Barack Obama promised change and hope. He’s bringing it when it comes to the mercury control industry.

If you haven’t heard, the new president has directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to drop an appeal of a Bush administration mercury control plan for coal-fired power plants.

Coal, the backbone of America’s electrical grid, runs about 1,100 plants in the U.S., but also spews out about 48 tons of mercury per year. The element is a potent toxic substance that affects brain development. It settles in our rivers and lakes and most people are exposed to it by eating fish.

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Courtesy U. of Minnesota

Exit up ahead: A University of Minnesota study has concluded that corn-based ethanol is no better than gasoline.

The Star Tribune says ethanol may even be a bigger polluter, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions and particulate matter. Cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass and other plant materials is far better for human health, the scientists say.

But the Renewable Fuels Association claims the study is flawed. Among other things, it assumes that grassland will be taken out of the federal Conservation Reserve Program to make more corn-based ethanol. The RFA says most of the increase in corn production in the U.S. has been through higher yields rather than conversion, and there’s no peer-reviewed evidence for the study’s methods. (see the pdf).

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I’ve had quite the relationship with my energy company. When I moved to New York, we fell in love. I would always pay attention to her needs – buying “green” energy when she installed wind turbines and reading my bill every month to compare usage to the previous month and 12 months prior, and she rewarded me for my efforts with a bill that required less and less every month.

But over the past four years I’ve started to settle down, and I’ve started to take my dear energy company for granted, and I feel like she’s beginning to take me for granted as well. I still keep my consumption low and pay on time to keep us both happy, but she’s stopped expanding into wind and solar technologies and now the spark is gone (pun intended). Our underlying relationship hasn’t changed – she still uses the same fundamental business model and I still only see my electricity usage once a month when the bill comes. To say the least, neither of us are doing anything new and the relationship has grown stale.

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The search for alternative transportation fuels just got a little easier.

The U.S. Department of Energy, now headed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, has rolled out an “Alternative Fueling Station Locator.” In other words, if you’re driving a vehicle that runs on biodiesel, electricity, ethanol, hydrogen, natural gas or propane, this tool can help you find it .

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Hold on to your hat. It’s getting breezy out there.

Seems everywhere you go on the Internet, they’re remembering a great year for wind in 2008 and predicting a decent one in 2009. What? In this economy? Yes.

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One of the more common green stories over the last month has focused on the question of whether the poor economic conditions are going to dampen the clean tech industry.  Other stories revolve around the new US administration’s policies.

There seem to be four main story lines:

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On the surface, the last several months have been good for installers and solar developers as panel prices have come crashing down.  Not only has the United States seen a substantial reduction in installed costs of PV installations but Europe has also experienced a rapid decline in panel pricing of close to 30% from one year ago.

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Cellulosic ethanol has been hailed as the next frontier in renewable fuels. After all, most ethanol in the U.S. comes from corn, a staple product in the food chain. Use more corn for ethanol, and you’re bound to drive up food prices. If you’ve seen “King Corn,” you know the score. Corn ethanol also has its problems with energy inputs versus energy outputs. In other words, the benefits can be sketchy.

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Amongst the hoo-ha of the US presidential inauguration I noted a small article stating that the new President is getting some pressure to turn the White House lawn into a vegetable patch all be it a somewhat large one, under the spiffy banner of eat the view. Putting aside for the moment critical considerations this would create, such as defining if broccoli was patriotic enough to be planted, and if a composter would be seen as a threat to the nation. There may be mileage in taking this idea a step further to demonstrate his by now well documented and stated clean tech commitments.

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The Internet revolutionized the world of computing – it took us from a world of large centralized mainframe computers with terminals attached to a world of any-to-any connectivity. The Internet evolved from a military need for survivability; by having a mesh of network nodes that could instantly re-route traffic around outages, it could sustain failures but continue to perform. Distributed generation, referred to as “DG” in industry speak, is essentially the “Internet of Energy” by producing electricity from many small energy sources.

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