solar power
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Here come Japan's post-nuclear model solar communities
If you thought Abu Dhabi's uber-green Masdar city was ambitious and/or doomed, just wait until you see what Japan's cooking up. In a pair of nearby cities in Hiroshima prefecture, Fukuyama and Onomichi, a coalition is going to power as much of their grid as possible with solar energy.
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Critical List: China makes solar power cheap; U.K. fishing fleet wastes cod
China is making solar power cheap in order to drive solar growth.
Since 1963, U.K. fishing boats have tossed $1 billion worth of dead or dying cod overboard to keep within their quotas.
In Washington State, what The New York Times calls "the largest dam removal project in American history" will destroy two dams and help salmon regrow their population. -
New photovoltaic generator runs on heat instead of sunlight
Photovoltaic cells, the basic unit of solar power systems, turn light into electricity. But fueling photovoltaics with sunlight isn't always practical. MIT scientists came up with a way around this issue: they found a really efficient way to turn heat into light.
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Why China's winning the cleantech contest
One Block Off the Grid, a company that organizes collective purchasing for green home improvements, put together a very loooong infographic about, in their words, "Why China is Kicking Our Ass in Clean Tech." Fast Company very helpfully chopped that infographic up into digestible pieces. But here is the only picture you really need to understand:
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Critical List: DeChristopher sentencing today; Gingrich invests in renewables
Activist Tim DeChristopher's sentencing is scheduled for today. He could go to prison for as many as 10 years.
Congress is still hard at work cutting funding for all manner of environmental programs.
With the West out as a customer, Iran is selling its natural gas to Iraq and Syria. -
Is this the greenest college campus ever?
California's Butte College has a 928-acre wildlife refuge. It promotes ride shares. It uses goats for landscaping, and worms for composting. It has LEED-certifiable buildings. And now it's going off the grid -- the first college in the country, the school claims, to be energy independent.
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The top 12 women of cleantech
While the clean-energy sector is very much a boy's club, women are starting to break down the clubhouse door. Here's a list of top women in cleantech.
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Banks inflate solar value for tax credit
Solar leasing has broadened participation in the distributed generation revolution. Unfortunately, this revolution has been co-opted by high finance.
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For the first time ever, renters can get solar incentives, too
There's a reason California is the largest solar market in the country -- I mean, aside from its abundance of sun. Namely, its regulators keep coming up with new ways to allow people to DIY-up their own distributed energy systems. Their latest brainstorm is a measure that allows renters to take advantage of the same solar incentives as people who own their own homes.