Green Options

The algae! Yes – the same slimy brown-green ‘plant’ that makes a pond or a lake look yucky – is the creating a great buzz as the most promising source of alternative energy. And now nanotechnology is being leveraged to add some more zing to the promise!

The world’s first retrofit of a power plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin operating this month in the south of France. By Alok Jha of the Guardian.

At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.

With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world’s increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

It’s plentiful, it’s homegrown, and it could help clean up the environment while powering our cities. The idea of transforming algae into a fuel is a reality. Nowadays there are numerous implementations of algae into the renewable energy market.

At least in California, that’s where some of it’s going - $10 million dollars to be exact. The money will be used to fund the Green Corps, a program that will provide training for underprivileged youth to learn jobs in green construction, energy, and technology. The funding will be matched by an additional $10 million from public-private partnerships.

Announced by Gov. Schwarzenegger last week, the program provides for 1,000 youth, ages [...]

Experts say only a fraction of the Sahara, probably the size of a small country, would need to be covered to produce enough energy to supply the whole of Europe. Written by David Adam at the Guardian.

Editors Note: This is a guest post by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. See his last post for us on EV charging stations on Gas 2.0.

Today, San Francisco took a meaningful step toward turning the promise of renewable ocean energy into reality. We submitted a preliminary permit application to the federal government to develop a wave power project off our coast that we believe can generate between 10 to 30 megawatts of energy, with potential of up to 100 megawatts. When this project is fully operational, upwards of 100 jobs could be created in San Francisco.

Ocean power is a true “game changer” in the area of renewable energy. When wave and tidal power technologies reach commercial scale, they are expected to be able to provide thousands of megawatts of power to our coastal communities, dramatically green our energy portfolios and create thousands of new American jobs. In San Francisco, we’ve been doing our part to spur these technologies by aggressively advancing tidal and wave power pilot projects.  We are 100% committed to this challenge.

Off-shore wind power could generate enough electricity to supply every home in the UK by the end of the next decade, the government announced.

One of 30 wind turbines in the Kentish Flats wind farm, which produces up to 90 MW of renewable energy for the UK.

Another 5,000-7,000 wind turbines could generate enough electricity by next decade, concludes a British government energy department study.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change study concluded that another 5,000-7,000 wind turbines could be built off the coast by 2020, generating 25 GW of energy, equivalent to 25 large coal-fired power stations. The new capacity would be on top of 8GW already being built or in planning, making a total of 33GW.

The results of the year-long research into the geology, birds and marine life goes even further than the Carbon Trust, a company set up by government to help businesses reduce carbon emissions, which last year said the UK could build a total 29GW of off-shore wind.

However, the announcement was clouded by claims from the energy company E.ON that the economics of what is the UK’s biggest current off-shore wind project, the London Array off the coast of Kent and Essex, were “on a knife edge”.

It is hard to boot up the computer or turn on the television without hearing about the recession, credit crisis, budget deficits, and unemployment rates.  Amazingly, venture capital investment in the clean tech sector reached new levels over the first three quarters of 2008.

Heartening news for purveyors of green. Sustainable Brands Weekly reports:

Eighty percent of corporate sustainability executives in the Fortune 500 plan to maintain or increase their budgets in 2009 - despite today’s down market, according to a new survey.

As we discussed in this piece on How To Cut Your Costs And Make Your Package Greener, cost saving efforts often have the unintended or sometimes intended impact of making your product and processes more eco friendly. As more and more companies discover this salient fact, the scales will tip from just incidental greening of product to full scale efforts to promote sustainability WHILE cutting costs.

We may have reached a tipping point.

The economic meltdown could be good news for the area of clean energy investing, according to Steven Fraser, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the recently published “Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace.” Fraser believes that backlash to the recent economic crisis will result in a new era of enlightened regulation and investment akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal, which helped America climb out of the Great Depression. Fraser offered these opinions in a recent interview on [...]

This article is part of EcoWorldly’s week-long spotlight on Politicians You Can Believe In. To read more, subscribe to our RSS feed, or view our posts about politics.

Despite their tumultuous economy, Iceland is vying for one of the non-permanent United Nations Security Council seats going up for a vote tomorrow.

Iceland, which generates nearly all of its power from geothermal and hydroelectric sources, has emphasized their valuable experience in the fight against climate change and said they would represent the goals of all small countries with their position on the council.

Not every country has Iceland’s volcanoes, geysers, and hot springs to tap for electricity, but President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson is convinced that all nations possess the natural resources to cut their fossil fuel use and that doing so is vital for global security.