“Sleepy” hasn’t been the right word for the electric utility industry in many years, but the business has felt particularly strong zaps lately. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami rewrote the future of nuclear power, which had been in the midst of a renaissance. The Environmental Protection Agency wants to impose the most stringent emissions rules the industry has ever faced. And the rapid development of shale gas in the U.S. could revolutionize electrical generation. These are tense times for any utility — especially one like Southern Co., which is building a major new nuclear power plant near Augusta, Ga., and generates most of its electricity by burning coal. This article is a linkout find the full copy at http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/news/companies/southern_tom_fanning_leadership.fortune/
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The GEnx is GE’s latest addition to its growing selection of energy efficient motors, engines and gas turbines.
Made specifically for commercial jets such as the Boeing 747-8 and Boeing 787, the engine promises 15% higher fuel efficiency than previous GE engine models, such as the GE90 and CF6. It will be used first by a Japan Airlines 787 later this year. Watch it in action in this video. Keep reading →
When global demand for solar photovoltaic (PV) panels tapered off this year, Chinese manufacturers were left with stockpiles of supply just waiting to be sold.
When these manufacturers began “dumping” their supply into the American market, prices for panels suddenly plummeted and companies like Solyndra felt the effects. One German solar manufacturer, SolarWorld, decided to take action by filing an anti-trade legislation with the US government. Keep reading →
Energy nerds may be calculating emissions every time they turn on their cars, but they may not realize that some motors are burning far more energy, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Industrial motor systems burn far more energy and emit much more CO2 than the average person realizes, several GE executives told Breaking Energy in a recent phone conversation (in total these systems account for roughly 25-30% of the United States’ total energy consumption.) They said that if industrial facility operators in the US adopted high-efficiency motors like the ones GE sells, those industries could save $3-5 billion annually in electric bills and could reduce CO2 emissions by 15-26 million metric tons per year, about the same as taking 3-5 million passenger vehicles off the road. Keep reading →
Though demand response technology has been around for decades, developers have been working for years to fine tune the system and make energy efficiency programs–such as smart grid communications and automated demand response–more accessible to consumers.
Today, global smart grid company Trilliant released its newest energy software, the Trilliant Consumer-Engagement Solutions, which uses Trilliant’s UnitySuite software, SecureMesh networking and DDX technology to give consumers more and more relevant information regarding personal energy consumption. Keep reading →
For 25 days, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was staffed round the clock by 850 craft workers in addition to its usual staff as they replaced about a third of the plant’s fuel assemblies.
Entergy was refueling the plant for the twenty-ninth time since it was built in 1972, a process that was completed on November 3. Meanwhile, a court case brought by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin against the plant remains pending in court. If the state wind the case, the nuclear plant will be shut down again by March 2012. Keep reading →
Chesapeake Energy said on Thursday it plans to raise $3.4 billion by selling a share of its stake in the Utica Shale to an unidentified joint-venture partner and floating shares in a new entity that owns acreage in the field.
The Utica is believed to hold billions of barrels of oil and significant reserves of natural gas. Keep reading →
Just as the White House announced that it would form an independent oversight team to review the overall health of the Department of Energy loan guarantee program, yet another clean energy company that profited from its piggy bank fell this week.
This time the company is not a solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing company like Solyndra–which received $535 million loan guarantee from the program and filed for bankruptcy this September– but a Massachusetts-based energy storage company called Beacon Power that designs and manufactures various devices for electric grid reliability and efficiency. Beacon Power was awarded a $43 million guarantee in August 2010 for the construction of a 20 MW flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York. Keep reading →
Although the Solyndra bankruptcy caused many to doubt the viability of US solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing, some companies have not missed a beat in the race to develop a cheaper more efficient model that will prove profitable.
Last week, Silicon Valley-based thin film PV solar manufacturing company MiaSole announced it had successfully produced a copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) model that was 13% more efficient than panels released just this year. Keep reading →
Eric Miller, former senior VP at Trilliant, has decamped the U.S. He is in search of the ideal spot to set up a software development shop focused on electric power and related clean technology. He thinks he has found it in Argentina.
The problem Keep reading →
