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The company said it wants to find out if there's enough biomass in the province for it to convert several of its coal-fired generating units in Ontario so they can burn 100 per cent biomass instead of coal. They also want to get a sense of how it would be collected and delivered and how much all that would cost.

Two strong potential candidates for the Next Big Thing in cleantech venture capital are nuclear and carbon capture and storage. I've spoken with numerous VCs recently who are looking for innovative ways to play in nuclear power. Bets have already been made by VCs in small-scale nukes, hot fusion, and technologies related to big-scale nukes. The hope is to find a low-cost solution that is practically zero carbon emissions and also provides reliable "base load" power. So in other words, the hope is for a lower-carbon replacement for coal power. The challenges are also significant, however, not least of which being time to market for any new innovations, as this interesting article illustrates. With the recent news that the DOE will be putting $2.4B into carbon capture and storage, and its inclusion in emerging climate legislation, it's also clear that CCS will be leaned upon as a hoped-for way of making our existing coal-fired generation infrastructure less impactful on the atmosphere, while still preserving its value as low-cost baseload power. So in other words, the hope is for a lower-carbon "fix" for coal power.

In last Thursday's vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin seemed to be falling over themselves to demonstrate their support of "clean coal." What is clean coal, anyway, and should I be in favor of it?

Interesting that EWEA develops this kind of tool.

As the price of oil and natural gas soars, many customers are looking to coal as an alternative fuel. That means a boon for suppliers -- and a potential bane for the environment.

Clean coal: Never was there an oxymoron more insidious, or more dangerous to our public health. Invoked as often by the Democratic presidential candidates as by the Republicans and by liberals and conservatives alike, this slogan has blindsided any meaningful progress toward a sustainable energy policy.

It's gone before you even knew it was there: As energy is unlocked from fuels at power plants, two-thirds of the energy consumed to create electricity is lost. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that conversion efficiency will never be 100 percent, because heat is lost at every step of the conversion process. But new technologies may be able to greatly increase conversion efficiency, moving from an overall rate of 36 percent to closer to 50 percent. At present, coal - in all its carbon-belching inefficiency - is king because it's cheap. Still, the use of natural gas to create electricity has been rising rapidly, in part because of more-efficient gas turbines. Natural gas prices have been climbing, however, and coal prices could rise as well.

Conventional geothermal power taps hot water rising naturally to the surface from shallow beds of volcanic rock. By contrast, hot rock, or engineered geothermal systems, depend on heating water by circulating it through rock as far down as 5 kilometres,

The Top 10 alternative energy lobbying groups are largely biofuel, solar and wind trade groups, though the biggest contributor by far is the "American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity,"

the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and a number of utilities are now studying the potential to add solar power to existing power plants in order to help cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Search giant Google on Tuesday pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The effort, dubbed RE), calls for Google to invest in companies developing clean-energy technologies and for Google itself to next year invest tens of millions in research and development in renewable energy.