Energy Law

Tech announces wind energy institute » Abilene Reporter News

Texas Tech University has announced it will become the research hub for the newly formed National Institute for Renewable Energy, a wind energy consortium started with financial help from West Texas organizations such as the Development Corporation of Abilene.

The institute?s formation was announced Monday at the American Wind Energy Association?s Windpower 2010 conference in Dallas, which has about 24,000 attendees from the industry.

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker sees the BP oil spill as a call to energy action, comparing it to spills of the past:

In September of 1968, Union Oil Company of California, which later became Unocal and is now part of Chevron, erected a drilling platform off the coast near Santa Barbara. Over the next four months, four wells were constructed. Work on a fifth had begun and was proceeding uneventfully until, on January 28, 1969, the new well suffered a blowout. It took ten days? effort before it was finally plugged, with cement slurry. By the time the flow had stopped completely, an estimated hundred thousand barrels of oil had poured into the Santa Barbara Channel. The slick it created covered eight hundred square miles. The area?s fishing industry was shut down, and pictures of blackened beaches filled the news.

A tally by American Businesses for Clean Energy (ABCE) shows more than 6,000 American businesses support clean energy and climate legislation, including nearly a quarter of the Fortune 100.

The analysis, released last week in collaboration with the We Can Lead campaign, found that those businesses employed 3.5 million Americans and had $3.5 trillion in revenue in 2009.

Twenty-one of the Fortune 100 and 49 of the Fortune 500 companies support clean energy legislation like the American Power Act currently circling the Senate, according to the analysis.

The military will have solar panels for hot water installed in 900 homes at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, making the base one of the largest residential producers of solar thermal power. Each house on the base will have one panel on its roof that will cover 75 percent of its hot water needs.

The project will be funded partly through subsidies provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which made more than $16 billion available for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects through the Energy Department.