As surely as last year’s Paris fashions make their way west to New York, U.S. utilities are beginning to embrace European-style programs like feed-in tariffs and green power premiums.

State-level decoupling regulations are easing that transition to some extent. But many utilities are still reluctant to embrace the change fully, especially as prices for conventional energy have come back down and utilities are finding that available capacity in voluntary green power is going unsubscribed.

Utilities do not like the financial uncertainty posed by long-term contracting for renewable power to supply the programs if they are not going to be able to move the power. It inevitably puts the utility’s shareholder obligations at odds with its ratepayer obligations and results in one of two solutions: green premiums go up and make the company look bad on green; or, everyone on the system pays to cover the nut, and no one is happy. (more…)

As the climate crisis accelerates, farmers are placed in the ever more precarious position of growing food for an increasing population in the face of increasingly bizarre weather patterns. Weather patterns are shifting due to the increasing amount of energy trapped in our atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

And yet, farming offers the fastest way to slowthe  climate crisis. This is because farmers manage photosynthesis, the biological process within green plants that pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it in a stable, useful form: organic carbon. Organic carbon is the chemical basis of leaves, shoots, roots, fungi and all the other living things that make up healthy soils.

Good farmers can accelerate this process and pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air into soil organic matter. Increased soil organic carbon can help us manage dry and wet years better by storing water. And the practices that build soil organic carbon require more diverse cropping systems, making farmers (and us) less reliant in any one crop. (more…)

The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world’s first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?

On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning.

A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant’s complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant’s owner, American Electric Power.

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A nanorobot which defends a single cell against dangers such as the AIDS virus or H1N1 is the main character of a video game about molecular biology that is being developed by the Universidad Santo Tomas, in Chile.

Kokori, which means “collective game” in Rapanui (the language spoken in Easter Island), is one of six projects that won 2.3 million dollars in a contest about applying informative technology for educational purposes, organized by the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research.

Of the six projects, Kokori, which uses information taught at the high school level biology, won $424,000.

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I am happy to announce a new information service that we added to our site: You can now submit green & clean technology articles, blog posts and press releases in the CleanTechies Community News.

This is a great way to share and discuss interesting news with the large network of CleanTechies around the world. You can also vote for your favorite articles, and search for news in different categories.

We will feature the most interesting & popular news in the CleanTechies Newsletter – sign up now to make sure you receive the next issue with the latest CleanTech updates, career advice, and exclusive offers only for subscribers!

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	Today, CleanTechies was awarded as “Best Blog of the Day” by the Blog of the Day Awards. The award comes only two months after CleanTechies was awarded 2nd place for “Best Business Blog” by the Weblog Awards.
“We are psyched to receive this award,” says Ian Thomson, CEO and Co-founder of CleanTechies. “It shows that CleanTechies is on the right way to becoming the leading career services forum providing insight, orientation, and opportunities for the CleanTech community.”

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Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Gwynne Rogers of the Natural Marketing Institute (NMI).  NMI is a market research and strategic consulting firm with expertise in health, wellness & sustainability.   Gwynne is the LOHAS Business Director at NMI.  She focuses on strategic analysis and planning for LOHAS related companies.  She holds a Masters in Environmental Management and an MBA from Duke University. She brings five years of specific experience in environmental marketing where she served various companies such as Pitney Bowes, Advanced Coal Technologies, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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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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Since we announced that CleanTechies got nominated as “Best Business Blog 2008“, green-minded citizens all over the world have been showing tremendous support and commitment in helping CleanTechies win this award. Today, our site was acknowledged by TreeHugger, the green voice on the Internet, asking all of its readers to vote for CleanTechies:

“CleanTechies beat out 5,000 blogs for a spot as a finalist in the “Best Business Blog” award competition. But what makes this such an achievement is that it was the only green blog in the category. Read on for what you can do to help this green blog get some recognition.”

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CleanTechies is nominated as “Best Business Blog” by The Weblog Awards, the world’s largest blog competition. The CleanTechies Blog was selected from over 5,000 open and public nominations in 48 categories and is one of 10 nominees – and the only green blog – in the category “Best Business Blog”. We need your help: Please help us win this award by voting for CleanTechies before the polls close on January 13 at 2pm PST.

Click here to vote now! Thank you very much for your support!

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