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Oil plays a negligible role in power generation and therefore does not compete with renewables in this respect. Renewables have become the dominant source of new power generation capacity over the last six years because they are competitive at the bottom end of the conventional fossil fuel power generation cost range – primarily with coal.

Oil plays a much more important role in the transport sector, which accounts for half of total demand, and where without low-emission transport policies in place, an extended period of low oil prices, may impact the speed of electric vehicle adoption.

Conversely, oil price volatility may undermine the viability of unconventional oil and gas resources as well long-term contracts, providing a window of opportunity to reduce or redirect fossil fuel subsidies towards clean energy, while minimising the potential of social disruption.

Normally these academics would be fine without our fascination. They weren't looking for glory when they decided to study organisms most people either can't see or wish they hadn't. But when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, our collective bias toward cute big creatures started to matter a great deal. That's because the instant the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans, at least not on the scale of theExxon Valdez spill deaths, most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster. (Chilean miners down a hole—and they've got video diaries? Tell us more!)

Mike Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: "The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe." Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida's beaches—and that was an average day. Or that gulf residents and cleanup workers continue to report serious health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant and crude oil exposure.

For the scientists aboard the WeatherBird II, the recasting of the Deepwater Horizon spill as a good-news story about a disaster averted has not been easy to watch. Over the past seven months, they, along with a small group of similarly focused oceanographers from other universities, have logged dozens of weeks at sea in cramped research vessels, carefully measuring and monitoring the spill's impact on the delicate and little-understood ecology of the deep ocean. And these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented. Among their most striking findings are graveyards of recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities, and a mysterious brown liquid coating large swaths of the ocean floor, snuffing out life underneath.

Renewables are the fastest-growing source of world energy supply, but fossil fuels are still set to meet more than three-fourths of total energy needs in 2035 assuming current policies are unchanged

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) today released the complete version of the Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (AEO2010), which includes 38 sensitivity cases that show how different assumptions regarding market and policy drivers affect the Reference case projections that EIA previously released in December, 2009. In addition to considering alternative scenarios for oil prices, economic growth, and the uptake of more energy-efficient technologies, the AEO2010 includes cases that examine the impact of changes in selected policies, such as the extension of existing policies that are currently scheduled to sunset as well as the sensitivity of natural gas shale production to variations in drilling activity and the size of the resource base.

There’s a promising new entry in the race to build cheap batteries for storing energy from solar panels and wind turbines. Stanford researchers led by Yi Cui, a professor of materials science and engineering, have demonstrated a partially liquid battery made of inexpensive lithium and sulfur. Cui says the battery will be easy to make and will last for thousands of charging cycles. Cui believes that the material and manufacturing costs of the battery might be low enough to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of $100 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, which the DOE estimates will make the technology economically attractive to utilities. Existing batteries can cost hundreds of dollars per kilowatt-hour of capacity, although several companies are working to commercialize cheaper ones (see “Ambri’s Better Battery” and “Battery to Take On Diesel and Natural Gas”).

Many politicians are supportive, not least Barack Obama, the US president, who in October promised $3.4bn in grants to pay for smart grid equipment.However, an investment on that scale does no more than lay the foundations: a full smart grid for the US will require an investment that is orders of magnitude greater. The commercial and regulatory framework to deliver that investment has not yet been developed.

The epithet “smart” can be applied to a wide range of network technologies. But among industry leaders, there is broad agreement about what a smart grid entails: the use of intelligent devices at all points in the electricity network, from the high-voltage transmission lines to appliances in the home, that can send information and receive instructions.

Smart metering is a sexy topic in the energy world, with nearly all Western economies considering plans for large deployments.  It can be used in many different ways but normally there is more than one goal behind a smart metering deployment: In the US, smart metering was, for the most part, driven by the desire to reduce the costs associated with manual meter reading, to reduce peak load and to enhance security of supply. In Italy, one of the key drivers was tackling energy theft and the cost of managing meters. In Ontario, it was peak shaving and the move toward time-of-use pricing. But if smart meters have the potential to address a number of issues, that potential can only be realised by flexible system design and deployment, avoiding excessive rigidity. In this case, one size most certainly does not fit all. We fear that the UK’s current plans for a nationwide rollout of smart meters may well be taking us down the wrong path by imposing standard solutions on the wrong part of the system.