Treehugger: Tesla's Gigafactory Will Produce As Much Renewable Energy As It Uses

A lot has been written about how big the Gigafactory will be: It's going to be one of the largest building on Earth (how it ranks will depend on how much the original plan is expanded), and it will produce more batteries when it is fully operational than the whole world was producing in 2013.

But relatively little has been written about another very cool aspect of the project: It will be a "net-zero" energy consumer and have carbon-neutral operations.

Tesla's Chief Technical Officer, JB Straubel, gave some details on how that will work at a recent talk at the University of Nevada.

Utility Dive: How Utilities and Regulators Are Dealing With the Budding Marijuana Industry

Marijuana growing is becoming so mainstream -- and is consuming so much energy -- that electric utilities and their regulators from coast to coast are sitting up and taking notice.

Those trends and others throughout the U.S. have reached the ears of the nation’s utility regulators. At their annual conference in Austin, regulators, utilities and efficiency experts discussed how the sector should respond to the explosive growth of what many are calling the most energy-intensive crop in the country.

“When I first heard about this panel, the first thought that popped into my head was, ‘Why do I care?’” said Commissioner Willie Phillips of the District of Columbia. “Why do we care about marijuana more than any other plant, any other customer?”

“Are they different?” he asked. “I think they are.”

Wall Street Journal: What Will the U.S. Energy Industry Look Like Over the Next Five Years?

Low fuel prices and new climate policies are rapidly transforming the American energy sector, while escalating wars in the Middle East and a nuclear deal with Iran are clouding the global oil picture.

To get a sense of what the energy future may hold, The Wall Street Journal reached out to three experts in energy and geopolitics: Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis; Sarah Emerson, principal at ESAI Energy and president of Energy Security Analysis Inc.; and Meghan O’Sullivan, the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs and director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Here are edited excerpts.

Guardian: Coal Is Not the Solution to Energy Poverty, Say Agencies

Coal power plants are not the solution to help billions of people without electricity or clean cooking facilities, aid agencies have warned.

Analysis by Cafod, Christian Aid and think tank the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) suggests that continuing with current energy policies that focus heavily on coal risks leaving a billion people without access to electricity and 3 billion without access to clean cooking facilities by 2030.

The analysis comes as a new report suggests consumption of coal for power is likely to have peaked in 2013 and is set to decline by between 2% and 4% in 2015.

Forbes: Canadian Battery Startup Is Succeeding Where U.S. Startups Have Mostly Failed

Corvus Energy, a lithium-ion battery company based in British Columbia, Canada, took the third spot in Deloitte’s most recent ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, communications, life sciences and energy technology companies in North America.

The Technology Fast 500 rankings are based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth for the three-year period beginning in 2011 and ending in 2014.

Over the past three years, the six-year-old startup company’s revenue increased by nearly 17,000%. Corvus Energy sells lithium-ion-based energy storage systems to customers in the marine, oil and gas and utility sector.