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Smart grid technology is a long time away from being a nationwide, or even state wide reality. There are many stumbling blocks keeping many utility companies or cities from joining into the venture.

Smart grid technology can affect energy pricing in two ways: raising the rates for high-demand peak periods and lowering it during off-peak times.

An underwater turbine that generates electricity from tidal streams was plugged into the UK's national grid today. It marks the first time a commercial-scale underwater turbine has fed power into the network and the start of a new source of renewable energy for the UK.

Hot on the heels of the release of the NRDC's renewable energy map, we have another piece of first-rate energy geek eye candy: NPR: Power Hungry: Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid. This map will let you check different sources (with separate maps for wind and solar, in addition to traditional sources), and toggle transmission lines and other features on and off. My only gripe is that you can't zoom the maps, which in some cases makes it a challenge to click on the circle for a particular power plant.

The PV inverter performance is benchmarked by the 500,000 fielded units of Sunny Boy. The reliability of the product is also fantastic.

For many, using lithium-ion batteries to store energy has proven to be too expensive to be worth-while. This happens to not be the case for Chris Shelton of AES Energy Storage.

The European power transmission sector is currently working towards the development of a sustainable and cost efficient future power grid, owing to the strong growth of renewable energy sources. Grid extension and up-gradation projects along with installation of new substations are attracting huge investments across Europe, especially in Germany, France, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Romania and Poland.

Green engineering will become a valuable skill, and jobs are becoming available in energy, renewable energy, the smart grid and more.

A new kind of silent hero has joined the fight against climate change. Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy. Flat, open and sun-drenched land is so scarce in Santa Coloma that the graveyard was just about the only viable spot to move ahead with its solar energy program. The power the 462 panels produces - equivalent to the yearly use by 60 homes - flows into the local energy grid for normal consumption and is one community's odd nod to the fight against global warming.

Here's one for the alternative wind power experiments file - a report from BusinessWeek on an interesting design idea, inspired by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940 - Humdinger's Wind Power Alternative. As an MIT engineering undergraduate visiting the rural fishing village of Petite Anse, Haiti, in 2004, Shawn Frayne hoped to devise a way to convert abundant agricultural waste into cheap fuel. But the budding engineer soon found that the community's mainly poor residents faced an altogether more immediate need. Unconnected to the local power grid, they relied heavily on dirty kerosene lamps, which are not only costly to operate but also unhealthy and dangerous. He decided to devise an alternative-a small, safe, and renewable power generator that could be used to power LED lights and small household electronics, such as radios.

Earlier this week, Portugal debuted the world's first commercial wave energy farm. Wave energy at the Agucadoura station is converted into electricity with the use of three red "sea-snakes", or cylindrical wave energy converters, that are attached to the seabed off Portugal's northern coast. Energy captured by the sea-snakes is carried to an undersea cable station, where it is then fed into the electrical grid.

Feed-in Tariffs in 70 words or less: Government and power utility offers premium, long-term contracts to residential, commercial, and industrial citizens to generate power on-site. Rates are based on the cost of buying and installing various renewable energy systems, but only paid on actual power produced. Citizens purchase back grid power, as per usual, from utility at regular prices. Increase in cost is paid for with a small surcharge to all electricity ratepayers.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency David Rodgers today announced the launch of DOE's Zero-Net Energy Commercial Building Initiative (CBI) with establishment of the National Laboratory Collaborative on Building Technologies Collaborative (NLCBT). These two efforts both focus on DOE's ongoing efforts to develop marketable Zero-Net Energy Commercial Buildings, buildings that use cutting-edge efficiency technologies and on-site renewable energy generation to offset their energy use from the electricity grid by 2025.

Britain is trying to water down tough new European legislation to boost the uptake of renewable energy, despite a pledge by Gordon Brown last month to launch a "green revolution" based on clean technology. Documents obtained by the Guardian show the UK wants to block attempts to give renewable electricity sources such as wind farms priority access to the national grid. The European official who drafted the legislation accused Britain of "obstructing" EU efforts on renewables and said UK officials wanted to protect traditional energy suppliers and their coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

BPA - Elliot Mainzer takes the key role in developing energy agency policy on climate change, planning and renewables As renewable energy becomes a bigger slice of the Northwest's energy pie, few institutions have as important a role to play as the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets electricity generated at 31 dams and a nuclear plant in the region. BPA's regionwide web of transmission lines delivers electrons generated at wind farms east of the Cascades to power-hungry consumers in the Willamette Valley. The agency's flexibility to modulate electricity production at dams on the Columbia allows utilities to safely feed their spiky supply of wind energy onto the grid.

While the arguments rage on both sides, the experts say that time is running out For the workers at Oldbury-on-Severn nuclear power plant, the next new year celebrations could be rather poignant. Just as Britain is planning the rebirth of nuclear power generation, their ageing plant will be closing down, probably on December 31. Oldbury, in Gloucestershire, has been pouring power into the national grid since 1967 and is the latest in a series of closures that has seen Britain's nuclear generating capacity fall from nearly 40% of the nation's needs in the 1980s to just 15% now. Most of the slack has been taken up by new gas-fired stations.

Internet search giant Google - sometimes criticised for the amount of energy its servers use - now aims to do for the power grid what it did for the web. Having conquered the market for web search by first simplifying how it is done and then linking advertising to users' search terms, Google Inc is now funding green technology and using its brand power to lobby for policy change.

An aide to Obama said Friday that the administration plans to add 20 gigawatts (GW) or more of wind power and 4 GW of geothermal and solar power by 2012 through loan guarantees and fast tracked national renewable energy requirements, like the Renewable Portfolio Standard. Last May the U.S. Energy Department estimated wind power could provide almost a quarter of U.S. electricity. Trade groups from the U.S. wind and solar industries were happy with the news, considering that the current economic environment for commercial credit has lowered all boats as it were, with all investment now endangered - not just investment in risky financial instruments, but even those investments in renewable energy that are essential to growing a stable economy. 4 votesBuzz up! No other country, in any single year, has added the volume of wind capacity that was added to the US electrical grid in 2007 with both wind and solar growing well over 40%, but with the credit crunch affecting all sectors of the economy, new projects could drop by as much as 50%, without help from the Federal government.