Germany

The critical issue of back up power

20 percent of America’s – and perhaps the world’s – electricity could soon come from wind and solar. Our societies thus need reliable, cheap and sustainable energy storage solutions. Concentrated solar could benefit from molten salts, yet wind energy doesn’t have yet its own solution. German and Swiss utilities are working on Compressed Air Energy Storage …

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An offshore wind energy boom in Europe

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) published its annual report and the results are encouraging as the offshore wind energy capacity grew by 54 percent in 2009 with 577 MW. The United Kingdom appears to be leading the sector as it installed more than half of the added capacity of the European Union. And this …

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Germany to cut its emissions by 40 percent

To Reuters, ” Germany will stick to a more ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 even though the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen fell short of expectations, a government adviser said on Monday. “ Details of how the country will achieve such drastic cuts still remain to be defined. …

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Europe to go beyond its Kyoto Protocol goals

The European Union 15 first members already achieved their Kyoto Protocol goals and will even go beyond. Meanwhile, the 27 members already cut their emissions by 13.6 percent. These excellent results date of 2007. With the economic recession of the past months, the industrial activity have drastically decreased and thus the emissions and thus slashed …

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Why Merkel’s reelection may be good news for climate

As Angela Merkel was reelected German Chancellor and is due to begin a new coalition with the Liberals, nuclear power plants may not be phased out in 2020 as it was previously agreed. Meanwhile, and if Germany keeps it targets of renewables answering 33 percent of the electricity demand in 2020 this may mean that …

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The Alps are endangered by climate change

To the latest report of the European Environment Agency, climate change “poses a grave threat” to the snows of the Alps, and thus will decrease the amounts of water received by many rivers like the Danube, Rhine, Po and Rhone. At the center of Europe the Alps – like the Himalayas are for Asia – …

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Shuting down PCs at night could save billions

An article on TreeHugger caught my attention as it explained that half US employees – and similar figures in other countries – don’t turn off their computers at the end of their work day. The potential savings are impressive. In America: $2.8 billion, in the United Kingdom $420 million and Germany $1.2 billion. That’s right, …

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A climate change mitigation paradox

Thanks to Meryn I came across a most interesting piece of information. According to the Spiegel (the leading German magazine) wind turbines in Europe do nothing for emissions-reduction goals. Despite the billions spent every year in wind energy, solar and similar renewable energy sources, greenhouse gases emissions haven’t decreased. What looks like a strong contradiction …

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Three exciting news on solar energies

In less than two days I came across three exciting news on how both solar thermal and photovoltaïc are moving toward worldwide in many ways. With today’s article we will go from the United States to Germany and we will conclude with India. We will tackle both markets and technological issues. These energies are still …

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Germany, a climate change mitigation example ?

Germany is often quoted as the definite example in climate change mitigation. However, as with all black and white fallacies, it is not really the case and the situation is not that simple. Indeed, even if our neighboring country gets far more energy from renewables than we are, it relies much too heavily on coal, …

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