It was no April Fool’s Day prank when the rate of a power demand increase spiked to its highest level of the year – 12.4% – on the morning of April 1st, 2013 in the Southwest Power Pool territory. Low seasonal and weekend demand overnight quickly reversed course as the business week began and utility… Keep reading →
Microbes in panda feces have shown some promise in making cellulosic biofuel production cheaper and more efficient. “Current methods for breaking down non-food plant material (stalks, stems and cobs) are expensive and require pretreatments that use heat and high pressure or acids…But the bacteria [Mississippi Stat Assistant professor Ashli] Brown and her team discovered do… Keep reading →
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) provides on its web site many claims about the great progress and benefits achieved by promoting and subsidizing wind energy in the state – an initiative kicked off by former Governor Pataki and followed slavishly by each succeeding administration and legislature. Unfortunately, like other promoters of… Keep reading →
Accounting giant Ernst & Young’s latest United States renewable energy attractiveness index confirms commonly understood perceptions of which states are friendliest to renewables, such as California and Hawaii, but also shows remarkable progress by individual states and the solar industry as a whole. The top ten states on the All Renewables Index, which you can… Keep reading →
Silver Spring Networks topped Inc. Magazine’s rankings. The editors at Inc. magazine have released their rankings of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in America. The list offers an interesting snapshot of where growth is taking place in the energy sector. The boom in America’s unconventional oil and gas development is clearly evident on the list. Out of the 110 energy… Keep reading →
MIT researchers have devised a membrane-free rechargeable battery prototype that could facilitate cheaper, large-scale energy storage and support widespread renewable energy use. On August 16, 2013, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled a membrane-free rechargeable flow battery prototype capable of overcoming the major barriers of energy storage – cost and performance –… Keep reading →
8. Distributed wind power is used at or near where it is generated, as opposed to wind power from wholesale generation, where power is sent to consumers via transmission lines and substations. Employed by households, schools, farms, industrial facilities, and municipalities alike, distributed wind doesn’t only refer to small-scale turbines; it includes any size turbine or array of… Keep reading →
The enormous blackout that left 50 million people along the US East Coast without power occurred 10 years ago this week and Scientific American spoke with electrical engineer Jeff Dagle, a member of the task force and a specialist in power-grid resilience at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to find out what caused the failure and what’s… Keep reading →
New York broke temperature and energy-use records in late July, and expectations that heat waves might become a more common feature of Eastern Seaboard summers are raising pressing questions about power grid stability, and how utilities can manage the load when demand peaks. There are both supply- and demand-side solutions to managing rising energy demand in… Keep reading →
Wind energy became the largest source of new US electricity generation capacity in the US last year, accounting for well over a third of capacity additions, according to reports released today by the Department of Energy. “Wind energy is now the fastest growing source of power in the United States – representing 43 percent of… Keep reading →
