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What do Seattle, Austin and New York have in common? They've all enacted regulations to expose energy-wasting buildings. Owners of large buildings will have to disclose their energy scores to prospective buyers, tenants and lenders.

10). Magic Box: 60 Minutes reports that the magic behind the Bloom Box starts with the company baking basic sand and cutting it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic, which are then coated with green and black “inks.” Using a special process Bloom creates these ceramic discs and stacks them together interspersed with metal plates of “a cheap metal alloy.” The bigger the stack the more power the Bloom Box will create.

German engineering giant Siemens is looking to throw some money at solar and wind power in India now. It is going to invest $346 million in India’s renewable energy sector over the next three years. Peter Löscher, Siemens’ chief executive, said the firm will increase its Indian workforce by about 50 per cent to 25,000 people and about a third of the investment will be for development of wind turbine technology. It is putting some into solar technology development there as well. India is a major growth market, in general, and renewable energy is no exception.

Most of the 220,000 U.S. Postal Service vehicles only travel 20 to 25 miles per day making them a good match with the range of an electric vehicle. Hundreds of stops make hybrids and electrics ideal for capturing braking energy and regenerating the batteries.

There are some low-volume passenger car manufacturers, but all make vehicles aimed at high priced specially markets, not low to mid priced daily drivers.

The basic idea is that specially designed hydraulic wind turbines are used to compress nitrogen into existing gas or oil pipeline infrastructure, some of it unused throughout North America. Several hundred, even thousand, kilometres of pipeline could be filled with nitrogen and kept under pressure, in effect becoming a kind of massive nitrogen battery for wind. When electricity needs to be generated anywhere along the pipeline, the nitrogen gas is released and expands to turn a turbine that generates electricity. Wind, under this setup, suddenly becomes dispatchable and has baseload characteristics. Also, the pipeline eliminates the need for transmission lines.

According to the most recent issue of the “Monthly Energy Review” by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), renewable energy (i.e., biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, wind) provided 10.51% of domestic U.S. energy production during the first nine months of 2009 – the latest time-frame for which data has been published.

In this framework, and according to its mission, we have considered it appropriate to issue some recommendations on the priorities that the Spanish Government should consider to achieve the goal of a sustainable energy model at the Spanish and European level during its presidency. The selected priorities should have a high potential to reach the goal of a sustainable energy model. They should be politically affordable in today’s context, and require a European approach. They should build on the existing political momentum. And they should be few, after all six months is not a lot of time…Thus, our recommendation is to select four general priorities: • Decarbonization of the energy sector, • research and technology transfer on energy, • promotion of energy conservation, and • energy interconnections.

The California Public Utilities Commission has just voted unanimously to approve Southern California Edison’s plan to install scores of tiny (for a utility) 1 MW to 2 MW grid-connected systems scattered across the rooftops of commercial buildings throughout the utility’s Southern California service area - to eventually add up to a half Gigawatt of distributed solar power.

Un porte-parole du RCA a révélé lors du Consumer Electronics Show 2010 (CES), un chargeur de batterie qui utilise le WiFi pour délivrer de l'électricité, en effet le module capte et converti les signaux WiFi en courant continu.

So what is a green job? Well green jobs are architects and engineers that build buildings, design buildings that operate at extremely low energy use. They are people that design, manufacture, and install devices in buildings ranging from high-tech windows to lighting to sensors and controls and electronics. It means looking at radically new industrial processes which simply replace previous kinds of industrial manufacturing with sophisticated bionumetics and nanotech approaches, to cutting down the material intensity and energy intensity of production, this is the kind of thing you need to do to stay competitive in the modern world.

Here’s one electricity storage technology that’s been around for over 20 years, under the radar, but might be due for a resurgence in interest with the addition of more wind power to the grid.  Wind tends to blow at night when we don’t need it.

In a "net zero energy cost building," the purchases and credits from imported and exported energy are a wash. It's a purely financial metric, driven largely by local utility rates. A "net zero energy emissions building" uses only emissions-free power sources, like wind or hydroelectric, or it buys offsets or credits to compensate for any carbon-emitting power it does buy. That doesn't make the building carbon neutral, which is a whole other story. For more on that, listen to the Energy:Minute titled "The Meaning of Zero."