Energy Law

The Government of India has set an ambitious target of 20,000 Megawatts of solar power by 2022.

This was revealed by Deepak Gupta, Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, while delivering the keynote address at an International Workshop on The Private Sector and Climate Change: Opportunities and Challenges in the Emerging Economies.

According to the government's solar mission plan, 20 million rural households will be provided solar lighting. It would also produce 20 million square metres of solar thermal area.

"This is an ambitious project. Perhaps, the biggest target in the world", Gupta told the workshop organised by Observer Research Foundation in association with US National Science Foundation, University of California and the University of Maryland.

Groups and companies including WWF and Danish wind turbine maker Vestas on Monday supported the launch of "WindMade" as a label for products made using wind power, aiming to attract green consumers.

To use the label, producers would have to pass a test confirming their use of wind power, and in return they can benefit from a possible price premium similar to that organic food has over conventional produce.

A technical group has not yet decided details of how the label would work, backers of the initiative said.

The largest solar electrical generation plant in the seven-state Tennessee Valley Authority region is scheduled to begin generating electricity here this week.

The 5.5-acre solar farm, which sits across from the north entrance to Procter & Gamble, is divided into two sections.

One section will supply electricity directly to TVA. The other will supply electricity to an adjoining warehouse and plant, once the home of American Olean and Dal-Tile.

NRG Bluewater Wind is aggressively looking to expand its reach. Analysts say the company's bid last week to construct turbines off the Maryland coast is indicative of its thirst to build anywhere it can.

NRG, which has a contract to supply Delmarva Power customers with electricity from a wind farm 13.2 miles off the Delaware coast, bid on 33 ocean tracts off Maryland under the name Bluewater Wind Maryland LLC.

"Bluewater has made it very clear they want to be a major player," said Matt DaPrato, an analyst with the Massachusetts-based IHS Emerging Energy Research.

In the West, fighting the federal Bureau of Land Management is a time-honored tradition. But as today's agency focuses on renewable solar energy projects, the BLM is looking more friend than foe to recession-stricken southern Nevada.

Ever since the Energy Policy Act of 2005 set the tangible goal of 10,000 megawatts of non-hydropower renewable energy by 2015, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior and the BLM have been working in tandem to facilitate large, utility-scale solar projects in the desert Southwest. The BLM, whose land conservation policies made it a constant target of ranchers and landowners in the 1970s and 80s, has shape-shifted into a business-friendly entity, at least where renewable energy is concerned.

The BLM believes it can meet the 10,000-megawatt goal during this presidential administration, and it is pressing forward on fast-tracking 14 different solar utility projects in the sun-drenched, federally managed desert lands of southern Nevada and southern California.

Planners on Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod have similar questions but different answers for how to regulate wind turbines.

Regional planning agencies on both the Cape and Vineyard released draft plans last month to deal with wind-energy projects in state waters under their jurisdiction. The Martha's Vineyard Commission's model regulations for island towns also cover land-based turbines, while the Cape Cod Commission is handling terrestrial projects with a separate set of rules.
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"I think we're all sort of headed in the same direction," Cape Cod Commission Executive Director Paul Niedzwiecki said. "We're probably taking a different approach."