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In “Money Well Spent: Industrial Energy Efficiency Program Spending in 2010“, the ACEEE details, for apparently the first time ever, the total U.S. industrial energy efficiency deployment and technical assistance at the federal, state and utility levels.

President Barack Obama today announced that the Federal Government will reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution by 28 percent by 2020. Reducing and reporting GHG pollution, as called for in Executive Order 13514 on Federal Sustainability, will ensure that the Federal Government leads by example in building the clean energy economy. Actions taken under this Executive Order will spur clean energy investments that create new private-sector jobs, drive long-term savings, build local market capacity, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in clean energy industries.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of Physics at Stanford, returned to campus Monday to speak about the role of clean energy in combating global climate change. A sustainable energy revolution, he said, is not only vital in mitigating climate change, but is a critical step in ensuring U.S. economic competitiveness.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are evaluating the feasibility of developing renewable energy production on Superfund, brownfields, and former landfill or mining sites.

Yes, "green" energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes -- and subsidies -- in it, let's take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what "green" means.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) today released the complete version of the Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (AEO2010), which includes 38 sensitivity cases that show how different assumptions regarding market and policy drivers affect the Reference case projections that EIA previously released in December, 2009. In addition to considering alternative scenarios for oil prices, economic growth, and the uptake of more energy-efficient technologies, the AEO2010 includes cases that examine the impact of changes in selected policies, such as the extension of existing policies that are currently scheduled to sunset as well as the sensitivity of natural gas shale production to variations in drilling activity and the size of the resource base.

“The $24m multihull white catamaran is topped by around 5,300 square feet of black photovoltaic solar panels consisting of 38,000 next-generation solar cells provided by solar manufacturer SunPower,” Tom Young of Business Green writes.

Thirty-seven of the world’s biggest developing countries are spent $557bn subsidising fossil fuels that year, according to new estimates by the IEA seen by the FT.

De Spaanse regering denkt dat zij subsidies, die bedoeld zijn voor producenten van zonnestroom, op te strijken voor elektriciteit die ze ’s nachts opwekken met dieselgeneratoren.

The first solar-powered air conditioner that can also send energy to the grid has rolled off the production line of China’s largest residential air-conditioner manufacturer Gree Electric Appliances.

A few of Pike Research’s smart grid industry predictions include the following:- Security will become the top smart grid concern- Distribution Automation will rival AMI as the most visible smart grid application- The “Bakersfield Effect” will continue, but some consumers will actually LIKE the smart grid- Smart meter and AMI focus will shift toward Europe and China- The “Year of the HAN” will not arrive… yet- The Demand Response business transformation will accelerate- The ARRA smart grid “stimulus” will finally have a positive impact- The standards “horse” will begin to catch the deployment “cart”- Data management will be the next bottleneck to smart grid benefits- Existing data and telecom vendors will get serious about the smart grid

Establishing national policies to spur the deployment and adoption of renewable electricity sources, such as wind and solar power, are important, but the scientists warn that research and innovation must also proceed in parallel on better energy storage technologies, new strategies for integrating the varying and intermittent output of these energy sources, and improved technologies for the long-distance transmission of renewable electricity.