renewables

renewable energy forecasting

Breakthrough renewable energy forecasting technologies may be two years away from revolutionizing the efficiency of wind and solar generation on America’s grid.[read more]

Air Force energy strategy

Unstable global energy supplies and greatly reduced federal funding might be the two biggest threats facing the US Air Force – but it looks like clean energy technology is the solution to both.[read more]

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Combating global warming is going to require a huge influx of green power onto the grid, both at the large scale (e.g., giant wind farms or solar power plants) and at the fragmented, distributed scale.[read more]

Energy Jobs

We do not currently have a workforce with adequate skills to build an economy based on renewables, energy efficiency, and smart transportation.[read more]

clean tech/shutterstock

Over the past few years, we've had "clean energy" and "advanced energy"; once the favored term was "renewable energy" and even "alternative energy." And then there was the battle over "cleantech" or "greentech."[read more]

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg used the 2013 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit near Washington, DC to prod the oil and gas industry to stop resisting efforts to forge “sensible” regulations.[read more]

American history buffs and foodies know the story of the three sisters of agriculture, a brilliant combinatorial planting technique practiced by Native Americans.  This uniquely American agricultural invention elegantly illustrates the concept of synergy.  Synergy is defined as the interactions of two or more things combined to...[read more]

Earlier, I wrote on how crucially an unreliable sources of power such as wind depend on fossil fuels. Based on real world production data from around the world, I noted that even with massively distributed production wind power is very variable and necessitates a reliable backup power source (typically from fossil fuels) which must be able to produce essentially all the power society consumes. A way around this problem would be a massive energy storage, but I found the size of the required storage to be unreasonably large.[read more]

Only 14 percent of country thinks we're going in the right direction on energy[read more]

America pioneered many of the clean energy technologies now being used and manufactured around the world, but the edge we once held in clean tech is slipping to foreign competitors. Five years ago, scientists warned the U.S. was falling behind other nations and Congress responded by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA-E, to help fund the development of breakthrough energy technologies. Now, this initiative faces political headwinds and the U.S. risks any momentum gained since ARPA-E was founded. In this one-on-one interview, ARPA-E Director Arun Majumdar discusses the energy challenges America faces from other countries and how the U.S. must “out-innovate” its competitors to spur new economic growth.[read more]

Germany has made one of the most radical policy changes in the wake of Fukushima. Like Japan, it decided to phase out nuclear power by 2022. Furthermore, by the middle of the century, fossil fuels shall only play a minor role in the energy supply of the country. Some...[read more]

The problem of replacing our dependence on fossil fuels is complex. In Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) #12, a checklist was provided to allow assessment of energy transition plans. The sort of questions listed in TCASE 12 are critical for evaluating the feasibility of future scenarios, like the ones from the...[read more]

There are interesting synergies between renewable energy and energy storage that have profound implications for the Smart Grid and our energy and economic security.  Wind and solar are readily available domestic sources of clean renewable electricity and share a common characteristic of intermittency.  Wind tends to pick up at...[read more]

Global Energy Growth  BP recently released their highly respected annual Statistical Review of World Energy for 2011. Most of the news stories on the report have focused on the exceptionally strong growth in global energy consumption. While that is without a doubt a major story that I will discuss here, I also want to highlight some...[read more]

Historically, electric grids have experienced varying electric demands during a day and varied the output of their generating plants to serve that demand and, at the same time, regulate frequency. Increased wind energy penetration will present additional challenges to the management of the energy on the New England Electric Grid, NEEG....[read more]