STUFF

Seattle City Council voted against coal export terminals. Fed govt reviewing 1st of at least 6 NW coast sites to ship Mont, WY coal to Asia.

Big Sandy power plant in KY plans switch to NG from coal, riling the KY coal industry.

CBO: analyzing impact of EPA rules on pump prices would cost $3M. Sounds worth it.

Shell plans to expand its oil sands output.

IL sueing refineries over alleged water contamination.

New Mex wildfire could become largest in state history.

SunMaxx Solar, Voltaic Solaire to install solar thermal system at Delta House in Brooklyn. Delta will gen 100% of its own el, hot water and heat, combining solar and wind gen.

New tariffs on Chinese silicon solar could hike prices of panels shipped to US 10-12% (by using Taiwan panels) but add only small amount (3-5%) to developers' project costs. Also, tariffs only apply to silicon solar cells, so Chinese can still use panel assembly plants for US shipments.

Germany's PV solar installations fed 22GW of el to the grid at one point late last week, providing near half of country's el needs.

Marubeni bought Gavilon (Neb) - US's 3rd largest grain marketer - for $3.6B. Includes grain elevators, fertilizer comps, energy businesses to allow Marubeni to compete locally with Cargill. Marubeni also investing $652M in Angolan ethanol.

U of Saskatchewan researchers discovered room-temp process to separate ethanol and water without chemicals.

Petro Vietnam expects ethanol exports to jump this year. $270M invested into total capac of 300M liters/y. In '11, they sold 20M liters in country, exported rest.

Ghana comp producing biodiesel from human waste at pilot projects. Commercial scale in 2 years (100 truck loads of waste per day). Support from Gates Foundation, UN.

Union of Concerned Scientists: a number of major US corps publicly support climate change science, but contrib heavily to politicians, groups that deny or play down the problem.

China pledged $27B more for clean/renewable energy, E efficiency, hybrid vehicle research projects through '12. Also set target of reducing C emissions 40-45% by '20.

Ernst & Young's Q report on attractiveness of countries to clean/renew energy investors. #1 - China, #2 - US, #3 - Germany, #4 - India, #5 - Italy.