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The new center-right Spanish government decided to halt temporarily the award of new feed-in tariff contracts starting January 2013 amid rising fiscal challenges. This could affect negatively about 4,500 MW and 550 MW of wind and solar PV power projects respectively, as well as other energy classes’ projects.

Today, I’m declaring war on everything “going green.” No, I’m just kidding. In fact, the Tobak’s just installed a huge solar array that, with all the tax breaks, is supposed to pay off in less than six years. Not bad.

But there’s another concern with clean energy that should give us pause, especially in a difficult economy like the one we’re in right now … and that’s the fact that renewables (we’re including nuclear here as well) remain prohibitively expensive compared to our old, dirty and carbon spewing energy friends like coal.

Here is the Brad Edwards interview. Dr. Edwards received his PhD in physics in 1990, and worked at Los Alamos National Lab for 11 years. After leaving Los Alamos, Dr. Edwards has dedicated his career to researching and developing the space elevator concept. All of his research indicates that the space elevator concept is valid and feasible. He currently heads a company called Black Line Ascension, which is actively promoting the space elevator concept. He has published several books on the space elevator, including The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transport System, and Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator.

Chile to Build Its First Large Solar Facility

Whether they’re building a new house or improving a well-loved home, energy-conscious homeowners everywhere are trying to lower energy use and costs. Even with the best of intentions, however, consumers are overwhelmed by too much information, which causes many of them to give up long before they screw in their first CFL light bulb. To remedy this situation, Minnesota Power created the Pyramid of Conservation as a “cheat sheet” for consumers who want to live a more energy-efficient life.

What do Seattle, Austin and New York have in common? They've all enacted regulations to expose energy-wasting buildings. Owners of large buildings will have to disclose their energy scores to prospective buyers, tenants and lenders.

A new study from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns that reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector may require gas prices greater than $7 per gallon by 2020.

Here’s one electricity storage technology that’s been around for over 20 years, under the radar, but might be due for a resurgence in interest with the addition of more wind power to the grid.  Wind tends to blow at night when we don’t need it.

In a "net zero energy cost building," the purchases and credits from imported and exported energy are a wash. It's a purely financial metric, driven largely by local utility rates. A "net zero energy emissions building" uses only emissions-free power sources, like wind or hydroelectric, or it buys offsets or credits to compensate for any carbon-emitting power it does buy. That doesn't make the building carbon neutral, which is a whole other story. For more on that, listen to the Energy:Minute titled "The Meaning of Zero."

The NextGen solar paint is a liquid material that forms webs of nanoscale solar cells when it dries and it can be painted onto practically any surface.  Developed by the Argonne National Laboratory, the solar paint beats out thin-film PV cells in efficiency because it captures more wavelengths of light.

The world needs to find ways of cleaning, desalinating and distributing water to its citizens. And it is an area for which the use of renewable energy seems particularly apt. However, to talk of renewable generation as a single entity is misleading. Wind and solar power — the most likely candidates for water treatment in non-coastal areas — are very different beasts. Even within the category of solar power there are myriad technologies. And each one has distinct properties that affect where and how it can best be deployed.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) presented two new solar energy analyses in Valencia, Spain this week, a Solar Photovoltaic Energy Technology Roadmap and a Concentrating Solar Power Technology Roadmap. The key finding from these is that 20-25% of global electricity production could be from solar energy by 2050.

“In private, the best-informed analysts now agree that Britain's environmental policies have put the country on track to have the world's most expensive electricity.”

There’s a promising new entry in the race to build cheap batteries for storing energy from solar panels and wind turbines. Stanford researchers led by Yi Cui, a professor of materials science and engineering, have demonstrated a partially liquid battery made of inexpensive lithium and sulfur. Cui says the battery will be easy to make and will last for thousands of charging cycles. Cui believes that the material and manufacturing costs of the battery might be low enough to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of $100 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, which the DOE estimates will make the technology economically attractive to utilities. Existing batteries can cost hundreds of dollars per kilowatt-hour of capacity, although several companies are working to commercialize cheaper ones (see “Ambri’s Better Battery” and “Battery to Take On Diesel and Natural Gas”).