News

Global clean energy investment fell by 18% to $287.5 billion (€269.7bn) in 2016, dragged down by sharp falls in equipment prices and slowdown in key Asian markets. According to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Chinese investment totalled at $87.8 billion, down 26% from the 2015 record high of $119.1 billion, while Japan invested a meagre $22.8 billion, marking a 43%…
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US President Barack Obama has urged the US to take bolder action in tackling climate change in his last presidential speech. In his farewell address, delivered on 10 January in Chicago, Obama  said: “We’ve  led the world to an agreement that has the promise to save this planet.  But without bolder action, our children won’t have time to debate the existence of…
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Recycling and waste management company Veolia UK has acquired Cynergin – an energy services company and Energy Performance Contract (EPC) specialist. Over recent years Cynergin has enjoyed notable success in a number of high profile Hospital Trust and public building energy projects, such as the Yeovil and Warrington & Halton Hospital Trusts and Somerset House and has a strong business…
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Roberto Rinaldi FRSC, a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to fund his world-leading work on lignin valorisation. According to Imperial College, these highly competitive grants are awarded to “outstanding early career researchers” to help them consolidate their…
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UK wood fuel supplier Forest Fuels has opened a new wood pellet depot at Garston, Liverpool, in a bid to increase its financial investment in the region. The ready availability of wood pellets for biomass boilers in the North West of England has been boosted with the arrival of Forest Fuels to its new facility in Liverpool, according to the company. The facility will hold…
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French firm Suez Environnement has announced a strategic partnership with a cloud-based waste and recycling company, Rubicon Global, to advance the digitalisation of its recycling and recovery activities on mainland Europe. The partnership was announced following Suez acquisition of a stake in Rubicon after it led the company’s latest funding round, which raised more than $50 million…
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An anaerobic digestion (AD) plant is being blamed for killing more than 1,000 fish in Wales, UK, according to media reports. According to a report in UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday, officials are investigating if a fault caused hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic waste to be discharged from an AD plant and into the River Teifi in West Wales, killing every single fish along an eight-mile…
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Laos is looking to expand its power grid network and may use renewable energy to produce electricity, according to Xinhua News. The Laos government plans to install 54 more electricity transmission lines and build another 16 substations by 2020. Laos Minister of Energy and Mines Khammany Inthirath has revealed the plan recently, saying the government recognises the need to install more…
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China will invest 2.5 trillion yuan ($361 billion) into renewable power generation by 2020, as it moves away from coal to renewable energy.  The investment will create more than 13 million jobs in the sector, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said in a document that lays out its plan to develop the nation's energy sector during the five-year 2016 to 2020 period. The NEA said installed…
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A new 15-year combined heat and power (CHP) contract is set to provide low carbon electricity and heat to Churchill College in the University of Cambridge. The contract will continue the energy services started in 1993 and see one of the latest generation of Veolia CHP units installed to provide the campus with secure energy supplies.   The service will replace the previous CHP that had…
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Irish energy specialist Bord na Móna is to stop importing palm kernel shells from plantations in some of the world’s most biodiverse countries following concerns that it is helping to fuel deforestation. According to The Irish Times, since 2010, more than 150,000 tonnes of palm kernel shells (PKS) have been bought by the semi-state company to burn along with peat at…
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US researchers have maintained that miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the US using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research. "To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available —…
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North India-based city Jaipur’s waste-to-energy plans have hit a roadblock due to the lack of a power purchase agreement (PPA), according to media reports. The Times of India reported that officials said that, in November 2015, the JMC had given its consent letter to establish the plant. Following this, the government departments and awarded company had to sign a PPA with Vidyut…
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Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association’s (ADBA) chief executive Charlotte Morton has written an open letter to the editor of UK-based newspaper The Mail on Sunday in response to the article published on AD on 1 January 2017, claiming it was misleading. The article, written by journalist David Rose and published on 1 January, claimed that AD plants increasingly rely on special…
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