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The 2,000 residents of the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea are now some of the world's first climate change refuges, as rising sea levels driven by global warming have claimed their island homes. The residents of the low-lying South Pacific atolls have given up their 20-year losing fight against rising seas and will be resettled elsewhere in Papua New Guinea.

CSEM, the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, has signed a contract with the government of the Emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah (RAK) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to develop a prototype of a “Solar Island”. The aim of the project is to validate a concept for the large-scale transformation of solar energy into hydrogen and electricity at very low cost. It is funded by 5 mio US$ by the Gouvernment of Ras al Khaimah. The plan is to build large “Solar Islands” floating in the sea. These giant floating islands will be fitted with solar panels which will convert solar energy into electricity and/or hydrogen. A prototype of such a solar island, equipped with thermal solar panels, is to be built and tested in the desert of the United Arab Emirates.

At the end of the day, most of the sun's light hits the oceans, because most of the Earth is ocean, but the United Arab Emerates has just contracted with a Swiss firm, CSEM to purchase a floating solar island.

KEMA, in partnership with the civil engineering firm Bureau Lievense and technology illustrators Rudolph and Robert Das, has developed an "Energy Island" concept to store power generated from an offshore wind farm. The concept design is the initial result of an on-going feasibility study being conducted for Dutch energy companies.

Moscow’s rapidly growing skyline will soon feature an eye-popping new addition: Crystal Island, which will be the world’s biggest building when completed. Sir Norman Foster’s mountainous 27 million square feet spiraling “city within a building” will cost $4 billion and it is scheduled to be built within next 5 years.

The need for large scale renewable energy sources is underlined by the global warming due to increasing CO2 levels. CO2 is an unavoidable by-product of the energy generation process using any kind of fossil fuel.

As you would expect from a Foster + Partners project, the self-contained city within a city has green energy management at the very heart of the design. Crystal Island will generate low carbon energy from solar arrays and wind turbines located on the building with vast atriums to regulate the internal air temperature during the extremes of the Russian summer and winter.

The island of Barbados is 99% dependent on fossil fuel imports to satisfy its energy needs, which is unsustainable. This study proposes a 10 MW distributed wind energy scheme using micro wind turbines (WT) of horizontal (HAWT) and vertical axis (VAWT) configurations. These units are rated less than 500 W, and the scheme is hereafter referred to as mWT10. mWT10 is compared to the proposed 10 MW medium WT farm by the Barbados Light & Power Company (BL&P). The economic bottom line is the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The results highlight the BL&P proposal as the best economic option at BDS$0.19 per kWh, while that of both mWT10 configurations exceeds the conventional cost of BDS$0.25 by two to nine times. This is attributed to significantly higher relative installation and operational costs. However, the financial gap between mWT10 LCOE and the retail price of electricity is much smaller due to a large fuel surcharge passed on to each customer. Annual additional benefits of using wind energy include: greenhouse gas emissions savings of 6–23 kt of carbon dioxide; and anavoided fuel costs of BDS$1.5–5.3 million.

Financing and planning concerns also plague the project, with the level of state subsidies to the two main contracting firms - RTE (Réseau de transport électricité) and REE (Red Electrica de Espana) - still to be determined, and with questions remaining about the exact location of the future power cables.

Concerns include the potentially destructive impact of constructing electricity infrastructure in local communities and sensitive environments, and local civic organisations have mounted highly organised campaigns to contest the project, arguing that they have been given insufficient justification for the construction of the necessary power lines. 

if the interconnection is not completed, the Iberian Peninsula risks becoming an "island", cut off from the electricity potential and supply of the rest of the European continent.