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Looking To Past, Future For Heat Beating Methods

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Electric utilities and consumers are getting creative in their efforts to cut back electricity use as it spikes in response to an all-consuming heat wave that has spread across the country to settle across the heavily-populated Northeastern states.

Demand response programs, in which companies and consumers are asked to cut back on electricity use through established mechanisms like turning off extraneous lights or limiting elevator service, have already been in effect as the Northeast dealt with spiking power demand on July 21. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 22, 2011 at 11:45 AM

A Google Earth Smart Grid

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Managing a sprawling electric grid can be costly and wasteful.

To better manage data points over its large geographic service area, the California Independent System Operator –which manages about 85% of California’s electricity–has installed an 80 by 6.5 inch screen in its control room that combines four information sources, overlaid on a Google Earth map, to display real-time information on where transmission lines are located and how and where electricity is being used. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 21, 2011 at 5:00 PM

Podcast: Tech Jocks And Sun Shots

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President Obama launched the SunShot Initiative in his State of the Union Address this year, inspired by President Kennedy’s moonshot program. Its ultimate aim is to drive down the costs of installed solar systems to a dollar a watt.

Ramamoorthy Ramesh is the Director of the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative and Solar Energy Technologies Program. He is a self-confessed “tech jock” on a mission to achieve the dollar-a-watt goal, which would mean a 75% reduction from today’s prices. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 19, 2011 at 2:00 PM

Making Energy Entrepreneurial

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The energy industry needs to achieve “escape velocity” with the help of entrepreneurial innovation, said one of Silicon Valley’s leading thought leaders said recently.

“If you think about the energy industry as an enterprise and we look at the entrepreneurial people involved, [they] are the energy mitochondria or the chloroplasts that are going to create the escape velocity,” Geoffrey Moore said to a conference audience gathered in California last week. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 18, 2011 at 4:45 PM

New York Residents Encouraged To Pipe Up On Energy

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New Yorkers are not widely known for their shyness in making suggestions. Now the city’s leadership is encouraging them to take their ideas to the internet.

Change by Us NYC is New York City’s latest attempt to encourage energy efficiency innovation. Initiated by CEOs for Cities, a think tank for urban leaders, the Change by Us website combines the messaging tools of social media with the concept of a new energy economy to create a new model for the traditional town hall meeting. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 15, 2011 at 10:15 AM

First Stop Brooklyn: Wind Energy Startup Makes An Unlikely Home

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Wind Analytics is everything an energy firm isn’t supposed to be.

The startup firm is new, small in scale, focused on leveraging distributed generation, funded by venture capital and headquartered in an icily cool part of New York City’s Brooklyn Borough. In an industry dominated by behemoth established players built on the hub-and-spoke model of centralized fossil fuel energy production distributed over vast physical footprints, Wind Analytics differences make it the anomaly that could just be the industry’s data-driven future. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 12, 2011 at 2:15 PM

How To Keep Privacy From Becoming A Smart Grid Show-Stopper

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Building privacy into the smart grid from the beginning is key to its success.

As consumers and citizens, we are leading increasingly digitized lives. Whether we’re purchasing a product, visiting a doctor or keeping up with friends and family on Twitter or Facebook, we’re sending potentially sensitive data over networks, to be stored in far-away databases. Meanwhile, a week doesn’t pass that we don’t hear about the newest phishing scheme, network infiltration or laptop theft. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 7, 2011 at 6:00 AM

eMetering Smart Grid Data

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A combination of pricing transparency and concern for the environment will drive steady uptake of smart meters both among large-scale and domestic customers even in the absence of a federal US electricity policy, technology firm eMeter says.

Although larger facilities represent the “low-hanging fruit” for gains in energy efficiency among electric utility customers, domestic customers share the same concerns about pricing and their environmental footprint, eMeter Chief Regulatory Officer Chris King told Breaking Energy. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 7, 2011 at 6:00 AM

Data Centers Go Natural

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A lot of energy innovations have a “back to the future” feel about them, in which new methods of using traditional mechanisms are leveraged to make simple changes that result in significant gains.

Data centers consume as much as 3% of often-strained US power generation, the vast majority of it in keeping the huge buildings where servers are stored cooled with air conditioning to prevent the servers from overheating. Keep reading →

 /  Published June 28, 2011 at 1:30 PM

Cleaning California: Q&A With Dan Adler

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Dan Adler is president of the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), a $30 million non-profit venture capital fund created to accelerate investment in the state’s clean energy economy.

CalCEF was formed after the California electricity crisis of 1999-2000 as part of the bankruptcy settlement negotiated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Keep reading →

 /  Published June 24, 2011 at 3:15 PM
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