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Manufacturers of refrigerator-sized nuclear reactors will seek approval from U.S. authorities within a year to help supply the world's growing electricity demand. John Deal, chief executive officer of Hyperion Power Generation Inc., intends to apply for a license "within a year" for plants that would power a small factory or town too remote for traditional utility grid connections. The Santa Fe, New Mexico-based company and Japan's Toshiba Corp. are vying for a head start over reactor makers General Electric Co. and Areva SA in downsizing nuclear technology and aim to submit license applications in the next year to U.S. regulators. They're seeking to tap a market that has generated about $135 billion in pending orders for large nuclear plants.

The connector between France and Spain is supposed to be the easy part.

" Renewable energy sources could be used at scale by 2050 if supported by an efficient European transmission grid and a single European power market united with similar grids and markets in North Africa. This is shown in a new report released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers. A group of energy and climate experts from the company in collaboration with researchers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the European Climate Forum (ECF) have examined possible transformation paths for the European and North African power sector. A transformation of the power sector based on one hundred percent renewables would address energy security and supply concerns while decarbonising electricity generation and at the same time reduce energy poverty, the report says."

IBM and researchers from Harvard University launched a joint effort today to identify more efficient and lower-cost solar cell materials using distributed computing. Leveraging small amounts of computing power from potentially hundreds of thousands of personal computers, this latest addition to the company's World Community Grid platform will process more than 1 million configurations of atoms over the next two years in search of an organic molecule that can be used to make materials for an ultra-efficient plastic photovoltaic cell.

The World Bank hopes to bring modern lighting to one-fourth of Africa's people by developing markets for products not hostage to fossil fuels or the continent's lamentable electricity grid. The bank and its private investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), say their "Lighting Africa" programme aims to bring light to 250 million sub-Saharan Africans cut off from existing power infrastructure by 2030. "Modern lighting will mean improved air quality and safety for millions of people in Africa," S. Vijay Iyer, the bank's energy sector manager for Africa, said in a statement. "It will mean longer reading hours for students and longer business hours for small shops."

This standard is intended to serve as the communications protocol for smart grids as well as providing WAN facilities to end users.

Chicago (IL) - Broadband over power lines is marching closer to actual availability. The P1901 Working Group today announced the release of the first draft defining medium access control and physical layer specifications for IEEE's Standard P1901. The draft was approved with more than 82% majority vote during a meeting held in Tokyo from July 21 - 24, the IEEE announced today. The initial version is based on technologies using FTT and Wavelet OFDM modulation schemes.

"Wave Hub on course for summer deployment 17 May 2010 Wave Hub, the pioneering marine energy project, is on course to be deployed this summer with fabrication of sub-sea cables and the hub itself nearing completion. Wave Hub will create the world's largest test site for wave energy technology by building a grid-connected socket on the seabed, 10 miles off the coast of Cornwall, to which wave power devices can be connected and their performance evaluated."

Increasing the amount of wind energy contributed to the electricity grid will not require large numbers of conventional coal- and gas-fired power plants to be kept on standby, according to a technical report published today. The report, commissioned by environmental groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, found that the UK's grid could cope with the variable energy input generated from wind farms.

"China, the world leader in wind power by installed capacity, is facing a growing problem with grid connection as more than half of the electricity its wind farms generate goes unused."

Good catch. Such lack of coordinated planning is not unusual in a start-up, but let's hope it will be just that - a temporary mismatch in the synchronisation of planning 2 major infrastructure projects (wind power generation & transmission networks).

Modern plants are often "combined cycle" generators, meaning that the exhaust of one engine is used as the heat source for another. The hot exhaust from the jet is used to boil water into steam, and the steam is used to turn a second turbine; if ...