Mobile internet services based in the “cloud” are a part of daily life and continue to proliferate. Given the huge amounts of energy needed to power the data centers that are the backbone of our online life, Greenpeace recently released a “How Green Is Your Cloud” study comparing which internet companies are the most environmentally [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Coal’
FFF: Green Peace Study on Server Farms
April 20th, 2012 
Justin Manger Double Set of Five Friday Facts: Natural Gas Leads the Pack
April 13th, 2012 Eric Wilson When looking at which energy source provides the most energy to the American economy, natural gas topped the charts for 2010 (the most recent year for which data was fully available). Today’s set of facts looks at the breakdown of the various sources and follows up last week’s Five Friday Facts which looked at the [...]
Posted in Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts, Renewable Energy 
Tags: Biomass, Coal, Energy, Geothermal, Hydroelectricity, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Oil Consumption, Solar Energy, Wind Power 
No Comments »Ball State Completes Largest Geothermal Installation
April 10th, 2012 Eric Wilson A few years back we wrote an article about Ball State University’s plan to replace their coal-fired boilers with a geothermal system. As it turns out, the time has come. According to the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Office of the Department of Energy, Ball State has completed the nation’s largest ground-source geothermal system [...]
Posted in Clean Technology, Eric Wilson, Local Energy/Food, News, Renewable Energy Tags: Coal, Department of Energy, Geothermal, Green Jobs, Jobs, Stimulus Bill No Comments »Why Dig for Energy When We’re Bombarded Every Day?
March 25th, 2012 Eric Wilson Ever wonder why oil is underground? I don’t mean how it got there (decomposing organisms trapped below layers of sediment that were compressed). I mean why we go through the trouble of digging it out of the ground. I realize it’s energy dense, but hear me out. I find it kind of curious to think [...]
MIT Study Details Future of Grid and Renewable Energy
March 12th, 2012 Eric Wilson A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) looked at what it deemed as “One of the most important emerging challenges facing the grid . . . the need to incorporate more renewable generation in response to policy initiatives at both state and federal levels.” At issue is the intermittent nature of many [...]
Posted in Eric Wilson, News, Renewable Energy, Smart Grid Tags: Battery, Biomass, Coal, Electric Vehicles, Electricity Generation, Grid, Hydroelectricity, Nuclear, Solar Energy, Wind Power No Comments »New Energy Innovation Hub for Batteries and Energy Storage
February 29th, 2012 Eric Wilson Earlier this month Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced “plans to launch a new Energy Innovation Hub for advanced research on batteries and energy storage with an investment of up to $120 million over five years.” The purpose of this newest hub “will be to deliver research leading to revolutionary new technologies.” Applications are due [...]
Posted in Eric Wilson, Renewable Energy Tags: Battery, Coal, Department of Energy, Electricity Generation, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Solar Energy, Stephen Chu, Wind Power No Comments »Environmental Groups Back Away from Natural Gas Companies’ Donations
February 24th, 2012 Chris DeArmond If at any point it seemed like natural gas companies and environmental groups would team up against the coal industry, it doesn’t anymore. As the Washington Post reported Monday, those “new friendships grew old, then cold.” In a matter of just a few years, environmental leaders have cut ties with natural gas companies as they [...]
Posted in Behavior, Business, News Tags: Chris DeArmond, Coal, Congress, Environment, Fracking, Natural Gas, NRDC, Shale Gas No Comments »Apple’s “Project Dolphin” To Include One of Nation’s Largest Green Energy Facilities
February 22nd, 2012 Justin Manger Near Maiden, North Carolina Apple is building a huge data center that will, of course, require huge amounts of energy to power the facility. Apple, in its latest environmental report, states that the data center will include the largest “end user-owner, onsite” solar array in the U.S. Or, in less slippery terms, that all the [...]
Top Polluting Power Plants in North America
January 9th, 2012 Justin Manger Here is a little bit of news that slipped under our radar as 2011 ran out. In October of last year, the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC) published a report on the emissions on 3,000 power plants in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. These are the three countries that signed the NAFTA trade agreement back in the [...]
Posted in Business, Justin Manger, News Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Coal, Electricity Generation, Environment, Pollution No Comments »Chinese Power Plants Fined for Sulfur Pollution, False Data
November 30th, 2011 Chris DeArmond Although China has faced harsh criticism for its lackadaisical enforcement of environmental regulations, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) recently issued fines to eight large coal-fired power plants. In each case, they were found to have exceeded the permissible limit for sulfur dioxide, and six of them disabled monitoring equipment or falsified emissions data. China [...]
Posted in China, Conservation, Energy Efficiency, News, Policy, Sustainable Development Tags: Chris DeArmond, Coal, Electricity Generation, Environment No Comments »
