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Interesting that EWEA develops this kind of tool.

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.

The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian. According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It's big but not immense -- maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who's there to indicate scale.

My Clean Break column today is actually more of a feature looking at compressed-air energy storage (CAES) and how Ontario, geologically, would be an excellent location to give it a try. About 50,000 natural gas and oil wells have been drilled in southwestern Ontario over the past 150 years and most of them are depleted. Turns out that depleted gas fields are one of several types of underground reservoir that can be used to store compressed air. Salt caverns are another option, and we have plenty of those as well. In fact, 60 per cent of Canada's natural gas storage is in the region. Compressing and storing air wouldn't be that different technically. Another benefit is that southwestern Ontario has strong wind resources, so building a 1,000 MW-plus CAES facility on its own or as part of a partnership with area wind developers could prove quite economical. The idea, of course, is that cheap wind power generated overnight when demand is down could be used to compress and store the air. The air could then be released to generate electricity during daytime peaks, making wind a dispatchable resource in Ontario and more of a realistic replacement for coal power as it gets phased out of the province. Surplus overnight nuclear power, when we have it (mostly during the summer), could also be stored this way.

A new international research project which could one day lead to a new source of safe, abundant clean energy for Earth was launched today by scientists, engineers and Ministers from across Europe, at a special event and press conference at the Science Museum in London. Today's launch event marks the start of a three year planning and preparatory phase of the European High Power Energy Research Facility ( HiPER ) project. This is the first step towards HiPER's long term goal, which is to facilitate the technological and scientific advances necessary to make nuclear fusion, which powers the sun, a possible source of energy in the future.

Wind comes out the clear winner. Concentrated solar power, geothermal, solar photovoltaics, tidal, wave, are good additions to the mix. Hydroelectric is added for its load balancing ability. Nuclear and coal are less beneficial. Corn and cellulosic ethanol should not be included in policy options. Hopefully, the next administration will be wise enough to follow Pr. Jakobson's recommendation . . . and align its subsidies with the right kind of technologies.

Shell highlights the view that renewable energy solutions are some way from offering a large-scale solution to our planets growing energy needs. The matters of finance and technology development breakthroughs appear to be the largest barriers to market, according to Shell. This view supports the notion that the world will be powered by a mix of fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy for the forseeable future.   

"So it is not a matter of choice, do we do coal, or oil, or nuclear? The world will need everything, including biofuels. You name it."

Highlights of the energy year 2007

The U.K. Business Secretary John Hutton, who earlier this month pledged to support new nuclear plants, said the government will consider whether to back a tidal power project with an output equivalent to five reactors. The government will study proposals including a dam between England and Wales that would produce 8,640 megawatts of power by 2020, enough to meet 5 percent of U.K. demand, the minister said today in a statement. It will also assess plans by Tidal Electric Ltd. to build a walled pool to produce 60 megawatts.

Ah Severn and Cape Cod - just build the bloody things, or be silent forever.

In the spectrum of the simplest solutions (turning lights off) and the most complex (fusion), you've categorised this solution at the right end of the spectrum