The U.S. lags behind other countries in the race for clean technology even though it has the greatest "innovation machine" in the world, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Stanford University audience Monday.

..."Right now we're in a state of paralysis. Many businesses say, 'No, no, we can't do this; this country was founded on cheap energy and that's what I want.'

"But that's just holding off the inevitable. If we hold off the inevitable for another five years or 10 years, we'll lose because other countries are ahead. We will play catch-up and the United States is at risk. Energy touches everything in the United States. It is very important."

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In 2009, eight new wind power plants came into operations, bringing the total capacity to 2,056 MW. Another 1,000 MW of wind energy offshore will be achieved in 2010.
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A report published earlier this month by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm tracking emerging technologies in global energy markets, predicts that the $10 billion offshore wind energy market will surge to $30 billion over the next decade.
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Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.

The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.  The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels.
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Offshore wind may provide as much as 17 percent of European Union electricity demand by 2030, surging from almost nothing now as the bloc promotes renewable energy, an industry group said.
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Infinite power from the wind is an American dream almost as old as the country itself, an idea that has entranced generations of scientists, artists and visionaries. In the early 19th century, when most labor was still done by human hands, an immigrant inventor named John Adolphus Etzler, pondering the windmills of his native Europe, sat down to scribble out some calculations. When he finished, he declared that wind power could be harnessed to liberate mankind from toil, providing as much energy as 40 trillion workers, or about 40,000 times earth’s population at that time. Imagine the glorious — and languorous — future that awaited!
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The UK's seas could provide enough extra wind energy to power the equivalent of 19m homes, according to an assessment by the government.

The government's strategic environmental assessment (Sea) confirmed projections that an extra 25GW of electricity generation capacity could be accommodated in UK waters.  This would be in addition to the 8GW of wind power already built or planned offshore, bringing the potential total electricity capacity of offshore wind to 33GW – enough to power every household in the UK.
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Fossil-fueled electricity generation sources such as coal and oil pose higher risks to wildlife than renewable electricity generation sources such as hydro and wind, a report prepared for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority concludes.

"Based on the comparative amounts of SO2, NOx, CO2 and mercury emissions generated from coal, oil, natural gas and hydro and the associated effects of acidic deposition, climate change and mercury bioaccumulation, coal as an electricity generation source is by far the largest contributor to risks to wildlife found in the NY/NE region," the report said.
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Spanish weekly electricity prices fell to a 15-month low after a storm powered wind turbines. That allowed utilities to reduce production from more expensive generators that burn coal or natural gas.
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The European Commission has placed offshore wind power at the heart of its plans for the next wave of EU energy legislation.

...It stressed that offshore wind can make a "significant" contribution to all three key objectives of the new energy policy - reducing climate change emissions, improving energy security and industry competitiveness.  The Commission said: "Today, the potential for offshore wind energy is largely untapped: even excluding potential deepwater deployments based on floating foundations, the potential exploitable by 2020 is likely to be some 30-40 times the current installed capacity."
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