… NY Green Bank (NYGB), New York State’s $1-billion clean-energy fund, and a young new efficiency company named Sealed signed a $5-million loan-financing agreement as a way to broaden the market for home energy-efficiency upgrades. In New York State, those upgrades face two key barriers … adoption. The first barrier is that a whole-home upgrade is a high out-of-pocket investment for a homeowner. Homeowners who make upgrades often have to pay cash outright or take out …
… Harish Hande and the company he founded, SELCO, provide solar electricity for lighting and power to India's poor. For the work of his company, Hande has received numerous recognitions; he is frequently cited as one of the top social entrepreneurs in India and an example for the entire developing world. The road to SELCO’s success, however, has not always been …
… oil company PEMEX had to find ways to implement this policy. Nevertheless, in spite of efforts by various government agencies as well as PEMEX, by mid-2014 no ethanol had been … makers looked at the country's energy supply, they expected that substituting bioethanol for some portion of gasoline fuel would meet a number of the country’s needs. First, it could help extend the country’s supply of crude oil. The country's demand for gasoline was growing, but the production of crude oil from the country's shallow-water …
… financial backing, buy and erect the turbines, and begin generating electricity by 2010. For Walmart de México, becoming the wind farm’s off-taker accomplished a number of important … electricity at below the rates charged by Mexico’s state-controlled utility, shaving costs for the famously thrifty retailer. In addition, the project allowed Walmart de México to get … Walmart de México consumed in Mexico in 2010. The wind farm was just one part of the efforts Walmart de México was undertaking in the sustainability area. The company had pledged …
… Like many countries, Australia has a large existing building stock that is responsible for a substantial percentage of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Given that it will take decades for these buildings to be replaced, the rigorous standards developed in recent years for new … gases that these buildings emit and reduce their operating costs. While these energy-efficiency upgrades are often cash-flow-positive with the right loans, they have failed to …
… most heavily traded edible oil in the world. Golden Agri Resources (GAR) has been in the forefront of this palm oil boom in Indonesia. Founded in 1996 by the influential Widjaja family (operators of the Sinar Mas business group), GAR became the holding company for the family’s agribusinesses, including its Indonesian subsidiary PT SMART. The company … concerned environmentalists. Palm oil plantations had been carved out of precious rainforest and peat land, resulting in the release of carbon into the atmosphere and the loss of …
… In 2014, the four largest palm oil trading companies signed an agreement to end deforestation, development of peat lands and exploitation of locals not only with their own operations, but also from all of their suppliers. For environmental NGOs, the Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge (as the agreement was named) represented a dramatic advance in their decades-long efforts to protect the Indonesian rainforest from further destruction. One year later the …
… Ash award in policy innovation, the "Nobel of policy," upon the Connecticut Green Bank for its role in "sparking the green bank movement." The Green Bank used financial … subordinated debt, or warehousing facilities, the Green Bank lowered the cost of capital for consumers and businesses to install energy efficiency upgrades and renewable technology. It supported the banking industry in offering …
… had to decide how it was going to respond and how much it was willing to invest in its efforts to grow in the U.S. In Europe, the supply-constrained market during 2007-10 had … with some of the continent’s leading developers of solar projects. Trina supplied modules for a number of large, signature projects, developing a strong track record. Now, the … Japanese module maker Sharp had bought Recurrent Energies and its pipeline of projects. Before that, the world’s largest module maker, First Solar, had bought a large developer. …
… In early 2014 Alcoa announced that Ford's F-150 pick-up trucks, the best-selling vehicles in the U.S., would use … planned another $150 million on facilities in Tennessee to meet the demand generated by the Ford contract. The aluminum industry's growing success in the automotive sector reflected … the response of auto manufacturers to the increasingly rigorous fuel economy standards for U.S. vehicles and consumer preferences for high mileage vehicles. To meet those …