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Recent research indicates that electric cars may reach break-even price with hybrids only in 2026, and with conventional cars in 2032, after governments spend €100-150 billion in subsidies.

A life-cycle analysis shows that almost half of an electric car’s entire CO2 emissions result from its production, more than double the emissions resulting from the production of a gasoline-powered car.

Proponents proudly proclaim that if an electric car is driven about 300,000 kilometers (180,000 miles), it will have emitted less than half the CO2 of a gasoline-powered car. But its battery will likely need to be replaced long before it reaches this target, implying many more tons of CO2 emissions.

Germany and EU row over energy subsidies

The dispute relates to the billions of euros of German public subsidies deployed to promote the energiewende shift to renewables while at the same time shielding heavy industry from the costs

Germany plans to generate up to 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035, as part of a radical shift in energy supply which involves a complete exit from nuclear power. The expansion of clean energy has been encouraged by a generous system of subsidies paid to renewables operators. These have been funded by surcharges that have left Germany with some of the highest household electricity bills in Europe.

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.

The price of natural gas in Lithuania was 15 percent higher than the European average last year, according to the European Commission. Only Bulgaria, where Gazprom has a near monopoly, paid more. Gazprom also has an ownership stake in Lithuania’s natural gas distribution network. Part of Lithuania’s electrical infrastructure is still controlled from Moscow, too, and it is not yet possible to connect the country to the European grid.

Lithuania also does not use oil shale, which provides much of the electricity for Estonia, the third Baltic member of the European Union.

Lithuania used to rely on nuclear power to supply most of its electricity. But as a condition of joining the union in 2004, the country agreed to shut down its Chernobyl-style nuclear power station at Ignalina.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s five biggest users of coal for electricity generation, said Thursday it would close down eight coal-fired power units with 3,300 megawatts of capacity.

Many of the plants were more than 50 years old, and under a consent decree between the TVA, four state governments and the Sierra Club, the authority was required to install additional pollution control equipment known as scrubbers or shut down the plants

Johnson said that electricity demand has dropped nearly 10 percent over the past five years., half of that because one company, USEC, which produced and sold enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power plants, ceased its energy-intensive operations.

“The rise of industrial big data is moving at twice the speed of other big data. That’s a great opportunity.” said William Ruh, the head of global software at G.E. “There’s all kinds of experiences that we’re going to create.”

The other is a kind of application software to help power companies figure out how to best build out and operate their turbines. By October, G.E. hopes to have similar applications out for railway, mining, and oil and gas companies.

Effectively, G.E. is taking the data-driven tools and strategies used by Google and Facebook to the much larger global economy.

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.

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.

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis

Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.

“This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations,

Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.

Walking around town, my friend and I had noticed that almost every home had a pile of coal outside, soft dark chunks that people shoveled into stoves for cooking and heating. Thousands upon thousands of coal fires were loading the air with tiny dots of soot. Scientists have taken to calling these dots “black carbon,” and have steadily ratcheted up their assessments of its harm. In March, for instance, a research team led by a Mumbai environmental group estimated that black carbon and other particulate matter from India’s coal-fired power plants cause about 100,000 deaths a year.

A 31-scientist team from nine nations released a comprehensive, four-year assessment in January arguing that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the little black specks I found on my glasses and clothes have roughly two-thirds the impact of carbon dioxide.

The rule of thumb is that if a well leaks more than about 3 percent” of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective,

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.

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.

Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?

including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.

In its announcement, the academy recalled Alfred Nobel’s desire that his prize be awarded for something that benefited humankind, noting that one-fourth of the world’s electrical energy consumption goes to producing light.

Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.