(Reuters) – California environmentalists opened fire on Wednesday on a measure approved for the state’s November ballot that would roll back a landmark law regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Linking the measure to the historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups lambasted the measure, noting in a statement that Texas-based oil companies Valero and Tesoro have put money behind it.

The measure, certified by California’s top elections official for the ballot on Tuesday, would suspend the law until the unemployment rate in the most populous U.S. state, currently more than 12 percent, drops to 5.5 percent or less for four consecutive quarters.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, AB32, in 2006 (more…)

Last week’s announcement of a marketing agreement between EV charging company Coulomb Technologies and energy services provider Siemens should come as no surprise. Siemens has been an investor in Coulomb, so a closer relationship was all but inevitable. Siemens gains access to Coulomb’s ChargePoint networked charging stations technology, while Coulomb can leverage Siemens’ smart grid infrastructure and applications.

The EV charging equipment market is currently (more…)

PACE financing is one of those issues that has sweeping implications for clean energy adoption, but can be just so darn difficult to understand (see: net metering). If you can you believe it, the current acronym (PACE stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy) is a major step toward intelligibility from what we were first calling it (Municipal Property Tax Financing . . . or MPTF?). Acronym alphabet soup aside, it’s a topic that mixes the intricacies of tax law and bond finance with mortgages and clean energy. Like we said, not easy. (more…)

In the wake of the failed Copenhagen summit, prospects for cutting global CO2 emissions are worse than they’ve been in years. With talk of mandated cuts now fading and with countries exploiting loopholes, the world appears headed toward a flawed agreement based not on science but on politics.

Those who thought the failed Copenhagen climate talks last December were a diplomatic nadir, from which only recovery was possible, are in for a shock. (more…)

Morgan Solar Inc. will receive a substantial financial contribution from the Ontario government to facilitate the launch of its commercial activities in the province. The young Toronto-based company has developed a unique photovoltaic (PV) panel characterized by its lightness, sturdiness, and unparalleled sunlight-concentrating capacity. With the $1.86 million in funding it received from the government, Morgan Solar will soon begin manufacturing its patented technology for market.

Construction of a new production facility will undoubtedly create many temporary employment opportunities, but (more…)

There is plenty of sun in deserts and the Sahara is one of the biggest deserts in the world. Europe intends to import its first solar generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in an interview on Sunday. The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its target of deriving 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. (more…)

Cleantech and renewable energy professionals now have a new legal resource at their disposal. Professionals looking for help on legal or policy issues can submit their environmental, clean tech, and renewable energy legal questions to CleanTechies’ Legal Q&A at http://law.cleantechies.com and get answers from cleantech law experts.

CleanTechies has joined forces with Cleantech Law Partners, a boutique law firm that caters to the unique legal needs of renewable energy and cleantech companies. The firm’s attorneys review the legal questions that are submitted on CleanTechies and provide their answers online.

Users can provide additional feedback by commenting on the discussion and sharing their own experiences and insights on cleantech and renewable energy law.

To submit your questions about environmental, clean tech or renewable energy law, follow this link.

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On Wednesday, President Obama will meet with a bipartisan group of Senators to discuss the need for comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year. Following that meeting, Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, will host a live chat on WhiteHouse.gov to take your questions on energy and climate change legislation.

You can watch the chat live starting at 3 PM EDT on Wednesday June 23, right here on WhiteHouse.gov/live (more…)

The consumer face of the Smart Grid looks like you and me.  It is tall and short, conservative and liberal, lazy and driven.  In short, it is everyone, which means that it can be both random and ordered depending on changing conditions, geographic realities, and discordant behavioral patterns.

Capitalizing on Smart Grid opportunities in the residential consumer market means finding order and predictability across a wide range of variables: different ecosystems, temperature variation, number of people living under one roof, behavioral patterns, etc.  Currently, data is measured home-to-home, which means that fine-grained details under the roof are usually unaccounted for.

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Want to devise an incentive to get a new industry really humming? Try creating a $100 million dollar fund to finance its projects. That’s what PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG) and solar financing specialist SunRun Inc. have decided to do.

Working through its non-utility subsidiary, Pacific Energy Capital II, LLC, PG&E announced a $100 million tax equity agreement that will offer financing for more than 3,500 solar roof installations planned by SunRun nationally. The fund represents the largest residential (more…)