energy innovation

Philly's Naval Shipyard/wikimedia commons

Philadelphia's new GridSTAR Center will serve as a "hub for workforce training, building performance testing, energy management research and ‘smart’ microgrid modernization deployments.”[read more]

Australian parliament

Last week, the Australian government announced the merger of two cabinet-level departments, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.[read more]

New Energy Sources via Shutterstock

When The Energy Collective asked me to write a series of posts about ‘new energy sources’, the term gave me pause. The more I thought about the concept of ‘new energy sources’, the more complex it became. What exactly is a new energy source, and what in particularly makes an new energy source ‘new’?[read more]

solar wind tower

Solar Energy, Inc. is attempting to build a massive downdraft tower reaching 2,250 feet in height and 500 feet in width. If approved, this colossal structure would be able to generate 600 megawatt hours of electricity.[read more]

energy security trust

Tying next-generation transportation energy R&D to a dedicated revenue source is a welcome step towards consistently funding energy R&D overall. Federal energy research and development is severely underfunded.[read more]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reports that 1,231 megawatts of new in-service generating capacity came online in January of 2013 – all of it from renewable sources including wind, solar and biomass.[read more]

Global Warming via Shutterstock

Technical fixes created by, for, and in rich countries will not work to solve global energy problems. For clean technologies to be both widely and rapidly adopted, they need to be developed, produced, and deployed in the particular environments where they are to be used.[read more]

Transforming the U.S. (and global) energy system from fossil fuels to low-carbon technologies requires a healthy, publicly supported innovation ecosystem that invests in and supports research, development, demonstration, and deployment. But as discussed in Part 2 of this series, America’s energy innovation ecosystem is “hollowed out”, particularly because of reduced investment in technology demonstration projects.[read more]

Wikimedia Commons

Last week, the Department of Energy announced the establishment of a new Energy Innovation Hub at the Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa – the fifth such Hub, following the creation of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research last November. The new Hub will be named the Critical Materials Institute and will “develop solutions to the domestic shortages of rare earth metals and other materials critical for U.S. energy security."[read more]

Energy Innovation via Shutterstock

Simultaneously managing environmental externalities and inducing technical change isn't easy, but commitment to credible institutional arrangements and policy rules offers a good shot.[read more]

Now that President Obama has nominated candidates to head the CIA and the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury in his second term, attention now shifts to his choices for the rest of the Cabinet, including Energy Secretary. A Politico report today suggests that the two leading candidates are former North Dakota Senator Byron...[read more]

Get past the snarkiness at the top of this post on Energy & Capital’s site, and there’s some interesting info on some of the innovation going on in the fracking end of the industry:"How’s this for irony? Fracking champions are looking toward solar power to try and cut down on pollution. … Halliburton, for example, is quite heavily...[read more]

One of the recommendations of the ITIF report Shifting Gears: Transcending Conventional Economic Doctrines to Develop Better Electric Vehicle Batteries is the creation of a “BatteryShot Initiative” to “coordinate government battery RD&D efforts and establish a clear metric for success”. (This follows the initiative of a 2011...[read more]

Wikimedia Commons.

Last night marked the third and final presidential debate of the 2012 election, and was the first time since 1984 that climate change went unmentioned by the presidential candidates in any of the debates. (“Obviously there are only so many [topics] you can get to,” debate moderator Bob Schieffer noted afterwards. “I had questions about...[read more]

Dr. James Brodrick, manager of the Department of Energy Solid State Lighting programAs the DesignLights ™ Consortium (DLC) gears up for the 2012 Stakeholder Meeting October 28-31 in Atlanta, GA, we had a chance to sit down with the meeting keynote speaker, Dr. James Brodrick, manager of the Department of Energy Solid State Lighting...[read more]