It isn’t gold.
Weakening venture capital funding for one of the globe’s fastest-growing sectors isn’t a mystery for sector watchers, but with increasing adoption of disruptive monitoring technology, the market opportunity isn’t a matter of if, but when. Keep reading →
Over the last decade, wind energy has catapulted from a fringe energy option to an economic, mainstream, $50 billion a year industry that employs 300,000 people globally. Over the last decade, technology advancements have driven the cost of wind down 60%, while the price of oil has surged over 350%. In fact, 40% of new power installations in America over the past five years have been wind energy. The success of wind power has become so widespread in the US that even companies like Walmart, Anheuser Busch and Nestle are becoming power producers using the technology.
Last week, the United States celebrated the milestone of 50 GW of installed wind power, demonstrating wind’s value as a mainstream, domestic source of energy for America. Fifty gigawatts is big: it’s enough capacity to power 12.8 million American homes, or meet the electricity demands of Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Virginia, Alabama and Connecticut through wind power alone. Keep reading →
The US wind power industry has lived and died by production tax credits over the years, and with the prospect of expiration finally looming at the end of this year, industry players are working hard to build a future without it.
US installations are set to fall off a cliff in 2013 with Navigant Consulting estimating additional incremental capacity between 1 and 4 GW, down dramatically from >9 GW in 2012. Keep reading →
Startup Battlefield Finalists pose onstage at Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 14, 2011 in San Francisco, California.
Low natural gas prices in the US have slowed momentum in the development of grid-level energy storage solutions, an expert panel gathered from venture capital, power generation and utility companies said last week. Keep reading →
Check out the tech GE’s wind turbine engineers use to track data from thousands of turbines http://ow.ly/aHY4c GE_Reports
IT is poised to revolutionize the energy industry by ceding control of consumption and generation to consumers and lead to an “age of empowerment”, an influential figure in the wholesale power sector said yesterday.
David Crane, the outspoken CEO of NRG Energy, told the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco: “We’ve come a long way from the days of the legendary Henry Ford and his comment that the American consumer can have any color of model T as long as it’s black. Keep reading →
For the average residential customer, there’s a lot of confusing information out there about smart meters. Much of the discussion around the smart grid focuses on how advances in technology will benefit utilities.
While it’s true that a self-healing grid will bring shorter, less frequent outages and that smart meters can help make the electrical grid more efficient, most customers view reliability of electrical service as a given, not a benefit. In order to increase customer acceptance and adoption of advanced metering technology, the personal benefits need to be framed in ways that resonate with residential customers. Keep reading →
US natural gas and gas liquids production has increased dramatically in recent years, driven in large part by output from tight geologic formations in Texas. In order to bring these resources to the marketplace, there is a constant need to build more gathering systems and pipelines.
Alleviating infrastructural bottlenecks is an ongoing challenge for the industry, something that Howard Energy aims to address by acquiring Meritage Midstream Services’ South Texas natural gas gathering assets. Keep reading →
A picture of the GE natural gas fueling station.
Efforts to find a use for America’s glut of shale gas got a boost on Wednesday when Chesapeake Energy announced an agreement with GE to increase the availability of compressed and liquid natural gas as a transportation fuel. Keep reading →
A man works on the factory floor at Quadrant, a high end plastic processor on October 19, 2011 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Quadrant, a 70 year old company, employs more than 2000 people in 20 countries and is one of the few remaining manufacturers in the area to still provide stable jobs in an uncertain economy.
Modern manufacturing is not your grandfather’s factory, and the same traditional education and immigration policies are forming barriers to keeping manufacturing in the US. Keep reading →
