An offshore oil rig exploded Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico, injuring at least one worker, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

All 13 people on board the Vermilion Oil Rig 380 have been accounted for, and the one who was injured is being transported to a hospital, Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough said.

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At long last, Nissan begins taking actual orders today for the first next-generation fully electric car from a major automaker, the Leaf.

More than 18,000 people who plunked down $99 to stay on the reservations list will have first crack at turning their interest into an actual order for the all-electric, five-seat car. Orders will be taken online and Nissan is still taking reservations on Leaf's web site. Even though now you can actually pay for one, deliveries won't start until December.

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Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter, executives of GE, and its partners recently came together to celebrate the start of construction of the state's largest wind power project. The wind power project stretches across 8 miles from the Oregon Trail westward across the continent.

Project investors GE Energy Financial Services, Reunion Power, Exergy Development Group and Atlantic Power Corp. signed a turbine blade in Bliss ushering in a wave of new jobs and economic development that the project will bring to the area.

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WASHINGTON, DC, August 24, 2010 (ENS) - The United States is now on track to slash the cost of electric vehicle batteries, halve the cost of solar power, double renewable energy manufacturing, and produce inexpensive personal genome maps, according to a new report on the results of the Obama administration's economic stimulus released today by Vice President Joe Biden.

Introducing the report from the Congressional Budget Office on the employment and economic impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in Washington, Biden said today the $100 billion investment in innovation funded by the Act and the goals set by the administration have changed the American economy by inspiring new technologies and launching new industries.

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Matt Simmons, the maverick investment banker who championed the concept of peak oil, died of a heart attack in a hot tub in Maine. He was 67.

Simmons is best known for raising the alarm, in books, in lectures, television interviews and to anyone who would listen, that the world’s oil reserves had peaked.

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There is much promise in the evolving world of battery technologies for many of the devices that we use every day. Better battery tech means notebooks that can operate longer per charge, cell phones we can talk on for longer, and electric cars that can travel longer distances. With all of the aspects of technology that the battery touches, a breakthrough here can have very far reaching effects.

Yet-Ming Chiang, a researcher and founder of A123 Systems, has developed a new battery design that he claims could make electric vehicles much cheaper. Chiang has started a new company to commercialize the battery technology called 24M. The researcher says that the new battery he has designed could cut costs of the battery packs for electric vehicles, such as the Chevrolet Volt, by as much as 85%.

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A Kleiner Perkins-backed startup is supplying the gear for the largest solar farm in the world that will use concentrating photovoltaics — a hybrid tech that uses solar cells and solar thermal tech. Utility Public Service Co., part of Xcel Energy, has agreed to buy power from a 30-megawatt (AC) project being developed by Cogentrix Energy and using CPV gear from Amonix.

When it comes to the basket of solar energy technologies to pick from, utilities have largely favored solar panels and large concentrating solar thermal systems that use mirrors and lenses to concentrate the sun’s rays and capture the heat. But concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) — a hybrid of the two? Not so much.

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A majority of the wind farms in the United States use 2.5 megawatt wind turbines, and recent technology has introduced even larger turbines at 5 megawatts. Europe, on the other hand, is racing ahead of the game with the largest wind turbine yet - 10 megawatts. And it may be changing the way wind turbines are designed altogether.

Europe has seen a lot of advantages to building larger wind turbines, such as avoiding environmental issues by using larger turbines in deeper waters. There is less of a risk of encountering environmental problems the further offshore the turbines are located. Europe seems to build larger turbines as the water grows deeper, as well.

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On the steps of the San Diego County Administration Center, ECOtality, Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!ecty/quotes/nls/ecty (ECTY 4.07, -0.15, -3.56%) , a leader in clean electric transportation and storage technologies, will reveal today the first potential locations of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the San Diego region. The announcement is a significant milestone in the company's work with the U.S. Department of Energy and The EV Project, the world's largest rollout of electric vehicle infrastructure.

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