As I’ve written a few times in the recent past, I believe that we have the proverbial cart before the horse when it comes to smart grid. We tend to think of this concept as “futuristic,” like flying cars, when, in fact, it’s what underpins the transition the world is making right now in the direction of energy efficiency, conservation, and renewables. (more…)

Here’s a good discussion of what I call the “no free lunch” theory of renewable energy: everything we do, whether it’s solar, wind, hydrokinetics, etc., comes with a non-negligible ecological cost. The issue, obviously, is objectively identifying all costs – ecological, financial, and human (e.g., disease and death stemming from various types of energy generation and consumption), (more…)

Frequent commenter and alternative fuels expert Ben Thorp responds to my piece on electric transportation the other day, noting:

Energy efficiency … may be the largest issue if saving fossil fuel or the global environment is a major concern. The US utility energy efficiency has been (more…)

Those of us who maintain optimism for a future than includes sustainable practices in energy generation place a great deal of hope in “distributed generation” – the concept in which the model of buying electricity from huge utilities becomes increasingly irrelevant, and in which individual users generate more – or all — of their own. Such a schema has many obvious (more…)

A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. Semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronics, including radio, computers, telephones, and many other devices. Such devices include transistors and digital and analog integrated circuits. Transition metal oxides also (more…)

In the venture capital community, one hears a great deal about “technology risk.” In my most recent meeting with Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins a few months ago, he told me: “We want all technology risk removed before we put more than a few million dollars into a deal.” (more…)

Most people think of massive wind farms when they think of wind power. But there’s a small revolution going on, and one that some people are, quite literally, screaming from the rooftops about.

One small wind technology recently appeared in Time Magazine’s list of Top 20 Green Tech Ideas. (more…)

Primus Power is a Hayward, California, startup that makes flow batteries for grid-scale energy storage. A flow battery is a type of rechargeable battery that works by the flow of electrolytes through an electrochemical cell, which converts the chemical energy to electricity. (more…)

Part of the events at the Electric Drive Transportation Association’s conference here in Washington DC was a press conference in which a few dozen of the currently- and soon-to-be-available EVs were displayed outside the Department of Energy Building. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and a few others spoke to an enthusiastic audience. (more…)

Besides being good for the environment for reducing emissions and being a renewable source of power, wind energy also uses less water than other types of power generation, stated the American Wind Energy Association recently.

This is an important aspect of energy generation (more…)