DOE Awards $21M in Grants to Cut Costs of Solar Thermal Desalination

The Energy Department sees massive potential to use the sun’s heat to purify seawater and industrial wastewater—but it needs new technologies to bring down the costs.

The Department of Energy sees big potential for solar thermal desalination technologies. But only if the costs can be brought down — way down.

House of Representatives passes bill to choke off Energy Department financing

Republicans in the House of Representatives quietly passed 13 provisions last week that would choke off Energy Department financing for existing clean energy and efficiency programs.

The House adopted the amendments on June 6 as part of its 2013 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. The proposed cuts reflect a broader trend. As the Tea Party reshapes the GOP, opposition to policies that reduce climate-changing gases and stoke the clean energy economy is soaring.

California bills streamline solar project permitting

California’s legislature has sent a trio of bills, S.B. 267, S.B. 16 and A.B. X1 13, to Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) office to streamline the permitting process for large-scale renewable energy projects. The bills were popular among both parties and provided certainty for project developers, and Brown is expected to sign them.

New report suggests legal and technological solutions to pharmaceutical pollutants in water supply

In recent decades, concern has grown over the presence of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) in water. This concern stems from the possibility that the presence of PPCPs in water supplies may pose a threat to both human and environmental health. Such threats may be both direct (e.g., exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds) and indirect (e.g., emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria). The water treatment and wastewater treatment community has been especially concerned over PPCPs because of PPCPs ubiquitous nature and their ability to persist or only partially degrade in water and during wastewater treatment. Studies done over the past several decades have indicated that wastewater contaminants including antibiotics, other prescription drugs, non-prescription drugs, steroids, reproductive hormones, and personal care products have been found in both surface water and ground water in the United States.

Hyrdofracking comes at a cost

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.