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Google's energy team developed aggressive "breakthrough" cost/performance levels for solar photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), on-shore and off-shore wind, geothermal including Enhanced Geothermal Systems, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), nuclear, Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), Battery Electric Vehicles (EV), rapid and long discharge grid-storage, and natural gas.

Recently, a research team in the UK has combined renewables to form energy-generating ribbons with great potential. The team, from the Institute for Materials Research and Innovation at the University of Bolton near Manchester in the UK, considered the fact that weather, especially in Britain, is highly unpredictable and decided to make a material that used more than one type of weather to produce electricity.

The Government has today announced plans to ensure the future of the Feed-in Tariffs scheme to make it more predictable. Transparency, longevity and certainty are at the heart of the new improved scheme.

It turns out, however, that what most environmentalists know about the future supply of natural gas and other fossil fuels is based more on industry hype than on actual data. And, that means that they are missing a key argument in their discussions about renewable energy, one that could be used to persuade those less concerned about pollution and climate change and more concerned about energy security: There is increasing evidence that no fossil fuel will continue to see its rate of production climb significantly in the decades ahead and so none of them is a viable "bridge fuel," not natural gas, not oil, not coal. This means that global society must leap over fossil fuels and move directly to renewables as quickly as possible. In advanced economies this leap must be combined with a program of radical reductions in energy use, reductions which are achievable using known technologies and practices.

The cost of electricity is difficult to unpick. That is why EWEA developed an online tool that instantly calculates electricity costs, including any fuel and carbon risks, for gas, coal, nuclear, onshore and offshore wind. Users can type in their own assumptions on, for example, coal and gas prices, future carbon costs, capital costs and availability.

A coalition of corporations and other organisations has launched a new global non-profit initiative aimed at tackling the “unprecedented challenges of urbanisation” and the need for economic, environmental and social sustainability.