News

THERE

BHUBANESWAR: With more and more investors queuing up for generation of power from non-conventional and renewable energy sources, Orissa, for the first time, is looking to supplement green energy by hooking to the grid.

Ford Motor Co is selling a closed plant near Detroit to two companies that plan a $725 million investment to develop a renewable energy park that could create up to 4,000 jobs, the carmaker said on Thursday.

Terms of the sale to Xtreme Power and Clairvoyant Energy were not disclosed. The transfer of the plant to the companies is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2010.

A top Obama Administration official said the U.S. oil and gas industry will survive a proposed repeal of billions of dollars tax preferences and there will be an insignificant impact on worldwide prices.

Wind power could meet China's electricity demands through 2030 and cut carbon dioxide emissions in China by 30 percent, U.S. and Chinese researchers said on Thursday.

China already is the world's chief emitter of carbon dioxide, a leading so-called greenhouse gas implicated by scientists in global climate change.

The world must devise a climate change treaty that will allow all countries to contribute to cutting emissions and not drive companies and jobs to other nations, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Thursday.

Dutch utility Essent expects to see one million electric vehicles on the roads in the Netherlands by 2020, its head of new energy said on Thursday.

Alexandra van Huffelen said Essent was working with other Dutch companies to stimulate the industry, lobbying the government to speed up the introduction of electric cars and launching demonstration projects around the country.

Britain's first clean coal plant will miss a government deadline and its first new nuclear plant will not come on line before 2020, reflecting global climate policy uncertainty, a utility chief said on Thursday.

Helene Pelosse

It is the only source of energy which could meet the needs of 10 billion human beings in 2050.

South Korea's Environment Minister Maanee Lee said on Thursday a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen may not reach an agreement, although Asia's fourth-largest economy will play a "bridging" role between developed and developing nations.