My Dad and I have a running joke when we’re in the car together. “Look,” he’ll say. “Gas is cheap. It’s down to $3.39.” Cheap, he means, compared with the month before when it was $3.79 per gallon.

The joke illustrates a good point. A few years ago we were flabbergasted by gasoline prices that exceeded $3 per gallon. Now we’re really happy when it doesn’t hit $4 per gallon.

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An industry push to design vehicles that can drive themselves to make them safer and more convenient could offer the added benefit of making them more fuel efficient, researchers say. (more…)

Greening the European Union has suffered a setback.

The European Biodiesel Board is reporting that the European Union biodiesel industry production forecasts are noting a 2011 decrease in output, the first since data has been gathered, down from 2010 figures of 9.57 million tons.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on 30 May that Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy and Europe’s biggest, would shutter all of its 17 nuclear power plants between 2015 and 2022, an extraordinary commitment, given that they currently produce about 28 percent of the country’s electricity. (more…)

A roof is more than a way of keeping the rain off. Nowadays many people think of a roof as a place to put solar panels to collect all of that free sunshine. The problem is that not all roofs are created equal. Scientists from the University of Gothenburg have launched a tool that uses the actual conditions to (more…)

The Norwegian government last week launched a global initiative to finance access to renewable energy, energy efficiency and low carbon development in developing countries.

The launch took place during a conference organized by the International Energy Agency and (more…)

In most countries solar power is often perceived as synonymous with solar photovoltaic (PV), the classic rooftop panels that convert sunlight to electricity through solar cells. But that could be a misconception, says Environmental Protection, since solar thermal, which gets less attention than PV, actually is more efficient. (more…)

Iberdrola is a prominent global private electric utilities company as well as the largest operator of renewable energy in the world. It is headquartered in Bilbao, Spain and services more than 16 million customers around the world (with nine million of those customers in Spain). Some of the operations include transmission, (more…)

Anyone vaguely interested in international news is probably aware of Greece’s economic crisis. But despite that, or perhaps because of that, the country’s Energy Minister has big plans for solar power.

According to a report on Bloomberg, Minister George Papaconstantinou said he expects that an (more…)

Those who fly or are planning to fly to Europe nowadays will find that there is a heavy tax to pay loosely called environmental fees. European rules forcing all airlines to pay for carbon emissions are within the law, an adviser to Europe’s highest court said on Thursday (October 6), in the latest stage of a bitter battle (more…)