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The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently approved the nation's most stringent energy efficiency standards for residential and commercial buildings, and the new requirements for the thermal performance of windows are expected to contribute ...

Or the limited effectiveness of top-down programs without bottom-up support.

"Shippingefficiency.org is a free-access, beta data-hub designed for ship owners, operators, charterers, ports, insurance companies, shipbrokers and other stakeholders, to factor in vessel efficiency information when making business decisions"

Good catch Phil, and nice efficiency.

PARIS (Reuters) - France may extend a system aimed at encouraging people to buy more fuel-efficient cars to products such as electronics, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told business daily Les Echos.

There's a problem with this mythology: sometimes there's no invisible hand. Sometimes short-sighted government regulations give preference to bad technologies over good ones - stifling innovation and blinding us to our own ability to make progress.

I added the tag 'USA' to this bookmark. It is not the case in Europe, where efficiency has improved steadily. But it's also a debate of apples and oranges. Nuclear, fossil and renewable energy are as different as cricket, baseball and golf bats. And we do not calculate batting averages accross them.

My colleague Inês gave a webinar recently on her work on energy efficiency supply curves titled: "The US Energy Savings Potential and Who Pays for It". Watch the webinar for free here. Energy use and CO2 emissions from the residential sector are distributed among a variety of household services, each of which may use different fuels at different intensities. Efficiency supply curves help policymakers determine where the low-hanging fruit are for GHG mitigation.

A proposal from the European Commission (EC) would allow member states to co-finance the installation of energy efficiency measures in the lowest income households.

The most efficient form of solar technology today is (arguably) extreme concentrated photovoltaics, essentially solar panels placed under a magnifying glass, but the problem with these systems is heat. Concentrated sunlight can melt silicon solar panels unless you include specialized cooling systems. Cooling technology costs money, and the panels require expensive tracking mechanisms to follow the sun through the day. MIT's new solar system bypasses the heat and traching problems all together.

Batteries have to contain all of the chemicals on both sides of their energy releasing equation. The very best batteries available today can store about 0.4 MJ/kg (0.05 kw-hr/lb) including the cases and safety systems. In contrast, gasoline carries about 46 MJ/kg (5.7 kw-hrs/lb).\n\nEven with a 20% efficient IC engine, a gasoline tank stores 20 times as much energy as a battery of equal weight. As the vehicle is moving it gets rid of some of that weight. Battery powered vehicles must carry the full weight of their energy source.\n\nThe energy density difference also plays a key role in the time that it takes to put more energy back on the vehicle once a fuel load is consumed. A two minute fill-up of a 12 gallon tank puts the equivalent of 87 kilowatt-hours into the vehicle, again, taking into account the 20% thermal efficiency.\n\n87 kilowatt-hours in 2 minutes works out to 2.6 MegaWatts. Even with a 220 volt connection, that would require about 11,800 amperes of current. Just imagine the size of the electric cables for that current.\n\nThere are certainly places and applications where electric vehicles have a role, but it is worth remembering that at least five or six generations of engineers have looked very hard at trying to meet transportation needs and they keep coming back to the same fact - when you want to move a vehicle, you need power, (energy per unit time).

hed the new guidelines at its second annual technical forum in San Jose Wednesday. The Green Grid calls it the Data Center 2.0 program, which it says will create a "multi-year set of design guides proposed for use by data center operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers."

In electrical applications, aluminum can do everything that copper can, but more efficiently and economically. Aluminum provides up to twice the conductivity per pound of copper (dependent on the specific alloy and application) at less than half the cost per pound (based upon current prices) for a 400% economic-efficiency advantage over copper.