The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided $150,000 to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to reduce asbestos exposure in schools and state buildings through compliance monitoring, compliance assistance and public outreach, inspections, enforcement, and ensuring asbestos abatement workers are property trained and accredited.
Read more »
SBE Inc., a power-and-electronics company based in Barre, Vt., is developing next-generation electric vehicle capacitors with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center. The partnership will assess and evaluate SBE’s capacitor technologies and how well they work as direct current buss capacitors for electric drives in hybrid, plug-in hybrid, electric,...
Read more »
Energy Focus, Inc. (EFOI), a global leader in energy efficient lighting, has sealed the deal on a $3.1 million contract to push the frontiers of high efficiency solar PV technologies with DuPont-University of Delaware’s “Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) Consortium” and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “A key part of our vision is to be...
Read more »
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s revised US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), released in May, mandates that the use of 100 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels annually by 2010. The mandate rises by 250 million gallons annually in 2011 and climbs to a whopping 16 billion gallons per year by 2022. Currently, a mere four...
Read more »
The evidence linking human-based greenhouse-gas emissions and the increase in global average temperatures over the last half century has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. Current and future GHG emissions are likely to exacerbate the severity of climate change and amplify the problems it creates for most nations. The American Meteorological Society has described the menu of choices humanity has for purposes of formulating a response to...
Read more »
State net-metering laws contemplate a range of clean-energy technologies. The specific portfolio of technologies eligible in each state varies, but all 42-states with net-metering laws allow solar photovoltaics and wind-power systems. In addition, most states allow hydro, biomass, solar thermal and fuel cells. The graph included above details the treatment of technologies by all...
Read more »
The Obama administration plans to nominate Arun Majumdar, currently the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, as the first director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ARPA-E’s goals are to create technologies that have the potential to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign energy...
Read more »
In a little more than a year from now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will require domestic emitters of heat-trapping emissions to report greenhouse gas (GHG) data under new regulations that will cover about 85 percent of the nation’s GHG emissions and include roughly 10,000 facilities. “This is a major step forward in our...
Read more »