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Siemens figures there are about 3.3 gigawatts of offshore wind power connected to the grid in Europe. That is similar in size to a large contemporary nuclear power station.

Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels

In Texas, Austin Energy signed a deal this spring for 20 years of output from a solar farm at less than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.

On Germany’s coast, for example, an estimated $1.3 billion went into revitalizing ports and factories to serve the industry, creating about 10,000 jobs. But demand frequently drops off when projects stall, at times leaving factories in coastal towns like Cuxhaven, on Germany’s North Sea, sitting idle with hundreds of workers laid off.

Tax Credit in Doubt, Wind Power Industry Is Withering

Wind Industry’s New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price

Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years.

this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber

Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.

"People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.

EU energy market: Pipe dream

A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.

France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.

In fact, some economists view the German reform narrative as a myth

Wage restraint was instead a function of weak demand after the collapse of the reunification-fueled construction boom in the mid-1990s.

Even if one accepts the story, economists also point out that Germany undertook its labor-market reforms when the winds of the world economy were extremely favorable. The global economy was growing, and China and other emerging economies were sucking in machine tools and other capital goods in which German manufacturers excelled.

Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.

In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.

In Germany, Hypo Real Estate, a property and public sector lender owned by the government after a bailout, owed its near collapse largely to problems at Depfa, its subsidiary in Dublin. Last month Hypo transferred most of its troubled assets to a so-called bad bank that will slowly wind down the investments.

In a typical day, Mr. Durgin tells me, 21 trains depart the mine, pulling 135 cars each. Each car bears 120 tons of coal. At this pace, he says, there is more than 20 years’ worth of coal ready to mine under my feet.

North Antelope Rochelle is among the biggest coal mines in the world. It produced 108 million tons last year — about 10 percent of all the coal burned by the nation’s power plants.

North Antelope Rochelle and the other vast strip mines cutting through the plains of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — whose low-sulfur carbon met standards imposed by the Clean Air Act — were the result

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

“What makes it difficult is that it is very fragmented,” he continued. “It is diversified in different countries and they are not used to working together, so it’s a huge organizational effort, and it’s also a huge political effort in the sense of convincing everybody to converge to common styles of supervision.”

three parts.

a broad assessment of a bank’s risk profile

With the dexterity of thieves stripping a vehicle for parts, they remove each van’s engine, bumpers, tires, drive shaft, fuel tank and the exhaust system.

Next, the crews pack everything into steel freight containers, which begin a journey by river barge and cargo ship to Ladson, S.C., near the port of Charleston. There, American teams put the vans back together again.

It would be more efficient to ship the vans in one piece, of course. But with current trade rules, efficiency is seldom the goal.

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas

European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.

Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.

As LED Industry Evolves, China Elbows Ahead

“LED lighting could see itself become the next solar, wind or other future opportunity that the U.S. will have given away by failing to address Chinese industrial policies and unfairly traded products,”

SolarWorld, a solar panel maker that complained to the American government about what it considered unfair advantages for Chinese competitors, was later the victim of a cyberattack by Chinese military officials, according to a recent indictment by the Justice Department.

A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine

Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.

“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”