Now that declining budgets have reduced the outlook for federal largesse, what big ideas might help to continue growth among solar, wind and other clean energy industries? With the help of his sources in the “the renewables and efficiency space,” Climate Progress’ Stephen Lacey came up with five priorities for “business-oriented” policies that could keep…
States across the country are gradually forcing or cajoling their electric companies into buying renewable energy, but the trend has fallen flat in the Southeast. The map is striking. Of the 11 states that haven’t set even voluntary targets on how much alternative energy utilities must buy, eight of them are Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas,…
Southern Co., the largest U.S. power company, would need to spend $13 billion to $18 billion through 2020 upgrading its coal-fired plants if U.S. EPA goes ahead with new and proposed rules for the power sector, the utility said yesterday. [Thursday] was the deadline to comment on a high-profile proposal from the Obama administration, known…
At this morning’s Sustainable Atlanta Roundtable, Kevin Caravati gave us a closer look at the Redfields-to-Greenfields project, which I wrote about earlier this week. I still just get dizzy from the numbers, starting with the ambitious “what if” question posed in a report about Atlanta (one of 11 metro areas that have been studied by…
Longtime environmental leader John Sibley III is joining Southface Energy Institute as a senior policy fellow, I learned today at the Sustainable Atlanta Roundtable. An Atlanta native and Yale-educated lawyer, Sibley has a long track record of playing at the highest levels in Georgia environmental politics and policy. He’s a former president of the Georgia…
Atlanta has foreclosed property and shuttered banks galore, as well as one of the largest park deficits of any metro area in the country. Ambitious as it sounds, a team at the Georgia Tech Research Institute is working on a solution for all those problems. Kevin Caravati, a senior research scientist at GTRI in Atlanta,…
In advance of Thursday’s key meeting to develop a list of projects to be funded by a proposed regional transportation sales tax, here are two trends worth noticing: • Roads are faring much better than transit on the official short lists of the powers that be. • Transit projects on those short lists are lopsided…
Early indications show that the renewable energy industry stands to lose some serious ground in the debt ceiling deal that has gripped Washington for the better part of a month. The first warning sirens sounded as July came to an end and House Republicans unveiled their wish list for environmental cuts. But as July turned…
Contracts for future non-residential construction in the metropolitan statistical area of Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta more than doubled when compared to the same month in 2010, according to the Research and Analytics unit of McGraw-Hill Construction. Commercial construction contracts tracked by McGraw-Hill’s Research and Analytics unit totaled more than $513.5 million in June 2011, up from just…
Digital media designer Eric Benz did me one better after the Downtown Connector Visioning Project town hall that we both attended Tuesday. I wrote the next morning about my favorite idea — to cover parts of the highway with plazas that would connect Midtown with downtown and West Midtown. Benz apparently didn’t sleep; he managed…
