The next week on Capitol Hill will be one of extreme importance for climate legislation, as Republicans and Democrats are set to tussle over a renewable energy mandate being included in the national energy bill that will be voted on in the Senate within the next seven days.

There is no getting around it. Leadership from China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs), is imperative if any sort of successful international agreement is to come out of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations.

Yesterday, U.S. President Obama and the People’s Republic of China President Hu released a joint-statement on issues relating to climate change and renewable energy. The two countries are making concrete efforts to work together in order to scale renewable energy such as wind, solar, advanced biofuels, etc. and to achieve a cleaner way to burn coal. In the statement, it is clear both countries want to see a substantive document come out of Copenhagen without sacrificing the right to economic development.

The Platts Smart Grid Policy and Implementation Forum kicked off this morning with a keynote address from Dr. Alicia Jackson. With general bipartisan support for smart grid on the Federal level, Dr. Jackson advises that we must be conscious to make sure direct investments now to fully optimize the grid of the future.

Supporters of renewable energy and conservationists both tend to environmentalists. Yet the group factions when clean energy threatens wildlife. Solar energy construction is facing this problem in California, and we anticipate the dispute to become more pervasive as renewable energy grows nationwide.

Part I of a four-part series discussing the smart grid and what it means for solar energy.

Incumbent New Jersey Governor, Democrat Jon Corzine, is under attack from his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, for not being supportive enough of solar power growth within the state.

In the same week, a report tells us we can achieve 10% of our energy from solar by 2025, and the Senate turns down the renewable energy tax credit. Again.

Government support for solar is seeing one of its standouts slide backwards, as Germany is cutting back on solar subsidies. This is obviously extremely disappointing, and while this isn’t entirely new news, the human end economic cost of the goverment’s change in policy is becoming much more apparent. Solar installers are having to deal with [...]

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post observed that the March 3 report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) “arguing that recent climate change stems from natural causes” was developed by “23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.” The release of the report came in the middle of the 2008 [...]