Germany

The March 11, 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster has precipitated a world of change in Japan's nuclear power industry.

The newest report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), in cooperation with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a clean tech analytics firm, shows that the combined impetus of stimulus funding, feed-in tariffs (FiTs) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) generated a record $211 billion globally in 2010 in renewable energy investment.

In an historic political defeat, that largely became a referendum on nuclear power, Germany's governing conservative party lost a state election in Baden-Wuerttemberg for the first time in nearly sixty years.

The rapid pace of wind power technology improvements became evident today as Vestas Wind Systems A/S (OTC: VWDRY.PK) announced it had signed the first repowering contract in Portugal since the government passed legislation designed to increase the output from existing wind power farms by up to 20%.

BMW has announced that it will invest US$565 million through 2013 to expand its plant in Leipzig, Germany for production of its all-electric vehicle, the Megacity Vehicle (MCV).

Good Energies and European investment fund NIBC Infrastructure Partners have reached a deal with Q-Cells SE to buy the world's largest current operating solar photovoltaic power plant.

It has been said that a cleantech revolution is impossible without access to rare earth metals.  Well, Germany is now telling the international community that China, the world's largest miner of rare earth metals, is refusing to trade these elements to certain countries.

Germany's new energy plan has garnered praise as well as protest, as the country propels toward a clean energy future.

The German government has announced its plan to generate 80% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2050.  Currently Germany produces 16% of its energy from renewable sources.

I spent three weeks in Germany this past August with my family, and one thing I noticed right off the bat there – all the solar panels.  They are everywhere, thousands of them.  On businesses, farms, small and large homes, in big cities and in rural towns.  I had some serious solar panel envy.

A paper on rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity and market penetration in the U.S., written by three National Renewable Energy Laboratory colleagues (Easan Drury, Paul Denholm and Robert Margolis), shows that fully 1 gigawatt (GW) of the world’s 15 gigawatts of solar PV was installed in the U.S. alone by December of 2009.