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A new approach to selling and recharging electric cars could overcome some of the basic issues that have kept them from being widely adopted. A startup called Project Better Place, which had the largest of any venture-funding round in 2007, raising $200 million, recently announced plans to install recharging infrastructure in Israel and Denmark and to sell electric cars using a business model much like that used today with cell phones.

There is, however, a third way. In Denmark and Germany-world leaders in wind energy development-many commercial-scale wind turbines are installed as single units or in small clusters distributed across the countryside, or scattered around and sometimes within urban agglomerations. And many of these turbines are either owned by the farmers on whose land the turbine stands, or by local residents.

An idealized application for superconductors is to employ them in the transmission of commercial power to cities. However, due to the high cost and impracticality of cooling miles of superconducting wire to cryogenic temperatures, this has only happened with short "test runs". In May of 2001 some 150,000 residents of Copenhagen, Denmark, began receiving their electricity through HTS (high-temperature superconducting) material. That cable was only 30 meters long, but proved adequate for testing purposes. In the summer of 2001 Pirelli completed installation of three 400-foot HTS cables for Detroit Edison at the Frisbie Substation capable of delivering 100 million watts of power. This marked the first time commercial power has been delivered to customers of a US power utility through superconducting wire. Intermagnetics General has announced that its IGC-SuperPower subsidiary has joined with BOC and Sumitomo Electric in a $26 million project to install an underground, HTS power cable in Albany, New York, in Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation's power grid. Sumitomo Electric's DI-BSCCO cable was employed in the first in-grid power cable demonstration project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and New York Energy Research & Development Authority. After connecting to the grid successfully on July 2006, the DI-BSCCO cable has been supplying the power to approximately 70,000 households without any problems. The long-term test will be completed in the 2007-2008 timeframe.

As a case study of a successful approach, let’s take a look at what Spain has been able to accomplish. Spain has tackled its development of renewable energy sources aggressively. With 11,615 megawatts (MW) of installed wind capacity at the end of last year, Spain is second in the world to Germany in capacity (and about on par with the United States). The 23,372,000 MWh generated in 2006 provided just over 8.5% of Spain’s electricity: only Denmark boasts a higher percentage.

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark created a refrigerator that uses magnets to cool instead of electricity by finding a cooling method which uses magnetic materials instead of electricity.

The Dutch and Danish power grid operators have announced they are to carry out a feasibility study into the possibility of an underwater electricity cable between the two countries, reports ANP news service. The two firms say the so-called Cobra cable will facilitate the use of renewable power. 'Strong connections between European countries can significantly increase how much wind power can be distributed on European grids,' Peter Jorgensen, one of the directors of Enereginet is quoted as saying. On Thursday the NorNed cable between the Netherlands and Norway – at 580 kms the longest underwater power cable in the world – was officially opened by the Dutch economic affairs minister Mara van der Hoeven. The cable has been operational since May.