Buffett Ready to Double $15 Billion Solar, Wind Bet

Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

While utilities don’t offer the sort of outsize returns of businesses that Warren Buffett favored earlier in his career, he has said he likes the industry because it provides opportunities for reinvestment and further acquisitions.

Warren Buffett briefly lost track of how many billions of dollars his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) is spending to build wind and solar power in the U.S. That didn’t stop him from vowing to double the outlay.
Describing the company’s increasing investment in renewable energy at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in Las Vegas yesterday, Buffett had to rely on a deputy, Greg Abel, to remind him just how much they’d committed: $15 billion.
Without missing a beat, Buffett responded: “There’s another $15 billion ready to go, as far as I’m concerned.”
Such bold remarks are common for the Berkshire chairman and chief executive officer. He frequently talks about hunting for “elephant”-size acquisitions and making multibillion-dollar stock purchases

 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-10/buffett-ready-to-double-15-billion-solar-wind-bet.html

Green energy solutions Kenya

Why Green Jobs Are Booming in Bangladesh

Reuters

Bangladesh is known for its apparel manufacturing industry—and for the conditions faced by garment workers toiling in Dickensian factories for a dollar a day. But according to a report released Sunday, the South Asian nation has become a top hot spot for renewable energy jobs, creating a green workforce as large as Spain’s in 2013.
How? Solar energy.
Bangladeshi’s are installing small photovoltaic systems at a rate of 80,000 a month, says the report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In a country where only 47 percent of the population had access to electricity in 2009, according to the Asian Development Bank, solar is increasingly becoming a way to leapfrog the need to build a bigger power grid.

In the past 10 years, the number of solar systems in Bangladesh has jumped from 25,000 to 2.8 million, according to IRENA. That in turn has created some 114,000 jobs, from assembling solar panels to selling, installing and maintaining them. In fact, the number of solar-related jobs nearly doubled between 2011 and 2013. “The numbers are set to increase further,” wrote the report’s authors. (By comparison some 4 million people work in Bangladesh’s garment industry.)