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Samsung Racks Up Sustainability Awards At CES 2013

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In case you haven’t heard, there’s a little trade show going on in Las Vegas right now. The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show is a festival of futuristic technology and highly advanced gadgets. Want to know what your TV’s going to look like in a few years? It’s probably on display at CES right now.

Although we may not know what shape it will be or in how many dimensions it will display, one thing’s for sure, your future television will be more energy-efficient and contain fewer earth-killing materials. Sustainability is at the forefront of CES this year, and Samsung has wasted no time in establishing itself as a company with the environment in mind. The company is the first to achieve Gold Level UL Environment certification for TVs and winning 2013 Eco-Design Awards for four other devices. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 11, 2013 at 10:30 AM

Ford and the EV-Backed, Solar-Powered, Cloud-Controlled Home

By Greentech Media


What’s the value of a home that can fine-tune EV charging in the garage, solar panels on the roof, appliances in the kitchen and thermostats on the wall to maximize its energy profile?

Ford Motor Co., SunPower and Whirlpool say it’s significant, at least according to a new computer model they’ve developed with the Georgia Institute of Technology. And while they haven’t launched any commercial offerings on this front yet, Ford has already developed a database of EV charging rates from utilities across the country to give each home system some grid-pertinent data to make decisions with — and a cloud-based management platform to control it all. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 9, 2013 at 8:50 AM

FERC: 38 million smartmeters now installed in US 100 million people now have better data to manage energy use http://ow.ly/giaNr

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FERC: 38 million smartmeters now installed in US 100 million plus people now have better data to manage energy use http://ow.ly/giaNr SmartGridKing

 /  Published January 8, 2013 at 12:10 PM

Nations Prepare for Cyber War, Nuclear Plants Potential Targets

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Security analysts are predicting that 2013 is when nation-sponsored cyberwarfare goes mainstream – and some think such attacks will lead to actual deaths.

 /  Published January 7, 2013 at 1:30 PM

Top Energy Stories of 2012

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The past year has proved a fundamental pivot in North American energy markets, and set the stage for the coming years to look very different from the past four decades of US energy industry history.

I’ve reviewed the ways the changes that originated in 2012 will affect the political scene in the US here, but in looking through our most popular and most compelling posts on Breaking Energy in the last year I noted how many of them supercede easy categorization. Stories about fracking cut across the buckets in which we seek to put our daily dose of energy news, analysis and discussion, but so have stories about the wind industry, financial shifts and smart grid technology. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 31, 2012 at 1:00 PM

Threats to the Power Grid and the Advances in Cyber Security to Thwart Them

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Utility companies confront security challenges daily, especially those related to securing the North American power grid. Increasingly, they’re responding by implementing comprehensive cyber security plans across their business networks and their generation, transmission and distribution systems.

From broad-based threats against corporate e-mail systems to targeted spear-phishing attacks aimed at nuclear operations, utilities face new challenges regularly. A focus area is the regular increase of vulnerabilities reported in the security of industrial control systems that monitor and control manage the power grid, as noted by the Department of Homeland Security and the media. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 28, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Smart Grid for the Next Ten Years: Making Use of All That Data

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The utility industry wanted more data, and now it’s available in quantities that may not have been foreseen. What are the best ways of managing all that data, interpreting it and getting the most value? Smart grid professionals offered thoughts on how to do it right and get the business intelligence to succeed in the next decade. Jeremy Eaton, Honeywell Smart Grid Solutions VP and general manager, provided a succinct summary of the issue: “In recent years, Honeywell has seen the widespread deployment of smart meters and a corresponding increase in access to granular energy use data. At the same time, the majority of homes and businesses in the United States (and beyond) have Wi-Fi connections, and want remote access to information through smartphones and other mobile devices. As a result, smart grid deployments will need to be tightly integrated as utilities look for combined hardware and software solutions that deliver energy data – and coaching – in a seamless manner.”

 /  Published December 27, 2012 at 12:20 PM

Energy Sector Disruption: Three Political Lessons from 2012

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Working in the energy sector is an inherently political activity. I once sat opposite a friend of a friend at lunch, and when she found out that I covered the energy business and then quizzed me on the industry’s practices, asked if I found people often wanted to hit me. I don’t find that, but the way a modern economy depends on the energy business means that everyone – along the entire spectrum of beliefs – also has opinions about its politics in ways that don’t necessarily reflect a subtle, shifting, complex reality.

Over the course of 2012, we’ve been focusing on the issues at play in energy politics, and have gathered them together in a special hub that can be found on Breaking Energy here. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 27, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Get Ready! FERC Spotlights Three Major Challenges for Utilities

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The bad news – there are big, big challenges looming for the electric utility industry. The good news – agencies and regulators are increasingly aware of these painful truths and, therefore, increasingly willing to discuss solutions. That was the message from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff during a briefing on Capitol Hill this week.

1. Falling load growth. Wellinghoff cited a recent study from the Brattle Group that confirms a 30-year trend of falling growth in energy usage. Today, the average growth is roughly 1% per year, down from the 5-10% common in the middle of the last century. And no, today’s anemic growth is not due just to the recession. It is an unstoppable result of our march to energy efficiency, as evidenced by LED lights, Net Zero buildings, variable speed motors, and more. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 21, 2012 at 2:45 PM

Tornado Power Idea Gets Chance to Prove Itself

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Let’s take a little ride on the Atmospheric Vortex Engine bandwagon. It might not go very far, this scheme to create an air vortex in a big tower to spin turbines to produce electricity, but $300,000 from Silicon Valley investor-billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs says it’s getting a shot.

The concept is a close cousin of the solar updraft towers (which we’ve been admittedly weirdly enthusiastic about), relying on convection to move air. But whereas those projects would use solar collectors of some sort as the heat source, the brainchild of inventor Louis Michaud wants to grab waste heat from, say, a thermal power plant and channel it into a powerful swirl of energy. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 21, 2012 at 1:00 PM
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