While solar power has proven to be profitable and easily adopted in developed nations, it is also one of the renewable energies most suitable for the developing world. Countries such as India, Brazil, and Nigeria, where sunlight is plentiful and the costs of climate change are likely to be high, are well suited to adopting [...]

In the face of 391 power outages in its main power lines during the first half of 2008 and an estimated national energy shortage of 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts, Venezuela is expanding its energy production with various renewable energy projects, one of which incorporates solar.

Through its Energy Revolution Mission, the South American nation has [...]

As recent years have shown, social entrepreneurship in the developing world doesn’t have to come from philanthropic behemoths such as Google or Microsoft—they can start right at home in the grassy steppes, rainy jungles or dusty cities. Case in point: Sunlabob’s solar initiative in Laos, which has brought solar lanterns, panels and even entire [...]

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 [...]

Although China may currently be the world’s factory for solar, having overtaken Germany as the world’s largest producer of solar cells—last year it produced 1,200 megawatts’ worth of solar cells, as opposed to Germany’s 875—it has started to take on the mantle of polysilicon production as well.
In its quest to achieve rock-bottom prices of solar-energy [...]

If you read our blog regularly, you might have noticed that I’m always ranting about how solar needs to be popularized before it will really sweep the nation. Well, it’s not there yet, but the last couple of weeks have given me a bit of hope. For one thing, last week’s Democratic National Convention in [...]

After several months of scrutinizing solar in China, let us shift our focus for now to another energy-guzzling, rising economic power with some ambitious energy goals of its own: India. While India’s emissions record is commendable in comparison with China’s (8 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2007, compared to China’s staggering 24 percent), by [...]

Lately, the air quality in Beijing has been astonishingly pleasant. For the past three weeks, when the skies haven’t been a sunny cerulean, they’ve been a rainy shade of gray, more cool than the usual muggy. Even when I was in the neighboring countryside two weekends ago, the difference between the rural and urban air [...]

Having just returned from the countryside, I already miss its bitingly cold, naturally clean water, its lush vegetation, its air free from the brown dust that characterizes Beijing. To be fair, Beijing hasn’t been so terrible lately—the past several days have been a striking blue—although every time a car passes by me on the street [...]

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 [...]