Renewable Energy Law News for Week of 10/10

Vermont Aims for 90% Renewable Energy by 2050The Vermont Department of Public Service released a draft Comprehensive Energy Plan, calling for 90% of the state's energy to come from renewables by 2050. It replaces a 2008 plan that called for 25% renewable energy by 2050. The new plan addresses Vermont's electricity, thermal energy, transportation, and land use. Vermont is the first state in the Northeast to implement a feed-in tariff to promote renewable energy development, and last year, its legislature voted to retire the aging Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in 2012. Read more here.Good for Wind: Administration Fast-tracks Transmission ProjectsIn a move that stands to enable more wind development sooner, this week Obama administration officials announced seven transmission priority projects that will be placed on a regulatory fast track, under the "Rapid Response Transmission Team" (RRTT) coordinated inter-agency approach to accelerate the permitting process for transmission projects.  The news marks another phase in a federal transmission siting and coordination effort stemming from a 2009 memorandum of understanding entered into by the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, Defense, and the Interior. Five of the projects are in the Western U.S.; two are in the East. Six of the seven are interstate projects. In total, the projects will have a capacity of nearly 5,000 MW.Read more here.SolarBridge Gets DOE ARPA-E GrantSolarBridge Technologies, an Austin, Texas-based manufacturer of PV microinverters, has secured a $1.75 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program.  ARPA-E, is a DOE investment platform that provides funding for companies that are developing groundbreaking green technologies but are not yet ready to attract significant private investment.SolarBridge says the government funds will help it develop a new electronic technique, dubbed Differential Power Processing (DPP), that seeks to enhance the output of solar panels. SolarBridge is working on the DPP initiative with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Read more here. Photo courtesy of:untitled (Scott Bedard) / CC BY 2.0