Under Ofgem's proposals the watchdog has called for an end to this practice and urged suppliers to sign up to the new guidelines and an independent accreditation scheme that would ensure only firms offering "additional" environmental benefits through their green tariffs can market them as green. It also proposes a gold, silver and bronze ranking system whereby tariffs are awarded a different badge based on the amount they invest in delivering these additional benefits.

As the cost of fuel soars and the pressure mounts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, several schemes for a new generation of airship are being considered by governments and private companies. “It’s a romantic project,” said Mr. Massaud, 45, sitting amid furniture designs in his Paris studio, “but then look at Jules Verne.”

The Hewitt family uses around 2.75 kilowatt-hours of electricity each day — less than 10 percent of the U.S. average. All of their power derives from the system shown here.

Below is the Declaration on Environment and Climate Change from the Group of 8. I’ll be annotating it as time allows and encourage you to weigh in in a comment. I’ll add footnote-style links to your contribution if you allude or refer to specific passages you think are significant, disingenuous, wishful, toothless, powerful…:

Improvements in energy efficiency over the past three decades have played a key role in limiting global increases in energy use and CO2 emissions. For IEA countries, energy efficiency gains since 1990 have led to annual energy savings of more than 16 EJ in 2005 and 1.3 Gt of avoided CO2 emissions. However, the recent rate of efficiency improvement has been much lower than in the past. The good news is that a large potential remains for further energy and CO2 savings across all sectors. In industry alone, the application of proven technologies and best practices on a global scale could save between 1.9 Gt and 3.2 Gt of CO2 emissions per year. In public power generation, if all countries produced electricity at current best practice levels, CO2 savings would be between 1.8 Gt and 2.5 Gt.

Although I just blogged on this topic last month, ComEd and Ameren's residential real-time pricing (RRTP) initiative just got a whole lot easier for consumers to use. One of Ameren's customers is also a web developer/electrical utility veteren, and created a handy-dandy web widget application that uses the information the utilities publish.

This question is generated by an advertising campaign by the railroad industry, which is arguing that a good way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to move more freight by rail rather than by truck. An example of the industry's ads can be seen on the Web site www.freightrailworks.org.

My colleagues at Clean Edge have just released the Utility Solar Assessment (USA) Study, making the case that solar power has the potential to reach cost parity with retail-electricity rates in most regions of the U.S. in less than a decade — but only if electric utilities step up to the plate.

StatoilHydro has decided to build the world’s first full scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and test it over a two-year period offshore Karmøy. The The company is investing approximately 400 million NOK. Planned startup is autumn 2009.

This is an update of my Peak Oil Overview at March '08. The major changes since my earlier post are the recent apparent decline in Russian production, the new ASPO peak oil projection, and discussion of the recent consumer producer summit in Saudi Arabia (slide 14). I also mention the expected change in IEA's November 2008 forecast of world production.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a solicitation for up to $10 billion in federal loan guarantees for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. This marks the second round of solicitations for DOE's Loan Guarantee Program, which encourages the commercial use of new or significantly improved energy technologies.

A very informative, quick-read guide on small wind systems is just a click away. This small reader is a great source of research if you would like to learn about wind and if it will work for you.

Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican. It requires the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. It prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data.

There is, however, a third way. In Denmark and Germany-world leaders in wind energy development-many commercial-scale wind turbines are installed as single units or in small clusters distributed across the countryside, or scattered around and sometimes within urban agglomerations. And many of these turbines are either owned by the farmers on whose land the turbine stands, or by local residents.

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