THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for March, 2010

The U.S. EPA has launched a program to push to recover brownfields for renewable energy generation. The initiative, called RE-PAL for RE-Powering America’s Land (pdf alert), is focusing on solar energy, wind and biomass projects that provide local economic benefits in the form of new jobs.  In doing so, RE-PAL pulls together five powerful trends: the use of low cost “green remediation,” the repurposing of brownfields to revitalize blighted communities, the generation of energy locally instead of building expensive new power plants, the promotion of green jobs, and the development of genuinely clean, renewable energy options for communities that refuse to tolerate new fossil fuel energy facilities.

Surely RE-PAL can’t be an accidental an acronym for a program like this, so let’s give our new best friend a shout-out.  The program is kicking off with a study of twelve sites spread across the U.S. including one in Puerto Rico, but in fact it’s been flying under the radar on an ad hoc basis for a while now, racking up some impressive brownfields-to-energy credits along the way.

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Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary in the UK, is outlining plans this week to start a “local energy revolution” in the UK.

This system would make it easier for local councils to generate electricity and sell it to the grid. It allows them to individually or jointly form renewable energy companies

This builds on a coming and much-anticipated feed-in tariff incentive scheme for the country.

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