In 1996, when the German Wind Energy Association (GWEA) came to life, the full force of Germany’s onshore wind power amounted to a handful of entrepreneurs experimenting with a budding but imperfect technology.
Today, only 16 years later, onshore wind power constitutes 8 percent of Germany’s energy supply, generating nearly half of the nation’s renewable electricity. More than 24,000 wind turbines dot the German landscape with a capacity of more than 32,000 megawatts. Keep reading →
Lower oil and gas prices took their toll, and ConocoPhillips (COP) continued to trim its portfolio of assets in the third quarter, but production results in unconventional U.S. oil formations helped the company come out ahead of analysts’ expectations.
Accenture’s research highlights six key questions #energy companies need to ask on business process management http://http://bit.ly/TS2KcH Accenture
Data centers are a vital cog in our digital world. As data centers become increasingly important, we need to look at the infrastructure behind them: the electric power grid. The grid is aging infrastructure designed in the 20th century well before the advent of digital services like those provided by data centers – and it’s simply not suited to meet the power demands of data centers.
Data centers depend on a reliable supply of electricity in order to perform 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Today’s electric infrastructure isn’t capable of providing the level of power reliability that data centers require, so these centers spend huge amounts of money on back-up systems in order to protect the facilities from power outages. There is increasing pressure to reduce the costs associated with electric service, however. A recent Gartner report showed that the annual cost to power an 8,000-square-foot data center can hit $1.6 million, and the cost is rising. These costs don’t include expenses associated with building, operating and maintaining back-up systems either. Keep reading →
Americans spend a lot of money on oil – about $632 billion a year. A lot of that money goes to paying the costs of getting the dinosaur juice out of the ground in the first place, including exploring for potential reserves, drilling test wells, drilling production wells, pumping the stuff, and transporting it.
Brazil may not be growing the way it once was, but there are still opportunities to be had in Latin America’s largest economy.
After a commodities-driven boom during the past decade, Brazil’s economy slowed substantially last year as global demand for raw materials waned. Keep reading →
The pace of Iraq’s economic and social development going forward is largely tied to the success or failure of its energy sector goals, and in turn the degree to which the country’s oil industry can meet its aggressive targets will play a pivotal role in the global oil market over the next two decades.
The International Energy Agency has analyzed the future of Iraq’s energy industry using three scenarios – high, central and delayed – as a means of addressing the opportunities and risks facing the development of Iraq’s energy sectors. The special report entitled “Iraq Energy Outlook” is part of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook series. Keep reading →
Some of the most influential voices in the clean energy sector gathered recently in New York for the US launch of the Corporate Renewable Energy Index and the Global Consumer Wind Study.
Companies manage what is measured, and increasingly understand their customers and their competitors by leveraging the data sets provided by measurements that in previous business cycles would have been difficult to gather, much less compare. Keep reading →
Warren Buffett bought himself two more wind farms on Sunday.
OK, it’s a little more roundabout than that. MidAmerica Wind bought two Southern California wind farm projects, part of the sprawling Alta Wind Energy Center – and by “projects” we mean they aren’t operating yet, but are expected to be by the end of the year. (They better be, in order to qualify for expiring federal tax breaks.) Keep reading →
The End of Big Energy?
By Peter GardettThe term “big oil” carries quasi-political connotations of a kind of shadow state that has often attracted sharp criticism. But if we look at the end of “big oil,” will we like what we see?
Energy companies are often called on to operate like states rather than private firms. They are held responsible for the safety, health and livelihoods of enormous numbers of people, they are entrusted with resources owned by the public and by virtue of their size and reach they are often as much partners as targets in tackling political problems at home and abroad. Keep reading →