recession

energy efficiency fund

Despite – or perhaps because of - the acute economic recession in Ireland, the Irish government has earmarked USD 45 million in seed capital for a new energy efficiency fund to help reduce the cash-strapped nation’s energy consumption by 20%.[read more]

There is ample evidence that spikes in oil prices leads to recession, at least in the US, which is an oil-importing nation. James Hamilton has shown that 10 out of the last 11 US recessions were associated with oil price spikes. How does this happen? An oil product, such as jet fuel, is in some ways analogous to a specialized employee, with skills different from what human employees have.[read more]

How the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer Vestas is laying off 10% of it's global workforce, halting production at one of its 26 plants. What does this mean for the company, and, more significantly, for the global wind industry in 2012?[read more]

 Robert Solow, Nobel laureate and father of neoclassical economic growth theory, says that policymakers’ current economic solutions are nothing more than “drivel” and that spurring innovation – especially energy innovation – must be a central goal of public policy moving forward.   As ITIF and the Breakthrough Institute...[read more]

US petroleum product exports have been in the news, along with the welcome discovery that we are apparently on track to become a net exporter of these fuels this year, for the first time since the 1940s. This is a far cry from energy independence, as various oil skeptics have been quick to point out, but it's still a noteworthy...[read more]

A year from today Americans will know who will serve as President from 2013 to 2017. Even though $4 gasoline was still fresh in the minds of voters, energy played only a minor role in the outcome of the 2008 election, overshadowed by two wars and a crippling financial crisis. Will that be the case again in 2012, or will energy loom larger, propelled by its close connection with the economy? Several Republican candidates have already raised energy as a campaign issue, and the administration has repeatedly emphasized the linkages between energy, jobs and taxes.[read more]

With all the bad economic news and political turbulence in the US, it's been easy to lose track of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, which appears to be spreading from smaller, peripheral countries like Greece to affect the banking systems of core European Union members like Italy and France. To read Paul Krugman's column in last Sunday's New York Times, Europe could be on the verge of another financial crisis on the scale of the one triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Aside from the global economic consequences of such an event, it would send ripples throughout the energy sector, affecting both conventional and renewable energy markets and participants. While such an outcome is far from certain, it's a worrying scenario to contemplate.[read more]

I had a completely different topic in mind for today's posting, but I'll have to come back to the energy implications of a potential European financial crisis later. Since President Obama's jobs speech to Congress last week I have been awaiting the text of the actual proposed bill, rather than the summaries I'd been seeing. It finally...[read more]

We are less than two days out from President Barack Obama’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress and to the nation to outline proposals to help put Americans back to work. This speech could be a strident call for all-out measures to reinvigorate American employment, a more limited set of programs constructed and conceived within a...[read more]

There are skeptics of energy efficiency who claim that, paradoxically, all the energy and money we have been saving due to energy efficiency, across all sectors of the economy, has actually caused us to increase our energy consumption.  This “economy-wide rebound” theory is a startling, but ultimately unsupportable, theory that is...[read more]

In April, 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi created a congressional committee to address three of the most pressing issues of the day: climate change, economic prosperity (in the form of jobs), and national security. Today, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, issued a final report. After three-and-...[read more]

At Grist, Sean Casten muses on the macroeconomic implications of trends in electricity consumption. His musings focus on the established correlation between electricity consumption and economic activity, an association that he fleshed out in an earlier post. In these two posts he looks at trends in residential, commercial, and industrial...[read more]

New information released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that over the last two years, coal-fired electricity suffered where renewable energy shined. From 2008 to 2009, energy consumption in general was down 4%, due almost totally to the recession, or as placating pundits like to call it, the economic downturn...[read more]

As oil prices continue their upward trend, I'm noticing more articles and getting more comments from readers questioning whether $80-plus oil could squelch the nascent economic recovery--or for those who believe the recession isn't over, deepen it again. It's not an unreasonable question, particularly when we compare current retail fuel...[read more]

So what do we learned from 2009? Recession drove a little bit of a decline on venture capital investments in the clean technologies sector compared to 2008 but the good news is that 2009 seem to be a record year for federal grants and funds on renewable energy, clean technology and green chemistry. There was also proliferation of new...[read more]