By Joe Vaillancourt
Capital News Service

The University of Michigan competes with a prestigious solar car team. Start-up solar projects in Lansing and at Michigan State University (highlighted in the video to the right) show the potential of solar power in the state.
Even signs along Michigan’s freeways are powered by the sun.
Despite such advances in efficiency, experts say solar energy and self-sufficient homes aren’t in Michigan’s near future—and not because of weather. Costs, among other concerns, remain too high for most consumers.

(MI) The Mudpuppy – A new Evergreen Solar facility in Midland is hiring, again.The company has posted openings for five jobs so far this month.

(MI) The Detroit News – Thousands of yellow rubber ducks raced down an Oakland County river to raise money for the Oakland Plus for Clean Water initiative.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – If confirmed as a case of H1N1, Ryan Settlemoir’s death would be the third in Michigan from the virus.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – City officials have applied for a $1.2-million federal grant to buy hybrid vehicles and cut energy costs.

(NY) New York Times – The Obama administration said Thursday that it would toughen standards for mountaintop-removal coal mining but would not end the practice as some environmental groups had hoped.

There are brief moments of gothic ghastliness in Jeff Alexander’s new book: Eel-like sea lampreys repeatedly strike and latch onto a teenage girl trying to swim across a choppy Lake Ontario at night. A 50-foot-wide band of dead fish lines a 40-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s shore. Loons poisoned with botulism can’t hold their heads out of the water, and drown.
But while those images might give readers the willies, the book’s larger tale of the federal government’s failure to keep invasive species out of the Great Lakes will make them …

(MI) The Detroit News – Genesee County’s proposal to draw 85 million gallons of water per day from Lake Huron is likely to face a legal challenge from at least one other Michigan county.

(NY) Newsday – The American eel has for millennia carried out a remarkable survival saga, swimming thousands of miles of ocean to reach Lake Ontario, where it matures the swims back to its ocean birthplace to spawn and die.

(MI) The Detroit News – State wildlife experts want to know why thousands of dead fish are floating on Lake St. Clair near St. Clair Shores. Rotting fish, including smallmouth bass, muskie, walleye, perch and bass, are littering boat wells and shorelines across several miles.