A recently renovated retirement facility in Canada will now benefit from the country's largest solar heating and cooling (SHC) installation. The system will cut electricity consumption roughly in half.
The company Phaesun has started a project in the East African country of Mozambique geared towards rural electrification using especially small photovoltaic systems - so-called "PicoPV systems".
Baja California, Mexico, wants to become the first Mega Region energy warehouse-producing, storing and exporting renewable energy to the US and Canada.
Interview with Tobias Zwirner who has been the Managing Director of Phaesun GmbH since 2001 and is a Board Member of the "Alliance for Rural Electrification" (ARE), which has its headquarters in Brussels. It concerns itself with the 1.6 billion people around the world who not have an electricity connection, 80% of whom live in rural areas.
In a worldwide survey, Sun & Wind Energy questioned more than 1,000 companies from the renewable energy sector about their social involvement. Only 49 companies took the opportunity to respond to our questionnaire. The result: social projects are popular. But background information in scarce.
From 2013 on utilities will have to buy up their full requirement of European Emission Allowances via auctions. One way to reduce their requirement, and thus costs, will be to generate CO2 certificates from CDM project participation.
Bio seems to be the buzzword of the moment when experts in India talk about the country's future energy supply. India's government wants to put more emphasis on biomass and the industry shows increaseing interest.
While US clean energy and climate advocates rarely display any real swing time mode when looking at the Copenhagen Climate Talks and beyond into 2010, they definitely also do not play the blues. Quite to the contrary: The lack of any concrete international outcome at that point in time might still give the domestic US process the needed tailwind to come to some clean energy, climate legislation.
While eco-protection and energy efficiency measures played only a minor role in the oil producing countries of the Gulf region in the past, such issues are meanwhile receiving an increasing interest. The region is expected to carry on with an enormous market potential.
