Green Energy

Maine had more community solar capacity than any other state in 2025. But a new law enacted in the name of affordability has brought development to a standstill.

Legislation to open the door for small plug-in solar panels hit roadblocks, including safety concerns raised by the state’s electrical workers union

Oxfordshire’s Ray Valley Solar already generates clean energy for 7,000 homes, and is now crowdfunding storage to marry daylight with evening demand

Hard paywall, but the key part of the article:

Even as Ocean Winds abandons two U.S. offshore wind leases, it’s staying the course on projects elsewhere, including a floating French array that flicked on this week.

In a Republican-dominated district, voters narrowly upheld a ban on utility scale renewables in most of the county in a 53% to 47% vote. A referendum backer called the result disappointing, yet ‘telling.’

Sources like wind and solar can now deliver continuous power [using batteries] according to a new report. And, they’re often a bargain compared with fossil fuels.

New Zealand has passed the “tipping point” where most people buying solar panels will save more money than they spend on them, researchers say, but more could be done to unlock households’ ability to make use of solar power.

As Pentagon officials delay approval of wind farms, scientific studies show that they can distort radar systems, but the problem is manageable, researchers say.

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CHRISTIANA, Tenn. (AP) — From a distance, the small solar farm in central Tennessee looks like others that now dot rural America, with row upon row of black panels absorbing the sun’s rays to generate electricity.

Massachusetts has activated long-term contracts for Vineyard Wind, the state’s first utility-scale offshore wind project. Officials say the move will stabilize prices for 20 years and cut a projected $1.4 billion from customer electricity bills over that period.

This is a really important breakthrough for reducing carbon emissions in the building industry!

Podcast host and long time climate reporter David Roberts interviews the owner of Energea, a company that enables individuals to invest in solar panel installations in Brazil, Columbia, parts of Africa, and the USA. locals pay for electricity to do what they want to do, the profits from that electricity go to investors.

India’s industrial sector is an economic engine, but it comes with high costs and dirty air. Smart policies can tap cheap solar to make electrifying industrial heat in India cheaper than most fossil fuel sources of heat.

Two-thirds of the state’s counties ban or heavily limit solar. Now, those blanket restrictions are going away, though counties can still bar individual projects.

Paywall removed

In March, one month into the US-Iran war that began on February 28, the People’s Republic doubled the number of solar panels it was exporting, distributing 68 gigawatts of photovoltaic cells and silicon wafers.

The US is, of course, substantially unprepared

The Tokyo metropolitan government is set to survey seabed and weather conditions off the Izu island chain for its plan to build the world’s largest “floating offshore” wind power farm by 2035.

While electrifying transportation is essential to addressing the climate crisis, the mining of nickel, copper, and lithium required to build out these green technologies brings its own environmental and social costs. To understand these impacts, author and political scientist Thea Riofrancos traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, home to one of the largest lithium reserves in the world. She joins Host Paloma Beltran to discuss her book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

“The oil crisis triggered by the Iran war has changed the fossil fuel industry for ever, turning countries away from fossil fuels to secure energy supplies, the world’s leading energy economist said.”

On Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston sided with nine clean energy organizations that sued to stop the federal government’s ​“arbitrary and capricious” efforts to hinder wind and solar development on public land or wherever federal permits are required — even as fossil fuels and other energy sources carried on as usual.

On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Over 9 GW of new offshore wind projects came online last year. The sector is set to grow even more as nations in Europe and Asia seek out domestic clean power.

The bill streamlines and speeds up the permitting and inspection process for residents installing solar panels; doubles the state’s net metering program, which credits those solar producers for the they generate, from 3 gigawatts to 6 gigawatts, and allows so-called “balcony” panels, portable devices that can be plugged-in rather than installed and thus available to renters and those not looking for a full commitment.

To prove that their innovation works, the team ran several tests. In a solar simulator, it achieved a photothermal efficiency of 91.27%, meaning almost all the light hitting it became usable heat.

Put differently, 500 million barrels of oil lost to the market is equivalent to:

As focus switches to renewable energy, pumped-storage hydropower project in Koh Kong province expected to be completed by 2029

The US attack on Iran has made the need for renewable energy inarguable. Environmentalists are now being seen for the pragmatists that they are

A carbon tax would have achieved this same shift in a far more equitable fashion, which of course made it politically quite difficult.

The federal tax credits can help save billions of dollars and lower electricity costs as sky-high power prices become an election issue.

Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain’s record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity.

Energy crisis unfolding in Middle East has added political urgency, and more funding, to transform the solar industry in particular

A generalized tendency to believe in secret plots can predict whether someone will oppose the construction of a local wind farm months later. Likewise, coming to oppose that local wind farm can deepen a person’s general conspiratorial worldview over time. These mutually reinforcing perspectives can potentially stall the transition to renewable energy sources if community concerns go unaddressed. The research was recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Richland County blocked large-scale renewables in most townships. Voters now have a rare opportunity to overturn that policy at the ballot box.

Solar energy has a simple but annoying weakness. It disappears when the sun does. Even the most efficient systems struggle with this basic reality—no sunlight means no power. Scientists have long tried to fix this by storing solar energy as heat, but doing it efficiently has proven tricky.

For decades, China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into green energy, making it a cornerstone of the country’s drive for energy independence. It also blocked foreign companies from competing in large segments of its domestic market, such as manufacturing wind turbines and electric car batteries, to ensure that Chinese companies could grow into giants.