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The sun will set early in Haiti tonight. By 5:23 PM, night will have come to the island nation, and while night comes to virtually every part of the world virtually everyday, throughout much of Haiti, the darkness will be much deeper. It’s been nearly two years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed [...]
My weekly Going Green column is up on the Time.com mainpage, and I take on the worrying state of the U.S. renewable energy industry. It’s not worrying now—2011, like the last few years, has been great for the wind and solar industries, as prices drop and installations spread. But that growth was driven in part by [...]
You might remember that a few weeks ago the U.S. Commerce Department opened up an investigation into alleged unfair trade practices by Chinese solar manufacturers. The investigation — instigated at the behest of some, though not all, U.S. solar manufacturers — had been brewing for some time, as Chinese solar companies were accused of essentially [...]
Nature is amazing. Take the humble leaf—it’s capable of absorbing the sunlight and converting it into the chemical energy that fuels the growth of plants. Photosynthesis is one of the fundamental forces of life, and it’s far superior to our technological efforts to harness sunlight. A photovoltaic solar panel can transform sunlight to electricity, [...]
I’ll be honest—I don’t pay close attention to space weather. I’m busy enough trying to figure out how scared I should be—and how scared I should make you—of regular old Earth weather, like hurricanes, floods and droughts. But maybe I should start keeping tabs on what’s going on above us. On September 24 the sun [...]
I haven’t written much about the California solar company Solyndra, which recently went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in taxpayer money as part of the Department of Energy’s program of loan guarantees for renewable energy companies. Short story: the sudden demise of the California-based company—which went out of business on Aug. 31, costing more [...]
Ah, solar panels: so clean, so elegant—and so bloody expensive. Covering your roof with photovoltaics may save you money in the long run, but it requires the installation of a lot of heavy and expensive equipment up front. Thin-film solar panels, printed on sheets at industrial scales, are slowly making inroads, but suppose you wanted [...]
An interesting debate showed up in my Twitter feed today. A few followers of China’s green energy policies have taken climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post to task for using some information that undersells what China has accomplished. I hadn’t read Lomborg’s article, which ran on April 21, but it [...]
I’m just back from the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, wanted to note a new ranking of global solar companies coming from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC). It’s not a ranking of the best solar panel companies, or the ones with the biggest sales. Instead, SVTC has analyzed which solar companies do the best job [...]
