President Obama's administration certainly sees the energy future of the US different than the last administration. Overall, this is very good news. A few years ago, when I first starting looking seriously at the US energy policies and proposals, I was not very confident about our chances to create a sustainable energy future. I'm much more optimistic now. Of course, this is a day to be optimistic and a day to believe in what we can accomplish if we just put our talents to it. At the same time, it's also the day to start looking more carefully at the proposals. There's much work to be done and the devil is, as always, in the details.

Check out FirstLook for an attractive interactive display of wind and solar resource data at http://firstlook.3tiergroup.com/ .

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published its long awaited
World Energy Outlook 2008 .
A highly recommended read.

A quick first summary with more analysis to come:

The current financial crisis could well lead to a growing worldwide petroleum shortage in the short to medium term. The crisis has lead to a decrease in crude oil prices (see our stats in the left column of the page). Oil companies are therefore not making the profits hoped for and some have started cutting or delaying new projects.
IEA expects that oil prices will bounce back up to around 100 dollars per barrel in 2010.

October 15, 2008:

Scientific American Energy and Water

Check out this free version of the Scientific American Earth 3.0: Energy vs Water .
Very informative.

October 10, 2008:

The Washington Post last week had an interesting article about geothermal energy in the Philippines and beyond, featuring Stanford's Roland Horne. Roland can also be heard in an interview and a seminar on geothermal energy on this site.

October 10, 2008

Cannot resist chuckling a bit at today's newspaper reports about plunging oil prices. Oil price is falling below 80 dollars because of decreasing demand, so one paper write "demand predictions are *slashed* by 400,000 barrels a day for this year". Doing my maths, this means that "slashing" is equivalent to a reduction of less than 0.5%.
At the same time, the newspaper reports that OPEC is calling for supply reduction to keep the oil price from slipping more. If someone had said this last year when the oil price was, shriek yelp, above 50 dollars, it would have been considered ridiculous.

Some good news from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL): wind power in the US is growing rapidly. Below is the full article copied from their news article. Very glad to see wind taking off in the US. Of course we need to put this a little in perspective: in terms of percentage of total electricity generation, wind is still a small player in the US. But there is definitely progress being made.

The Energy Digest of May 2008

with thanks to Gil Masters

Interest in Smart Grids growing: DOE selects $50 Million in projects

The following projects are some of those selected in response to DOE's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability Funding Opportunity Announcement. DoE sought applications for research and development activities to improve the security of controls systems for energy delivery and increase the use of distributed generation during peak load periods.

Smart Energy was featured in a lead story in the Stanford Report. Also check out the accompanying video.