Year in Review 2010: The Year in Clean Energy

It was a record year for solar power, and the electric car began its comeback but, thanks to our increasingly desperate need for fossil fuels, 2010 also saw the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. We're getting closer to workable clean

With the economy hemorrhaging jobs, President Obama kicked off 2010 with the January announcement of $2.3 billion dollars in tax credits for companies building clean energy technology—everything ranging from turbine blades to batteries to solar

It's not all just solar panels. Off the coast of Reedsport, Oregon, a New Jersey-based company called Ocean Power Technologies began building a wave-power farm, using giant plungers that rise and fall with the waves. It isn't operational yet,

After a decade-long fight that pitted the Kennedy clan against clean energy developers, the Cape Wind project, an offshore wind farm planned for Nantucket Sound, finally got federal approval on May 17. It will likely be America's first offshore wi

Thanks to a feature on 60 Minutes, the "Bloom Box," a mysterious clean energy system embraced, on a small scale, by Google and eBay, makes a big splash in the media. It turns out to be a fuel cell system. How exactly it works&m

In July, with the opening of the La Florida plant in the state of Navarra, Spain overtakes the United States as the largest producer of solar energy. La Florida, which uses parabolic troughs (like the ones above) is the largest solar facility in the w

On April 20, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caused a fire and an excruciating, interminable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn't until September 19 that the well was declared "effectively dead." The event prompt

In October, Google announces an investment in an offshore "transmission backbone" for wind energy along the Atlantic coast. Wind farms could plug into this Atlantic Wind Connection to easily deliver clean power to customers on shore.