Copper end use trends

Utilities to Use Renewable Power Sources function getSharePasskey() { return 'ex=1344052800&en=d63cdcfa40d96b86&ei=5124';} function getShareURL() { return encodeURIComponent('http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/washington/05energy.html'); } function getShareHeadline() { return encodeURIComponent('Energy Bill Adopted by House Requires Utilities to Use Renewable Power Sources'); } function getShareDescription() { return encodeURIComponent('Utilities would be required to produce 15 percent of their electricity from sources like wind and solar power. President Bush has promised a veto.'); } function getShareKeywords() { return encodeURIComponent('Electric Light and Power,Law and Legislation,Conservation of Resources,Politics and Government,Nancy Pelosi'); } function getShareSection() { return encodeURIComponent('washington'); } function getShareSectionDisplay() { return encodeURIComponent('Washington'); } function getShareSubSection() { return encodeURIComponent(''); } function getShareByline() { return encodeURIComponent('By JOHN M. BRODER'); } function getSharePubdate() { return encodeURIComponent('August 5, 2007'); }

E.ON to Acquire Wind Farms in Spain and Portugal

CHINA claims that its economy is growing at 10 to 11 percent a year, and China’s official analysts say that their nation will catch up with the United States long before the 22nd century arrives. Don’t believe it.

Google Reader - my favorite RSS application - recently added a powerful search functionality that has made me infinitely better at studying people and their social patterns. Using Google Reader you can now search an individual feed, tag or a folder and get back a total item count, all sorted by date for as long as you have been a subscriber to that feed. In my case, some of my feeds go back to October 2005 when the Reader first launched. That's a ton of data to mine for trends. Now that my reader shows a huge cache of posts, I am subscribing to tons more feeds, stuffing them into a folder solely for the purpose of data mining them. The site also has limited set of advanced search operators. One hopes they will add more. It's worth noting that I don't actually read these high volume feeds. Rather, I mark them all as read so they get logged in my feed database and can be searched for insights.

this is a signal moment

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel prize with Gore, is preparing a Synthesis Report. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said the report would show that the earth faced a catastrophic temperature rise within the next century.

The viability of electric cars is set to take a giant leap forward after energy giant EDF announced it is to install 250 recharging stations across the UK by April 2008. The company is to join forces with recharging station manufacturer Elektromotive to provide the recharging stations, which it claims will make electric cars such as the G-Wiz and MEGA City more attractive propositions for urban commuters.

They just announced that they have completed their first jet flight with their engines (for most of the flight) running purely on biodiesel. The details so far are sparse, but here's what they are saying: The experimental test flights were conducted starting with a blend of jet fuel and biodiesel. The engine data was measured and the performance was evaluated and found acceptable for continued use, eventually resulting in the landmark flight using 100% renewable biodiesel fuel

Each small three-foot bolt generates enough electricity to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes. But a full-scale system, LeRoy believes, could power 30,000 homes for a day with just one lightning bolt. Given that the average Midwest thunderstorm releases enough electrical energy to power the entire U.S. for 20 minutes, who knows what the potential is for the harvesting of lightning fields and arrays of bolt conductors.

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.