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At the end of 2007, China's installed base of wind power totaled just over 6 gigawatts (GW), making China the fifth largest producer of wind power, after Germany, the U.S., Spain and India. As a consequence of the rapid build-out of wind power projects in China, in April 2008 the National Development and Reform Commission revised its 11th Five Year Plan Period plan for wind power development from 5 GW to 10 GW by 2010.

Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican. It requires the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. It prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data.

(The Volt will be a ful-sized four-passenger car with a range of about 65 kilometres using only its batteries. It is scheduled to go into production in the United States in 2010.)

The Volt will use a battery with a capacity of 16 kilowatt-hours of charge. But that battery won’t dip below eight kWh of charge, so a full nightly charge would be eight kWh - about the same amount of power as is consumed by a water heater, a plasma TV or a computer and monitor left on all day.

Report: Electric Utilities Investing Billions in Transmission The U.S. electric utility industry invested $6.9 billion in transmission projects in 2006, and members of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) plan to invest another $38.1 billion from 2007 to 2010, according to a new EEI report. This represents a 60% increase above the amount invested from 2003 to 2006. EEI is the association of shareholder-owned U.S. electric companies and represents about 70% of the U.S. electric power industry. The EEI report notes that transmission lines are being added for a variety of reasons, and one is to connect remote renewable energy resources to the electrical grid.

Solar power is a truly efficient source of energy, but it tends to fluctuate, and, as you might know, it turns off at night. One clever way to alleviate this intermittence is to store solar energy in the form of heat using molten salt. An aerospace company, Hamilton Sundstra, has created a venture called SolarReserve, and it plans to have its first molten salt solar power plant online by 2010.

“We use one-fifth of the raw silicon material compared with traditional PV cells,” he says. This can make a huge difference to the overall cost of producing solar cells

The ultimate goal is to make them 50 percent cheaper than existing cells by 2010, he says.

These work like car headlights but in reverse, ensuring that any light hitting the reflector is directed toward the sphere.

With very ambitious EU targets (5.75% biofuels to be used for transport by 2010 and 10% by 2020), Hodson and his colleagues are trying hard to keep up the credibility of the EU’s biofuels action by defining sustainability certification criteria for the use of the alternative fuels.

Widespread adoption of PHEVs could reduce GHG emissions from vehicles by more than 450 million metric tons annually in 2050—equivalent to removing 82.5 million passenger cars from the road. Cumulative GHG emissions reductions from 2010 to 2050 could reach 10.3 billion metric tons under the most aggressive scenarios for the development of a lower-carbon electrical infrastructure and PHEV penetration.

A European consortium called The Hydrogen Train concluded a feasibility study last year that looked at demonstrating the first hydrogen-powered train in Europe on a Danish railway. The goal of the project is to launch the first train by 2010