Atlantic Canada's Bay of Fundy has some of the world's highest and most powerful tides. Every day, 100 billion tonnes of seawater surge in and out of the bay - a perfect source of clean, reusable alternative energy, if it can be properly harnessed. Tidal power isn't new, of course; small grain mills were powered by tides in Europe centuries ago. But tapping into the reliable, natural ebb-and-flow of water to generate electricity didn't begin until the 1960s.

Scientists at the Ohio State Institute for Materials Research recently announced that they have developed a new hyper-efficient solar material that is able to capture light from every spectrum of the rainbow. Whereas most photovoltaics are limited to collecting energy from a small range of frequencies, the new material is able to absorb energy from all spectrums of visible light at once. The breakthrough development heralds a new breed of extremely efficient solar panels on the horizon.

A detailed new economic analysis "Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California" finds: Over the past thirty-five years, innovative energy efficiency policies created 1.5 million additional fulltime jobs with a total payroll of over $45 billion. Looking forward, the report finds that if California improves energy efficiency by just 1 percent per year, proposed state climate policies will increase the Gross State Product (GSP) by approximately $76 billion, increase real household incomes by up to $48 billion and create as many as 403,000 new

A group of Spanish developers working for a company called Ecofasa just announced a new biofuel made up from trash. This isn't a biodiesel made from used frying oil; instead, it's made from general urban waste which is treated by bacteria. The result of that bacteria? Fatty acids that can be used to produce standard biodiesel. According to the company's CEO, the process is fully biologic, competes with no feedstock and is really sustainable. However, the process doesn't yield that much actual fuel: just one liter of biodiesel from 10 kg of trash. The project is now in a development phase, but Ecofasa said that a commercially viable model could be ready in three to four years.

- U.S. producers of solar power will no longer need federal subsidies within eight years because by then solar power will cost less than electricity generated by conventional power plants, industry players said this week. The U.S. government recently extended tax breaks for wind and solar producers for another eight years. They are set to expire in 2016.

Eastern Europeans and others seeking to use the current financial meltdown as an excuse to roll back climate commitment have failed (for now). The BBC reports: European Union leaders agreed to stick to their plan to cut greenhouse gases - despite a surprise demand by Poland and six other member states to drop them to ease the impact on industry struggling with the global credit crunch. Speaking at the end of a two-day summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it."

In a significant milestone in the deployment of flexible, printed photovoltaics, Konarka, a solar-cell startup based in Lowell, MA, has opened a commercial-scale factory, with the capacity to produce enough organic solar cells every year to generate one gigawatt of electricity, the equivalent of a large nuclear reactor. Organic solar cells could cut the cost of solar power by making use of inexpensive organic polymers rather than the expensive crystalline silicon used in most solar cells. What's more, the polymers can be processed using low-cost equipment such as ink-jet printers or coating equipment employed to make photographic film, which reduces both capital and manufacturing costs compared with conventional solar-cell manufacturing.

Not this week. As part of the Solar Power International conference here, big businesses such as equipment maker Applied Materials Inc. and solar cell manufacturer SunPower Corp. rented out bars and restaurants and shut down the streets to serve up free drinks and food to executives who partied through the night. "It's amazing, the euphoria in the industry right now," Victoria Hollick, vice president of Conserval Engineering Inc., said as a disc jockey played songs like "Good Times" and "Celebration." The solar industry has good reason to celebrate right now.

The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) has outlined four easy steps to a thirty fold increase in the size of the US solar power industry between 2009 and 2016, leading to over $230 billion worth of investment and the creation of 440,000 permanent jobs. The influential industry group laid out the plans at this week's Solar Power International conference in San Diego. The four key recommendations to achieve this goal are as follows:

Abu Dhabi has taken a 20% stake in the London Array - the £3bn project to build the world's largest offshore wind farm in the Thames estuary. Masdar, part of Abu Dhabi's multibillion-pound drive to develop green energy technologies, is buying part of the 50% stake in the project held by the German-based utility E.ON.

A major tidal energy project is being planned for waters off the coast of Northern Ireland and Scotland. ScottishPower has identified sites off the Antrim Coast, Pentland Firth and the Sound of Islay to test sea turbines which could power thousands of homes. They have been working on the Lanstrom device, which is said to be one of the world's most advanced tidal turbine.

BPA - Elliot Mainzer takes the key role in developing energy agency policy on climate change, planning and renewables As renewable energy becomes a bigger slice of the Northwest's energy pie, few institutions have as important a role to play as the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets electricity generated at 31 dams and a nuclear plant in the region. BPA's regionwide web of transmission lines delivers electrons generated at wind farms east of the Cascades to power-hungry consumers in the Willamette Valley. The agency's flexibility to modulate electricity production at dams on the Columbia allows utilities to safely feed their spiky supply of wind energy onto the grid.

It's a question we've heard a lot lately: "Who will lend me money to finance solar installations?" In fact, a couple of our readers, Reeves and Byron, were kind enough to send comments on the subject: "We've heard there are some articles out there showing that if you get the right kind of financing, your solar installation can be cash flow positive right away. Problem is, I can't find those articles."

An unusual combination of economic and environmental forces have created a "perfect storm" that could help geothermal shed its back-seat status to its renewable cousins wind and solar energy, experts said at an international conference. One after another, state and federal regulators, oil company executives, investor-owned utility officials and private developers on Monday recited the conditions in play to an overflow crowd of more than 1,000.

The world's oceans are an energetic place, and military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin said today it has been granted $1.2 million by the Department of Energy to demonstrate that ocean thermal energy conversion is possible. Although the ocean often doesn't feel very warm, the temperature gradient between the warm, sun-soaked surface and the frigid, dark depths provides enough of a differential to run a heat engine. The idea has been kicking around for over a century but has never been scaled. Lockheed Martin helped build the largest ocean thermal energy conversion system to date back in the 80s, but it only ever produced 50,000 watts, or .05 megawatts.

With the passing of its Renewable Energy Act - legislation that spent 19 years in limbo - the Philippines can save over US$2.9 billion, a WWF and University of the Philippines study has found. The savings would come from increasing the country's renewable energy share in its power generation mix from 0.16 per cent to 41 per cent from wind, solar, ocean, run-of-river hydropower and biomass.

Ethiopia on Thursday signed a 220-million-euro (300 million dollar) deal with a French company for the construction of Africa's largest wind farm. The contract was inked by representatives of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPC) and French wind turbine manufacturer Vergnet.

Congress' financial bailout included an increase and extension on tax credits for solar energy users, still mostly an option for the rich. Earlier this year, Vicki Eckels put a state-of-the-art solar power system on her house in Fort Lauderdale for $43,000. ''I feel good because I'm a clean energy producer.'' The federal government will reward her by knocking off $2,000 from her 2008 taxes. If she had waited until next year to install the system, her tax savings could have been $12,900, thanks to a provision hidden within the massive bailout Congress passed last week.

In an effort to meet President Bush's "Twenty in Ten" goal and meet the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) targets in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) the Biomass Research and Development Board (the Board)-co-chaired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-developed the National Biofuels Action Plan (NBAP) to accelerate the development of a sustainable biofuels industry.

As utility costs mount ever higher, Americans now have real options to take home energy matters into their own hands with "green" systems that can pay for themselves in as little as a few years. Among the choices: wind, solar, geothermal and a "microhydro" option that is potentially cheaper than a year's tuition at many state colleges.