May 3rd, 2012

A solar panel topped car port in Charles Town has become largest solar array in West Virginia

The 407-kilowatt system made by Oregon-based Solar World will provide about half the power for the 100,000 square-foot financial center of American Public University System (APUS), an online education provider that serves the military and public service communities

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October 18th, 2010

GLWN, also known as the Great Lakes Wind Network, has teamed up with the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation to help bring more small and medium manufacturers into the developing U.S. wind energy business.

The partnership will help these smaller firms build capacity so they can supply parts for North American wind turbines, and in turn, strengthen growing U.S. wind markets.

Part of the money for this joint project will come from the National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s (NIST) Clean Energy Manufacturing Center, which is trying to help U.S. manufacturers find a place on the production chain for wind power.

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October 1st, 2010

The Environmental Protection Agency is threatening to hit five mid-Atlantic states with new rules that could raise sewer bills and limit construction in a large-scale crackdown on pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.

The move represents the most aggressive action in the 27-year history of the Chesapeake cleanup. When states previously failed to meet deadlines in 2000 and 2010, the agency did nothing. The new deadline is 2025, but the EPA served notice that it will not tolerates states lagging behind in improvements.

Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York are in the EPA crosshairs. Those states combine to account for more than 70 percent of the pollution that causes “dead zones” in the bay. The agency informed those states that their cleanup plans “serious deficiencies” and threatened to force them to make up the difference with costly new measures.

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February 18th, 2010

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Congressmen Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) are asking for more information about the chemicals used to extract natural gas wells.

Urban gas well outside a mall in North Texas

Today, the two lawmakers sent letters to eight oil and natural gas companies requesting details of the ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, a method of accessing natural gas deposits by blasting or fracturing the rock with a high pressure injection of water treated with chemicals.

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January 12th, 2010

Green Right Now Reports

A coalition of groups that includes the Sierra Club, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, has accused coal mining giant Massey Energy of more than 12,000 violations of the Clean Water Act and mining laws related to its mining operations in West Virginia.

The groups have served the company legal notice that they intend to file a citizens lawsuit against Massey if the company does not clean up the violations in 60 days.

Massey continues to illegally dump pollution into Appalachian waterways, despite a $20 million federal fine imposed for separate, previous environmental violations, the groups reported in a news release on Monday.

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April 6th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports

A softening economy and a milder-than-usual winter contributed to a decline in carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants in 2008, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project.

EIP officials noted that the decrease is a departure from the recent trends, with power plant carbon dioxide emissions having risen 0.9 percent since 2003, and 4.5 percent since 1998, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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March 12th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Seeking to show that proposed new U.S. coal plants would exact a high environmental toll even beyond their carbon air pollution, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a list today of the states that would bear the greatest burden from coal waste.

Texas, with eight proposed plants, topped the NRDC’s “Filthy 15″ list. It was followed by South Dakota, Florida, Nevada and Montana, Illinois, South Carolina, Ohio, Wyoming, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri , Wisconsin, Georgia and West Virginia.

Those states have 54 proposed coal plants awaiting permitting. Across the nation, there are 80 proposed plants that would dump an estimated 18 million tons of dangerous coal combustion waste annually into various dump sites, largely unmonitored by the federal government.

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March 12th, 2009

Here is the Natural Resources Defense Council’s list of the 15 states that would be the biggest polluters — the “Filthy 15” — based on their total of 54 planned coal plants that create nearly 14 million tons of dangerous waste (state; number of proposed plants; estimated coal ash waste in tons):

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December 17th, 2008

By Harriet Blake

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition just as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as a potential energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

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