Clean Energy | The Ferris Files

The Weekly: UPS Hates Styrofoam, Prius Plans a Minivan

A roundup of the week’s news in sustainability and clean tech. […]

The Weekly: Light Bulbs that Last Forever, Glaciers that Don’t, Solar Planes that Try

This week’s cleantech and sustainability news from around the Matter Network. […]

The Weekly: Obama Drills, the Grid Lobby Powers Up, ConAgra Sees the Light

Top News: This week, President Obama startled both his allies and critics with a plan to permit drilling for oil off the Southern Atlantic states and in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile the Secret Service, in a stroke of karmic justice, denied the president’s request for a hybrid limo. […]

A Visit to India’s Largest Wind Plantation

At the southernmost tip of India lies the Muppandal Wind Farm, the biggest source of wind energy in India and one of the largest in Asia. I drove through it by accident a few days ago and and can report that Muppandal is as curious and multilayered as India itself. […]

How India Puts Itself on a Power Diet

On a recent trip to India, I came to understand one reason why India’s per-capita electricity consumption is 15 times less than that in the United States. […]

New Ideas in Rural-Size Energy

The Innovate column I write for Sierra magazine has one shortcoming: The word-count is too small for me to convey the wealth of useful resources I’ve found. Over the last few months, I blogged about the five technologies included in the March/April issue, which focused on what’s known as “Appropriate Technology.” […]

This Issue’s “Innovate” Column: Energy for the Developing World

If there’s one thing I learned from reporting this month’s “Innovate” column, it’s this: The biggest beneficiaries of renewable energy will be the poor, rural farmers of the Third World. The billions of people who live off the grid in Africa, Asia and Latin America will use smaller and humbler technology than we will in the urban, modernized world. Yet its impact will be far greater. […]

My New Column Starts This Month In Sierra Magazine

Look on page 69 of this month’s Sierra magazine and you’ll find “Innovate,” a column in which I explore new ideas in energy. I’m excited about this assignment because it lets me roam about at the beginning of our new era, the Renewables Age, and bend down to pick up the shiniest objects. […]

The Weekly: Methane from the Deep, Biofuel from the Sun

Bubble, Bubble, Methane is Trouble: A vast storehouse of methane under the Arctic Ocean has perforated and is starting to leak, researchers disclosed. While scientists have long been preoccupied with methane release from thawing permafrost on mainland Siberia, the underwater stores in the adjoining East Siberian Arctic Shelf are much larger, and the release of […]

The Weekly: Solar Gets Scary, Walmart Gets Tough, Antarctica Can’t Get No Respect

Photo Credit: http://camworld.org

The Unstoppable….Solar Lobby?!? A skirmish this week in Arizona revealed that the solar industry, while still adolescent, is developing some political brawn. A bill in the state legislature proposed expanding the definition of “renewable” to include nuclear power, a move that would have allowed the state’s lone nuclear plant to fulfill […]

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