While decentralized sources of power, such as harnessing solar and wind energy to generate electricity, are well understood opportunities, there are additional fundamental areas where we are moving inexorably towards an infrastructure where being on the grid is an option, not a necessity. A recently announced new waste-to-energy system that turns trash into clean energy from IST [...]

Last month one of the leaders in providing enabling technology for the smart grid, GridPoint, Inc., conducted a public demonstration of their “smart charging” software. This took place at an EV conference sponsored by the Electric Drive Transportation Association. As we reported in an earlier feature “Smart Grid Enablers - GridPoint,” the move to a more [...]

In the aftermath of the defeat of Proposition 7, the ambitious citizen’s initiative that would have required California’s utilities to deliver 50% renewable electricity by 2030, where is the golden state in terms of increasing its production of renewable electricity, and what factors are likely to help or hinder implementation of large scale electricity projects [...]

Our latest interactive spreadsheet “Cost to Mitigate CO2” is an attempt to present the financial implications of precipitously moving to a fossil fuel free world. We have provided only three variables - how many parts per million of increased atmospheric CO2 correspond to one degree centigrade higher global average temperature, how many gigatons of CO2 emissions correspond [...]

Earlier this year, on October 27th, Ausra commissioned their first solar thermal pilot plant, a 5.0 megawatt facility located in Kimberlina, just north of Bakersfield, California. It is the first solar thermal power facility to be commissioned in California in over 20 years - significantly, the approximately 350 megawatts of solar thermal power installed back [...]

As the winds of change blow through America on this historic election day, here’s an update on wind energy. The last two years have seen an astonishing growth in wind capacity worldwide, particularly since the installed base of wind generating capacity now constitutes a substantial denominator over which to calculate percentage growth.  Sometime this year, [...]

It is difficult to put both sides of any initiative into a few words and capture all the nuances, but here are some observations for voters to consider as we go into the last days before the election.  The points made here are based on very recent conversations with people intimately involved with the campaigns both for and [...]