In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.

The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes, though most of them are small.

On Friday, the Energy Department, which has put some $440 million into its geothermal program this year alone, said that despite the latest developments, it remained confident of the technology’s long-term prospects. Many geothermal methods do not require drilling so deep or fracturing bedrock. [full nytimes article]

Although they will be continuing similar programs in Oregon, spokemen said.

Dow Chemical said on Monday it would begin selling a new rooftop shingle next year that converts sunlight into electricity — and could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 for the company.
The new solar shingles can be integrated into rooftops with standard asphalt shingles, Dow said, and will be introduced in 2010 before a wider roll-out in 2011.
“We’re looking at this one product that could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 and $10 billion by 2020,” Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow Solar Solutions, told Reuters in an interview.
The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells.
[link]

This is pretty good news, although it clearly aint the “American Industry” responding to market forces, or even real time needs… FTA, it also mentions word of the handout that clearly helped stimulate them:

“Dow received $20 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop its BIPV products.”

not to mention their stock went up almost 5% after the announcement. Still, its progress. Rooftop solar systems have been kind of limited to roofing tiles, which have lower solar conversion efficiency than solar panels, and are pretty dang expensive. You see them mostly on celebrities pads or mcmansions. Dow says theyre rooftop solar shingle will be almost 30% cheaper, and cut the installation time in half. All good news for photovoltaic price points.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.
[Full Article]

Although the article doesnt mention it, one solution might be to just turn off the water currently being used for coal and oil fired power generation plants, although it might be easier just to use a magical sorcerer to pull invisible water off another mystical plane. But then, we could just have them transmogrify manure into clean coal, yeah!

The Hamburg-based renewable energy group Lichtblick and its automaker partner Volkswagen say the [home sized gas generators] plants would produce not only heating and hot water but also electricity, with any excess power fed into the local grid. The two firms said the concept of “SchwarmStrom” (literally, “swarm power”) would allow Germany to abandon nuclear and coal power stations sooner and help compensate for the volatility of renewables like wind and solar power.
[link]

Clearly a pretty ambitious move: the programme will attempt to build and install 100,000 of the mini plants, producing a total of 2,000 megawatts of electricity, the same as First Solar / China’s Solar Farm in the Mongolian Desert. It looks like everyone is aiming for the 2k megawatt mark, an easy number to try and hit because its the amount of energy two nuclear power plants generally produce.

Chinese government officials signed an agreement on Tuesday with First Solar, an American solar developer, for a 2,000-megawatt photovoltaic farm to be built in the Mongolian desert.
Set for completion in 2019, the First Solar project represents the world’s biggest photovoltaic power plant project to date, and is part of an 11,950-megawatt renewable-energy park planned for Ordos City in Inner Mongolia.[ full article ]

Along with the recent Issuance of yuan-linked government bonds, it looks like China is putting some money behind their talk, unlike some other countries:

China’s Ministry of Finance said it plans to offer 6 billion yuan ($879 million) of government bonds in Hong Kong for the first time to elevate the “international status” of its currency. China is promoting greater use of the yuan overseas after Premier Wen Jiabao expressed concern in March that the U.S. dollar will weaken, eroding the value of its $2.1 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves. Brazil, Russia and India have also said the world is too reliant on the greenback. [ bloomberg ]

“In very short order we increased the power output by eight-fold, as a conservative estimate,” says Derek Lovley. “With this, we’ve broken through the plateau in power production that’s been holding us back in recent years.” Now, planning can move forward to design microbial fuel cells that convert waste water and renewable biomass to electricity, treat a single home’s waste while producing localized power (especially attractive in developing countries), power mobile electronics, vehicles and implanted medical devices, and drive bioremediation of contaminated environments. [Full Article]