Earlier this week, the China Huaneng Group started building China’s largest ever solar power plant, a massive 166 Megawatt (MW) facility in the southern province of Yunnan.

The project, costing a total of 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion), is scheduled to commence operations in 2010. According to the China Electricity Council, the company intends to expand its capacity for solar, wind and other clean energy projects to an impressive 10,000 MW by the end of the same year.

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The UK government announced today that Britain has overtaken Denmark to become the world’s biggest producer of offshore wind power.

The rise to the top of the global league table follows the construction of a new wind farm off the coast of Skegness, Lincolnshire, which increases the UK’s total electricity generation from offshore wind sources to 590 megawatts (MW), enough to power 300,000 homes.

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Governor of New Jersey since January 17, 2006, Corzine wants the Garden State to triple the total amount of wind generated power that it plans to use by 2020. This would bring its total up to 3,000 megawatts, measuring out to be 13% of New Jersey’s total energy, and enough energy to power anywhere between 800,000 and just under a million homes.

This comes just days after the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities announced that it had chosen Garden State Offshore Energy (GSOE) as the preferred developer for a 350-megawatt wind farm off the NJ coast.

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After two years, an oversized yellow buoy floating five miles off the southern tip of Long Beach Island has definitely proved its technology feasible. With the rise and fall of each wave, pistons slide up and down inside a cylinder within the buoy, generating electricity.

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The government announced to spend ZAR 400 million, which equates to roughly $49 million USD.

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However these statistics only take into account the large scale wind farms that are sprouting across the country. What they fail to take into account, are the individual wind turbines that are being installed on homes, businesses and farms.

According to a new report by the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), 7,844 private wind systems were set to be installed this year, 4385 more than in 2007.

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Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced the introduction of “a national energy plan” on Saturday, including a return to nuclear power.

A month after the conservatives and their embattled leader returned to power back in April, the Italian government said it would begin building nuclear power stations to solve the country’s dependence on foreign oil and gas supplies.

“A new national energy plan will be presented in spring, which will be based on three points: diversification of supplies, the start of nuclear energy production and development of renewable and alternative energy,” Berlusconi said at the opening ceremony of a new liquefied natural gas terminal.

>>More on energy policy in Europe at RG&B

The decision to return to nuclear would reverse a 20-year ban on nuclear power stemming from a 1987 referendum passed in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, a year earlier. The country’s four nuclear plants operating at the time were shut down, and have not produced any power since.

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The first announcement saw Oglethorpe Power Corporation (OPC) announce plans to buld as many as three 100-megawatt biomass electric generating facilities in the state of Georgia. The second, was an announcement by SBD International promising the future construction of a small solar farm in Florida, capable of generating up to 20 megawatts.

And these sorts of announcements come across our desks almost every day. But there are only so many articles we can write that would be as long as this introduction.

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However engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have made a breakthrough in the development of a new carbon-based material that they believe might allow for at least a doubling of current electricity storage capabilities. The new structure is called grapheme, and measures in at one atom thick.

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In an attempt to continue using the large coal deposits bespeckling our planet, while still keeping greenhouse gas emission down, one of Europe’s biggest power companies has turned to Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS for short.

Vattenfall, a Swedish owned firm, will be using CCS at the site of the new “Schwarze Pumpe”, Black Pump, located in the Lausitz region in the State of Brandenburg. The pilot unit, which has a thermal capacity of 30 megawatts, has cost approximately Euro 70 million over the past 15 months.

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“However, the looming expiration of the federal renewable energy production tax credit (PTC) less than four months from now threatens this spectacular progress,” said Randall Swisher, AWEA’s executive director.

Subsequently, wind energy is well on track to providing the 20% of US electricity by 2030, as envisioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE).

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Sadly, that enthusiasm is also running up against a very solid and very old wall; bureaucratic red tape and shoddy designs.

The current power distribution system set up in the United States is currently run by about 500 owners, is a hundred years old, and is designed around helping prop each other up in the case of emergencies. What it is not designed to do, is to take a large amount of power and safely store or transport it.

You would think this would have been a justifiable goal for a power distribution system, but I guess things were different.

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Japan’s biggest shipping company – Nippon Yusen KK – is going to be working with Nippon Oil Corp to develop solar panels capable of partially powering their vessels.

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“We’re a land grant institution dedicated to outreach and engineering,” said Larson, who is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. “It makes sense to support this industry that will eventually help students find jobs in their own state and support this clean, renewable energy industry.”

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However this is an announcement based on stats that AWEA is hoping the rest of the world won’t look at too hard.

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A not so new energy concept has been unveiled by EnviroMission Limited in South Melbourne, Australia, and it harkens back to an idea demonstrated more than 20 years ago. It is basically small amount of panels on the ground, centering around a massive tower. The collectors warm the air near the surface, and then channel it up the tower. Turbines placed at the bottom make electricity created by the updraft.

“It’s a combination chimney, windmill, greenhouse,” said Kim Forté of EnviroMission Limited, who have designed a kilometer-high tower, and now are hoping to build it somewhere in southwestern USA.

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Americans have a habit of framing our scientific history as a series of Great Inventors, from Eli Whitney to Thomas Edison to Afrika Bambaataa. The history books say each was prodded by Adam Smith’s invisible hand to come up with the great technological advances that have made our country a home of innovation.

There’s a problem with this mythology: sometimes there’s no invisible hand. Sometimes short-sighted government regulations give preference to bad technologies over good ones — stifling innovation and blinding us to our own ability to make progress.

Nowhere is this mythology more evident than in our energy system, the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in the country. A host of bad regulations have made this system grossly inefficient, contributing both to global warming and to high power costs.

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So could the same hold true for solar energy? There is a certain coolness factor to generating your own electricity, and just like the Prius you get a nifty display showing the amount of energy being produced by your solar installation.

However, there are few people in Europe who fully understand solar power, with many believing it to be too expensive or impractical in the less sunny parts of the continent. With this in mind, the European Photovoltaic Industry Association has organised ‘Solar Days’ this weekend in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Britain.

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