With the evidence of our gluttony for oil now rudely lapping at our shores, at the G-20 meeting that just wrapped up in Toronto, Obama pressed for and got agreement from other world leaders to actually end fossil fuel subsidies, by erasing the word “voluntary” in the agreement, the Los Angeles Times is reporting.

Despite the earlier fears of environmentalists that it would be merely a voluntary “goal”,  at the last minute a newly muscular non-voluntary end to fossil energy subsidies, was inserted into the final language of the G-20 agreement, at the request of the US President. America.gov found that fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $558 billion worldwide in 2008.

The top 20 nations at the G-20 have now also agreed to ongoing reviews to check on how well each of them lives up to the commitment.

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The Indian government has set up a solar securities fund which would ensure that project developers of large-scale solar photovoltaic projects get paid at premium to the utility tariffs.

The $70 million fund would be used to release finances to the project developers who are refused payments by state electricity boards under power-purchase agreements. The government now allows grid-connected solar power projects to forge independent agreements with transmission companies thus allowing them to choose to whom the project developers want to sell the electricity.

India recently announced the National Solar Mission which aims at increasing the solar energy installments to 20,000 MW by 2020. The first stage of the this Mission which concludes in 2013 could see 1,100 MW of grid-connected solar PV power plants. Since the capital cost, manufacturing cost and the payback period of investments are considerably high to attract sustainable flow of investments, the Indian government has announced several incentives and subsidies for the solar manufacturing industry as well as the project developers.

One of such incentives is the high tariff rates that the transmission companies have to pay to the project developers, this reduces the payback period and attracts investors. The tariff rates from coal-fired power plants is as low as a third of these recently announced tariff rates.

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If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck – or a really great ducklike thingamajig.  Apply that maxim to energy, and you get some insight into why more Americans are shedding fossil fuels in favor of wind power and other forms of clean, renewable energy.  After all, if it gets the same job done at far lower risk and with less cost over the long run, what’s not to like? Case in point: even though the housing market has not recovered from its crash, sales of small home-scaled wind turbines increased last year by almost 10,000 units.

The wind turbine sales report was just released by the American Wind Energy Association (naturally), fresh on the heels of its new collaboration with the United Steel Workers labor union and other partners to push for more green jobs through a national renewable energy policy. To hammer home the point, AWEA sent a gigantic 131-foot made-in-the-U.S.A. wind turbine blade  to Congress, inscribed with 6,000 signatures from wind power and green jobs supporters.  And guess who partnered in that ?  GE.  That’s right, GE.

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Today, President Obama told twenty three senators who met at the White House to discuss proposed climate legislation, to use the funds of polluters, not taxpayers, in order to fund the replacement of existing fossil energy with new climate-safe energy.

Senators coming out of the meeting say that President Obama told them that the climate and clean energy bill must put a price on carbon emissions. “The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions,” said Senator John Kerry.

“He was very strong about the need to put a price on carbon and make polluters pay,” said Senator Joe Lieberman, adding “He made a very passionate and, I think, effective argument that polluters should pay.”

And Obama’s own words, even before the Gulf Coast gusher this year made it clear that he believes a price on pollution is needed.

“Does it make sense for us to start pricing in the fact that this thing is really bad for the environment?  And if we do, then can we do it in a way that doesn’t involve some big bureaucracy in a control and command system, but just says, look, we’re just going to — there’s going to be a price to pollution.  And then everybody can adapt and decide which are the — which are the best energies.”

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If you are a Californian who’s been wanting to put on solar, but your spouse has objections on aesthetic grounds, you now have an alternative. There are now more CSI-approved choices for building-integrated solar (BIPV) modules in the updated list this month at GosolarCalifornia. Expected performance of all the new BIPV is listed at the CSI-EPBB site.

California has just approved the SRS-Energy curved thinfilm tile. These can be added to your terracotta-colored clay tile roof like this…

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On my recent tour of Finnish greentech, I found that a simple law on the books for decades helps account for the incredibly low carbon footprint of Finns, who look just as energy-intensive as Americans, but register at half our weight on this fragile planet.

Finns get almost one third of their electricity second-hand, after industrial users have had first dibs at it.  Vesa Koivisto of Fortum (the largest utility in Finland) told me that paper mills actually supply about one third of the electricity on the grid. Why?

Heavy industries are allowed to produce and sell electricity, any way they can make it.

Since heavy industry processes create heat as a byproduct, this has led to real incentives for Finland’s paper mills to also become electric utilities, through capturing the heat in their process, and selling the power, for income on the side. Finland leads the world in the use of combined heat & power (CHP) systems, which have been widely used there since the 1960s.

This stupendously easy and effective piece of climate legislation is something even we could pass, even here in the hopelessly plutocratic remains of our poor democracy.

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In a partnership that illustrates the powerful currents at work in today’s environmental movement, the United Steel Workers labor union has joined with the American Wind Energy Association and BlueGreen Alliance, an organization that includes other labor unions, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, to produce a blueprint for new green jobs in the wind power industry.

In pushing hard for green jobs, this diverse labor-industry-environmental group puts itself squarely on the side of the U.S. military’s push for alternative energy in the interests of a strong national defense.  It also joins a growing number of leading U.S companies calling for national climate legislation and green jobs, in yet another sign that the dominance of fossil fuels is rapidly coming to a close.

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As part of the U.S. military’s broad adoption of sustainability principles, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been undergoing a historic mission shift.  In the past, the Corps performed remediation as a sidebar to other projects.  Now it is now focusing its considerable resources on environmental restoration for its own sake, including an all-out push to save the marsh islands of Jamaica Bay in New York City from disappearing.

The deployment of military resources for proactive environmental restoration has already enabled the Corps and its numerous partners (including The Conservation Fund) to build up a rich store of experience in marshlands restoration, which could play a key role in helping the Gulf state coastal communities preserve their remaining marshlands,  recover from the disastrous BP oil spill, and determine the course of their economic future.

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The fire hydrant of the future will have a new mission in addition to fighting fires.  Geared up with new data collection, storage and communication equipment, fire hydrants will play a key role in efforts to conserve water in the nation’s vast, complex water systems.

Compared to its record on greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. has actually done a pretty good job of conserving water, with usage declining over the past 25 years primarily due to improvements in agricultural irrigation and the adoption of power plant cooling processes that recycle water.  However, there is plenty of room for improvement and the new hydrants are expected to enable utilities to conserve more water by detecting and responding to leaks more quickly, and help utilities to cut their carbon footprint, too.

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By 2020, we will use more energy storing all of our virtual lives “on the cloud” than we will by flying in airplanes. As we all add more and more of all of our all-too-easily-uploaded data to humanity’s ever growing attic where all our virtual stuff is stored, the need to add more data storage in an environmentally friendly way becomes crucial, because data servers use more and more energy.

But a data center or server farm doesn’t just use energy. It also can actually generate electricity. Data centers generate heat. Heat can be harnessed to create two forms of energy we need; both electricity, and district heat as well (co-generation, or combined heat and power or CHP).

A data center can actually be a source of both valuable heating and create actual megawatts of electricity, just from doing its thing, and storing our virtual stuff.

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