Okay, I’m a little slow on the uptake on this but I’ve been pursing a recent report from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on the effect of installing a rooftop solar array on the sale price of homes in California. (It makes for dense reading and unless you’re really into “hedonic pricing models” and “difference-in-difference model,” you might want to stick with the two-page summary.) The upshot: California homes that sport solar panels sell for a $17,000 premium for an average newish 3.1-kilowatt photovoltaic array. “This is a sizable effect,” Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at the Lab and a coauthor of …

It was a sunny year at the 2011 Coachella Music Festival, and the stage is set for the town's new concentrating photovoltaic farm.Photo: Paige K. ParsonsAn interesting solar development got buried by Thursday’s big news that French fossil fuel conglomerate Total had agreed to acquire a majority stake in SunPower, the Silicon Valley photovoltaic panel maker and power plant development. That $1.37 billion Total is spending on SunPower naturally overshadowed the Southern California desert community of Coachella’s announcement that it had flipped the switch on a 420-kilowatt concentrating photovoltaic farm at its water reclamation plant. Don’t yawn. Here’s why the …

Now that we've put together some green muscle, what will we do with it?Photo: Denis GilesMuch of the green movement has been mounting a rearguard fight in Washington to fend off attempts to gut the U.S. EPA in the wake of the Republican sweep of the 2010 elections. California, as usual, is heading down a different road. The enviro-business coalition that defeated Prop 23, Texas oil companies' attempt to derail the state's global-warming law, is stepping up effort to push lawmakers to expand California's climate-change efforts. First, the No on 23 campaign led by billionaire hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer resurfaced …

Tech companies have something hanging over their heads.Photo: The SharpteamAs I sit here at the Local 123 café in Berkeley on Earth Day, a dozen hipsters are transfixed by their Macbooks, their heads lost in the cloud. According to a Greenpeace report [PDF] released this week, all those presumably green and well-meaning digital workers-slash-slackers are contributing to global warming every time they update their Facebook status, scan their Twitter stream or check their Gmail. That's because all those apps live in massive data centers -- a.k.a. "the cloud." In the "How Dirty is Your Data?" report, Greenpeace analysts estimate data …

Google's Oklahoma wind farm will be built this year.Photo: Marcin WicharyIt's getting a bit hard to keep up with all of Google's green investments these days -- $168 million put into a big solar power plant project one week; $100 million for the world's largest wind farm the next. But this week's big money move -- the third so far this month -- is different. It also involves wind but is a power purchase agreement (known as a PPA in the utility trade) rather than a direct investment in a specific project. The deal with wind developer NextEra Energy Resources …

Google is helping to create economies of scale for clean energy.Photo: T.J.Another day, another $100 million invested in clean energy. Google has been on a green tech investment roll of late. Last week, the search giant put $168 million into BrightSource Energy's 370-megawatt solar thermal power plant, currently the world's largest solar project, which is under construction in the Southern California desert. And on Monday, Google announced it would invest $100 million in the 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon. Shepherds Flat, being built near Arlington, Ore., will be the world's largest turbine farm when completed, if it hasn't …

The Notrees wind farm.Photo: Duke EnergyThey like to do things big in Texas, so it's no surprise that the Lone Star state will launch the world's largest wind battery storage project. Duke Energy is not a Texas company, but it owns the aptly named Notrees wind farm in the Texas panhandle. The North Carolina power giant is teaming up with an Austin area startup called Xtreme Power to install a 36-megawatt battery at the 153-megawatt Notrees Windpower Project near Kermit, Texas. That's one big battery. Such technology is likely to become crucial as wind farms become ever larger but erratic …

The Kogan Creek Power Station.Photo: Kogan Solar BoostAustralian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Wednesday appeared at giant coal-fired power plant to announce that the Southern Hemisphere's largest solar project would be built in Queensland. Why, you may be wondering, would the PM travel to a remote 750-megawatt coal power station to make a big renewable energy news pronouncement? Well, coal is king in Australia, and the 44-megawatt solar thermal project to be built by Areva Solar at the Kogan Creek Power Station will generate additional steam to drive the coal plant's turbines. "By using energy from the sun with Areva's …

A rendering of the future Ivanpah solar plant. Photo: BrightSource EnergyIt's only Tuesday but two milestones have been reached this week in the long march toward a carbon-free future. On Monday, BrightSource Energy became the first solar power plant developer to complete the financing of a large-scale project in two decades. The United States Department of Energy finalized a $1.6 billion loan guarantee BrightSource's 370-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System solar thermal power plant now under construction in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. (The feds initially had pledged $1.37 billion but threw in another $230 million Monday.) As the …

I was going to write today about Facebook's efforts to boost the energy efficiency of its Oregon data center by 38 percent. The social networking Goliath did that by redesigning servers and the operations of the facility, then broke with industry convention by sharing its secret sauce with competitors in a new initiative it calls the Open Compute Project. (That didn't exactly neutralize criticism from Greenpeace, which has mounted a campaign against Facebook for its dependence on coal-fired power plants at the company's Prineville, Ore., data center.) Data centers are the steel mills of our post-industrial information economy and consume …