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Saving Energy — for an Hour

New York City’s nighttime skyline will look as if it’s had a few teeth knocked out this coming Saturday.

The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and several other structures and landmarks in Manhattan will turn off their night lights for an hour on March 28 to bring attention to climate change.

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Energy Department Issues First Renewable-Energy Loan Guarantee

The Energy Department has tentatively awarded its first alternative-energy loan guarantee, breaking a four-year logjam in the federal loan program.

The $535 million loan guarantee will go to Solyndra Inc., which said it would use the money to expand its production of photovoltaic systems at its facilities in Fremont, Calif. The company said the federal loan guarantee would cover roughly 75 percent of the project costs and would ultimately produce thousands of new construction, manufacturing and installation jobs.

Once the panels are installed and producing power, the company said, they will generate up to 15 gigawatts of electricity and save some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

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Toyota’s View on the Hybrid Sales Slump

The following is one in a series of reflections from Micheline Maynard, a business correspondent in Detroit, on her recent switch from a Lexus S.U.V. to a hybrid electric Toyota Prius. Share your thoughts on the topic here, or discuss the Prius directly with Ms. Maynard at our Prius Diary discussion board on Facebook.

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Kissing Edison’s Light Bulb Goodbye

The European Commission formally adopted new regulations on Wednesday that will effectively phase out incandescent light bulbs in Europe by 2012.

The switch to energy-efficient lamps for homes, offices, streets and factories, officials said, would generate energy savings equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Belgium – or the yearly output of 20 power stations of 500 megawatts.

For their part, consumers would save 11 billion euros — or $14 billion — each year that they otherwise would have spent on energy bills.

The European energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs said the goal was “replacing last century lighting products” with technologies that “will keep the same quality of lighting, while saving energy, CO2 and money.”

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Measuring Emissions From Trucks and Buses

What is the real carbon-dioxide emissions profile for trucks and buses in Europe?

Amid all the talk of shifting to a low-carbon economy, it is often surprising to learn how little is known about the polluting power of everyday technologies.

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Big-Bellied, Text-Messaging Trash Cans?

In the ongoing struggle against climate change, enter the texting trash can.

This month, Somerville, Mass., will install text-messaging technology in about 50 public trash cans located in high-pedestrian and far-flung areas. The idea is that the cans, made by BigBelly Solar, will transmit text messages to a central database, notifying haulers that they are full and allowing town managers to maximize collection efficiency.

Somerville has about 50 BigBelly cans – a handful purchased in early 2007 and the rest last April. Like the robotic trash collector popularized in Pixar’s film “Wall-E,” BigBelly units compact trash as it is deposited, and obtain the energy to do so from the sun — via a photovoltaic panel on top.

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The Shrinking Business Card

Earlier this month Nick Ellis of Bright Green Talent came by to tell me about the green job market, and the placement services that his company provides.

What really struck me was his business card. Not only was it (inevitably) colored green, but it was one-fourth smaller than a regular business card. This is a paper-saving feature, as Mr. Ellis pointed out when presenting it, and the card also states that it is printed on 100 percent recycled paper — using soy ink, of course.

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Home Green Home: Hunting Energy Leaks

On the occasion of my first home energy audit, I decided to see what I could dig up on the topic from The New York Times’s archives. How far back, I wondered, does this notion go — particularly the idea of using infrared cameras and other high-tech gizmos to really get the energy fingerprint of a home?

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Boeing and Vestas Form Research Partnership

A wind-turbine blade 44 meters long (144 ft.) and weighing 7 tons forms part of the the Vestas display this week at an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It is only a partnership. But it is an interesting sign of how industries may combine forces under a carbon-constrained economy.

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A New Valve for Controlling Flows of Electricity

A variable frequency transformer is already in use in Quebec, but a new installation scheduled for New Jersey will be used to control power flows in new ways.

Transformers are usually simple tools, used to step up or step down the voltage of electricity, but an unusual new device is expected to make its debut on the electric grid later this year: a Variable Frequency Transformer.

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Integrating Wind and Hydro Power in Quebec

Can wind and water be combined to reliably produce clean power?

When Hydro-Quebec begins construction next summer on the 1550 MW La Romaine hydroelectric dam, the $2.8 billion-a-year utility will be simultaneously developing smart grid control and load forecasting technologies aimed at integrating hydropower with Quebec’s fast growing inventory of wind farms.

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At Home With the Energy Detective

I used the Energy Detective, left, to monitor the energy-consumption profile of my various appliances.

Although home energy tracking devices like the single-outlet Kill A Watt or the whole-house Power2Save unit are gaining popularity in this energy-conscious age, I hadn’t tried one until my electric bill topped out at $150 in January. That prompted me to invest in an Energy Detective, a device that retails for $145 and promises to give homeowners a telling glimpse into their personal energy consumption habits — and the appliances that consume the most juice.

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Renewable Energy at the Kibbutz

Workers positioned panels at the construction site for a hybrid solar power station on Kibbutz Samar in southern Israel last week.

Spurred by government incentives, ample sunshine and investments from energy companies eager to turn a profit, a growing number of south-Israel kibbutzim — those communal-living enterprises that have traditionally emphasized ideals like collective labor, egalitarianism and natural living — are turning to state-of-the-art energy projects.

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Do C.F.L.’s Increase Greenhouse Gases?

A Canadian utility claimed that widespread use of the cooler-burning fluorescent bulbs (center) were causing chilly customers to turn up the heat to compensate.

For those wondering if the benefits of the increasingly ubiquitous compact fluorescent lightbulb (see our logo above) have been overstated, a report last night from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offers a little something to chew on. The report suggested that the energy savings associated with the bulbs — which use far less electricity than their incandescent predecessors — may be offset by higher heating bills, and more greenhouse emissions.

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The Meaning of New York’s Carbon Trading Move

David A. Paterson, governor of New York, is taking some of the bite out of a regional carbon emissions trading initiative.

Governor David A. Paterson of New York is thinking of giving the utility industry more free allowances to pollute under the Northeast carbon-trading system, as my colleague Danny Hakim reports today.

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Experiments in District Heating

Schematic of a community solar heating plan being deployed in Alberta.

Last month, North Carolina’s Vanir Energy and EnerWorks, of London, Ontario, completed what the two renewable companies describe as the world’s largest solar thermal heating and cooling installation – 640 collectors on the 1-million square-foot Fletcher Business Park in North Carolina.

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Companies Add Chief Sustainability Officers

Amid mounting job woes, at least one position seems to be gaining currency: chief sustainability officer.

This week, SAP, the multinational software giant, announced that it was appointing its first-ever chief sustainability officer as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions and save energy.

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Biden, Luminaries Promote Green Jobs

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., right, was joined by Labor Secretary-Designate Hilda Solis, second right, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, among others, at a meeting of the Obama administration’s Middle Class Task Force in Philadelphia on Friday.

At an event to promote green jobs for the middle class today in Philadelphia, Vice President Joe Biden hailed the arrival of many thousands of jobs in the new energy economy, which he described as “good, high-paying jobs, the vast majority of which are not exportable.”

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Mapping Green Businesses, if Not Jobs

The Environmental Defense Fund is busy plotting the locations of renewable energy and energy efficiency jobs in various states.

Laid off from an auto supplier or a semiconductor plant? In need of one of those myriad green jobs that the Obama administration is promising?

The Environmental Defense Fund has unveiled a new tool that just might help job-seekers in the heartland – an old-fashioned map, with digital technology. The map depicts a given state, and uses bubbles to show the geographic spread of companies that work in the renewable energy or energy efficiency fields. Hover your cursor over the bubble, and up pops the name, address and specialty of the company.

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Inching Toward a Smarter Grid

Making power transmission and distribution a more intelligent affair is gaining momentum.

The stimulus bill splits funding for the nation’s electric grid into two separate pots, with $11 billion for the so-called “smart grid” — an umbrella term referring to a more efficient, digitally managed power delivery system — and $10 billion for power transmission.

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