Living in the Bay Area, I’m used to the abundance of great green start-ups blazing new trails nearby, whether its Berkeley pioneering PACE, Emeryville where Amarys boils up its Algae, San Francisco where 1BOG is perking in a cool SOMA warehouse, Silicon Valley with all those cleantech businesses, even Fremont now has a new Tesla factory… but doesn’t every region have that town most unlikely to make it into green news?  Sleepy, rural, oil stained, fast food, big box-riddled Vacaville is that town.

Yet it is Vacaville, I read in Wired, that is pioneering – despite having fewer than 100,000 inhabitants – the nation’s very first Level 3 DC rapid charger for electric vehicles!

A visionary EV enthusiast as city transportation manager put Vacaville out front on this, in a move sure to make this particular pink-roofed Vacaville Sonic Burger off 1-80 at Davis Street a new destination spot for the Bay Area.

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While some Arizona legislators seem to have a bit of trouble deciphering the U.S. constitution, the state’s utility companies are wide awake when it comes to shifting out of fossil fuels and adopting renewable energy.  Tucson Electric Power (TEP) has joined the rush to renewables with an announcement that it will purchase the electrical output from solar, landfill gas, and wind installations, which when completed will total almost 160 megawatts or enough to power about 30,000 homes.

The greatest amount will come from ten new solar power installations, which together will account for 107 of the 160 MW.  TEP anticipates completion of these along with the wind and landfill gas projects in 2011 or 2012.

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The contrast could not be more extreme.  This week, as British Petroleum’s undersea oil gusher continued to flow uncontrolled into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling the Louisiana coast and threatening other states, Independent Natural Resources, Inc. announced that it has passed a critical milestone in constructing a new wave energy installation in the Gulf off the coast of Freeport, Texas.  The installation, engineered by INRI’s wholly owned subsidiary Renew Blue, is designed to use clean, renewable wave energy to power a desalination plant.

The project will use the SEADOG Pump system, which uses no blades or turbines to extract power from waves.  CleanTechnica has followed Renew Blue’s wave energy project since last fall, and overcoming this latest hurdle – obtaining a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – could open the door to numerous other wave energy projects in the future.

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Britain would start exporting domestic waste converted into fuel pellets to mainland Europe as it struggles to recycle the growing amount of household waste.

The generation of domestic waste seems to have exceeded the capacity of the British municipalities to recycle them. In addition, with limited land the solution of landfills is also completely exhausted. Thus the municipalities have decided to turn the domestic waste into fuel pellets and export them to neighboring countries like Germany and Holland.

Europe is a big importer of energy resources which has been proved to be a major strategic thorn in the recent past. Russia consistently flexed its muscles by refusing to supply gas to Europe. This pushed the EU to prepare plans for an unprecedented project in the African Sahara.

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In far less time than it will take BP to drill the relief wells needed to permanently stop the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a community college has installed the largest concentrating solar array in the U.S. It took only two months of construction to install the six-acre array, which will generate about 2.6 million kilowatt hours of clean, renewable, spill-free energy annually.

The new solar array will supply about 30% of the electricity for Victor Valley College, which is part of the California community college system, and it will double as a learning center for new green jobs training programs.  With 109 schools, the system serves about 10% of U.S. students, so the quick conversion to solar at one campus adds a huge jolt of momentum to a trend that is converting college campuses across the country to renewable energy while training students for new green jobs, too.

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Progress was made this week to realizing the nations first wind freshwater wind farm in the shallow and vast expanse of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, by the Lake Erie Energy Development Company.

The local non-profit group LEEDCo snared a deal with General Electric to supply the first five turbines for a $100 million demonstration project by 2012, as the first step of a 10-year plan to build a 200 turbine, 1,000 MW wind farm in the nearly 10,000 square mile lake by 2020, using state-of-the-art 4 MW turbines.

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At the ExxonMobil’s annual shareholders meeting on May 26th, the San Francisco-based sustainable investors group As You Sow asked for a vote on forcing the company to assess the risks to drinking water, public health, and shareholder value associated with hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.

Representing the holders of 16,746 ExxonMobil shares valued at more than $1.1 million, As You Sow – as well as the two largest US proxy voting services, RiskMetrics Group and Proxy Governance – want to enforce disclosure of the environmental risks of “fracking” for natural gas, a process that injects high volumes of water, chemicals and particles underground to create fractures through which gas can flow for collection.

To make up for the complete absence of SEC filings from ExxonMobil covering environmental or regulatory risk, shareholders took the unusual step of filing their own assessment of these risks with the SEC.

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In a sign that suggests that legislators are turning their attention to renewable energy amendments for the climate and clean energy bill, three Senators and four House members have come up with virtually identical bills to ease the cost of transition to electric vehicle adoption in the US in the same way that the Japanese Government jump-started the Prius in its early days, with an increase in targeted subsidies. The similarity shows foresight, for that will ease the reconciliation between House and Senate bills later, if they make it that far.

The way related (renewable energy, in this case) bills work, is that they get added to bigger bills (in this case, the American Power Act).  That’s how bills get big: they have lots of individual policy ideas in them.  The Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010 would become part of the climate bill in floor amendments, after (and if) it can hurdle the 60 vote filibuster.

Senators Dorgan (D-ND) Alexander (R-TN) and Merkley (D-OR) and Representatives Markey (D-MA) Biggert (R-IL) and California Democrats Jerry McNerney and Anita Eshoo propose to invest about $10 billion to accelerate the adoption of electric cars with $10,000 rebates and incentives for infrastructure development. For now, they have two Republicans, but don’t count on that to stop a Senate filibuster.

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Electric utility companies in the U.S. are starting shed their dependence on fossil fuels, what with some converting coal power plants to biomass and others launching ambitious plans for solar energy generation, including distributed solar micro-arrays.  Now they are taking the pursuit of new solar energy technology to the next level, with a new partnership between the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Solar Technology Acceleration Center (SolarTAC) in Colorado.

The partnership is significant because EPRI, a nonprofit research company, represents a good 90% of the electricity generated in the U.S.  Hooking EPRI up with SolarTAC, one of the newest and largest solar test facilities in the world, sends a clear signal that U.S. utilities are picking up the renewable energy pace.  And if that’s not clear enough, EPRI spells it out: “Anticipating renewable portfolio mandates and higher costs for fossil fuels, utilities are moving to develop renewable technology options.”

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In harsh and inhospitable environments, with hot days and cold nights, this invention creates a temperate and moist earthen nursery for protecting and nurturing seeds into trees with a self replenishing source of drip irrigation. It is a plant incubator that’s designed to cool faster than the night air, creating condensation.

The way nature sows seeds is ingenious. Birds eat the seed, their digestion process partly breaks them down, then they excrete them. The excretions blocks soil evaporation above the seed, providing a moist growing medium for the young plant.

That environment inspires this Popular Science Invention Award-winning Groasis Waterboxx by Lily grower Pieter Hoff.

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