The Australian government will begin imposing a tax on carbon emissions in mid-2012. But large giveaways to industry mean Australia’s scheme doesn’t go nearly far enough in reducing the nation’s CO2 emissions or providing economic stimulus. Another global climate conference has come and gone with little action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which makes efforts to combat climate change at the national or local level all the more important. After years of bitter debate and haggling, we in Australia last month finally decided to follow Europe in putting a price on carbon. Unfortunately, Australia’s plan, like Europe’s, gave away far too much to major emitters of CO2 and does far too little to reduce emissions, aiming for a 5 percent cut in carbon by 2020, with uncertainty as to how deep the cuts may be beyond then. Countries that ...

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Fuel cells offer a highly efficient, reliable and increasingly durable means of generating clean electrical energy independent of the grid or integrated with grid power. Installations are growing across a wide range of applications, from combined heat and power (CHP) generation at commercial, industrial, government and educational facilities to hybrid electric vehicles and consumer electronics.

They’re also being evaluated as a means of storing intermittent electricity production from wind power farms and wastewater-to-energy treatment plants, as well as capturing CO2 and NOX emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Fuel cells’ “green” credentials continue to be questioned, however, especially when the fuel used to produce the hydrogen used by alkaline fuel cells is methane in the form of natural or biogas. According to the infographic above, ...

Photo courtesy First Solar

Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have been known to come swooping in and making big investments in companies and sectors where values have been driven down. News broke yesterday that Berkshire’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings has agreed to buy First Solar’s 550 megawatt (MW) Topaz Solar Farm. Having been valued at $2 billion, it’s likely that MidAmerican is acquiring Topaz at a discount given tough conditions prevailing in the US solar power market. Financial terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, according to CNN’s report.

First Solar broke ground last month on the Topaz project in California’s San Luis Obispo county. At a planned capacity of 550 MW, it’s one of the largest solar photovoltaic (PV) power projects in the world. Upon completion, slated for 2015, Topaz will supply clean, renewable ...

Climate talks began in Durban, South Africa on Monday amid downplayed expectations for any meaningful agreements on cutting greenhouse gas emissions or progress on finding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. With the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory carbon targets now covering less than a third of the world’s carbon emissions, some observers say that a global, top-down approach may increasingly be replaced by local, incremental climate policies, from Australia’s new carbon tax to Colombian initiatives to replace polluting truck fleets and promote renewable energy. “The situation has never been weaker for [a global] vision,” said James L. Connaughton, who chaired the Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush. In 1997, nearly 200 industrialized nations agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, pledging a 5.2 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared with 1990 levels by 2012. But the U.S. never ratified ...

Advocates say that massive amounts of renewable energy are feasible and will save money in the long run. But how do we know that’s true? Because that’s exactly what’s happening. Let’s take Colorado. The state has a 30% renewable energy requirement. How are things going? Xcel, the largest utility in the state, says it will meet that requirement in 2012…that’s 8 years earlier than required. Ok, some may say, but isn’t such a massive investment going to be painfully expensive? Actually, according to Xcel, investing in renewables is going to save money in the long run. They are required to calculate the counterfactual—what would their costs be if they didn’t buy renewables? According to Xcel’s own calculations, if the state’s renewable energy standard didn’t exist, their ratepayers would pay an additional $409 million by 2021. ...

U.S. fossil fuel use rose in 2010. This is the U.S. energy split in 2010.

Climate scientists have warned us (for decades). Some politicians have warned us. Military reports have warned us. And citizens of the world have certainly warned now. Now, the International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning us: if we don’t make a massive switch to clean energy in the next few years (5 years according to the IEA), climate change is going to wreck us.

Now, an important thing to remember is that avoiding the catastrophes of climate change is not like meeting a legislative or business deadline. It’s not like stopping the car before driving into the wall. It’s more like this: we’ve driven the car into the biggest hurricane the world has ever seen, ...

With one of the most anti-science, anti-climate-action, anti-clean-energy political parties in the world (perhaps the most), the United States Congress has been unable to move forward with any significant effort to cut our CO2 emissions. In case you missed it, though, the Supreme Court declared in 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the right and the responsibility to determine if greenhouse gas emissions were a threat to human health and safety and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Based on the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that humans cause global warming and the effects of global warming are a huge threat to humanity, the EPA declared CO2 a public danger at the end of 2009, just before the Copenhagen climate conference.

With Republicans in recent set ...

Graphic courtesy of FuelCell Energy

Connecticut’s FuelCell Energy recently received an award from the Dept. of Energy (DOE) to employ its patented Direct FuelCell (DFC) technology in building a pilot demonstration CO2 capture system attached to a coal-fired power plant. This third post on the project – see Parts 1 & 2- explains the way the system is designed to work and what the project aims to achieve.

Back in August, the DOE announced $41 million of funding to help further develop and test 16 advanced post-combustion coal plant CO2 capture technologies. FuelCell Energy’s DFC-coal plant CO2 capture system was one of the 16 projects to win an award.

The DOE’s primary target objectives are straightforward and the same for all the projects receiving funding: capture at least 90% of the plant’s carbon dioxide (CO2) ...

Photo courtesy of Siemens AG

Ontario’s Hydrogenics has won a contract to supply a hydrogen production, storage and fuel cell system to the German city of Herten, the Mississauga-based company announced today.

Developing the means to manage intermittent electricity generation from wind power farms has been a key challenge for grid operators, one that Herten city officials decided was best addressed by using a Hydrogenics’ HySTAT 30 hydrogen generator to electrolyze water, storing the resulting hydrogen and then converting it back to electricity using a Hydrogenics’ HyPM 50-kilowatt (kW) fuel cell power system.

“Electrolyzing water into hydrogen using excess intermittent renewable energy is the optimal clean pathway to smart grid stabilization and energy storage capacity, Hydrogenics’ president and CEO Daryl Wilson stated in a press release.

“It has real advantages over alternative energy storage solutions. We are very pleased ...

Photo credit: FuelCell Energy

Capturing the carbon dioxide emitted from the myriad variety of industrial and commercial operations that use fossil fuels to produce power has been a “big idea” that’s really gone nowhere despite years of fossil fuel industry support, lobbying and many millions of dollars of government subsidization. Similarly, fuel cells and the “hydrogen economy” have long been touted as the energy system of the future, but that future still seems a long way off, if it will ever come about.

Fuel cells may hold the key to solving the increasingly urgent problem of how to capture CO2 emissions from coal-fired and other fossil fuel plants, at least that’s what fuel cell proponents assert and the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) intends to find out.

The DOE awarded $3 million to Connecticut-based FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ: ...