Congress passes the emergency bailout plan, belatedly bundling in extensions of renewable energy tax credits.

It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a distinct possibility: in a recent report, analysts have predicted that China’s solar market will experience a glut in late 2009. In light of the sky-high prices of imported polysilicon, Chinese manufacturers such as LDK Solar and Suntech (Suntech is China’s largest solar cell producer, and the world’s [...]

With the credit crunch exploding into full-on crisis mode, it has been a busy (and expensive) week for Congress. Most of the attention has fallen on the Fed’s plan to have the federal government buy up distressed mortgage-backed securities in the hope of avoiding broader failures in the financial system. Amid the ensuing hullabaloo, lawmakers’ [...]

Let us rejoice as India cements the beginning of a (hopefully) long relationship with solar with plans for its first polysilicon solar project, its largest solar thermal plant and the world’s largest solar farm. Not bad for a country just recently getting into the game—and perhaps expected, for a country with a potential generation capacity [...]

For this week and next week, the news services will focus on the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively. From now until Election Day, observers can expect to see discussion of climate change policies and technologies attached firmly to discussion of the relative merits of Barack Obama and John McCain’s energy proposals.
In one of the [...]

Just in time for the Olympics, a report from an international non-profit group has crowned China the world’s current leader in terms of installed renewable capacity. The report, “China’s Clean Revolution,” was released August 1—the final version will come out on August 8—by the Climate Group, an organization based in the USA, Australia, the UK, [...]

Living in Beijing right now has made me rather ambivalent toward China’s environmental policies. It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the PRC isn’t the poster country for eco-consciousness. Almost everybody drinks their water either boiled or from a bottle, and a blue sky day in Shanghai or Beijing is a rare day [...]

The Bureau of Land Management has put a freeze on applications for solar installations on public land in the Southwest.

China may not have as advanced a solar program as Germany (although, as Eric’s noted, Germany’s solar subsidies recently underwent a drastic slash) or Spain do, but a few pockets of land both to the north and to the south have become shining beacons of light for the rest of the country.
Take Jiangsu province, for [...]

Last week, I had the fortune to tour a production site of Beijing Tsinghua Solar Co., Ltd., one of China’s biggest manufacturers of solar hot water systems. While the facility itself lies in the brownish, dusty outskirts of Beijing, where the grass grows sparsely and the sky remains a stubborn gray from sunup until sundown, [...]