Renewable Energy

Green energy internships in cutting edge ecovillage

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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri is one community pushing forward their own micro-scale energy research. Like most small villages, Dancing Rabbit isn’t filled with PhD qualified engineers. They’re ordinary people, some with interests in formal scientific research, some with a focus on organic farming or green building methods, so they decided to launch a renewable energy internship to encourage interested engineers and university-level engineering students into the community for a summer.

ODAC Newsletter – July 1

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The fallout from the IEA’s recent decision to release 60 million barrels of oil reserves continued this week. OPEC members criticized the IEA for “breaching its own principles” and interfering with the market. Traders too seemed little impressed with the move as prices recovered last week’s losses, as Greece drew back from the brink. After all, 60 million barrels is less than a day’s global consumption.

Can biomass help phase out coal?

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If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

Brown to green: A new use for blighted industrial sites

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Few places in the U.S. are as well suited to developing renewable energy as the contaminated sites known as “brownfields.” But as communities from Philadelphia to California are discovering, government support is critical to enable solar and wind entrepreneurs to make use of these abandoned lands.

ODAC Newsletter – June 24

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The oil market was plunged into turmoil as the IEA announced it will tap its strategic reserve for only the third time ever. The agency had hinted in the past months that it might be prepared to release stocks to offset the shortfall in production from the Libyan crisis, to calm prices and avoid a “hard landing” for the global economy.

Santa isn’t bringing gigawatts

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Through the clouds of wishful thinking that too often make up what we are pleased to call a collective conversation on the subject of energy, a ray of common sense occasionally shines through. This week’s ray came by way of a study on the Earth’s thermodynamic balance, soon to be released in no less a scientific publication than the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The study found among other things that there’s a fairly modest upper limit to the amount of energy that wind farms can extract from the atmosphere without changing the climate.

Less heat, more light on peak oil

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“Because money talks and BS walks, if the hydrogen economy was an apprentice working for Donald Trump, it would’ve been fired in the first season.” This is just one of the pearls of wisdom from Transition Voice’s new “Snarky Guide to Peak Oil.” It’s got the facts you need to debunk energy myths and the attitude you need to defuse a heated discussion with a smile.

Clean and Green Investment Forum — Summary

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On June 6 and 7, I attended Opal Financial’s Clean and Green Investment Forum. I was invited to take part in a panel on “Green Energy in Emerging and Frontier Markets”. The forum brought together clean tech entrepreneurs and investors as well as a few academics and analysts and proved very stimulating. The overall vibe was one of optimism and opportunity — we’re talking entrepreneurs and investors here.

300 ans d’energies fossiles en 300 secondes

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Dubbed French version of Dubbed French version of the PCI video ‘300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds’. L’histoire humaine des 300 dernières années dont le développement repose sur les énergies fossiles.

Profligacies of Scale

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Promoters of big centralized power generation schemes often justify their plans by invoking economies of scale. That logic made sense at a time when economic expansion and abundant resource supplies defined the framework for all economic activity, electricity generation very much included; in a post-abundance world, what were once economies could very easily turn into something else.

Your renewable energy path

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Get energy independence (and help the climate too!) Two interviews with off-grid authors who have walked the walk, living outside the power grid, with a minimum of fossil fuels. Where to start with solar, heat pumps, hot water heat, wind or wood. Cam Mather from aztext.com, living in comfort – off grid 14 years. From the UK, Nick Rosen author of “Off the Grid” at off-grid.net.