The need to engineer energy storage equipment that could work well with solar or wind power plants has prompted many private and public investments in battery and other storage technologies.
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It builds biomass power plants, huge wind turbines for offshore wind farms and, as of today, concentrated solar thermal power plants.
It is developing giant off-shore wind turbines, biomass power plants (including projects in Florida and Washington with Duke Energy), and, with its Ausra acquisition, solar thermal power plants.
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That's what it figures to get for its infrastructure division with aircraft engines, locomotives, power plants and wind turbines.
Its U.S. business, PPM Energy, operates cogeneration power plants and wind farms .
The idea is to speed up renewable energy projects by preventing mining claims from sidetracking solar power plants and wind farms.
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It also can throw a monkey in solar and wind developers efforts to obtain state approvals for their projects and scare off bankers and investors needed to finance what are often multibillion-dollar solar power plants and wind farms.
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Windmills are unpopular with some U.S. politicians and utility executives because they require ample subsidies to be viable, and the unpredictable wind means utilities must maintain additional power plants on standby.
With old coal power stations being closed down Britain needs new energy plants - and wind farms, gas and nuclear power stations are seen as the answers.
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Companies that stand to benefit from tougher curbs on emissions from coal-fired power plants, including utilities that have invested heavily in wind, solar power and nuclear, are pushing the White House not to weaken the rules.
They seem to believe we can replace those dirty coal plants with solar and wind power.
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Roughly 4.2 billion solar rooftops, 300 million wind turbines, 2, 500 nuclear power plants or 200 Three Gorges Dams, according to Menlo Park, Calif.
The production of modern wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear power plants are extremely energy-intensive enterprises, and are by and large powered by the burning of fossil fuels.
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The company has also announced plans to build two "clean coal" power plants last week just as it announced the completion of a wind farm that will provide power to 24, 000 homes.
The Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), a quango with the ability to force through important national projects over the objections of locals, is supposed to make it easier to build power lines, storage plants, wind farms and the like.
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It holds true with renewable power plants, such as solar and wind facilities.
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Already, the world's 700-odd waste-to-energy plants generate more power than all its wind turbines and solar panels put together.
In some part of the country such as Texas, wind energy is now competitive with natural gas-fired power plants, the report said.
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Neither solar nor wind power is competitive on its own with electricity from fossil fuel plants.
The wind power, meantime, must be backed up by natural gas plants that are running at all times.
Because the wind blows inconsistently, power companies would have to turn fossil-fuel plants on when windmills fall still.
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We have 191 million buildings in the EU. The mission now is to convert the entire building stock of Europe to partial green power plants that can collect solar energy on the roofs, wind energy off the sides of the building, geothermal energy from the ground below the building, biomass energy from the conversion of garbage in the building, etc.
The emissions implications of increased wind power penetration is to a large extent determined by the portfolio of other power plants.
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The mix includes a lot of wind and geothermal, but solar could start to overtake others because many solar power plants are under construction now.
Environmentalists fret that new nuclear plants will come at the expense of eco-friendly technologies such as wind and wave power.
China has a huge thirst for energy that it will slake from as many wells as it can, with planned big increases in wind power and in gas as well as the nuclear build-out and ever more coal-fired plants.
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