Beyond petroleum? – headlines
•Big Oil’s Big Lies About Alternative •Peak Oil and the New Carbon Boom •Did Global Oil Consumption Slow in 2012? •Elephant in the room: How OPEC sets oil prices and limits carbon emissions
Renewable Energy
Energy transitions – June 28
•Renewables to surpass gas by 2016 in the global power mix •More buybacks in Germany •Solar Cities’ insight into the electricity demand fall •Developing a Regional Renewable Energy Roadmap for Central America •Analysis: How energy efficiency firms are eating utilities’ lunch •’Solar sharing’ spreading among Fukushima farmers
Mixing renewables and back-up gas power is going to be wasteful
The purpose of this draft paper is to assess what will happen if, as expected, many gigawatts of intermittent renewables are added to the UK grid alongside large amounts of standby gas power.
Alternative Energy Challenges
The various obstacles to alternative energy compound the fundamental challenge of how to supplant a fossil fuel–based supply chain withone driven by alternative energy forms themselves.
The Microgrid Solution
“The move to the smart grid is impossible to achieve in one big operational mass,”…“Breaking it into bite-sized pieces — this is the future of the microgrid market.”
Energy transitions – June 14
•Community Solar Concept A Big Hit At Michigan Energy Fair •A Secret Success Story •Generating interest in homegrown power •Power to the people – and to their homes •Brittany villages blazing a trail in energy self-sufficiency •Four German words
Watts Up, Vaclav? Putting Peak Oil and the Renewables Transition in Context
Smil’s mantra is this: "All of the past shifts to new sources of primary energy have been gradual, prolonged affairs, with new sources taking decades from the beginning of production to become more than insignificant contributors, and then another two to three decades before capturing a quarter or a third of their respective markets."
Distributed Renewable Generation
Industrial-scale wind and solar power projects can produce significant quantities of renewable energy,but distributed renewable energy generation–particularly rooftop photovoltaic installations–can achieve the same objective much faster without the environmental harm and at lower cost.
Life, energy, the universe and everything
In Douglas Adams’ science fiction series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a computer dubbed Deep Thought discovers the "answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything." Here I ponder the answer to the slightly expanded question of life, energy, the universe, and everything.
Microgrids: A Utility’s Best Friend or Worst Enemy?
A recent data roundup by renewable energy industry analyst Paul Gipe shows that variable renewables are meeting much larger percentages of grid power than previously thought possible in some European countries.
Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Energy Is Putting Power Back in the Hands of the People
The sun is waiting to be tapped for clean, cheap energy if we can get our heads out of the sand.
Conventional Wisdom About Clean Energy Is Still Way Out of Date
“We’re fifteen to twenty years out of date in how we think about renewables,” said Dr. Eric Martinot to an audience at the first Pathways to 100% Renewables Conference held April 16 in San Francisco. “It’s not 1990 anymore.”
