Tag archives for electricity
Posted by Smart meters are just one aspect of the new electric infrastructure generally known as the smart grid, but for consumers, they are the most visible. Utilities in California, Texas and other states have led the way on installing the meters, which can relay information about a household’s energy use back to the grid. A new…
Posted by Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. But is duplicating “Race to the Top” the way to get a new energy grid up and running? If you don’t keep track of education policy, Race to the Top is the Obama administration’s signature schools initiative, with $4 billion in federal grant money awarded to…
Posted by The “Let’s Do It Again!” team from James B. Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina weaves reuse, recycling, and waste reduction into construction of the high-efficiency electric cars it builds for Shell Eco-marathon Americas. This year, the team’s three vehicles incorporate parts of an old baby carriage, a child car seat, a chair, some…
In order to gain easy access to work on the engine between heats, students from Mater Dei High School of Evansville, Indiana, typically build their Shell Eco-marathon cars to open like unhinged clamshells. However, as coach Dan Ritter explains, duct tape works surprisingly well at holding everything together on the track. It seems to have…
A Promising Outlook for Solar Energy Forecasting
Posted by Amy Sinatra Ayres on March 14, 2013 
Solar energy continues to grow in the United States, but its relative unpredictability remains a hurdle in deploying it on the grid. Now a research team is working to create detailed 36-hour forecasts of incoming energy from the sun. The three-year effort, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is funded by a…
Chances are, if you’re in one of about 36 million U.S. households with a smart meter installed, you don’t necessarily know what information is being collected or how to use it. In an effort to make home energy usage data more transparent for customers, utilities and other key electric industry players launched the Green Button…
Really Scary Movies: Films About Energy, Anxiety and Disaster
Posted by Glenn McDonald on October 31, 2012 As evidenced by all the October cable movie marathons, Halloween season is the time when people like to watch scary movies. I tend to watch an inordinate amount of scary movies myself, for reasons I probably don’t want to know. It’s no secret that horror films are often reflections of cultural anxieties, and many a…
The NBC drama Revolution, which premiered last week, is set in a world completely devoid of electrical power 15 years after a massive, mysterious blackout. People go back to traveling by horse and on foot; villages grow their own food; iPhones become useless relics. Some critics have complained that the show is short on explanations…
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A lack of wind won’t stall our future renewable energy economy, but Congress might. Debunking the Myths That Take the Wind out of Wind Energy’s Sails Wind has its downsides. It’s intermittent; it’s too expensive. Fair points, but there are ways around them. For example the whole intermittency issue could be handled now by using…
Some of the people who could shape the energy future have a maddening aversion to playing favorites. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the U.S. presidential race, where President Barack Obama endorses “all of the above” energy strategy, the same approach, word-for-word, touted by the opposition Republican party. The GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney,…
Most news coverage of energy and the environment is in love with the new: cool new technologies, new research, and all the impressive creative energy that’s being poured into these fields. Yet one of the most significant factors shaping the energy field is the power of old decisions. Take, for example, the power plants that…
Record Warm Water in Long Island Sound Shuts Down Connecticut Nuclear Power Plant
Posted by Joseph Eaton on August 13, 2012 In a sign of the severity of this summer’s record heat, one of the two reactors at Connecticut’s only nuclear power plant has been shut down due to historically high water temperatures in Long Island Sound, source of the facility’s cooling water. Unit 2 of Millstone Power Plant near New London was shut down Sunday…
The drive for a new and better way of doing things is built into the car designed by students from Italy’s Italy’s Politecnico di Torino, and entered in Shell Eco-marathon Europe 2012 this week in Rotterdam. Most students in the fuel efficiency competition choose ultra-lightweight material like carbon fiber to shave mileage. But for their…
Does it make climate sense to drive cars with natural gas? Our nation appears to be rapidly moving to a natural gas-powered economy. Advances in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling have made huge deposits of natural gas in shale and tight sands commercially viable. (See “Hydrofracturing: An Energy Revolution.”) Suddenly the United States is…
Posted by For the past 20 years, Purdue Solar Racing (PSR) has been designing and building a variety of solar powered vehicles. While these cars have all varied greatly in their designs and manufacturing processes, Shell Eco-marathon’s urban concept category motivated PSR to enter into a completely unexplored realm with its eighth car, Celeritas. Urban concept vehicles…
Come along on a test drive of the Nissan Leaf. Ever wonder what one of those all-electric cars feels like when you’re behind the wheel? Well, here’s your chance. We’ll start by getting the lowdown on what it means to be a “zero-emission vehicle” from one of the Energy Department’s car specialists. We’ll kick the…
A look at things a year after one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake erupted some 50 miles off Japan’s Tohoku coast. The ensuing tsunamis set off by the quake devastated communities up and down the Japanese coast, killing some 20,000 people. The one-two natural-disaster punch also…
Coal-Fired Haze Mars the Dark Skies of Big Bend
Posted by Amy Sinatra Ayres on February 16, 2012 Big Bend National Park is known for its beauty — and its haze problem. So it might come as a surprise to some that it recently earned the designation of a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park. The designation makes the 801,000-acre (324,153-hectare) West Texas park, which borders the Rio Grande, one of only 10…
Landmark Approval for New U.S. Nuclear Reactors
Posted by Amy Sinatra Ayres on February 10, 2012 For the first time in 34 years, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission cleared the way for licensing of new nuclear reactors in the United States. It’s not the first step for the addition to the Vogtle site outside of Augusta, Georgia, which four years ago began what was supposed to be a streamlined approval process.…
Nuclear Generation Capacity Drops in 2011
Posted by Mason Inman on December 7, 2011 
After reaching an all-time high in 2010, this year the nuclear power capacity—the amount of electricity that all the world’s nuclear power plants can produce—took a dip. (Related: World Electricity Mix Interactive) The earthquake-tsunami disaster at the Fukushima power plants in Japan, which are still being cleaned up, led many to sour on nuclear energy.…
Somewhere, pigs are flying and hell must be icing up, because Congress has actually spent some time discussing the electrical grid. As usual, however, they’re locked in another partisan squabble, but procrastinating on addressing the more fundamental danger. Over the past week, the Environmental Protection Agency has been defending its new, tighter air quality rules…
There’s some rare good news on the energy pollution front, confirmed by groundbreaking new use of satellite imagery. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the acid rain precursor that ravages respiratory health, have fallen in half since 2005 over what has been one of the most coal-heavy areas of the eastern United States, reported scientists using the…
Posted by Today, America relies on oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear to power our country. But our aging infrastructure demands refurbishment to meet 21st century needs. As Amory Lovins explains in his upcoming book, Reinventing Fire, efficiency and renewables can end our addiction to fossil fuels, create the core industries of the new energy era, generate…
Whether at Christmas time or in the heat of summer, nobody likes a lump of coal. Unfortunately, that’s what the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is delivering in its latest report.
Many conversations at the American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) conference in Aspen focused on what needs to be done, what can be done realistically, and what isn’t being done to transition the United States away from fossil fuels. So it was refreshing and inspiring to hear about something that has been done: retrofitting New York…
