Renewable/Alternative Energy : News brief

World Bank funding for efficient and renewable energy rose 87 this year to nearly $2.7 billion, reflecting the importance of moving to a low-carbon economy, the bank's energy chief said on Thursday.

Investment in "green" energy projects is essential for poor countries hit hard by soaring oil prices, said Jamal Saghir, World Bank Director for Energy, Transport and Water.

Chipotle will seek LEED certification for the new restaurant, which would make it among the first LEED-certified restaurants in the country. The company is a participant in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Retail pilot program.

Last month Chipotle was named one of 2008’s green pioneers by SB20, for serving more locally sourced produce and 100% free range pork and chicken in all its 730 restaurants.

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, yesterday announced plans to invest $10.25m (£5.5m) in research into a new form of geothermal energy technology that advocates claim could provide more than 2,500 times the US annual energy use.

Green chemistry, a common-sense discipline that's less than twenty years old, has been emerging in recent years from the lab and into the marketplace, making inroads in conventional chemical companies and creating opportunities for upstarts. As I've noted in the past, this has been taking place at a slow, almost imperceptible pace, with

The 42nd U.S. President, Bill Clinton, delivered a top 10 laundry list of actions that the U.S. government should take to help solve the energy crisis during a speech to kick off the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.

Along with the list, which advocated various incentives to accelerate the proliferation of clean technologies, Clinton suggested some more controversial plans

Read more about Clinton at the Clean Energy Summit here. 

Retailers are typically obsessed with what to put under their roofs, not on them. Yet the nation’s biggest store chains are coming to see their immense, flat roofs as an untapped resource. In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale. One reason they are racing is to beat a Dec. 31 deadline to gain tax advantages for these projects.

There are already more than 1,300 hybrid taxis in the city, and each one saves its drivers about $6,500 a year, Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman Matthew Daus said in a joint statement with the mayor.

 Read More about Bloomberg's Green Initiatives here. 

An open letter to Opec president Chakib Khelil signed by biofuel trade bodies from Europe, the US, Canada and Brazil argues that his recent claim that "the intrusion of bioethanol in the market" is responsible for 40 per cent of the rise in world oil prices is both "self-serving and misleading".

Read more about OPEC's claims here