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Every occupant in a building creates demand for lighting, ventilation, thermal comfort, and electrical power. Lighting, heating, and cooling unoccupied spaces is a huge source of energy waste in buildings, and many studies have shown that building occupancy profiles have a significant impact on building energy use and operational controls. Closer alignment of occupancy patterns to building equipment schedules can be an effective low-cost/no-cost energy efficiency strategy leading to more intelligent control of buildings, a better balance between occupant comfort and energy savings, and lower utility bills. This includes, but is not limited to, HVAC temperature set points, lighting schedules, and economizer schedules.

This paper examines both the potential of and barriers to grid-scale energy storage playing a substantive role in transitioning to an efficient, reliable and cost-effective power system with a high penetration of renewable energy sources. Grid-scale storage is a term that describes a number of different technologies with a wide range of characteristics. This versatility leads to the use of storage to perform a number of grid-services. We first enumerate these services, with an emphasize on those that are best suited to mitigate the effects of uncertainty and variability associated with intermittent, non-dispatchable renewable energy sources. We then provide an overview of the current methods to evaluate grid-integrated storage, summarize key findings, and highlight ongoing challenges to large-scale adoption of grid-scale energy storage. We focus on one particular area that is critical to both the efficient use of energy storage in the power grid and its long-term economic viability: the conflict between the technical benefits of this resource, which can provide both power and energy related grid-services (in some cases simultaneously), and the economic challenges of compensating these services within the current market structures. We then examine recent progress in addressing these issues through regulatory changes and other initiatives designed to mitigate previous market failures. This discussion is followed by some remarks about ongoing regulatory and market design challenges. The paper closes with a summary of the ideas presented and a discussion of critical research needs.

The International Copper Association (ICA) is the leading authority on the fundamentals of future copper demand and substitution. ICA’s portfolio of material demand and substitution work covers global studies, surveys and detailed data sets. Full studies and data sets are used by ICA and its members for market development purposes, and select information is available to market commentators.

President Barack Obama today announced that the Federal Government will reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution by 28 percent by 2020. Reducing and reporting GHG pollution, as called for in Executive Order 13514 on Federal Sustainability, will ensure that the Federal Government leads by example in building the clean energy economy. Actions taken under this Executive Order will spur clean energy investments that create new private-sector jobs, drive long-term savings, build local market capacity, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in clean energy industries.

ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has won an order to supply amorphous dry-type transformers from its recently launched EcoDryTM line, for a real estate project being executed by the ZheJiang WanAn Real-Estate Co. Ltd.

The Roadmap 2050 project sets out the crucial role of a zero-carbon power sector to Europe’s long-term climate commitments and shows different pathways that can make this a reality delivering economic and energy security goals. The Roadmap is based on extensive technical, economic and policy analyses conducted by five leading consultancies: Imperial College London, KEMA, McKinsey & Company, Oxford Economics, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, in addition to the involvement of utilities, transmission operators and NGOs.

Trina Solar Limited (NYSE: TSL) ("Trina Solar" or the "Company"), a leading integrated manufacturer of solar photovoltaic products from the production of ingots, wafers and cells to the assembly of PV modules, today announced the inauguration of the largest rooftop solar system in Europe with a capacity of 40MW.

Taking the holistic view, one can understand how some of the most basic conditions of life are threatened by a basic contradiction. Civilization, the quintessential expression of Enlightenment values that relies on ever-expanding energy, threatens to reduce humanity to barbarism if not extinction through exactly such energy production.

or every farmer or rancher who has leased his land for drilling, there are many homeowners living nearby who get nothing but the shitty end of the stick: pollution, noise and a loss of property value.

What gives the film its power is the attention paid to people like Stevens who organized petition drives and showed up at town council meetings to voice their opposition to fracking. They look like Tea Party activists or Walmart shoppers, mostly white and plain as a barn door, but they know that they do not want drilling in their townships and are willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent it. For all of the left’s dismay about its lack of power, the film’s closing credits reveal that there are 312 local anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania made up of exactly such people who will likely be our allies as the environmental crisis deepens.

The renewable energy super-grid is planned to become operational in 2020 and will involve Europe's leading utilities, who will share part of the massive price tag.   The project would be the first multinational grid designed to address the fluctuating nature of green power generation, one of the main challenges slowing down the share of renewables in the baseload energy mix.   Energy from power produced from the wind farms at night could be stored in Norway's hydropower facilities to be released the following day; helping to secure a more stable energy supply.