When Erica Grubb installed solar panels on the roof of her Berkeley house, the decision was both personal and political.
Personal because Grubb used a small inheritance from her mother to purchase the solar panels, which cost $18,000 — $13,000 after rebates.
Political because seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s movie on global warming, inspired Grubb, a [...]

Brazil’s 2007-08 ethanol exports could slip to 2.5 billion liters, down about 20% from an estimated 3.1 billion liters this season, as the U.S. begins to sell ethanol abroad next year due to excess stocks, the president of sugar consultancy Datagro said Friday.
This year, the U.S. has been Brazil’s principal buyer of ethanol, in large [...]

Ethanol may not be the energy panacea many in Hawai’i had hoped for.
Producing the biofuel from sugar cane would help move Hawai’i away from dependence on imported oil while invigorating the farm industry.
Sounds great, but making it happen is far from simple.
The barriers to producing ethanol locally include:
# Building production plants.
# Getting water rights switched [...]

Ascent Solar Technologies says that the Ascent Solar alliance that has been collaborating for several months in response to President George W. Bush’s Solar America Initiative, plans to produce an entirely new series of “plug and play” products for the nation’s commercial and residential building markets.
Using Ascent Solar’s thin film photovoltaic (PV) technology on plastics, [...]

BACK in 1999, when she was the head of refining at Chevron, Patricia A. Woertz told a group of energy officials that it was time to stop mixing agricultural policy with fuels policy.
In that same speech, at a fuels conference in Washington, Ms. Woertz also publicly expressed worry about the unintended consequences of a federal [...]