Disturbing:
¶ A Korean website assembled this image collection of produce from towns and villages surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And they are NOT pretty pictures. [msnNOW]
World:
¶ China will multiply its solar capacity fivefold to more than 35 GW installed by 2015. Added demand will help alleviate industry oversupply that contributed to a 20% plunge in the average price of solar panels last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. [eco-business.com]
¶ German power utilities E.ON and EnBW have both announced plans to mothball fossil-fuel power plants in Europe that can no longer compete with renewables in electricity markets. [Recharge]
¶ Most people in the UK back the idea of a switch to a renewables-based energy system, according to research by academics from the Universities of Cardiff and Nottingham. Of people polled, 85% support solar and 75% support wind. [reNews]
¶ Enel Green Power has connected its first PV plants in Romania to the grid. The two plants have a combined installed capacity of around 19 MW. The operating plants will be able to generate up to an approximate 29 million kWh per year. [Your Renewable News]
¶ Just before Greenpeace activists broke into the Tricastin nuclear plant in France, the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report saying significant progress had been made strengthening nuclear safety, despite the “challenge” posed by ageing reactors. [Carbonated.tv]
¶ On the 700th day of their protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project, villagers of Idinthakarai in Tamil Nadu”dropped dead” on the roads in a symbolic gesture, an anti-plant activist said Monday. [Business Standard]
US:
¶ The oil industry’s top lobby group in Washington has launched an aggressive new ad campaign urging the repeal of the Renewable Fuel Standard, a 2007 law mandating the blending of gasoline with increasing volumes of ethanol. [Economic Times]
¶ Dominion Virginia Power’s Altavista power station is now running on renewable biomass as part of a plan to convert three of its coal-fired power plants in the state to burn mostly waste wood left from regional timbering operations as fuel. [CBS Local]
¶ Providing capital and technology to farm the wind in America’s heartland with global renewable energy company Enel Green Power, GE is investing common equity and supplying turbines for the 250-MW Buffalo Dunes Wind Project in Kansas. [Windpower Engineering]
¶ An Xcel Energy subsidiary expects to save $590 million in fuel costs over the next 20 years as a result of long-term power purchase agreements with three wind power farms in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. [Triple Pundit]
¶ Temperatures reached 116 degrees in some urban parts of California early this month, but there were no rolling blackouts, no brownouts, no problems. That happened with the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station producing not even one watt of electricity. [San Gabriel Valley Tribune]
¶ Panels of alarms designed to warn personnel of operational failures at the Pilgrim nuclear plant in Massachusetts mysteriously shut down at 12:30 AM Monday and just as mysteriously restarted at 2:05 AM. [Capecodonline]
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