Meeting this standard with a combination of concentrated and distributed solar power will require local water resources but will present fewer environmental problems than other energy sources tend to create.

China’s overall solar power capacity will reach 10 gigawatts by 2015, said an official with China’s National Energy Administration.

A photovoltaic panel production line in Jiangsu province. China had solar power projects totaling 300 megawatts, at the end of 2010, after starting two pilot projects in the past two years.

Wind energy has transformed rural Sherman County, OR, according to a story in today’s New York Times by Lee van der Voo.

The land-based wind turbines witnesses also focused on “unworkable” rules recently proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that threaten hundreds of wind farm plants.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is backing a drive to increase solar energy capacity in Asia-Pacific by six-fold to 3,000 megawatts by 2013.