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The commonly accepted wisdom in the energy industry is that the grid could only draw something like 20 percent of its power from wind and solar resources before encountering major reliability problems. But the new power flow simulation (.pdf), presented for the first time this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting, shows that, at least in California, the power grid might be able to handle three times that much renewable energy without encountering major trouble pushing electrons around the state.

GM's engineers have been flogging the mules -- known formally as "engineering development vehicles" -- pretty hard for a couple of months now and they've got the lithium-ion batteries and electric drivetrain pretty much sorted. Lutz finally got a chance to take one of the range-extended electric vehicles for a spin and notes on his blog, "While the car is still most definitely a work in progress, the thrill of driving electrically -- that instant, silent torque -- is certainly present and accounted for."

An idealized application for superconductors is to employ them in the transmission of commercial power to cities. However, due to the high cost and impracticality of cooling miles of superconducting wire to cryogenic temperatures, this has only happened with short "test runs". In May of 2001 some 150,000 residents of Copenhagen, Denmark, began receiving their electricity through HTS (high-temperature superconducting) material. That cable was only 30 meters long, but proved adequate for testing purposes. In the summer of 2001 Pirelli completed installation of three 400-foot HTS cables for Detroit Edison at the Frisbie Substation capable of delivering 100 million watts of power. This marked the first time commercial power has been delivered to customers of a US power utility through superconducting wire. Intermagnetics General has announced that its IGC-SuperPower subsidiary has joined with BOC and Sumitomo Electric in a $26 million project to install an underground, HTS power cable in Albany, New York, in Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation's power grid. Sumitomo Electric's DI-BSCCO cable was employed in the first in-grid power cable demonstration project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and New York Energy Research & Development Authority. After connecting to the grid successfully on July 2006, the DI-BSCCO cable has been supplying the power to approximately 70,000 households without any problems. The long-term test will be completed in the 2007-2008 timeframe.

DOE and SuperPower, Inc. commemorated on February 21 a $27 million project to install a 350-meter high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cable between two electrical substations in Albany. While that might not sound like much cable for the money, the project is the first demonstration of a technology that could someday be used to build a more energy efficient power grid. The HTS cable reduces energy loss by up to 10%, and wires using the same technology could potentially be integrated into generators, transformers, cables, and fault current limiters, making most of the equipment that produces and delivers power more energy efficient. On the other end of the power line, HTS wires can be employed in motors, providing an energy efficiency improvement for one of the largest electrical loads served by electric utilities.

Forty years ago, Harold Hay, 98, invented a simple, inexpensive way to heat and cool a home using the sun’s rays, but without the panels and wiring that come with conventional solar energy systems. He’s been pushing for its adoption ever since, trying to find footing in each of the solar industry’s last three boom-and-bust cycles. Yet, despite the merits of his pioneering technology, the energy establishment has shown only fleeting interest.

a small group of scientists are working on a method that will let you keep using gas: make gas into a renewable resource by recycling the carbon dioxide to help create more gas