Today, ILSR issued a report on Walmart’s rapidly expanding climate pollution and joined with leading environmental organizations in calling for change. The new report, Walmart’s Assault on the Climate: The Truth Behind One of the Biggest Climate Polluters and Slickest Greenwashers in America, finds: Nearly a decade after launching its sustainability campaign, Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions … Read More
I gave a presentation at the 5th Annual Conference of the Upper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability on Nov. 8, 2013, talking about the challenges to sustainability and the opportunity presented by a transformation to distributed renewable energy in the utility sector. My remarks follow. Scroll to the bottom to flip through the slide presentation. ************ … Read More
On November 6, 2013, Debra Lynn Dadd’s Toxic Free Talk Radio Show had ILSR’s Brenda Platt as a guest representing the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative and talking about bioplastics. Brenda is Director of the Sustainable Plastics Initiative, Co-Chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative (www.sustainablebiomaterials.org), and co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Washington, DC. She … Read More
What happens when a monopoly utility sees a threat to their business model? A lot of two-faced talking to regulators about the best carbon-free energy sources. Read here for more background. Like what you see? Get a weekly email on Democratic Energy, or follow us on Twitter:
On November 5th, citizens of Longmont will vote on a referendum determining whether to expedite building a Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network by issuing revenue bonds, a process that would speed up the build by several decades. The network is being built by Longmont Power and Communications, a city-owned utility north of Denver, Colorado. The … Read More
Two weeks ago, I listened – incredulously – to Minnesota’s largest utility, Xcel Energy, suggest that solar energy offers its ratepayers no value as an environmental hedge against carbon emissions or as a price hedge against natural gas fuel price fluctuations. But just three days later, Xcel was singing a different tune [docket pdf] to the … Read More
As renewable energy grows, the grid needs to grow more flexible to accommodate variations in the wind and sun. This video explains the limitations of “baseload” nuclear and coal power plants to work alongside large amounts of clean power.… Read More
It was an unseasonably sunny day for part two of Minnesota’s value of solar stakeholder process: participation day. The leadoff was the Department of Commerce’s proposed approach to a value of solar methodology. Shown below, it set some broad principles the Department intends to use in the value of solar formula it develops: Accuracy … Read More
This report details eight practical energy policies cities can and have used to their economic advantage… Read More
