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Food prices were going up, he said, because people in developing countries like China, India and Brazil itself were simply eating more as their economic conditions improved.

It's not always about numbers and science. The general appeal for this idea might make it work, even though - from an engineering viewpoint - it's like trying to build a fortune saving nickels and dimes.

seems like just yesterday I was talking about smart grid stuff. There's more news: Tendril Networks, a smart grid start-up, has announced all the goods on its networked in-home energy display, called Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem (TREE).

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing. That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore's hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

"China, the world leader in wind power by installed capacity, is facing a growing problem with grid connection as more than half of the electricity its wind farms generate goes unused."

Good catch. Such lack of coordinated planning is not unusual in a start-up, but let's hope it will be just that - a temporary mismatch in the synchronisation of planning 2 major infrastructure projects (wind power generation & transmission networks).

This Wired article summarizes and links to a poster for the American Geophysical Union meetings (pdf) from Elaine Hart, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Her power flow simulation suggests that the existing transmission network in California can accommodate up to 70% of renewables in the portfolio on a hot summer day. The number of overloaded lines in the simulation rises from 11 to 31, which is not that large an increase given that there are almost 5,000 transmission lines in California. Still, this kind of work can be really useful to help target transmission investment. The Wired article also has some good links for further reading. I look forward to seeing more of this research!

This week, a coalition of scientific societies and university organizations is slated to hand the Obama and McCain campaigns detailed steps and budget estimates for improving America's ability to monitor and forecast climate trends and severe weather. This October, the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), based at the University of Colorado at Denver, is expected to offer up an exhaustive agenda for a president's first 100 and 1,000 days.