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Last year Apple commissioned its new 500,000 acre data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The facility, costing an estimated $1 billion facility to build, is the company's biggest data center several times over, aimed to support everything from iTunes to its iCloud services to the Siri voice functionality in the iPhone 4S.

China and India are the ideal markets in which to realize clean technology, both from their government's stated goals and their economic, political and social needs.

The "Power Behind the Panel" is getting more in front. Last week, Trina Solar invited me and about 100 other guests to a private Beverly Hills home where Mark Kingsley, Trina’s Chief Commercial Officer (pictured below), and Grey’s Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey unveiled “15 Minutes,” a new solar PR and advocacy campaign.

Prices for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) solar photovoltaic (PV) modules fell below the $1/W mark in January 2012, and in some cases well below even that, marking the first time that global average prices have fallen below this milestone, according to IMS Research.

When it comes to hiring, the biggest issue renewable energy employers face today is finding the right engineers with the right skills for their businesses. This can be identified as "talent mismatch," or an imbalance in the labor market between the people applying for positions and the skills required. The very nature of the renewable industry, with its constantly evolving technologies, presents great challenges for employers when it comes to finding the right matches for their mission-critical positions. But there are progressive actions that renewable energy employers can take to secure the right talent for future productivity. In fact, there are three simple considerations: identifying transferrable skills from other industries, using creativity to put people in the right positions, and offering dual-ladder career paths.

Never one to do anything by half-measures, a somewhat surprising legacy of ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government has been to send installed capacity in Italy's photovoltaic (PV) market soaring through the roof. Reacting to a resounding public vote against nuclear power in 2011, a fourth edition of feed-in-tariffs (FiTs) was announced for the sector and though somewhat reduced, they were still high enough to keep Italy's "PV counter" ticking faster than ever.

Few industries have got the black eye, literally and metaphorically, of mining. After centuries of environmental effects ranging from toxic emissions to unsightly tailings ponds, acid mine drainage, massive energy consumption and other impacts, mining is slowly cleaning up its act. Why? Mostly because new clean technologies are increasing industr

In my 20-plus years of dealing with economic development on tribal lands, I have found that few people are familiar with federal Indian law or tribal law, governments and dispute resolution systems, which reflect each tribe's sovereign status and unique culture, language, laws, mores and traditions. And it is from this lack of familiarity that problems arise.

The Washington State legislature is considering potential changes to the state's geothermal law (Chapter 78.60 Revised Code of Washington), following up on last year's effort. The bill seeks to bring Washington's law in line with federal laws and other states' laws, as part of an effort to promote geothermal development in the state.

President Obama’s 2013 budget caused a lot of smiles this week among energy efficiency advocates — even if it is more of a wish list than anything else. Obama calls for about $1.2 billion in spending for energy efficiency. What does this mean for the energy efficiency industry? Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save E

Decentralizing and diversifying renewable energy power generation technologies could be the panacea to save Kenyans from unreliable and expensive power supplied by hydro and thermal power generation, a recent study has found.

Southern California Edison has won approval to modify a photovoltaic program that won praise for its intent to promote distributed, rooftop generation when it received the initial thumbs-up from state regulators in 2009. With the changes, though, the utility will look for larger and more ground-mounted projects and scale back the plan to build some of the projects on its own.

Anyone following the controversies surrounding wind farm siting policy over the past five years has surely been startled at the rapid escalation of concerns being voiced by residents near wind farms. After years of building wind farms in ranching communities with few if any complaints, we began to hear clusters of noise complaints about a few wind farms, especially in Wisconsin, New York, Ontario, and Maine. These complaints focused on the surprising intrusiveness of wind farm noise, and sometimes sleep disruption; nearly all of those having problems lived within a half-mile or so of turbines, with occasional issues being reported out to a mile or so.

The Year of the Dragon has gotten off to an inauspicious start for the Chinese wind industry and in particular, Sinovel Wind Group Co. (Sinovel), China's leading wind turbine manufacturer.

Winners of the Excellence in Renewable Energy Awards for Project of the Year Award represent facilities that signified excellence in five technologies: Solar, Wind, Biomass, Geothermal and Hydro.

Spain’s recent decision to stop subsidizing new renewable energy projects as part of managing its debt crisis has been hitting the headlines. Renewable energy skeptics will surely spin this as added proof that renewable energy is simply not economical, as they’ve been warning us all along. But we believe that conclusion is misguided and

There are two holes the size of bulldozers in the argument made by Johanna Wald in "Clearing Up the Record on Solar Energy on Public Lands", that opening public lands to large scale industrial solar development is a necessary "sacrifice" to fight climate change (see similar arguments from The Wilderness Society and Climate Progress).First, I'm remi

DOE announced more than $12 million in funding to speed solar energy innovation from the lab to the marketplace. The funding, which will be made available through the agency's SunShot Incubator program, will support advancements in hardware, reductions in soft costs, and the development of pilot manufacturing and production projects. Each awardee will make significant cost-share commitments.

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