Clean Energy

  WASHINGTON - President Obama, having watched his Republican adversaries pound him for weeks, got his turn Tuesday, using his State of the Union speech to land the first major counterpunch of the still-forming 2012 election. It came before a prime-time audience of millions that the GOP candidates can only envy, even if their fiery debates are turning heads. Obama didn't mention Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich in his third State of the Union address. But the GOP contenders were never far from mind.

AS REPORTED by the New York Daily News and other outlets tuned to NBC yesterday morning, the incredible (dare we say, ridiculous) Duggar parents, Michelle and Jim Bob , are expecting their 20th child this spring, the couple revealed on "Today. " "We are so excited," said Michelle, who is roughly a third of the way into this pregnancy, or roughly five months off from the next one. Michelle, 45, clearly has a biological clock that keeps on ticking like a Timex. No word if it also takes a licking.

Looking back, Swarthmore's leaders are a tad foggy on how the borough came to far outpace other communities in the use of alternative energy. Maybe it stemmed from the borough's long history of environmental activism. Or the nature of a town founded by Quakers that is host to a celebrated liberal-arts college. In any event, Swarthmore has achieved a level of green that most towns would envy. In the last year, more than a quarter of the energy needed to power its homes, buildings, and schools - 27.9 percent - came from renewable sources.

A low-wattage LED-light conversion project at Ursinus College in Collegeville is among 13 clean energy projects that received $3.7 million in grants Friday from the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority. Ursinus will receive $120,645 to add to its $41,514 investment to retrofit 214 parking lot and walkway lights with LED lights, reducing annual electricity costs by about $20,000. The Allentown Commercial and Industrial Development Authority also received a $500,000 grant to go toward a $31 million biogas project at Allentown's wastewater treatment plant.

Kevin Brown is cofounder of Cleantech Alliance Mid-Atlantic (cleantechma.org) Philadelphia identifies with underdogs: Rocky, the Eagles, and now energy. When business people or policymakers think of Philly, they naturally jump to the Big Five: pharmaceuticals, higher education, legal, finance, and technology. Clean tech, or renewable energy, rarely makes the list. But that's about to change. We have the potential to be a full-fledged front-runner in one of the hottest growth industries.

WASHINGTON - Rep. Jon Runyan, freshman Republican from South Jersey, slipped into the crowded, phone-booth-size reception area of his Longworth Building office on a recent morning, looming over aide Kara Webster, who was eating forkfuls of steamed vegetables between phone calls. "What's going on?" he said, then stopped and wrinkled his nose. "What's that you're eating? It smells like sauerkraut or cabbage or something. " The needling by Runyan, 37, was reminiscent of the teasing in a locker room, though much tamer.

WASHINGTON - The CEO of the nation's biggest nuclear power producer says Congress should get out of the way as the nation moves toward natural gas and other forms of clean energy. John Rowe, CEO of Chicago-based Exelon, which is the parent of Philadelphia's Peco Energy Co., said that in trying to boost "clean" energy - wind, solar, nuclear and natural gas - Congress and states have enacted or proposed bills that would burden consumers, cripple markets and increase federal debt but do little to clean up the air. In a speech to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, Rowe said his message to lawmakers is simple: "I'm asking that Congress do nothing.

Armed with microfiber mops and dusters and low-noise vacuums, a group of workers has emerged from the cover of night to lead a revolution. Cleaning crews are boldly steering janitorial carts into office buildings' lobbies, work cubicles, and restrooms when such potentially disruptive activity has long been considered a no-no: in the daytime. They are buffing and wiping and collecting trash in the middle of other workers' workdays - even as those employees take phone calls, pore over spreadsheets, or write reports.

ICAN'T BELIEVE how much those solar trash cans cost. What a waste of money. Me personally, I don't use them and know others who don't. For all that money, they should have made them open up automatically. I can't stand touching that handle that the whole world has touched - it's so dirty! I walked three blocks one day with my trash in hand because I didn't want to touch the dirty handles. To me those cans are useless. It was money wasted. Cynthia Perkins, Philadelphia

Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn't until the end of the speech - the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda - that Obama warmed to his task.