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“Australia is an energy-efficiency laggard among developed nations and if the Government is to deliver on its election promise of putting Australia ‘at the forefront of OECD energy efficiency improvement’ it needs decisive efficiency initiatives in addition to an emissions trading scheme,”

The paper indicates that Australia has largely untapped its energy saving potential – up to around 70% in the residential and commercial sector and up to 46% in the manufacturing sector.

MAGINE having to call an IT help desk to fix your central heating when it breaks down. That's not such a bizarre notion if a plan by engineers at IBM in Switzerland goes ahead. A cooling system they have developed allows the waste heat from computer chips to be put to use for domestic heating.

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.

Now there are some new twists and turns—essentially, three very positive developments that would not have been generally anticipated a decade ago. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.

A brief general picture of the world, european and italian energy situations is made, analyzing several different energy sources and paying attention to the relations energy-quality of life, energy-environment and energy-health. Then will be discussed fossil fuels, renewable energies, the role of electric energy, nuclear energy, energy savings, the greenhouse effect, a possible sustainable development, the hydrogen economy and the risk and its perception. Then follow the conclusions and perspectives.

Ford Motor Company has developed an intelligent charging system that previews how its production vehicles will interact with the grid. The unnamed system enables all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle owners to restrict charging to when electricity prices fall below a certain threshold, or even “when the grid is using only renewable energy such as wind or solar power,” according to Ford.

One of the more aggressive developers is Ford, which has test vehicles on the road as part of its plan to bring electrified vehicles to market over the next four years. Although not alone in its drive to capture this potentially valuable market, Ford’s strategy and product range reflects the market sentiments; primarily that there is no silver bullet. To be successful requires a portfolio of technologies.

The study concludes that developments are required in planning a European grid to ensure that investments are made in the right places, in the way the grid is operated so that maximum benefi t is extracted from a given infrastructure, and in transmission technologies so that effective options are available for environmental, operational, energy efficiency and investment considerations. Specific recommendations are made in each of these areas.

This report provides a Europe-wide resource assessment of onshore and offshore wind potential in a geographically explicit manner. In addition to calculating raw wind resource potential, this study also introduces and quantitatively analyses the environmental and social constraints on wind sector development. Concerns addressed include the noise and visual impact of wind power, as well as the deaths of birds and bats that fly into rotor blades. The report also evaluates the future costs of wind energy production across Europe in order to gauge the potential output at competitive rates.