Honeywell is making a major play in the smart grid and demand response world, building on its already enormous client base of more than 100 utilities – with millions of customers – that the company says has already resulted in more than a gigawatt in saved electricity.
The company is building out a global footprint in smart grid with both large and small projects it says will underpin efficiency efforts and support end-user control of the systems that consume energy. Keep reading →
The interior of the General Motors Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant is shown October 11, 2011 in Hamtramck, Michigan. Officials from the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration toured the plant today to highlight the Obama administrations fuel economy standards.
Electric vehicle manufacturers and advocates are facing questions from an increasingly interested US public about how the cars work and whether they can meet conventional driving needs. Keep reading →
Millions of people in the US regularly respond to surveys asking where their energy comes from by responding “the socket” or “the plug.” The invisibility and omnipresence of electricity is, ironically, one of the challenges for the industry in trying to communicate its fundamental importance.
Making energy creation and consumption visible and relevant to people who are not engineers or experts, but are nonetheless reliant on energy for every aspect of their daily lives, is a challenge a number of firms in the sector have begun to embrace. Keep reading →
Since 2007, Duke Energy has invested more than $2.5 billion to build wind and solar farms across the U.S. – http://bit.ly/Ayyfns DukeEnergy
The Navy’s push to become a more environmentally-friendly fighting force took a beating on Capitol Hill last week. But the tongue lashing delivered by House defense lawmakers has little chance of gaining traction on the Hill or inside the Pentagon, analysts say. House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee member Randy Forbes took Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to task, slamming the service’s continued investment in alternative fuels, one of Mabus’ top priorities for the service. “I understand that alternative fuels may help our guys in the field, but wouldn’t you agree that the thing they’d be more concerned about is having more ships, more planes, more prepositioned stocks,” Forbes said during the Friday hearing. “Shouldn’t we refocus our priorities and make those things our priorities instead of advancing a biofuels market?”
US natural gas pipeline companies added about 2,400 miles of pipeline as part of 25 projects in 2011, helping to improve service in congested areas including California, Florida and parts of the Northeast, the Energy Information Administration said on Friday.
The new lines increased capacity by 13.7 billion cubic feet a day, about the same increase as in 2010 but less than that in 2008 and 2009 when a total of more than 60 bcf of capacity was added to keep pace with increasing shale-gas production, as well as new LNG terminals and storage facilities. Keep reading →
The Genovation Cars G2 concept plug-in electric hybrid vehicle model during aerodynamics testing at the Glenn L. Martin Wind Tunnel at University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, January 26, 2012.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) describes its new technology as a 2.4 kilovolt, 45kVA (45,000 volt amps for the less technical among us) solid-state, direct current (DC) fast charging system for electric vehicles (EVs). Keep reading →
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), stung by a federal regulatory ruling regarding its treatment of Northwest wind power producers, is proposing new measures-including splitting the cost for lost revenue-to mollify the wind producers when an overabundance of hydroelectric power leads BPA to curtail the wind turbines in the region.
BPA sells power from dozens of federal hydro projects in the Northwest, and it controls most of the transmission lines in the region. Federal regulators in December said BPA acted unfairly in shutting off wind power in spring 2011 when a big snowmelt gave it more electricity than it said it needed. BPA’s action was opposed by wind generators, led by Portland, Oregon-based Iberdrola Renewables, many of whom lost federal production tax credits and state renewable energy certificates when their turbines were shut down and who worried that BPA’s policy could set a precedent that would stifle future support for the industry in the region. Keep reading →
Nationwide, utilities face increasingly stringent renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requirements. California, for example, requires utilities to derive 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As utilities examine options for renewable energy generation, solar continually emerges as an ideal solution for utilities looking to boost renewable generation using proven and cost-effective technologies.
Traditionally, utilities procured two basic forms of solar: small customer-sited projects, which offset the customer’s own electricity use (sometimes referred to as retail distributed generation) and large central-station facilities, to which the ‘bigger is better’ maxim has often been applied. To reduce the cost of these facilities to the absolute lowest possible price-point – on either a dollar-per-watt or cents-per-kilowatt basis – they have grown to enormous sizes, sometimes to hundreds of megawatts (MW). This has also been a function of utility procurement processes, which often use the delivered price of electricity as a sole awarding factor, thus favoring very large projects over small or mid-sized ones. Keep reading →
