According to business intelligence provider, IntertechPira, the total value of clean technologies by end-use category globally is expected to rise by over 250% to a sizeable $525 billion in 2019. This represents average annual growth of 13.5% for the ten year period from 2009.

Clean technologies include products and technologies designed to be economically competitive by using less material and energy to reduce their environmental impact compared with incumbent technologies. “The Future of Clean Technologies” report published by IntertechPira takes an in-depth look at the future of clean technologies with quantitative market forecasts to 2019 broken down by product, technology and end-use sector. It details prospects for raw material and technology suppliers and identifies the key materials, products, technologies and end-use sectors most likely to undergo significant growth over the next ten years.

The report covers the global market for clean technology devices and materials. Global is defined as including western Europe, eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa, principally South Africa. The report finds that growth rates in clean technologies “greatly outperform those aimed at the traditional power generation industry”. According to IntertechPira, the pace of growth, and the promise it may hold, has a lot to do with the high-profile involvement of governments and private investors in many of the sectors.

Clean-tech still seen as expensive

Clean technology investments are still seen as astronomically costly by many venture capital firms, who tend to become nervous when faced with capital-intensive industrial segments. As such, most are making smaller sums available for small R&D teams to work with, rather than releasing larger sums, more appropriate for project finance-type capital investments. The emphasis seems to be very much upon supporting ventures headed by people with operational experience and technical expertise.

(more…)

By: T. Boone Pickens

The Congressional Independence Day recess is here. The amount of time available to pass substantive legislation before both houses adjourn is dwindling.

Between the end of the July 4th Recess and the August Recess, Congress will try to pass the financial reform bill, and the Senate will fulfill its Constitutional duties on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. With all that, the single largest unfinished piece of business for the 111th Congress remains the adoption of a comprehensive energy bill.

I have been around this business for a long time, and I understand that an energy bill is likely to contain a great deal of compromise on key issues. That’s the nature of the system — you have compromise to get the things you really need and serve what you believe to be the greater good. The debate surrounding the balance between our environmental and energy polices, while important, should not delay us from adopting legislation to reduce our dependence on OPEC oil.

(more…)

The U.S. Department of Energy probably didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it announced an interpretive rule in early June that would effectively ban multi-head shower systems.

Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors – National Association has called on its members to strongly protest a DOE proposal that would ban multiple head showers. DOE proposes to interpret the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, as amended, to mean that a showerhead is anything past the mixing valve. That would mean that all fittings could not spray more than 2.5 GPM combined.

“Without advance notice to stakeholders, the United States Department of Energy has issued an interpretive rule defining showerheads which will have an impact on the installation of higher-end bathrooms such as spas and showers that have both a showerhead and hand shower or shower towers,” PHCC-NA said in its alert.

DOE interprets that a showerhead is all components that are supplied standard together and function from one inlet (i.e., after the mixing valve) forming a single showerhead for purposes of the maximum water use standards.

Using this rule, DOE will find a showerhead to be noncompliant with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act’s maximum water use standard if the showerhead’s standard components, operating in their maximum design flow configuration, taken together use in excess of 2.5 GPM when flowing at 80-psi, even if each component individually does not exceed 2.5 GPM.

Read the rest of this post.

By: Jonathan Hiskes

Obama administration officials have failed to resolve a dispute with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that has shut down Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), according to an email obtained by Grist. The impasse will likely kill the promising clean-energy financing tool until Congress passes legislation addressing it, according to Cisco DeVries, who first created the PACE system three years ago.

Department of Energy officials have been unable to convince the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie and Freddie, to end the corporations’ prohibition on using PACE, DeVries told PACE advocates in an email Friday evening.

PACE allows homeowners to finance solar panels or energy-savings retrofits through an addition to their property tax bill, paid back over 15 to 20 years; the programs are funded through local government bonds. Fannie and Freddie have expressed concern that if homeowners go into default, PACE loans would have to be repaid before mortgages.

(more…)

By: Nathan Stubbs

When Corey Saft looked at the first utility bill for his newly built rent house on Whittington Drive, it was with more than the usual sense of apprehension. The UL architecture professor had spent the past two years dreaming, planning, designing and ultimately building the narrow home, with a footprint under 800 square feet, on the lot adjacent to his residential home, with much of that time devoted to ensuring the house maximized energy efficiencies.

Holding up the bill, Saft now had total vindication. Not only did it read “no amount due” but as it turned out, Lafayette Utilities System actually owed him 62 cents for the month. It was no anomaly. When the next bill came, for the month of April, Saft hardly batted an eye when he saw that utilities for the house had skyrocketed more than 500 percent, up to a whopping $5.

“There was a sense of relief, really,” Saft says of his reaction to the first two months’ bills. “You don’t want to be too optimistic. I mean everything you read says one thing, but usually it never comes out that good. So I was definitely pretty surprised. It was hoped for; I wouldn’t say anticipated. It’s the first time this was done in a hot, humid climate where everything kind of worked out the way it was supposed to.”

(more…)