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Does the paper fully take the quality of various energy carriers into account? Does it merit an article on units & exergy?

Two strong potential candidates for the Next Big Thing in cleantech venture capital are nuclear and carbon capture and storage. I've spoken with numerous VCs recently who are looking for innovative ways to play in nuclear power. Bets have already been made by VCs in small-scale nukes, hot fusion, and technologies related to big-scale nukes. The hope is to find a low-cost solution that is practically zero carbon emissions and also provides reliable "base load" power. So in other words, the hope is for a lower-carbon replacement for coal power. The challenges are also significant, however, not least of which being time to market for any new innovations, as this interesting article illustrates. With the recent news that the DOE will be putting $2.4B into carbon capture and storage, and its inclusion in emerging climate legislation, it's also clear that CCS will be leaned upon as a hoped-for way of making our existing coal-fired generation infrastructure less impactful on the atmosphere, while still preserving its value as low-cost baseload power. So in other words, the hope is for a lower-carbon "fix" for coal power.

Geothermal in the Oil Field Symposium August 18-19, 2010 Casper, Wyoming Thank you to everyone who attended the first Geothermal in the Oil Field Symposium. We hope that you enjoyed your time in Casper. If you have questions or need more information about the symposium, Contact Us.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is giving the healthcare industry access to its expertise in energy efficiency through the Hospital Energy Alliance (HEA) in a bid to drive down consumption in the sector.

MPI's generator technology exhibits electrical performance very similar to chemical batteries except that the output voltage does not gradually decline with time, but remains indefinitely constant. Variations can readily be scaled to produce 1 kW of electricity. These 1 kW generators will be modular. They can be combined to fulfill larger power requirements.

When a story sounds too good to be true ...

Riverbank does pumped hydro storage, but not like conventional projects that require the right geography and topology (i.e. a large natural reservoir hundreds of metres over lake level).

IF YOU are locked eyeball to eyeball with an adversary as wily as Iran, it does not make much sense to do something that emboldens your opponent and sows defeatism among your friends. But that, it is now clear, is precisely what America's spies achieved when they said in December that, contrary to their own previous assessments, Iran stopped its secret nuclear-weapons programme in 2003.

"The weaknesses of federal regulatory agencies have been exposed by recent high-profile accidents. Guest columnist Tom Carpenter fears the Department of Energy will reduce its oversight of cleanup at the nation's nuclear waste sites. By Tom Carpenter Special to The Times PREV of NEXT Related Millions of gallons of oil gush continue to rush unabated from BP's mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico, and 11 workers are dead from the massive explosion that caused the biggest oil spill in decades. Weeks before this event, the news was dominated by the preventable explosion that killed 29 West Virginia coal miners. In both cases, the not-so surprising news was that the mine and the oil rig had abysmal records of safety violations before the explosions yet were still allowed to operate by the captive regulatory agencies. Where is the government accountability? It is the government's job to assure that ultra-hazardous industries operate safely and responsibly. Is nuclear next? The Department of Energy sits on the nation's biggest nuclear nightmare. Its inventories of highly radioactive and toxic wastes defy comprehension. Washingtonians are familiar with the DOE's No. 1 accomplishment, the Hanford nuclear site, which holds the lion's share of the nation's radioactive detritus. Suffice it to say that the escape of even a small fraction of such material into the environment would constitute a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe."

"The U.S. Departments of Energy and the Interior have picked a former nuclear site in Nevada to be transformed into a zone for testing "cutting-edge" solar energy technologies. The research will take place on 25 square miles of land owned by the Interior's Bureau of Land Management, an area larger than the size of Manhattan, the Energy Department said today in a statement. The area lies in the southwest corner of the Nevada Test Site, about 65 miles (104.6 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, where the U.S. military used to detonate atomic weapons. The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration will oversee the project, according to the statement. "

Domestic energy is getting expensive, but what does that mean compared to the situation in our parents' or grandparents' days? Should we grumble?

It is true that electricity prices in the UK are now similar, measured in terms loaves of bread, to what they were in 1960. What is different is our attitude to waste. Then, lights were functional, not decorative, electric heating was used only when really needed, never casually. And left over bread was made into toast, bread pudding or whatever. These days we seem to accept huge waste of two resources that we are becoming short of - food and energy.