Washington Post: The Senate Just Passed an Overwhelmingly Bipartisan Energy Bill
It doesn’t happen every day, but it did happen Wednesday.
The U.S. Senate acted in a bipartisan fashion to pass a sweeping energy bill, touching on everything from cybersecurity for power plants to the future of the grid. The bill resulted from collaboration between Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell.
It has been widely praised by many industry groups, and received somewhat more mixed reviews from the environmental community. Energy efficiency advocates applauded its measures for buildings and weatherization programs, even as some greens have expressed concerns about the legislation’s provisions that would define the burning of biomass as carbon-neutral.
Fortune: New Buildings in San Francisco Will Require Solar, Says New Rule
The rule will make the city by the bay one of the first big cities in the U.S. to do so.
San Francisco will soon become one of the first big cities in the U.S. to mandate solar power for new buildings, thanks to new legislation that is set to go into effect in January.
The legislation, introduced by Supervisor Scott Wiener, just got approval from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. The mandate calls for all new buildings up to 10 stories tall, both residential and commercial, to use either solar panels for electricity or a solar system to heat water.
The Verge: The Company Funding Faraday Future Just Unveiled Its Own Electric Car
LeEco -- the Chinese holding company known as LeTV until just a few months ago -- just introduced its first electric car ahead of the Beijing auto show. Called LeSEE, the concept sedan is designed to be fully autonomous with a foldaway steering wheel. LeEco has sometimes been billed as "the Netflix of China," and has said that it intends to make in-car entertainment (which is currently a big topic in the self-driving world) a key part of its foray into transportation.
Where the plot thickens is that LeEco is also bankrolling Faraday Future, the California-based EV startup that has poached hundreds of auto industry staff in recent years and is currently building a $1 billion factory in Nevada.
The Daily Beast: What Do These Oil Sheikhs Have to Hide?
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will meet with the kings and emirs of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Saudi Arabia. And of the many things they may talk about (Iran, Syria, Yemen, al Qaeda, and ISIS, not to mention oil prices and the efforts by U.S. lawyers and politicians to blame the 9/11 attacks on the Riyadh royals), it’s doubtful they will do much talking about the Panama Papers. But they certainly should.
Platts: German Nuclear Reactor Hits World Record
Germany's 1.4 GW Grohnde reactor has now generated over 350 TWh of electricity during its 32 years in operation, more than any other single nuclear power generation block around the world, but in the future it will play an increasing role in providing grid stability rather than providing only baseload power, plant operator E.ON Kernkraft said in a statement.
"While the plant was used exclusively as baseload [around-the-clock operation] in the past, it is now used up to 600 hours each month to regulate load," E.ON said, adding that it has increased fourfold the capability of the reactor to ramp up or down to now 40 MW per minute.