Why We Need CCS, Part 4: Carbon Negative Solutions

HighlightsThe economic growth ambitions of the developing world combined with the very tight carbon budget prescribed for the 2 áµ'C scenario could potentially demand a very large deployment of carbon negative solutions from the middle of the 21st century.CCS is the best candidate for achieving negative...

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YieldCos Could Cut Renewables Costs by 20%, Study Finds

Financial innovation has unlocked distributed solar and helped to drive down costs in recent years, but there is also ample room for new investment vehicles for large-scale wind and solar, according to a new study.Widespread use of YieldCos should allow for wind and solar costs to drop by more than 20 percent compared to current...

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Our Comment in Nature Calling for Oil Sands Moratorium

Here is the press release for our Nature paper, released June 25, calling for a moratorium on oil sands expansion. This means no loss of current jobs in the oil sands. But it does mean a return to sanity from this selfish rush to accelerate global warming, ocean acidification and ecological destruction - events that will lead to...

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Some Energy System Home Truths

One point of note on the annual calendar of energy events is the release by BP of their Statistical Review of World Energy. The data, all available to download in Excel format, covers the period up to the end of the previous year (i.e. the current data is to the end of 2013) and as such is about 18 months ahead of the equivalent...

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Energy Quote of the Day: 'Utilities are Most Valuable When they Stay Invisible'

On the last day of this year’s 37th IAEE International Conference in New York a distinguished panel of experts, among them Ralph Izzo (Chairman and CEO of Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (PSEG)), Jigar Shah (Founder of SunEdison) and David Newbery (Director of Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG), University of Cambridge)...

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Energy Efficiency Prospects Surge for Minnesota Utilities

Samantha Williams, Staff Attorney, ChicagoThe Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has rejected a nearly two-fold increase in fixed charges for CenterPoint Energy Resource’s residential customers, and ordered a mechanism â€" decoupling â€" for the gas utility that’s aimed at encouraging more energy savings for the state’s...

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Has Consumer Electronics Energy Use Finally Peaked?

Noah Horowitz, Senior Scientist and Director of the Center for Energy Efficiency, San Francisco, CAThe Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) just issued its latest report on the amount of electricity used by consumer electronics (CE) and the good news is that it’s finally begun to come down. However, the total is still enormous...

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HTR-PM: Nuclear-Heated Gas Producing Superheated Steam

The first HTR-PM (High Temperature Reactor â€" Pebble Module), one of the more intriguing nuclear plant designs, is currently under construction on the coast of the Shidao Bay near Weihai, China.This system uses evolutionary engineering design principles that give it a high probability of success, assuming that the developers and...

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Randall Abramson: Juniors Clean Up Behind the Elephant Hunters

Randall Abramson, CFA, is CEO and Portfolio Manager of Trapeze Asset Management Inc., a firm he cofounded in 1999 shortly after founding its affiliate broker dealer, Trapeze Capital Corp. Abramson was named one of Canada's 'Stock Market Superstars' in Bob Thompson's Stock Market Superstars: Secrets of Canada's Top Stock Pickers...

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How Solar Finance is Driving Solar Businesses to Change

At the risk of sounding like an old man with graying whiskers, I can remember giving a presentation more than a decade ago about how we needed to stop thinking in terms of capital cost and think about price per kilowatt hour when it comes to selling solar.I could see that in other parts of the world, solar systems were becoming...

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Energy Storage Opportunities are Everywhere

Hi everybody,Thank you for your interest and all your comments on my previous articles.So here is part 4 of my insights into the Future of Energy from an interview for TheEnergyBlog.I’m looking forward to your comments and ideas.All the best,Michael“I like to think of storage in the widest sense,” says Dr. Weinhold. “It’s...

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Hollande's Proposed "Cap" on Nuclear Electricity Capacity

France’s President Francois Hollande and his Socialist Party ran on a platform that included scaling back France’s dependence on nuclear energy. It was not a very popular part of his campaign pitch, but Sarkozy was such a flawed candidate that Hollande won anyway.Hollande is trying to follow through on his promise, but there...

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