I never know what to make of the frequent references I come across to the International Monetary Fund. Who exactly are these mysterious and terribly powerful people? How do they work? What are their true motivations?

In any case, they most certainly get some points for (more…)

Whether they’re building a new house or improving a well-loved home, energy-conscious homeowners everywhere are trying to lower energy use and costs. Even with the best of intentions, however, consumers are overwhelmed by too much information, which causes many of them to give up long before they screw in their first CFL light bulb. To (more…)

Frequent commenter Cameron Atwood sent me this article describing Germany’s generous subsidies for solar PV and asked me to react to it.

Yes, the German program was overzealous; no one (no one I’ve come across, at least) disputes that. The program’s meteoric rise and fall over the past few (more…)

Here’s an article that’s illustrates what happens when regulators get clever in creating incentives for environmental stewardship and responsibility: smart people work around them, unintended consequences result, and windfall profits occur in random places that have nothing to do with environmental benefit.

If I were doing this, I’d make the whole situation (more…)

One of the unmistakable aspects of the traditional v. green energy argument, no matter which jurisdiction you are talking about, is how time and advancement necessarily does funny things to the entire dialogue.

Basically, it is not that much of a stretch to compare what is going on with alternative energy technology (more…)

Here’s an article that tells a story that’s playing itself out all over the world – this time, in Spain: Fiery drama and fierce tensions caused by tightening budgets for energy.

Nowhere more than Spain, deficits need to be cut. (more…)

If the notion “he who lives by the subsidy dies by the subsidy” is true, then oil, gas and nuclear companies must be dying a thousand deaths.

“A Sad Green Story,” the recent New York Times article by David Brooks, is way off the mark with where we need to go as a country and as an entire planet. Now is not the time to malign investments in (more…)

While at most conferences on solar energy, people talk about the BoS (Balance of System), at the SOCAP 12 conference held last week in San Francisco, it was all about the lessons learned from the BoP (Bottom of the Pyramid)—or the world’s largest, poorest demographic. That’s not only because the many renewable energy businesses working in developing (more…)

Installed solar capacity continued to grow across Europe in 2011 despite a decline in subsidies for green energy continent-wide, according to a new report.

Roughly 18.5 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic energy capacity were installed in the European Union during 2011, about two-thirds of the world’s increase (more…)

We’ve had discussions recently on the amount of subsidies that the fossil fuel industries receive from the federal government here in the U.S. To be sure, there is a great deal of hanky-panky played with these numbers. Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the accounting method and total number that one chooses is often a function of the case one’s (more…)