Deployed by Austin-based Incenergy LLC, the home smart grid systems capture minute-to-minute energy usage for the whole home and six major appliances or systems. The project achieved an installed cost per home of $341 ($241 for equipment plus $100 for installation).

Using detailed land analysis, Illinois researchers have found that biofuel crops cultivated on available land could produce up to half of the world’s current fuel consumption — without affecting food crops or pastureland.

As the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) draws to a close, I decided to tackle a topic that has been quietly popping up in many of the discussions and panel sessions this week.  In many places the topic of feed in tariffs is under heated debate.

“In private, the best-informed analysts now agree that Britain's environmental policies have put the country on track to have the world's most expensive electricity.”

PV solar proponents often claim because PV solar power “is there” during peak demand periods when higher spot prices are likely to occur, PV solar power should be evaluated against the higher spot prices for all hours of peak demand. 

An innovative program to build prototypes of multiple designs of small modular reactors (SMRs) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is getting off to a rocky start. The anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth (FOE) is charging that the Department of Energy (DOE) is trying to avoid having to submit the projects to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licenses to build them.

The rationale for continued cost declines that I encounter most often is based on volume: If we install more wind and solar capacity, costs will fall in a virtuous cycle, making subsequent installations cheaper and prompting even more of them. The underlying logic behind this argument derives from empirically observed "experience curves", in which cost components such as manufacturing fall by a set percentage for each doubling of cumulative output. The problem with these curves is that they tend to flatten out fairly quickly, delivering their maximum effect in the early years of a technology, when doublings are frequent.

In the latest Electric Power Research Institute Journal, an article titled "Hydropower Reservoirs: A Question of Emissions" notes that reservoirs used for hydropower and for pumped-hydro energy storage are not necessarily as green as you might imagine. Or rather, they might be too green: carbon-rich organic material that accumulates on the reservoir floor can be the source of carbon emissions. A recent study of the 90-year-old Lake Wohlen, in Switzerland, for example, found high emissions of methane, as recently reported in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, in an article titled: "Extreme Methane Emissions from a Swiss Hydropower Reservoir: Contribution from Bubbling Sediments."

As for being a NIMBY. If you like labels, then sure. Not In My Back Yard. Not In My Neighbours Back Yard and certainly Not In My Kids Back Yard.

You could make a lot of money and make no difference in climate