Clean Energy Transition

The report, according to the news source, outlined that roughly 20 percent of commercial buildings with the highest potential energy savings averaged 43 percent in potential reductions, while the bottom 20 percent averaged only 5 percent in potential savings.

Given a choice between meeting the EU’s target of getting 20% of energy – and 35% of the EU’s electricity mix – from renewables by 2020 or keeping the system stable, “I would rather say that system stability and avoiding blackouts is more important,” she said.

In theory, there are several basic economic and psychological motivators that motivate people to be more sustainable. It is easy assume that providing people with information that using less energy is more cost-effective would motivate a shift toward conservation. However, Fischlein observed that there is often an “energy-efficiency gap,” or a difference between what is economically efficient and what actually gets done. Fischlein stated that “more information alone is not enough,” as increasing awareness has been shown to increase knowledge while motivating little behavioral change.   According to Fischlein, even raising the price of energy might not promote a decrease in consumption because energy exhibits low price elasticity. She also observed “psychological licensing” related to energy use, which effectively means that people lose a sense of moral responsibility for their actions because they have to pay to consume. Motivating altruistic conservation is also difficult because energy use is not visible, so people cannot see the impact of their actions in any direct way.

But a deeper analysis requested by the Guardian shows that only one in three homes, or about 10.3m households, will see the predicted reductions in their combined bills as a result of installing one or more of the renewable energy or efficiency measures, or receiving the Warm Home Discount for low-income and vulnerable households. Meanwhile the majority of bill payers, 19.1m, will see an average increase in their bills, over and above the extra costs of rising fossil fuel prices and huge investment in the electricity grid.

The task force recommendations include: creating a national database of survey data, with information from DECC, The Crown Estate and, at the appropriate time, developers - to reduce duplication and minimise cost and time introducing common standards in data collection and assessment to ensure developers can use methodologies consistently and with confidence using mandatory multilateral consultation to engage other sea users (fisheries, shipping, recreational users, communities, etc) at the earliest opportunity, before applications increasing resources in Marine Scotland (on cost-recovery basis) to provide required environment specialists for efficient scoping and application processes prioritising early work to identify potential sites for new test facilities, including deep water offshore wind technologies

The Scottish Government’s small business loans scheme offers interest free loans of up to £100,000 to help save energy or install renewable energy technologies. Over 100 Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) have already taken loans worth £2.5 million this financial year, the most in any one year since the scheme started in 2008, with estimated lifetime energy savings of 30,000 Megawatt hours.

Ukraine seeks to reduce its current dependency on gas imports. To address the issue, a number of initiatives are being taken which are aimed at boosting energy efficiency, introducing energy saving technologies and renewable energy resources. The feed-in tariffs effective since April 2009, rank among the highest in Europe, which considering the saturated European market, makes Ukraine especially luring for the foreign investors in the field. As forecasted by the government, in the next 3-4 years Ukraine will be able to attract about 3 billion dollars of private investments for the development of renewable energy production.

Recently, a research team in the UK has combined renewables to form energy-generating ribbons with great potential. The team, from the Institute for Materials Research and Innovation at the University of Bolton near Manchester in the UK, considered the fact that weather, especially in Britain, is highly unpredictable and decided to make a material that used more than one type of weather to produce electricity.

Edinburgh Napier University transformed pott ale and draff from the making of whisky into fuel to run a vehicle, and now the university has turned that process into a business called Celtic Renewables Ltd.!

Google's energy team developed aggressive "breakthrough" cost/performance levels for solar photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), on-shore and off-shore wind, geothermal including Enhanced Geothermal Systems, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), nuclear, Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), Battery Electric Vehicles (EV), rapid and long discharge grid-storage, and natural gas.

As I see it, to prove that, it would be necessary to have sensors at all locations (or at least a large number of locations) where it would be reasonably possible to have wind and solar power installations. The data would have to be transmitted, in real-time, to a central location where it would be continuously analyzed to see how much power would be available reliably with no interruptions. So far as I know, that has never been done.

The boom in cheap natural gas in this country is good news for the environment, because relatively clean gas is replacing dirty coal-fired power plants. But in the long run, cheap natural gas could slow the growth of even cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar power.

Solar installers and manufacturers certainly saw good news on that front last year. Forbes reports that an analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance found a record level of investment in clean energy in 2011. The renewable energy sector saw around $260 billion invested worldwide last year, a 5 percent increase.

The Drive Technologies division of Siemens Industry, Inc. announced an industry first in the launch of its online Energy Savings Estimator, a user-friendly tool that allows customers using drives, motors, couplings and gearboxes the ability to estimate potential energy savings across their entire drive train.

The Arkansas Energy Office (AEO), a division of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, today announced 'Track and Save',  a new program that will allow library patrons the opportunity to check out kilowatt meters from public libraries throughout Arkansas to measure energy use at home.

The report says that officials continue to drag their feet on energy-saving renovations, only using a little over half of the nearly $186 million granted California for efficiency projects by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009.