distributed energy

utility company/shutterstock

I’m all for microgrids, distributed energy resources, and the concept of Transactive Energy to improve grid resiliency. But the Smart Grid and its enabling technologies do not mean the end of electric or gas utilities.[read more]

powerlines

This post explaining some important differences between high voltage AC and high voltage DC power transmission options. It is part of a series explaining the options for building out a transmission Supergrid.[read more]

utility company/shutterstock

Some believe that solar panels are becoming so common that they may eventually put utilities out of business. Can this really happen?[read more]

smart grid investment

Two cities in California are leveraging innovative financial programs to help fund adoption of both energy efficiency and renewables generation technologies, spurring technology markets.[read more]

Jannis Tobias Werner / Shutterstock.com

We now live in an economy that can’t function without electricity – there are no substitutes for it. Our lifestyles depend on electricity to keep us comfortable and productive on a 24 x 7 basis.[read more]

As a scientist and an unabashed nerd, I love data. Particularly, I love it when ready access to data reveals things that are surprising in the face of conventional wisdom. Despite record-low wholesale electricity prices there's been a slow but quite noticeable creep of wholesale natural gas prices upward to the range of $6/MMBtu.[read more]

Lightning Bolt via Shutterstock

More than 8 million people along the U.S. East Coast were rendered powerless in the wake of October 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, for example. Each new large-scale natural disaster delivers its own unique cocktail of heartache and damage, but the need to modernize the electrical grid is a common denominator—growing only more glaring with each new setback.[read more]

The devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan offer horrifying visuals of a geologic worst case scenario.   It may also deliver a worst case disaster scenario for their national electrical system as some nuclear plants are beyond repair.  According to the Department of Energy’s global statistics,  in...[read more]

One of the reasons that I am a strong advocate of smaller nuclear energy plants is that I resist the notion of the inevitability of greater interconnectedness and dependence. I like systems that have firewalls, circuit breakers, and air gaps to ensure that a failure in one location can be isolated. I do not like tightly integrated...[read more]

Dave Roberts has a post at Grist outlining his take on the debate about building large power plants on sensitive land — specifically a solar thermal power plant in the Mojave desert - Taking distributed energy seriously. Many folks are conflicted over the seeming clash between conserving America’s remaining wild landscapes and...[read more]

On Earth Day 2009, Jon Wellinghoff, the newly appointed chairman of the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declared that "baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism." He went on to compare power plants to computers, further exposing the limits of his technical knowledge "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's...[read more]