ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Five companies, partnerships and entities have submitted proposals to build a massive pipeline from Alaska's North Slope to bring the region's vast but long-languishing natural gas reserves to markets thousands of miles away, state officials announced late on Friday.

"The Belarusian government approached us for these plants and we have had a really good cooperation with them," Michael Hauck, head of marketing at Biogas Nord, which specializes in biogas plants, told Reuters.

Australia - The Australian government's science branch has launched a major effort to develop new batteries to store energy. The project is led by CSIRO, the Australian Commonwealth's Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, is Australia's national science agency.

Director of the CSIRO Energy Transformed National Research Flagship Dr John Wright said the Smart Storage battery technology aims to deliver a low cost, high performance, high power stationary energy storage solution suitable for grid-connected and remote applications.

San Jose, California - Google today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas.

In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.

Tokyo, Japan - Though Honda has been mass producing solar cells since October, and has begun sales of them, the opening of Honda Soltec’s production facility in Kumamoto, Japan makes it official: Honda’s in the solar business.

As you’d expect from the cutting edge car company, the product is state of the art. Honda is using thin-film, copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) cell technology - a technology still trying to gain footing against tried and true silicon solar. But Honda says that overall, in the big picture, grand scheme of things, CIGS is greener than silicon solar. The company says CIGS use 50 percent less energy to manufacture, start to finish, than conventional silicon crystal solar cells.

"We want to be in the top three in the industry by 2011," Siemens' Wind Power unit chief Andreas Nauen told German weekly Euro am Sonntag in comments released on Saturday ahead of publication on Sunday.