The UK faces widespread power cuts for the first time since the 1970s, according to the Government’s own predictions. Demand for electricity from homes and businesses is set to exceed the available supply within eight years.

Something about this reminds us of Desertec: ambitious, expensive (though not in the same league as the €400bn Desertec), and with a bunch of big name vendors involved (apparently - there is no sign of it on either Mitsubishi’s or IHI’s websites). It’s also a long way off and far from certain.

The study concludes that developments are required in planning a European grid to ensure that investments are made in the right places, in the way the grid is operated so that maximum benefi t is extracted from a given infrastructure, and in transmission technologies so that effective options are available for environmental, operational, energy efficiency and investment considerations. Specific recommendations are made in each of these areas.

The diagram below displays affordability and effectiveness (the top right-hand label should read ‘High effectiveness/high affordability’, not ‘low affordability’). And yes, on these measures alone, stratospheric aerosols - one of the more dramatic proposals - do pretty well:

But there may be another way. A radical intelligent highway design utilizing solar panels, LED lighting, and heating elements has been awarded funding by the Department of Transportation to the tune of $100,000. Will the Solar Highway soon replace asphalt, and how will we all adapt to driving on glass?

An engineering company claimed it could produce electricity simply by wiring a nail in the tree’s trunk to a metal rod in the ground.

Do high oil prices cause recessions? The US economist James Hamilton is famous for his 1983 finding that oil price spikes had preceded all but one post-war US recessions[1]. Hamilton recently claimed that the current recession can be fully accounted for by the high oil prices of 2007-08. But while oil prices are certainly an important macroeconomic variable, it is just not plausible that they have anything like the impact that Hamilton suggests.

Rwanda will join the rest of Africa to urge developed countries to reduce their carbon emissions by 40 percent come 2050.

One of the more intriguing examples was from an inventor named Steve LeRoy who has developed a system to harness energy from lightning bolts.

Abstract Many are interested in China’s energy situation, however, numerous energy related issues in China still remain unanswered, for example, what are the potential forces driving energy demand and supply? Previous reviews focused only on fossil fuel based energy and ignored other important elements including renewable and ‘clean ’ energy sources. The work presented here is intended to fill this gap by bringing the research on fossil-based and renewable energy economic studies together and identifying the potential drivers behind both energy demand and supply to provide a complete picture of China’s energy situation in the new millennium. This will be of interest to anyone concerned with the development of China’s economy in general and the energy economy, in particular.

Germany launched a campaign Wednesday to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2020, making battery research a priority as it tries to position the country as a market leader.

IBM is focusing on Lithium-Air batteries, which the company said has the potential to pack up to 10 times the power stored in Lithium-Ion batteries commonly found in cell phones and laptops.

Unilever, maker of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is pondering how to make an ice cream that is made, shipped and sold warm, with the consumer taking the final step of actually freezing the product.

This “reverse auction market” feed-in tariff is designed to avoid the pitfalls the have plagued efforts in Europe to encourage development of renewable energy by paying artificially high rates for electricity produced by solar power plants or rooftop photovoltaic projects.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) installation and monitoring firm, The Power Company, on Monday said that there were numerous benefits to the inclusion of small-scale solar PV systems under the renewable energy feed-in tariff (Refit).

Ford Motor Company has developed an intelligent charging system that previews how its production vehicles will interact with the grid. The unnamed system enables all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle owners to restrict charging to when electricity prices fall below a certain threshold, or even “when the grid is using only renewable energy such as wind or solar power,” according to Ford.

A Chinese company set a new world record in solar power efficiency this week. According to the company, Suntech Power Holdings, they achieved a 15.6% conversion efficiency on “a commercial grade multi-crystalline silicon PV module.” This breaks a 15-year-old world record set by US company Sandia National Labs.

People make environmental choices the same way they manage money, preferring smaller gains right away to bigger gains later, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

The energy trends of the past and their likely evolution in the next 50 years have been analyzed in the light of technological progress. It is concluded that society will tend to become less centralized than in the past and that it is possible to have future per capita values of energy consumption at the world level similar to those at present, with a substantial redistribution to allow for economic growth of the less developed countries. A condition for this is increasing penetration of electricity. The rationale for the suggested scenario is described, and prospects for electricity for both the industrialized and developing countries are discussed.