Germany’s already an undisputed powerhouse in renewable energy, but it will need to become even more innovative now that it aims to quit nuclear power by 2022.

Up until last year, Germany operated 17 nuclear reactors that provided about one-fourth of the country’s electricity. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, though, the government revived a previously suspended plan to phase out its nuclear power capacity in favor of more wind energy development and new gas- and coal-fired power plants.

A new wrinkle has now emerged in that plan: switching on power plants only when wind and solar aren’t producing enough electricity to meet demand is making some new gas-fired plants appear unprofitable. That’s leading some companies to question whether those plants should be built.

“Though certain projects …

The world was producing nearly 238 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy as of the end of 2011, with the fastest development of new capacity taking place in China and India.

That total comes to about 3 percent of the world’s current electricity consumption, according to the World Wind Energy Association.

Together, China and India accounted for more than half of newly installed wind power last year, notes the Global Wind Energy Council. It was the second year in a row in which wind energy capacity growth was dominated by countries outside the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). That trend is expected to continue in years to come.

Meanwhile, it looks as though wind power in the US is set to hit …

Have China’s solar cell makers been “dumping” their products on the US market at low prices that undercut the competition? The US Department of Commerce this week made a preliminary finding that says, “Yes.”

Delivered in response to a complaint filed last year by SolarWorld, a German-based photovoltaics (PV) company with factories in the US, the Commerce Department finding concludes that “Chinese producers/exporters sold solar cells in the United States at dumping margins ranging from 31.14 percent to 249.96 percent.”

The legal definition of “dumping margin” is “the amount by which the normal value exceeds the export price or constructed export price of the subject merchandise.”

In other words, the Commerce Department has concluded that some Chinese solar companies were charging prices lower than one-third the fair value of their goods. …

From space, our planet might look like a “big blue marble” rich with water. On the ground, though, reality is different: water use in many parts of the world has become unsustainable, threatening not only local populations but global agriculture and business as well.

Water stress has “major implications for global supply chains,” according to the risk analysis firm Maplecroft. The company’s Water Stress Index for 2012 maps global water use down to a resolution of 10 square kilometers, comparing renewable water supply from precipitation, streams and rivers with consumption for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses.

The 10 countries facing extreme risk nationwide are all in the Middle East or North Africa:

Bahrain
Qatar
Kuwait
Libya
Djibouti
United Arab Emirates
Yemen
Saudi Arabia
Oman
Egypt

Other countries have subnational regions with extreme water stress. They include:

The northeast provinces of China, including Beijing, Jiangsu, …

Go online and do a search for “energy-efficient office” and you’ll get results numbering in the millions … an overwhelming output for the average entrepreneur who’s just looking for simple, straightforward advice on how to make technology at work more sustainable.

So what are the best resources for a green-thinking small-business owner or mid-market company exec to turn to? Following are 10 of the most useful to add to your bookmarks:

Energy Star – A joint effort of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Star is probably best known for its rating system for energy-efficient appliances and other products. But it also provides a variety of resources aimed at small-and medium-size business …

Several leading energy companies are expressing interest in working with the British government to make carbon capture and storage (CCS) commercially viable.

“This high level of interest proves that the UK is back on track with CCS,” a spokesperson for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was quoted as saying. “From the outset, we are working through collaboration with industry to ensure we make CCS a reality and importantly create the maximum return for what is one of the best offers anywhere in the world.”

CCS is considered a crucial strategy for controlling carbon emissions while allowing the continued use of fossil fuels, especially coal for electricity. The UK’s CCS commercialization program, which builds upon an earlier effort to kickstart the technology, offers £1 billion in direct funding support for the design and …

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing — still isn’t, in fact — but the transition to smart electricity meters in the US is moving steadily forward.

According to the most recent tally by the Institute for Electric Efficiency (IEE), nearly one in every three households in the US now has a smart meter. That means some 36 million smart meters have now been deployed across the country.

By 2015, the IEE projects, that number will rise to 65 million.

Before 2012 runs out, a total of 22 utilities in 16 states are expected to have finished rolling out smart meters to their entire customer base: 29 million people in all. Energy companies in the lead include:

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) — Just passed the 9-million-meter milestone in California;
Southern …

With the opening of the Alamosa Solar generating facility, Colorado is now home to the world’s largest concentrating photovoltaic electric power plant in the world.

Located in the San Luis Valley, the 30-megawatt plant was developed by Cogentrix Energy.

Covering 225 acres, the project features more than 500 pedestal-mounted trackers, each one with 7,560 Fresnel lenses that focus sunlight onto arrays of solar cells. The lenses boost the power of the sunlight hitting the photovoltaics by a factor of 500.

By focusing sunlight onto high-efficiency solar cells, concentrating photovoltaic power (CPV) is able to use fewer silicon solar cells than traditional photovoltaic power.

According to the CPV Consortium, “CPV, with its higher efficiency delivers higher energy production per megawatt installed, provides the lowest cost of solar energy in high solar regions of the world. The technology …

The rollout of smart meters around the world continues to encounter various objections. Some people view the meters as an invasion of privacy, or worry about the potential for hackers to access their home-energy data. Others are concerned the meters — which typically use radio waves to transmit data — pose a health hazard.

A few in that group say smart meters have already caused them to suffer from a range of debilitating impacts: tingling sensations, dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, difficulty in concentrating, etc.

What does science say? Following are 10 things we know about radio frequency emissions and their use in smart metering:

Radio frequency emissions, or radio waves, have frequencies ranging from 300 GHz (gigahertz) (wavelengths of around 1 millimeter) to 3 hertz (wavelengths of around 100 kilometers). They are the lowest-energy/longest-wavelength form of radiation on the electromagnetic …

There’s the G8, the G20 and, now, the G-Science.

In advance of the next G8 Summit, national science academies from 15 countries are urging world leaders to put more focus on several of the planet’s “most pressing challenges.” These include:

The growing global demand for two highly interdependent resources:  energy and water;
The growing need to build greater resilience to disasters, both natural and technological; and
Better ways to assess national greenhouse gas emissions to verify countries are working to meet their own climate goals or international commitments.

In terms of energy and water, the science academies state, “A systems approach based on specific regional circumstances and long-term planning is essential. Viewing each factor separately will lead to inefficiencies, added stress on water availability for food production and for critical ecosystems, and a higher risk …

For consumers, sentiment about prices generally follows two simple rules: more expensive and hard to get = bad, cheap and abundant = good.

In that context, all the new oil “wealth” coming from sources like Canada’s oil sands, the US’s corn-based biofuels and, potentially, gas- and coal-to-liquid technologies definitely falls under the “bad” column.

That’s because of the high cost to produce such non-conventional sources of liquid fuel … which have been the only sources to grow significantly, while production of conventional crude has been basically flat since 2005.

While detailed and verifiable data on production costs can be hard to come by, one estimate puts the marginal cost of production for, say, the bituminous deposits in Alberta at around $85 per barrel. Coal-to-liquids? A different estimate says it’s worthwhile …

It had to happen eventually: smart meters have rolled out in such large numbers around the world that the movement opposing them has taken on global dimensions as well.

Just do a Google search for “smart meters” and observe how many of the page one, top-10 results are anti-meter. StopSmartMeters! SmartMeterDangers. RefuseSmartMeters. The list goes on and on.

Other, more general-interest websites take on the topic of smart meters with equal apocalyptic fervor. “The new silent killer,” declares one site. “No more privacy” and “the end of the American dream,” warns another. “Stop the Invasion!” shrieks a third.

It seems that, while a silent majority accepts its newly installed smart meters as just another updated piece of marketplace technology — no more threatening than, say, a smartphone or an iPad — familiarity does in fact breed contempt among a …

Where are electric cars hitting the road in the greatest numbers? Japan, the US, China and Europe are leading the way, with a wide variety of programs and incentives encouraging city-dwellers in particular to switch to plug-in-based transport.

Just 16 cities in nine countries account for nearly one-third of all the electric vehicles (EVs) in use today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The circumstances and strategies in each of these leading areas, though, can vary dramatically.

In an effort to better understand what best drives adoption of plug-in cars, the IEA and several other organizations — including the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Clean Energy Ministerial and C40 — compiled a review of some of the most successful city programs to date. That review, the “EV City Casebook: A Look …

The race is on to get one vast, untapped source of energy before it gets us: methane hydrates.

An ice-like compound of methane trapped within the crystalline structure of frozen water, methane hydrates are found in sediments on the ocean floor, deep under Antarctic ice and below the Arctic permafrost. Globally, methane hydrates could hold twice as much carbon as all the other known fossil fuels on the planet, according to the US Geological Survey.

So they’re abundant, which — to researchers with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and elsewhere — sounds great, from an energy perspective. But all that carbon makes it potentially not so great from a climate perspective … especially since, while methane has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is also more than 60 times …

Greening your business computing strategies is not only a smart way to enhance your brand in the eyes of customers: it can save you money in both electricity costs and equipment wear-and-tear. In fact, an overwhelming majority – 71 percent – of mid-size companies say cutting costs is their primary motivation for pursuing green IT strategies, according to research from the Aberdeen Group.

Green IT not only pays off for small- and medium-size businesses, but it does so many times over.

“We’ve found that companies that are most mature with green IT initiatives are seeing sometimes as much as four- or five-fold more savings in those areas than peers who don’t have green IT initiatives in place,” said David Hatch, …

Before you get all excited about the prospect of investing in a space-mining operation that could deliver “near-infinite” amounts of scarce (here on Earth, anyway) metals and minerals, let us say one word: energy.

Yes, Planetary Resources‘ just-announced “bold” — or “audacious” or “visionary” — plan to mine near-Earth asteroids for precious resources could, in theory, make economic sense at some point. As an article in Wired notes, “Mining the top few feet of a single modestly sized, half-mile-diameter asteroid could yield around 130 tons of platinum, worth roughly $6 billion.” So even if all the upfront research and development costs, say, $10 billion, two simple (as if) back-and-forth trips to an asteroid would be more than worth the investment, yes?

Unfortunately, this is …

The fast, steep drop in the price of solar photovoltaics (PV) around the world has pushed many solar-power companies to (and sometimes over) the financial brink, but it’s been great for homeowners and others who couldn’t afford the technology just a few short years ago.

There’s another way in which solar energy could be made cheaper still, though: by finding a way to make solar panels “plug-and-play” … that is, so easy to install, they could go from store shelf to generating electricity on someone’s rooftop in a matter of hours, rather than days, weeks or months.

Together with mounting hardware, so-called “soft” costs — the price of permitting, installation and interconnection — still account for more than half the total expense of a home solar-energy system, notes the US Department of Energy (DOE). That’s why the …

Nuclear energy is a lot of things: reliable, controversial, fraught with economic and engineering challenges. And — in the aftermath of Fukushima but with an urgent global need to decarbonize our energy — it now finds itself at a crossroads.

Will it become the go-to source for clean power in the future? Will a combination of obstacles (escalating costs, public opposition, geopolitical worries) see nuclear fade away? Or will its contribution to world energy supplies — about 14 percent of all electricity generated — stay about the same as it is today?

While the US recently approved its first new nuclear reactor in 30 years, energy-hungry China has been building reactors like crazy, with 26 new facilities currently under construction, another …

Which country generates the most electricity from hydropower? It probably comes as no surprise that China — famous for the 21,000-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest-capacity hydropower plant — is the world leader in hydroelectricity.

Asia is also the region where hydropower is growing most rapidly, according to the latest available figures, as reported in BP’s 2011 Statistical Review of World Energy.

Globally, electricity from hydropower grew by 5.3 percent between 2009 and 2010, with new developments in the Asia-Pacific region accounting for the bulk of that growth: a full 72.1 percent.

In terms getting the greatest amount of its total energy from hydroelectricity, though, no country can hold a candle to Norway, which in 2010 got nearly 64 percent of all of its energy — that includes oil-based energy …

Hydropower already accounts for about one-third of all the clean energy generated in the US, but it could produce even more without the need to build even a single new dam.

That’s because there are so many non-powered dams — that is, dams that weren’t built to generate electricity — across the country. In fact, dams not used for hydropower far outnumber the power-purposed ones: the US Department of Energy (DOE) estimates there are more than 80,000 of the former, compared to around 2,500 of the latter.

“The abundance, cost, and environmental favorability of NPDs (non-powered dams), combined with the reliability and predictability of hydropower, make these dams a highly attractive source for expanding the nation’s renewable energy supply,” notes the DOE in a new study examining …

It’s been a long time since Denmark was a global power, but it’s shaping up to lead a power renaissance of a much different kind: clean power.

Unlike many other countries today, Denmark is not only not cheerleading for the Fossil Fuel 2.0 Age (that is, tar sands in Canada, shale oil in the US, coal-to-liquids in South Africa and beyond) but it’s pursuing renewables with a vengeance hard to find even in other heavily green parts of Europe.

Yes, Denmark-based Dong Energy still depends upon North Sea oil and gas for a lot of its business, although it’s also developing a lot of wind energy. It was also one of the first companies to team up with electric-car infrastructure promoter Better Place, way back in 2008.

But the nation itself …

What else is crude oil but ancient sunlight in liquid form, a fuel distilled from the remains of tiny photosynthesizers that lived in the world’s oceans some 300 million years ago?

If that kind of ancient sunlight is becoming more expensive and harder to get, could we run our cars with distilled sunlight of a different, more recent kind? Say, for example, wood or crop waste?

Of course, that’s the idea behind everything from corn-based ethanol to Craig Venter’s quest for a genetically modified organism that can produce bio-oil. The ultimate goal is to find the easiest, most cost-effective way to make large quantities of “drop-in fuel” that can keep the world’s cars, trucks and planes running even as crude oil becomes ever more costly.

While it touts the growth of domestic oil and gas supplies, for example, …

More than anything, the Worldwatch Institute’s latest annual update on the challenges of sustainability — “State of the World 2012″ — is a reminder of how much time has been wasted since the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. And, with Rio+20 just a few months away, the main message of this year’s report is: time is running out.

It’s a message we’ve been hearing repeatedly of late: from the International Energy Agency, from an international gathering of scientists that released the first-ever “State of the Planet” declaration, from climate researchers and many others. We’re fast approaching so many global tipping points, noted a 2009 study from Arizona State University, that “it’s too late to be a pessimist.”

The non-stop pursuit of …

Rare earth elements aren’t really rare on our planet. But they can be hard to find in large, mineral-form quantities that are economically worth developing.

While rare earth mineral deposits have been mined from the US to Brazil and India to South Africa, the lion’s share — more than 95 percent — of today’s supplies come from China. That’s become a growing concern as China has rolled out production caps and quotas.

Why? Because rare earth metals are currently crucial for making a variety of high-tech products, including lasers, lighting, superconductors and advanced batteries.

Of the 17 rare earth elements, five have been identified as “critical” by the US Department of Energy (DOE), both in terms of their importance to clean-energy technologies and in their vulnerability to supply risks. These include:

Yttrium …

We tend to assume that moving toward a world of all electric, zero-emissions cars is just a matter of time.

The reasoning goes like this: year after year, more and more owners of gasoline-powered vehicles will trade in their carbon-emitting wheels for cleaner, plug-in models until, voila, at one point in the future, every car on the road will be a “clean” one.

Only that’s not exactly what real life is telling us.

While electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have only recently become available on the mass market, hybrid electrics without the plug have been around for well over a decade now, and became increasingly popular as oil prices began marching upward. But the assumption “once-a-hybrid-owner-always-a-hybrid-owner” is wrong, it turns out.

Only about one-third of hybrid vehicle owners in the US choose another …

Keeping streets lit at night can end up costing a city a significant amount of money in energy and maintenance expenses over time. And with governments almost everywhere looking to cut budgets these days, municipalities are exploring a variety of ways to lower their streetlighting bills.

In the US alone, more than 52 million streetlights might need replacing over the next few decades. So how are cities looking to get a bigger bang for their streetlighting bucks?

Trading in for more efficiency – Chicago is replacing many of its old sodium-vapor streetlights with metal-halide lamps that are 33 percent more energy efficient.
Going solar – Chennai, India, expects to cut its streetlight energy consumption by 25 percent by replacing 60,000 streetlights with LEDs, compact fluorescents and other efficient technologies, …

Oil prices and the broader economy are linked in complex ways, but there’s no question the connections are critical.

While the investment, banking and mortgage sectors receive the greatest blame for nearly crashing the global economy in 2008, oil prices — which reached a record high of $146 per barrel in July of that year before rapidly spiraling downward — also played a part. And while recent spot prices haven’t reached those eye-popping levels, the average this year has pushed past the 12-month average seen in 2008.

That’s serious cause for concern, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA).

If oil this year averages $120 per barrel (Brent crude is currently around $122 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate is just under $103 per barrel), the …

Biofuels — liquid fuels made from everything from algae to corn — haven’t yet come anywhere close to replacing crude oil. But they’re being produced in increasingly large volumes around the globe.

(Biomass is also used to produce electricity; we’ll have more details on biomass energy following our latest survey, which is still open for responses.)

In 2010, the world produced 59,261,000 tons of oil equivalent in biofuels, a 13.8-percent increase over 2009, according to BP’s 2011 Statistical Review of World Energy. Just under 43 percent of that — 25,351,000 tons of oil equivalent — was produced in the US, where most biofuel is ethanol made from corn. (In 2011, for the first time, more US-grown corn went toward fuel rather than food. Europe and Asia, by contrast, produce …

Transforming today’s gasoline-dependent roads into “green highways” for electric cars is a lot more complex than just adding a few charging stations every 10 or 20 miles.

And considering we’re trying to build an electrified transport system in a short span of time — we don’t have the luxury of the 100-odd years it took to develop the combustion-engine-based road system — it’s important to do it right from the start. That would suggest we need to do some heavy duty virtual modeling before we start any actual building in real life.

That’s exactly what IBM and ZSE, the biggest electric company in Slovakia, aim to do in a joint project to help the capital city of Bratislava get ready for a plug-in car future.

Working together, the companies are studying the …

By all appearances, Nissan’s “Taxi of Tomorrow” — which has just made its debut in advance of the New York International Auto Show — is a comfortable, user-friendly and well-engineered vehicle. It’s just too bad it doesn’t live up to its “tomorrow” moniker in terms of fuel efficiency.

Yes, as even the Natural Resources Defense Council has pointed out, at 25 miles per gallon, the 2014 Nissan NV200 Taxi is nearly twice as fuel-efficient as the previous NYC taxi vehicle of choice, the Ford Crown Victoria. And, yes, Nissan has said an electric-only version of the NV200 could start coming off the assembly lines in 2017. But if the last few years of sustainability research should have taught us anything, it’s that incremental improvements like this aren’t …