Wind power generation in Texas is growing so quickly that it is testing the limits of the state’s electrical grid.

The state set a record on March 5 when wind turbines generated 6,272 megawatts of energy, or about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main power grid.

That peak far exceeded the 6.2 percent average for wind power in Texas, whose 9,410 megawatts of total wind capacity make it the nation’s wind power leader.

But wind power’s growth poses a critical challenge for the state’s booming wind industry, which includes a 180-megawatt wind farm completed last fall near Corpus Christi in South Texas. (more…)

A rising Asian nation leverages labor advantages to adapt Western technology to lower cost fabrication, and its leading companies rise as no-frills leaders in an emerging global market.

Thanks to free trade policies – kept in place, in part, to satisfy Western consumer demand for the product in its most afforable form — the Asian nation finds a ready export market that helps to build a worldwide brand and return immense profits.

Then, given a generation to develop a domestic engineering and technical workforce worthy of their place in the industry, the Asian nation’s concerns soon come to surpass their Western competitors and they bypass the godfathers of the business in innovation and quality, while retaining an edge in affordability.

Ring any bells?

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Most would agree that smart grid is the most happening sector in the clean tech industry right now. It is trying to revamp our outdated and inefficient electrical grids through digital technology. The goal is a green grid which will bring us power savings and lower carbon dioxide emissions. The savings come at a steep up-front cost though –- an estimated $520 billion, according to a McKinsey report.

The transportation sector wasn’t included in the study, and neither was a value set for carbon emissions. The savings could be considerably greater if a value is pegged to carbon emissions, an additional 8 percent at $30 a ton.

Of late we have seen many companies trying to take on the energy management challenge from the user’s end. Home energy management products that control appliances at consumers’ homes to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency is an integral part of smart-grid strategy.

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More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system.

Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for example, to move electricity surpluses to areas of shortages.

The U.S. electricity grid today resembles the roads and highways of the mid-twentieth century before the interstate highway system was built. What is needed today is the electricity equivalent of the interstate highway system.

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Hallowell International in Bangor, Maine, is the manufacturer of the Acadia, a combined heating and cooling system that can be combined with solar or wind installations to take users off the grid. The system can be installed in new buildings or can be retrofitted when consumers are considering green upgrades.

CleanTechies has three questions for president and founder Duane Hallowell.

CleanTechies: Acadia uses something called “boosted compression” technology. Tell us about that.

Duane Hallowell: Since the 1950s, heat pumps, which operate by exchanging air for heating and cooling, have been the most popular and environmentally-friendly heating ventilation and cooling (HVAC) application. However, because they absorb heat from the outside air, they are inefficient in cold-weather climates, requiring additional, costly heating elements in order to work correctly.

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The Chinese government will invest more money in the development of smart grid technology than the United States in 2010, according to a new market study.

China will spend more than $7.3 billion in the form of stimulus loans, grants and tax incentives this year, compared to $7.1 million by the U.S., according to an analysis by Zpryme, a Texas-based research firm.

“They’ve got a strong economy to push forward,” said Jason Rodriguez, director of research at Zpryme.

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The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year was awesome and grandiose as always. As I scoped out the latest in tech madness, I was assaulted by a sensory overload of 3-D screen enablers, perceptive sensors, gaming devices for a lazier and racier audience and phones that promise to be smarter than ever before. The general trend in every category seems to be hybrid super gadgets that perform multiple functions like smartbooks which function as smartphones and netbooks that are also e-book readers, smart TVs that display websites, mobile TVs for cars and phones, and so forth.

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Interviewing Oded Distel from NewTech, and many others Harvey Stein from ISRAEL21c goes to the Watec conference a few weeks ago.

Here is his video on water savings technologies. Companies featured include Takadu (smart grid technology), see the poop pellets of Applied Cleantech; there is also Solaris Synergy, solar panels that float on water. Enjoy the video, meet some new companies.

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So, in case you missed it, there is evidently some kind of climate change conference underway this week. And, its not going well. Still, even if we imagine for a moment that a binding international treaty with hard carbon caps could be salvaged from the wreckage in Copenhagen, there is more news from home in the NYT showing that the US is not up to the climate change challenge at home.

We are developing the technology, but Matthew Wald’s story about a “false start” for smart grids in California and elsewhere provides yet another lens to focus on the policy deficit that is crippling every effort at meaningful energy reform. And, with public will degraded by global recession and climate change skepticism calcifying thanks to Climategate, policymakers cannot afford many more (or, anymore?) false starts.

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Driving to work and flipping on a light switch may seem to unrelated activities, but very soon lithium ion batteries will assist in making both possible.

The nascent electric vehicle market is likely to standardize on lithium ion batteries. Today the cost of plug-in and all-electric vehicles is too high for many consumers thanks to batteries, which can add $10,000 or more to the price tag. The cost of batteries is only expected to come down after battery cells and packs are produced in sufficient volume to achieve economies of scale.

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