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Articles by Jesse Jenkins

Jesse Jenkins is the director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute. He is also the founder and chief editor of WattHead: Energy News and Commentary and writes frequently at several other sites.

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  • Without affordable clean alternatives, South Africa turns to coal

    South Africa’s finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives and simultaneous concerns about the environmental […]

  • Retooling green jobs for the next generation

    When you think “green jobs,” do you conjure images of green hard hats, caulk guns, and tool belts? Well it might be time to start thinking about “green” lab beakers, “green” drafting tables and “green” brief cases as well, because the careers needed to secure competitive clean energy industries will also run the gamut from […]

  • The economics of the Bloom Box

    Bloom Energy at the eBay headquaters. Photo courtesy BloomEnergy via Flickr Cross-posted from WattHead. With all the hype today around the release of the “breakthrough” Bloom Energy fuel cell (which has become known as the “Bloom box” and is referred to by Bloom as an “Energy Server“), it’s good to find a couple of posts […]

  • National Institutes of Energy needed to fill energy research and development gap

    Friday factoids time: The U.S. biomedical and pharmaceutical industry invests between 10-20 percent of revenues in research and development (R&D) and new product development, spending $58.8 billion on R&D in 2007. The U.S. government adds an additional $30 billion per year investment in biomedical R&D through the National Institutes of Health. In contrast, the U.S. […]