Kosovo Citizens Protest World Bank’s Plan to Build Coal Plant
The World Bank wants to build a big coal plant in Kosovo, and is refusing to consider cleaner, more modern energy technologies.
The World Bank wants to build a big coal plant in Kosovo, and is refusing to consider cleaner, more modern energy technologies.
The Mystery of the Invincible Oil Subsidies (Video)
Why does bad policy that everyone hates stick around?
North Sea Gas Rig Blowout Is An ‘Explosion Waiting To Happen’
A deepwater rig in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland suffered a blowout five days ago, and is uncontrollably leaking natural gas in what experts fear is an “explosion waiting to happen.” “Relief drilling would take six months and require boring through 4 kilometers of rock with painstaking precision in order to intercept the gas pocket, one engineer said.” “All 238 staff were evacuated from the Elgin platform after the gas leak was discovered on Sunday afternoon. Shell is also removing workers from two offshore installations close to the Elgin platform,” the Guardian reports.
Shell Oil President: "There Is No Immediate Fix For the Price of Oil Today"
Shell Oil President talks with Charlie Rose about energy and says there is no immediate fix for soaring gas prices, despite GOP attacks against the president on this issue.
Scotland Now Gets 1/3 of Its Power from Renewable Sources
The milestone is evidence that Scotland may indeed reach its goal of being 100% renewable-powered by 2020.
Mark Ruffalo Shows Colbert A Few Things About Fracking
Mark Ruffalo Shows Colbert A Few Things About Fracking
Quote of the Day: David Mirvish on Urban Congestion and Driving Downtown
One would think that a guy who owns a pile of downtown theatres would want clear fast roads for his suburban customers. Not so.
Turkey To Reduce Oil Imports From Iran
Turkey announced today that it will reduce its oil imports from Iran by 10 percent. Turkey is Iran’s fifth largest oil purchaser and previously would not commit to cutting Iranian crude imports. Turkey’s Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said the country will replace the oil with supplies from Libya. “We plan to increase the number and the route of countries we buy oil from,” Yildiz said. While a European Union oil embargo of Iran is set to take effect in July, in a separate move today, President Obama announced new sanctions on foreign banks that continue to purchase Iranian oil. The AP notes that the “State Department announced that it would grant waivers to 10 European Union countries and Japan because of steps they have already taken to cut back on Iranian oil.”
Take A Look At The Coolest Wind Map Ever
Ever wonder what the wind really looks like? Turns out Vincent Van Gogh wasn't far off when he painted Starry Night.
Source of Total Gas Rig Leak Found But Stopping It Still Long Off
A crisis continues: The area of sea that's covered by slick far larger than acknowledged.
Waitrose Launches Flagship Energy Centre
Waitrose has opened the first of two low carbon energy centres that will power its stores using locally sourced woodchip biomass in a bid to cut total emissions by 15%.
The first centre will be on the Isle of Wight and will provide heat and power to the retailer’s East Cowes store, providing the vast majority of its energy needs making it almost independent of the national grid.
It is expected the centre, developed by outsourcing firm MITIE, will cut the store’s carbon emissions by over 750 tonnes per year and help the supermarket chain achieve an absolute emissions reduction of 15% by 2020-21 when compared with 2010 levels.
The second energy centre currently being developed is in Bracknell and will come online at the end of May. Using the same technology, it will cut emissions by the same amount.
Over time Waitrose hope the centres will become community energy hubs, with the potential to supply heat to local homes and community facilities.
Waitrose’s director of development Nigel Keen said: “We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions by an absolute reduction of 15% when comparing our emissions from 2010 with those in 2020 and the one-site energy centres at East Cowes and Bracknell will help us achieve our target.”
Allen & York specialise in energy jobs throughout the world. Current Energy jobs include:
Salary: £35k-£45k
Location: Scotland
Energy News: Fracking Could Crack Carbon Capture; Shell Gets Another Arctic Drilling OK; More
Not to be a downer, but there's a quartet of concerning news this morning worth paying attention to. Beyond the headline: The Koch Brothers fund disinformation on Obama's influence on fuel prices; and, the Senate rejects ending Big Oil subsidies.
Energy Transparency Laws Could Create 59,000 Jobs And Cut Energy Costs $18 Billion By 2020
As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
And if you can’t measure it, you can’t make money from it.
If we want to get serious about making this country more energy efficient, we need better measurement tools to help us understand how much our buildings are consuming. After all, buildings account for 40% of energy use in the U.S.
One of the simplest tools is the energy disclosure law — a requirement that all buildings over a certain size make their energy consumption public. The law may also include a rating system for ranking the performance of buildings online or in real estate dealings.
By making the information public and setting up a rating system, it provides an additional incentive for building owners to make efficiency upgrades.
There are currently five cities and two states that have passed such laws for commercial and multi-tenant buildings. Around four billion square feet of buildings are covered under these areas — double the number of LEED buildings in the U.S.
However, there’s still no serious push for the policy on a national level. And that could be preventing building owners from saving tens of billions of dollars in energy costs.
Two new reports from the Institute for Market Transformation illustrate how this straightforward policy could break the energy efficiency retrofit market wide open, potentially unlocking $18 billion in energy savings and 59,000 jobs by 2020.
The energy disclosure laws covered in the report would cover commercial buildings 25,000 square feet and greater. It would also cover multifamily residential buildings 20 units and greater.
Here’s how researchers describe the tool:
Brilliant in its simplicity, public disclosure of building energy consumption will start a stampede to upgrade buildings – motivating the good buildings to achieve higher levels of efficiency and prompting the laggards into action.
Using the nationally accepted ENERGY STAR performance scoring system – which grades buildings from “1” to “100” and is based on actual utility bills – an anemic score of 17 in a “class A” Manhattan office tower will generate action: An energy auditor will be hired, meters installed, lighting ungraded, fans and motors tuned, and old refrigerators replaced. The ENERGY STAR score of 17 becomes 77. New jobs will be created and the building owners and tenants will spend less on their utility bills.
The law isn’t designed to penalize or threaten building owners. It simply provides an opportunity for operators to track their energy use, thus providing an incentive to upgrade buildings and control costs. As we see in cities and states that require energy disclosure, commercial building operators have been responding to these laws, thus creating new opportunities for energy efficiency businesses in the area.
The IMT report highlights a number of businesses that are seeing a direct impact from disclosure laws. For example, after New York City passed its law, Ecological, a company that develops sustainability plans for building owners, gained more than 400 clients.
“We saw a significant rise in the number of clients that are interested in the actions they can take to improve their building’s efficiency, and their bottom lines. We anticipate that this trend will continue in the New with each year of compliance reporting,” said Lindsay Napor McLean, the company’s chief operating officer.
All that activity results in new jobs. Working with the Political Economy Research Institute, IMT estimates that a nationwide initiative would create more than 59,000 net jobs over the next eight years.
Simple, effective national efficiency laws could also help attract businesses looking to set up shop in the U.S.
Tim Donovan is CEO of Day One Energy Solutions, a company deploying efficiency and energy-tracking technologies on commercial and government buildings. He’s based in California, but does business in the UK. He told Climate Progress recently that his business had moved over the UK because of its “bold, aggressive steps to address climate change, and deploy efficiency and renewables.”
With a strong nationwide efficiency program, carbon reduction requirements, and a bank to help finance projects, Donavan calls it “very fertile ground for efficiency.” Of course, the U.S. government has put unprecedented support behind efficiency in recent years. But it hasn’t come together in a comprehensive way like in other countries.
“I just don’t see the U.S. as the best market. As we continue to grow in the UK, we’d love to be over here.”
A national energy disclosure law for large commercial buildings is one piece of making the U.S. a more attractive market. It would send a strong signal to the business community that the country is committed to efficiency — helping build new companies, create jobs and save buildings operators billions of dollars.
Energy Transparency Laws Could Create 59,000 Jobs And Cut Energy Costs $18 Billion By 2020
As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
And if you can’t measure it, you can’t make money from it.
If we want to get serious about making this country more energy efficient, we need better measurement tools to help us understand how much our buildings are consuming. After all, buildings account for 40% of energy use in the U.S.
One of the simplest tools is the energy disclosure law — a requirement that all buildings over a certain size make their energy consumption public. The law may also include a rating system for ranking the performance of buildings online or in real estate dealings.
By making the information public and setting up a rating system, it provides an additional incentive for building owners to make efficiency upgrades.
There are currently five cities and two states that have passed such laws for commercial and multi-tenant buildings. Around four billion square feet of buildings are covered under these areas — double the number of LEED buildings in the U.S.
However, there’s still no serious push for the policy on a national level. And that could be preventing building owners from saving tens of billions of dollars in energy costs.
Two new reports from the Institute for Market Transformation illustrate how this straightforward policy could break the energy efficiency retrofit market wide open, potentially unlocking $18 billion in energy savings and 59,000 jobs by 2020.
The energy disclosure laws covered in the report would cover commercial buildings 25,000 square feet and greater. It would also cover multifamily residential buildings 20 units and greater.
Here’s how researchers describe the tool:
Brilliant in its simplicity, public disclosure of building energy consumption will start a stampede to upgrade buildings – motivating the good buildings to achieve higher levels of efficiency and prompting the laggards into action.
Using the nationally accepted ENERGY STAR performance scoring system – which grades buildings from “1” to “100” and is based on actual utility bills – an anemic score of 17 in a “class A” Manhattan office tower will generate action: An energy auditor will be hired, meters installed, lighting ungraded, fans and motors tuned, and old refrigerators replaced. The ENERGY STAR score of 17 becomes 77. New jobs will be created and the building owners and tenants will spend less on their utility bills.
The law isn’t designed to penalize or threaten building owners. It simply provides an opportunity for operators to track their energy use, thus providing an incentive to upgrade buildings and control costs. As we see in cities and states that require energy disclosure, commercial building operators have been responding to these laws, thus creating new opportunities for energy efficiency businesses in the area.
The IMT report highlights a number of businesses that are seeing a direct impact from disclosure laws. For example, after New York City passed its law, Ecological, a company that develops sustainability plans for building owners, gained more than 400 clients.
“We saw a significant rise in the number of clients that are interested in the actions they can take to improve their building’s efficiency, and their bottom lines. We anticipate that this trend will continue in the New with each year of compliance reporting,” said Lindsay Napor McLean, the company’s chief operating officer.
All that activity results in new jobs. Working with the Political Economy Research Institute, IMT estimates that a nationwide initiative would create more than 59,000 net jobs over the next eight years.
Simple, effective national efficiency laws could also help attract businesses looking to set up shop in the U.S.
Tim Donovan is CEO of Day One Energy Solutions, a company deploying efficiency and energy-tracking technologies on commercial and government buildings. He’s based in California, but does business in the UK. He told Climate Progress recently that his business had moved over the UK because of its “bold, aggressive steps to address climate change, and deploy efficiency and renewables.”
With a strong nationwide efficiency program, carbon reduction requirements, and a bank to help finance projects, Donavan calls it “very fertile ground for efficiency.” Of course, the U.S. government has put unprecedented support behind efficiency in recent years. But it hasn’t come together in a comprehensive way like in other countries.
“I just don’t see the U.S. as the best market. As we continue to grow in the UK, we’d love to be over here.”
A national energy disclosure law for large commercial buildings is one piece of making the U.S. a more attractive market. It would send a strong signal to the business community that the country is committed to efficiency — helping build new companies, create jobs and save buildings operators billions of dollars.
Jiuquan, Gansu Province Drives Development of Wind Farms Along China’s Hexi Corridor
China is seeking to develop the Hexi Corridor, part of the ancient Northern Silk Road that lies inside China, into a demonstration zone for renewable energy in a move to lessen its dependence on foreign oil and gas.
NREL Thinks Big at Wind Technology Center
The Front Range environment at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) is harsh. The winds — the very reason the NWTC is there — have little mercy. The frigid cold of winter gives way to the baking sun of summer. Yet in the midst of this difficult landscape, the future of wind energy grows bigger and stronger thanks to the work being done by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) NWTC and its industry partners.
Wales on Target to Reduce Waste Emissions
Wales is driving down emissions from waste management as it reports on early outcomes from its climate change strategy. The strategy, published in October 2010, aims to reduce the country’s total emissions by 3% per year.
While the waste sector is responsible for a very small proportion of emissions covered by the 3% target, it is an area where the Welsh Government can take direct action. Studies from the Climate Change Strategy for Wales report show a fall in greenhouse gas emissions from waste activities in Wales from just over 1.1 MtCo2e/year in 2006 to just over 1.0 MtCo2e/year in 2009.
Baseline emissions for 2010 have yet to be published, but the 3% target level set for 2020 is just under 0.8 MtCo2e/year so it looks likely that this will be reached.
In addition, Wales currently has the highest recycling rates in the UK – it is expected to hit an average rate of 50% later this year, which is well on the way to its 2012-13 target of 52%.
The Welsh Government is looking to build on its achievements by targeting methane emissions from landfill sites and in turn, has published a report listing how each local authority in Wales disposed of its waste for the six months from October 2010 to March 2011.
Members of the public will be able to see where their waste has ended up. The report concentrates on how sustainably each local authority has recycled the plastics, glass, metals, paper and card waste it collected from residents and businesses.
Allen & York specialise in waste recruitment and have a large number of waste jobs available in the UK, including:
Salary: £42k-£47k
Location: South East
Panic Buying of Fuel Grips UK Motorists
Panic by UK motorists causes fuel supplies to run dry, all because of a few careless words from the Prime Minister.
