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.