PV Magazine: Tory Victory Muddles UK Solar Waters

Despite overseeing fastest growth in the U.K.'s PV industry, a majority Conservative government has been quiet on the issue of solar’s future, say experts.

Having surprisingly secured a majority government in yesterday’s U.K. general election, the Conservative Party -- shorn of the left-leaning influence of previous coalition partners the Liberal Democrats -- could be set to spring a few other surprises on the country's solar landscape.

Financial Review: Tesla Powerwall Storage Battery Books $800M in First-Week Orders

Tesla is already building a 5-million-square-foot battery factory. It's not big enough.

That was the message from Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk this week while discussing, for the first time, the early response to his new product line of storage batteries designed for use in homes and businesses. The numbers are impressive. In the first few days of reservations since the battery announcement late on April 30, Tesla booked orders worth roughly $800 million in potential revenue, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg Business.

Inside Climate News: Obama's Proposed Rule Could Mean Mining Public-Land Coal for Free

Recently proposed federal rules on mining royalties, intended to close loopholes that subsidize exports of coal mined from public lands, may instead end up giving away the coal to the industry for free, according to an environmentalist think tank.

Cut-rate royalties have persistently shortchanged the public, according to critics, when vast expanses of public land are leased by the government to coal mining companies.  But this newly disclosed flaw in the Obama administration’s plan to fix the problem means that its solution might backfire, eliminating royalties completely in some circumstances.

Guardian: Australia's Renewable Energy Target Deal Hits Last-Minute Snag Over Wood Burning

A deal to end the lengthy standoff over Australia’s renewable energy target has hit a dramatic late hitch after Labor accused the Coalition of trying to include the burning of wood waste as a renewable energy source.

The federal government and the opposition have held on-off talks for several months over a deal to cut the renewable energy target (RET), which mandates that 41,000 gigawatt-hours of Australia’s energy must come from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2020.

Grist: Why the Koch Brothers' War Against Clean Energy Is Still Failing

For the past four years, a set of right-wing advocacy groups, largely funded by the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry, has been waging jihad on bipartisan government policies that support renewable energy.

Most of their efforts to stymie clean energy have failed. Even the handful of “victories” that they claim are actually failures in disguise.

Now, with some RPS laws having been in place for more than a decade, the results are in: Renewable energy is growing, local jobs and industries are being created, and it has been difficult to detect any rate increases as a result. In fact, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, compliance costs for RPS laws were an average of 1 percent of retail electricity rates across the 24 states they studied.