Clean Energy Transition

Right now, we have no idea what to do with this stuff. It's hard to imagine next century, let alone 15 million years from now. Do we really want to leave this stuff lying around? It will almost certainly escape from anywhere we put it.

Luckily, scientists are working on ways to avoid these long term problems. British scientists have 'transumted' iodine-129 into iodine-128 with a high-powered laser. Now, dropping one neutron might not seem like a big deal, but the half life of iodine-129 is 15 million years while the half life of iodine 128 is 25 minutes.

a number of the renewable energy-rich areas are too far from the electric transmission grid to render them useful. "We've made tremendous progress developing the transmission plan to bring electricity from the wind-rich Tehachapi Mountain area to Southern California customers. Our goal with RETI is to identify the next Tehachapi." -- Dian M. Grueneich, Commissioner, California Public Utilities Commission In an attempt to alleviate this dilemma, California has formed a public-private partnership called the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) to consider the feasibility of building new transmission lines to access renewable generation.

The state's Public Utilities Commission wants to require developers to build homes so energy efficient that they will require no net energy from the grid by 2020.

Keynes goes further, to explain how economists move from simplifying assumptions to abandonment of the actual facts, and to conclude that reality is what their model says.

Renewable energy in the United States is on the rise. America now generates twice as much electricity from the wind and the sun as we did just four years ago, and 2007 promises to be another year of record growth.

This paper examines the incentives that generation firms have in restructured electricity markets for supporting long-term transmission investments. In particular, we study whether generation firms, which arguably play a dominant role in the restructured electricity markets, have the incentives to fund or support incremental social-welfare-improving transmission investments.

The British government plans to build a wave farm off the Cornish coast that could supply electricity for 7,500 homes.

But even if we put this to one side, 51 mpg is hardly cause for celebration. In 1983, the standard Peugeot 205 managed 72 mpg on highways[6].

Any answers to these questions would be purely speculative, but if the industry had continued expanding at its previous rate, then instead of the current 104 reactors, we might easily have 200, contributing 40% of our total electricity supplies. Coal-fired power plants would supply only 32% of our power needs, instead of 50%, and we'd emit roughly 650 million tons less CO2 per year.

Even a 5 percent drop in peak demand can yield substantial savings in generation, transmission, and distribution costs – enough to eliminate the need for installing and running some 625 infrequently used peaking power plants and associated power delivery infrastructure.

n electro-magnetic rail system would provide an interesting option for launches from the Moon, which has 1/6 the Earth's gravity and no atmosphere.

KEMA, in partnership with the civil engineering firm Bureau Lievense and technology illustrators Rudolph and Robert Das, has developed an "Energy Island" concept to store power generated from an offshore wind farm. The concept design is the initial result of an on-going feasibility study being conducted for Dutch energy companies.

Kaneda accepted the challenge to renovate the office building so that it would have a net electricity use of zero or less. Furthermore, the office building was to produce zero carbon dioxide; no fossil fuels would be burned for heating with the requisite production of greenhouse gases.