While New York is often referred to as the global energy finance center, it is not otherwise known as an energy industry focal point. That appears to be changing, however, as energy issues have recently shot towards the top of local and state political agendas and high-profile energy events – like New York Energy Week… Keep reading →
Storing large quantities of energy is one of the greatest challenges facing utility-scale renewable sources like wind and solar. Battery technology has significantly advanced in recent years, but still remains relatively expensive. Researchers have been working on various methods of storing energy, like vanadium flow batteries, and now engineers at the University of Missouri have made a breakthrough that allows them to create and control plasma, which could have wide-ranging implications for generating and storing energy.
“Besides liquid, gas and solid, matter has a fourth state, known as plasma. Fire and lightning are familiar forms of plasma. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun,” MU said in a statement. Keep reading →
The US wind power industry had a banner year in 2012, as developers raced to bring on projects before the federal production tax credit was set to expire at the end of the year. The frantic rush to take advantage of the tax incentive resulted in some impressive statistics highlighted in the American Wind Energy Association’s U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report for 2012, released Thursday.
Breaking Energy recently sat down with AWEA’s vice president of public affairs Peter Kelley ahead of the launch to gain some insight into what made 2012 so important and what to expect from the industry going forward. Keep reading →
Breaking Energy recently spoke with Solar Impulse co-founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg about their ambitious goal to fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane that uses zero liquid fuel and can fly through the night.
A major milestone along the path to that goal will be reached in the coming weeks when Solar Impulse flies from San Francisco (Moffett Airfield) and stop in four US cities including Phoenix, Dallas Fort Worth and Washington D.C. before reaching New York’s JFK airport, its final destination in early July. Keep reading →
It was a record year for solar installations in the United States in 2012, boosting an industry still struggling with consolidation and bankruptcies.
Over 3.3 gigawatts of solar power were installed last year, according to a report Thursday from the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. That’s enough to power about 500,000 homes, and it was a 76% increase from 2011. Keep reading →
There’s still a ways to go, but PETE is moving along.
“Photon enhanced thermionic emission,” the conceptual breakthrough that Stanford researchers introduced three years ago as a way to capture and make use of both the light and heat in a solar device, has undergone improvements that boost its efficiency by 100 times. Keep reading →
The Shams 1 concentrated solar power plant was inaugurated earlier this week in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, UAE. At 100 megawatts, Shams 1 is currently the largest operational CSP plant in the world. The project is noteworthy because it is a major step forward for renewable energy technology, and CSP in particular, but also because it was developed in an Opec country. Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, partnered with French oil major Total and Spain’s energy infrastructure company Abengoa. Breaking Energy attended the proceedings, along with several other international journalists, as Masdar’s guest. Masdar is a subsidiary of Mubadala, a UAE government-owned investment vehicle.
“With the addition of Shams 1, Masdar’s renewable energy portfolio accounts for almost 68 percent of the Gulf’s renewable energy capacity and nearly 10 percent of the world’s installed CSP capacity”, according to the company. Keep reading →
It’s been a long road, but the government-backed ZeaChem cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant in Oregon is finally turning out fuel.
The company announced the step this week, calling the Boardman plant “among the first operational cellulosic biorefineries in the world.” It’s a bit of good news in the seemingly illusory realm of ethanol made from non-food feedstocks, which have been slow to fulfill their promise of extricating the industry from the food vs. fuels debate. Keep reading →
What if the future of lighting looked surprisingly like the past? Cree, a lighting company with its roots in selling LEDs to the 80% of the lighting market that is commercial, has hit the consumer market with a new bulb it says could eventually save more than $40 billion in energy costs if adoption of the new technology hits 100%
The logic in appealing to the consumer market is similar to the IT strategies proliferating across the industrial sector, and more specifically energy: technology decisions are made by consumers based on their comfort with it, even when the applications aren’t for their personal lives. “This is a very important step to accelerate the adoption [of LED lighting]; getting the consumer on board will change the inflection point,” Cree Vice President, Corporate Marketing Mike Watson told Breaking Energy in a recent interview. Keep reading →
The Department of Energy has led sector technology changes in part by helping create a series of “data jams,” and today announced several new related events on its blog, including one set for the upcoming New York Energy Week.
From Energy.gov: Keep reading →
