Fred Pearce has framed his latest opinion piece in Yale Environment 360 as one about Europe fiddling around with its climate change commitment (with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as lead violin), while the US is poised to reengage with the world under the Obama administration. What it's really about though is what the US would need to do to take that lead, and it all has to do with renewable energy. Though some of this may be recap for avid TreeHugger readers, it's worth repeating: Stephen Chu Appointment a Good Sign Beyond his stated commitment to dealing with climate change during the campaign, Pearce indicates that the appointment of Stephen Chu as energy secretary is the real sign that the US could soon lead the renewable energy/climate change race. Not only has he done pioneering research on solar power, energy efficiency and cellulosic biofuels at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he's also an advocate of a nationwide expansion of the electric grid to bring renewable energy from where it's most easily generated (west of the Mississippi) to where the greatest demand is (east of the river).

My brother, Abe, and his wife, Josie, built an amazing house down in Terlingua, Texas, basically out of mud and empty bottles. OK, that's oversimplifying it, but they built the dwelling with their own hands, mostly out of adobe, rocks they collected from their property, and other scrounged materials. It's a beautiful, self-sufficient abode that includes a rainwater catchment system, solar and wind power, and a groovy Tolkienesque fireplace. They've now moved to the state of Chihuahua in Mexico, and are working on another house while raising a new baby.

Electric Car Conversion Kits are equipments and components that can be used to convert a Gas Powered Car to Electric. There are a few different types - AC kits, DC kits, custom kits, universal kits etc - the kits you end up using will depend on your budget, and your need. Once you build your Own Electric Car you will completely eliminate Gas cost and never pay for gas again, Qualify for up to $1000 IRS refund for driving a clean fuel vehicle. Electric car kits vary in cost depending on make and quality and can be quite expensive. This lens looks into how you can put your own electric car conversion kit together and use it to build your electric car thus avoiding the high cost of of electric car conversion kits or buying a new elctric car.

At present, China produces just over 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy, making it 5th in the world for total wind energy. (Germany leads with 22.2 GW.) However, with China's massive push for 21st Century renewable technologies, we shouldn't be surprised if China achieves 100 GW by 2020 say energy experts.

BERLIN (AFP) - The German government wants to build up to 30 offshore windfarms in a bid to meet its renewable energy targets, Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said in an interview published Sunday. Tiefensee told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the windfarms would be built in the Baltic and North seas and said some 2,000 windmills should soon be producing 11,000 megawatts of electricity.

China needs a lot of energy to power its economy and the country's reliance on coal has led to major problems with unsafe work conditions and pollution. By 2006, China's energy requirements had become the second highest in the world, doubling its needs from the past decade.

This is an internal UK government report documenting the growing windpower potential within the country

In this week's New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about the Danish isle of Samsø, which over the past 10 years, has gone from exclusively using fossil fuel energy sources, to living exclusively off renewable energy. Using a combination of onshore and offshore turbines, private mini-turbines, solar panels, straw-burning furnaces and biofuels, the 4,300-resident island has become a sort of a sandbox for green experimentation.

Germany has grand plans to build its first ever offshore wind farms in the North and Baltic Sea, a project that energy experts warn still has a long way to go in meeting formidable financial and technical challenges.

We know what's really been holding you back from building a wind energy farm in your backyard is the fact that turbines clash with the rest of your décor. Well, Philippe Starck is here to rescue the renewable energy industry with his Democratic Ecology. The transparent mini-turbine, which comes out in September, can generate 20-60 percent of the energy needed to power a home for $633. Pramac, a company better known for oil and diesel generators, helped out with the technical details.

The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian. According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It's big but not immense -- maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who's there to indicate scale.

Herzog and de Meuron have been very busy lately designing some amazing new buildings in Europe, like their Project Triangle in Paris. Their newest design for the Spanish banking group BBVA will be built on the outskirts of Madrid as early as 2013. The verdant green headquarters will feature luscious gardens and will create it's own microclimate by using natural ventilation, evapotranspiration, and the shade of the gardens and buildings to create a cool artificial oasis on a desert-like site. The project is meant to function as a small city, encouraging people to walk and meet within the outdoor spaces. The project is essentially a linear series of 3-story buildings seperated by alleyways and irrigated gardens. The smaller buildings are designed to give employees access to natural light and the outdoors, while the tower rises as a skyward-tilted circle, giving BBVA a presence in the Madrid skyline. The courtyard located around the tower is planted with shady trees and features a large basin of water that serves as a resevoir and humidifies the air.

Early last month, Jeanne Fair, 62, got her first hot meals delivered to her home in this lake town in the sparsely populated southwestern part of the state. Then after two deliveries the meals stopped because gas prices had made the delivery too expensive.

When people talk about types of renewable energy they normally say something like "wind power, solar power, geothermal" and list wave power almost as an afterthought. Though it certainly isn't as developed as these other renewable energy sources, significant potential exists. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say that the reason wave power plays second fiddle to other sources is because with most ways of generating power from the ocean the technical aspects take place out of sight, below the water, maybe that's part of it. In any case, check out this slideshow showcasing: 6 Different Ways the Waves & Tides Can Generate Electricity

This Wired article summarizes and links to a poster for the American Geophysical Union meetings (pdf) from Elaine Hart, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Her power flow simulation suggests that the existing transmission network in California can accommodate up to 70% of renewables in the portfolio on a hot summer day. The number of overloaded lines in the simulation rises from 11 to 31, which is not that large an increase given that there are almost 5,000 transmission lines in California. Still, this kind of work can be really useful to help target transmission investment. The Wired article also has some good links for further reading. I look forward to seeing more of this research!

You need to warn or remove the rockurbody guy who is attacking your group with spam, or off topic tags. He's also hit other sites as well.

He's destroying your group by posting off topic content in large numbers

My Clean Break column today is actually more of a feature looking at compressed-air energy storage (CAES) and how Ontario, geologically, would be an excellent location to give it a try. About 50,000 natural gas and oil wells have been drilled in southwestern Ontario over the past 150 years and most of them are depleted. Turns out that depleted gas fields are one of several types of underground reservoir that can be used to store compressed air. Salt caverns are another option, and we have plenty of those as well. In fact, 60 per cent of Canada's natural gas storage is in the region. Compressing and storing air wouldn't be that different technically. Another benefit is that southwestern Ontario has strong wind resources, so building a 1,000 MW-plus CAES facility on its own or as part of a partnership with area wind developers could prove quite economical. The idea, of course, is that cheap wind power generated overnight when demand is down could be used to compress and store the air. The air could then be released to generate electricity during daytime peaks, making wind a dispatchable resource in Ontario and more of a realistic replacement for coal power as it gets phased out of the province. Surplus overnight nuclear power, when we have it (mostly during the summer), could also be stored this way.

My colleague Inês gave a webinar recently on her work on energy efficiency supply curves titled: "The US Energy Savings Potential and Who Pays for It". Watch the webinar for free here. Energy use and CO2 emissions from the residential sector are distributed among a variety of household services, each of which may use different fuels at different intensities. Efficiency supply curves help policymakers determine where the low-hanging fruit are for GHG mitigation.

UK scientists have made hydrogen from water in a simple experiment on a lab bench. Fraser Armstrong, at the University of Oxford, and colleagues attached an enzyme and a light-harvesting dye to titanium dioxide particles to make a hydrogen-producing system powered by sunlight.