United States
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Watch America’s trash problem keep getting bigger
This map shows where landfills have sprung up over the last 100 years.
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Critical List: Snow comes in April this year; Obama campaign seeks environmentalists
New York and Pennsylvania are getting hit with an April blizzard. The United States and Britain are going to collaborate on offshore wind development. Lithium air batteries could extend an electric vehicle’s battery life by a factor of 10 … if anyone could figure out how to make one.
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Solar grid parity 101 — and why you should care
We're rapidly approaching solar grid parity, the tipping point when installing solar power will cost less than buying electricity from the grid.
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Gainesville, Fla., becomes a world leader in solar power
Beating out Japan, France, and China in solar installed per capita, this small city proves you don't have to be big to go big on solar power.
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Bigger subsidies make bigger solar a bad bet
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Americans seem unable to resist big things, and solar power plants are no exception. There may be no reasoning with an affinity for all things “super sized,” but the economics of large scale solar projects (and […]
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America and Germany Getting Their Clean Energy Just Desserts
Germany is the unquestioned world leader in renewable energy. By mid-2011, the European nation generated over 20 percent of its electricity from wind and solar power alone, and had created over 400,000 jobs in the industry. The sweet German success is no accident, however, and the following pie chart illustrates the results of a carefully […]
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‘The Story of Broke,’ Annie Leonard’s new video
Annie Leonard made a splash with her viral video about our consumerist society, “The Story of Stuff,” which inspired a book, an in-depth website, and a series of spinoffs. Her latest installment in the series is “The Story of Broke” — watch it here: The video in a nutshell: The Story of Broke: Why there’s […]
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California pushes back against energy imports
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Western grid operators have been making plans for large-scale renewable energy imports into the California electricity market, prompting the governor’s senior advisor for renewable energy facilities to write a “self-reliance” response. Here are a few highlights […]
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Local solar could power the Mountain West right now, all of America in 2026
If the U.S. had kept pace with German solar installation, we'd be on our way to being a 100 percent solar-powered nation.