Energy, Clean Energy | featured news

Suntech, one of the world's biggest solar panel manufacturers, was forced in bankruptcy court Wednesday, becoming the latest casualty of a painful slump in the global solar industry.

Barack Obama will use a visit to a Chicago-area lab on Friday to call on Congress to set aside $2bn over the next decade to fund research into a next generation of electric cars. The White House said the Energy Security Trust, which Obama first proposed in his state of the union address, would use royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters and would not add to the deficit.

A new process for extracting hydrogen from a liquid fuel could sweep aside one obstacle to a "hydrogen economy".

Wave power is the oft-forgotten cousin of solar and wind power. It has huge potential, but it is not quite as far along as the better known sources of clean power, so it tends to be overlooked. But it shouldn't! To clean up our power grid we'll need all the help we can get. Granted, in many places where wave power would work, offshore wind power would also work, but that might not be the case everywhere (ie. very deep water), and if wave power's cost can be brought down enough, that might not even matter.

Eager for jobs and tax money, Mojave Desert counties welcomed big solar projects. But they may have been too optimistic.

On the eve of the first presidential debate, a flurry of new polls suggest most Americans support clean energy and policies to reduce climate change — topics that have garnered scant attention on the campaign trail.

Mitt Romney is more apt today to talk about his support for oil drilling than about the environmental policies that he advocated while governor of Massachusetts... It was May 2006. Mr. Romney, the Massachusetts governor, was chatting up his Montana counterpart about his vision for an energy-efficient car of the future — lightweight and narrow, with tandem-style seating, so that two vehicles could drive side by side in one highway lane.

Citing national security risks, President Barack Obama on Friday blocked a Chinese company from owning four wind farm projects in northern Oregon near a Navy base where the U.S. military flies unmanned drones and electronic-warfare planes on training missions....

The American wind sector has been buffeted by weak demand for electricity, stiff competition from gas and uncertainty over a tax credit that has become a campaign wedge issue.

Carbon dioxide emissions hit an unexpected 20-year low earlier this year, mainly because utilities have switched from coal to natural gas.