Twenty years ago, international leaders descended on Brazil to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Kyoto Protocol. This summer, a 20-member United Nations panel will once again head to Rio de Janeiro with an even more ambitious agenda.

Due to growing urbanization and resulting environmental threats, China has invested nearly US$50 billion annually into its renewable energy sector since 2009. China's five-year investment in environmental protection is on track to reach 3.1 trillion yuan (US$454 billion). By 2015, its environmental protection industry is expected to top 2 trillion yuan (US$317 billion).

With developers having made their final end-of-year push through the last day of December, the January ritual of announcements concerning new projects entering commercial operation and new PPAs kicking in continued this week.

The U.S. wind industry posted strong fourth quarter results, AWEA reported on Thursday during a webinar for members and press.

Solar players on both sides of the Pacific have been warily anticipating the Feb. 13 deadline when the Department of Commerce was set to announce whether it would impose duties on solar cells and modules coming in from China.

During the fourteen years that I've lived in Switzerland, the Germans have been the world's staunchest supporters of green power and alternative energy. Their aggressive development of wind power was breathtaking, as was their warm embrace of photovoltaic power.

In his Jan. 24 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama reinstated his commitment to renewable energy. Despite the demise of solar manufacturer Solyndra looming over the past year of his term, Obama said that he “will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.” Obama called for a commitment by the Defense Department

I have a new favorite word — aggregation. At the risk of sounding like a reporter, I'm going to summarize a pre-holiday news story you might have missed but need to know about.

Securitizing renewable energy networks from cyber-attacks is not complicated by their oft-cited operational headache of intermittency, but rather by their separation from a utility's control system, said smart grid executives at the Gridwise Global Forum in Washington, DC in early November. Though renewable intermittency adds to the challenge of stabilizing a grid, the forum revealed new evidence of real-world smart grid load shifting that continues to chip away at the tired argument that renewable energy cannot successfully integrate into a legacy grid.

So far, the complaint by American wind tower manufacturers against their competition from Asia has mirrored the solar industry petition filed in October.

If we want wind to continue growing, more turbines will need to be placed in our communities and close to our backyards. And that will inevitably cause more social friction.

In news that clears the way for construction to start immediately, California-based NaturEner USA, LLC, secured a $320 million construction loan with Morgan Stanley for the189-MW Rim Rock wind power project in Montana.

They stand as looming testaments to innovation, growing ever more prominent and powerful. Yet for much of 2011, wind installations remained somewhat obscured, eclipsed by the media storm surrounding the solar industry.

Chile is built for renewable energy. The seemingly unending coastline that runs the length of its boundary is prime real estate for wind development, and eventually the offshore wind projects, that could power the cities found along its spine. The nation's solar resources, especially in the northern regions, are among the best in the world. And its place along the ring of fire means its geothermal potential is vast, yet untapped.

A top GE executive is calling the political battle between economy and environment "nonsense." In a video interview at an international clean energy investment conference last week, Mark Vachon, vice president of GE's successful Ecomagination program, hailed "environmental performance" as a key driver for business.

Two new reports about the wind industry in Australia provide good news about the facts but bad news about the politics. The first report is from CSIRO, Australia’s peak scientific research organisation, on community acceptance of rural wind farms. Dr. Nina Hall from the CSIRO Science into Society Group was lead author. Hall and her colleagu

BP Wind Energy and Sempra U.S. Gas & Power announced plans to further expand their strategic relationship by jointly developing the Mehoopany Wind Farm in Pennsylvania and the Flat Ridge 2 Wind Farm in Kansas, representing a total investment of more than $1 billion.

If there was one key takeaway from the most recent RenewableEnergyWorld.com and Solar Power-gen webcast it was that the year ahead will be difficult for large-scale solar power development due to poor access to capital, an uncertain policy landscape, the pending trade case against China and module prices that are too low to support a healthy indust

Weeks after the end of the U.N. climate talks, international leaders from across the world are meeting again on the world stage to discuss fossil fuels, nuclear energy and the growth of renewables.

With a glut of shale gas on the market, natural gas prices continue to tumble in the U.S. And they'll only fall more throughout the year.