Downtown Vancouver. Photo by Connormah, via Wikimedia Commons.
* The Vancouver city council voted unanimously Wednesday to support a shift toward using 100% renewable energy sources in a renewed push to meet its "greenest city" goals. Currently, 32% of Vancouver's energy needs are met by renewable energy including electric power, heating and cooling. [MetroNews Canada]
* SunEdison plans to buy about 1,000 vanadium flow batteries from Imergy Power Systems. They will store more than 100 MWh of energy at SunEdison's rural electrification and solar-powered minigrid projects in India. SunEdison intends to bring reliable energy to 20 million people globally by 2020. [Clean Technology Business Review]
* Renewable electricity in the UK surged 20% to 64.4 TWh in 2014 and claimed a record share of 19.2% of total generation. The latest Energy Statistics show offshore wind generation rose by 16.1% and onshore wind by 7.9% compared with 2013. Both increases were mainly due to increased capacity. [reNews]
* Texas has become a renewable energy leader, thanks in part to a renewable energy bill introduced by Senator Troy Fraser in 2005. Now Fraser asks if the work is already done and whether incentives should be frozen. The original goals were 5,000 MW by 2015 and 10,000 MW by 2025. But Texas hit that mark in 2010. [Fierce Energy]
* Oil companies continue to get burned by low oil prices, but the pain is bleeding over into the financial industry. Major banks are suffering huge losses from both directly backing some struggling oil companies, but also from buying high-yield debt that is now going sour and difficult for the banks to sell on the market. [CleanTechnica]
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