GE has just launched a new wind turbine that spells bad news for fossil fuel power generation. The “brand new machine” is GE’s its biggest onshore turbine to date, and more to the point, it provides a low cost pathway for harvesting energy from less than ideal wind speeds. That opens up a whole new wide swath of new siting possibilities for wind farms taking advantage of the low-to-medium range, and GE is eyeballing German, Turkey, and Australia just for starters.
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The new GE wind turbine will likely rev up the already-hot US wind market, which has been chugging along strongly in spite of President* Trump’s antipathy to wind energy ( hello, Scotland!).

Also in spite of Trump, his own Department of Energy has been promoting wind with great enthusiasm — and backing that up with taxpayer dollars, too.

In the latest development, the Energy Department just threw down $50 million for new energy infrastructure resiliency projects, including a pathway for ramping up the penetration of “clean” distributed energy resources in the nation’s electricity grid (to be clear, the agency includes natural gas in the “clean” category).

France will stop granting new exploration permits next year as it seeks to end all oil and gas production by 2040, according to a draft bill presented at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

The move would allow the government to turn down more than 40 exploration requests already made, while some existing permits may be extended to respect contracts, the presentation showed. That includes the Guyane Maritime license off French Guiana, in which Total SA has a stake, according to an adviser to Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot, who briefed reporters in Paris.

This legislation would “allow us to progressively free ourselves,” Hulot said after the cabinet meeting, also confirming that current exploration permits off French Guiana would remain valid. “It will allow investors to go much further in their renewable investments. Currently oil and gas leave us dependent on geopolitics.”

Recently, deadly floods ravaged India and South Asia, and powerful storms in United States knocked out power to millions. But when people’s lives are thrown into chaos by devastating natural disaster, using alternative energy source may not seem like an obvious response. However, since energy grids are often the first to fail when a disaster hits, and outages hamper recovery efforts, energy entrepreneurs believe that off-grid renewable energy could provide an instant source of power to those who need it most.

“After a natural disaster hits, it can take weeks or longer for power to be restored and the expense of repairing transmission lines can be very high. Solar and battery mini-grids are a more resilient solution, as it allows local and remote communities to regain access to power, clean drinking water, medical facilities and communications immediately,” says William Brent, director of Power For All, a coalition of 200 public and private organizations campaigning to deliver universal energy access by 2030.

“Also, in the case of renewable mini-grids, the fuel — the Sun— is local, unlike diesel generators, which are subject to disruption in fuel supply because of a disaster,” says Brent

In August, Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, faced its worst flooding in decades, affecting 13 million people. With uncertainty about the availability of grid power, renewable energy mini-grids — Tara Urja and Desi Power — stepped up to provide back-up power and assist with relief operations in eight villages. ?Tara Urja and Desi Power are private energy service companies working with the Smart Power India, an initiative funded by Rockefeller Foundation to help scale mini-grids in India.

“In Bihar, mini-grids and battery energy storage ensured relief operation was not hampered due to power outages, and the affected villages were not plunged into darkness by night,” says Mukesh Khandelwal, COO of Tara Urja.?“Our electricians maintained a round-the-clock watch during the peak days of flooding to make sure that the village-level office received electricity through a feeder line to coordinate relief operations,” adds Khandelwal.