The UN is calling on governments, businesses and civil society to double energy efficiency efforts, which could significantly reduce energy consumption, decrease greenhouse-gas emissions and save considerable sums of money.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (C) and his wife Ban Soon-taek receive Brazil’s football team jerseys as gifts from residents during a visit to the Babilonia shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 27, 2010.
In rural villages in East Africa, nearly 150 women entrepreneurs are selling solar lamps and cell phone chargers that provide clean and reliable lighting and connectivity to remote and energy-poor communities. These women, empowered by the social enterprise Solar Sister, are the ground troops of social and economic development. Keep reading →
One of the US electricity sector’s founding pillars was the growth of air-conditioning demand across the country in the years after the Second World War. While electrification had grown to near-universal access in the preceding decades on industrial demand and huge Depression-era government programs, the boom in power plant construction was extended and broadened by the prospect of cooling millions of homes, office buildings and shopping centers and an extended demographic shift in people moving to the sunnier states of the South was boosted.
But air conditioning isn’t without cost, especially during temperatures spikes in the summer when blackout risks loom and prices for power skyrocket in a vise of massive demand and limited total power production. Keep reading →
Geothermal energy technology is moving beyond volcanos, and popping up in unexpected spots like oilfields.
The technology developed in the last century to tap the earth’s heat has been most productive in regions where hotter layers are closer to the earth’s surface, like hot springs and active volcanic formations. Steam produced in those layers is used to generate electricity. Keep reading →
An environmental activist and two business executives walk into a bar…and they start a solar power company. While this may not make your favorite jokes list, it serves as an interesting background story for an innovative residential solar startup.
“The solar power industry is at an inflection point,” and with low cost cells produced in China and elsewhere, companies like Sungevity are on the cusp of putting solar everywhere – “it’s becoming ubiquitous,” the company’s President and founder Danny Kennedy recently told Breaking Energy. Keep reading →
Generating power for your residence is no longer for the paranoid or the peculiar; more than 2,000 of California’s heavy domestic energy users have signed up with Gen110 to meet most of their own power needs, and investors are sinking more money into the business as its burgeoning potential becomes apparent.
Gen110 CEO and co-founder Jason Brown isn’t your usual “energy guy.” He is a relatively recent graduate of business school with a background in sales, not power engineering, and his membership as part of Silicon Valley’s technorati has been confirmed this week with the announcement of funding by the tech startup’s venture capitalist of choice: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Keep reading →
What do gadget-laden outdoor enthusiasts in the developed world have in common with rural villagers that have no access to electricity in developing nations? They could soon be using the same clean hydrogen generation technology being developed by a small, private US chemical company.
“It’s been a long road and providing hydrogen has been hard to do, we are lucky that we can provide a reliable on/off system,” SiGNa Chemistry’s CEO Michael Lefenfeld recently told Breaking Energy. Keep reading →
Tiny hills and valleys on the surface of leaves have guided a team of Princeton University scientists in the creation of a new kind of solar cell. By wrinkling up a layer of adhesive, the team designed solar cells that can capture more light, even in the infrared region.
“If you look at leaves very closely, they are not smooth,” said Yueh-Lin Loo, Princeton’s principle investigator on the project. “We’d like to mimic this geometric effect in synthetic, man-made light-harvesting systems.” Keep reading →
The burgeoning US market for leased residential solar systems got some extra help on Thursday with the launch of a new fund to increase financing options for solar installers and their customers.
The fund, named MySolar, was created by Clean Power Finance, an online marketplace for solar financing; MS Solar Solutions Corp, a unit of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, and Main Street Power Company, a developer of solar systems and provider of power-purchase agreements. Keep reading →
In the brave new world of the smart grid, it won’t be enough for utilities to just provide their customers with the technology and hope they take advantage of it.
To reap the full benefits of a system that matches supply and demand, utilities will have to work a lot harder to deliver real-time information about pricing, energy use, and the status of smart appliances to desktop computers or mobile devices. Keep reading →
