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Smoke wafting from wood fires has long provided a familiar winter smell in many parts of the country -- and, in some cases, a foggy haze that has filled people's lungs with fine particles that can cause coughing and wheezing. Citing health concerns, the Environmental Protection Agency now is pressing ahead with regulations to significantly limit the pollution from newly manufactured residential wood heaters. But some of the states with the most wood smoke -- including Minnesota and Wisconsin -- are refusing to go along, claiming that the EPA's new rules could leave low-income residents in the cold. Missouri and...

The EPA is not protecting anyone’s health. It is forcing them to pay more for what should be the most traditional and affordable sources of electricity in the world One of the lesser known attempts to prove that renewable energy, wind and solar power, can replace traditional energy sources—coal, oil, and natural gas—went belly up in much the same way current wind and solar companies depend on tapping the taxpayer for government subsidies in order to stay in business. Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative begun in 2007 and shut down four years later. Two members of the Institute...

In the full throes of realization that their top-down, heavily subsidized energy-sector transition from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable sources has directly resulted in energy prices around three times higher than those in the United States — not to mention a resurgence of coal to close the practicality gap left by those renewables — the German government has been looking for a way to steeply revise the Energiewende program of which they were once so loud and proud. On Thursday, a group of German government officials submitted their recommendations to Chancellor Merkel for saving Germans some of the...

| About Us | Goals | Research | Links / Downloads | Home Widescale Biodiesel Production from AlgaeMichael Briggs, University of New Hampshire, Physics DepartmentAs more evidence comes out daily of the ties between the leaders of petroleum producing countries and terrorists (not to mention the human rights abuses in their own countries), the incentive for finding an alternative to petroleum rises higher and higher. The environmental problems of petroleum have finally been surpassed by the strategic weakness of being dependent on a fuel that can only be purchased from tyrants.In the United States, oil is primarily used for transportation - roughly two-thirds of all oil...

ObamaCare isn't the only policy train wreck in progress. Like Mao urging peasants to melt down their pots, pans and farm tools to turn China into a steel-producing superpower overnight, Germany dished out subsidies to encourage homeowners and farmers to install solar panels and windmills and sell energy back to the power company at inflated prices. Success—Germany now gets 25% of its power from renewables—has turned out to be a disaster. As Germans rush to grab this easy money, carbon dioxide output has risen, not fallen, because money-strapped utilities have switched to burning cheap American coal to provide the necessary...

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting walk through some of the myths about renewable energy. It’s not quite (quite!) as expensive as many think, variability isn’t entirely a killer and so on. But the one that interests me most is the assertion that renewables just don’t seem to be creating that many green jobs: During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama touted the prospect that investing in clean energy could produce five million “green jobs.” The idea of creating jobs helped underpin the $90 billion clean-energy stimulus in 2009 and later efforts, and remains a staple of administration rhetoric. But...

With a potentially striking blow to renewable mandate advocates, a recent federal court ruling calls into question the constitutionality of key components of many states’ renewable energy mandates. On Friday, June 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) against the state of Michigan (among other petitioners) in a dispute over FERC’s plan to apportion costs for new power lines to transport millions of megawatts of wind power around the Great Lakes region.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., May 6 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army has given the first development contracts for renewable energy technologies under a $7 billion initiative. Five companies were awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity awards in geothermal technologies. The U.S. companies are: Constellation NewEnergy Inc., ECC Renewables LLC, Enel Green Power North America Inc., LTC Federal LLC and Siemens Government Technologies Inc. The multiple award task orders were issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, Ala., working with the Army Energy Initiatives Task Force. "Announcement of awards for the remaining technologies -- solar, wind and biomass -- are anticipated...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A new California innovation accelerator for energy storage firms is getting a "fresh charge," thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy. CalCharge – a partnership between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CalCEF, a family of nonprofit organizations working to promote the transition to a clean energy economy-- will play a central role in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), the latest U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub. JCESR, led by Argonne National Laboratory in Indiana, will combine the R&D power of five DOE national laboratories, five universities, and four...

One of the most important issues in this year's election is energy. Our ongoing addiction to Mideast oil leaves us dependent on countries that are often unstable and hostile. Developing our own domestic energy resources and investing in renewable energy lessens this dependence. It also has the potential to create jobs and improve our trade deficit. The two presidential candidates have laid out energy plans that sound similar: both President Obama and Governor Romney want to continue to develop domestic energy resources, including renewable energy, with the aim of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil. But according to...

Today is the Scottish National Party conference in Perth. At some stage, SNP leader Alex Salmond will no doubt be crowing, as he is wont to do, about his success in transforming Scotland into the "Saudi Arabia of renewables". This is inaccurate. What he has actually done is transform Scotland into the Saudi Arabia of tourism, which is to say he has turned a once-beautiful country into a vast, inhospitable desert which no one in their right mind would want to visit. Scotland's landscape was, until recently, one of the great glories of our national heritage. What made it so...

This is our favorite news item this week, hands down. The Europeans, so enamored by things green that they have implemented subsidies, mandates and regulations that have nearly strangled their economy, have found a way out of their dilemma. “Energy from gas power stations has been rebranded as a green, low-carbon source of power by a €80bn European Union programme, in a triumph of the deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry lobby over renewable forms of power,” reports the Guardian in Great Britain. There you have it. To make the green quota, simply reclassify a fossil fuel as green enough. Voila! ....

A $9 billion Obama administration grant program for renewable energy projects has created tens of thousands of jobs, an Energy Department report out Friday concludes. The report comes just one week after Speaker John Boehner slammed Energy Secretary Steven Chu over the claim and challenged him to provide proof of the jobs creation. The report — conducted by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory — concludes that the program supported 52,000 to 75,000 construction and installation jobs on average over the three years it was in effect. Between 43,000 to 66,000 of those were indirect jobs in the supply chain (for...

March 21, 2012 Gingrich: Obama's no friend of renewable energy GOP presidential candidate on why advocates of renewable energy should be outraged at the Obama administration

"Clean." "Green." What do those words mean? When President Obama talks about "clean energy," some people think of "clean coal" and low-carbon nuclear power, while others envision shiny solar panels and wind turbines. And when politicians tout "green jobs," they might just as easily be talking about employment at General Motors as at Greenpeace. "Clean" and "green" are wide open to interpretation and misappropriation; that's why they're so often mentioned in quotation marks. Not so for renewable energy, however. Snip..... Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there's one big problem: Unless you're...

California's increasing use of renewable power will come at a price, pushing up electricity bills across the state. And while it's impossible to tell how big the cost to consumers will be, some experts fear the total cost of renewable energy in California will be in the billions of dollars. In the next three years, many long-planned solar plants and wind farms will come online, bringing California closer to its goal of getting one-third of the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As soon as they start delivering power to utility companies, the utilities' customers will start paying for...

Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes. The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009. The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require...

The United States faces a clear choice of pushing forward quickly to refine solar, wind and other renewable energy sources or continue to ignore the less obvious costs of reliance on oil, coal, and nuclear energy, Robert Kennedy Jr. told a group of environmentalists Sunday afternoon. In discussing other costs that are often ignored, Kennedy cited the process of transporting coal from West Virginia. The government spends millions of dollars per mile to fill thousands of miles of road in the state with 22 inches of asphalt, Kennedy said. "Coal claims to be cheap but is probably the most catastrophically...

Agave a better biofuel than sugar cane Agave produces a highly-efficient intoxicant, as anyone who’s woken up “Wasting Away in Margaritaville” can attest. According to a joint Sydney University / Oxford University study, the plant could also be a highly-efficient feedstock for biofuels... [Agave is] an arid plant, which means it’s suitable for regions where food crops are at best marginal... By moving ethanol feedstock away from high-quality farmland, agave-driven ethanol production would therefore solve one of the conundrums of biofuels: the accusation that corn- or sugar-based ethanol production displaces food production... Study of a trial plantation near the regional...

What does the word "renewable" mean? Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass. These energy sources, said the IPCC, generate about 13.8% of our energy and, if encouraged to grow, could eventually displace most fossil fuel use. It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world's energy...