Every Christmas since we opened in 2009, I’ve written a hopeful little holiday message in the spirit of the season and the expectation of a bright New Year. At this point, however, I have to question the sanity, or at …
Tag: energy storage
(Mixed) Message of Hope for the Holiday Season
Tagged with: climate change is the most important challenge facing humankind, efficiency solutions, electric transportation, energy storage, environment justice and world peace, falling prices of renewables, kibosh of oil/gas exploration in the Arctic and the Northern Atlantic Oceans, smart grid, upsurge in distributed solar in the developing world
The Cost-Effectiveness of Clean Energy Is Constantly Improving: And That’s Important News in Today’s Horrific Political Climate
Here’s more evidence of an extremely important phenomenon on the world energy stage: the continued fall in the cost of solar electricity. Environmentalists continue to wring their hands as people like Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt, and Rick Perry are nominated …
Making Our Way Towards Sustainability
The populations in most countries are becoming increasingly eco-conscious, as evidenced by reports like this one, indicating that there are now more bicycles than cars in Copenhagen. To be fair, it’s possible that a cause on this is the 100% …
Tagged with: clean energy, eco-conscious, efficiency solutions, Electric Vehicles, energy storage, increasing cost-effectiveness of renewable energy, more bicycles than cars in Copenhagen, our civilization's path to environmental sustainability, we will decarbonize our energy and transportation sectors whether we give a damn about our environment or not
Cool New Idea in Wind Turbines
Here’s a new idea in the quest to reduce or remove the variability of wind energy: an integrated water reservoir, making use of the huge watertight tower. This creates a (small) pumped hydro energy storage solution without the elevation change. …
Is Hydrokinetics Coming to Myanmar? Probably Not
We’ve all seen the plummeting prices of solar, wind, energy efficiency solutions, energy storage and the rest. And while all that’s good, it creates huge stressors on other areas of clean energy technology: hydrokinetics, biomass and geothermal. Having said that, …
Is Hydrokinetics Coming to Myanmar? Probably Not Read More »
This Report on Flow Batteries Will Make You Smile
A reader from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, CA, a group that’s heavily committed to sustainability, writes: For an emotional uplift check out the flow battery progress sponsored by ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Administration-Energy).
Pro-nuke People Look Askance at Energy Storage and Variable Resources
I’ve mentioned that I like to keep tabs on a pro-nuke (anti-renewables) group, and make helpful contributions to their discussions. Recently, I notice that they’re a bit freaked out that the cost of lithium-ion batteries is soon to fall to …
Pro-nuke People Look Askance at Energy Storage and Variable Resources Read More »
Insights from a Top-Notch Cleantech Businessman
In the 10 years I’ve known Kansas City-based cleantech businessman Fritz Maffry, I’ve always been impressed with his understanding of the macro issues associated with energy and transportation. Fortunately, Fritz has the wonderful habit of jotting down his thoughts periodically …
Marketing Can Be Shameless, and the Products It Promotes Can Be Harmful
I’ve been chatting with an old friend who, like me, had a long career in marketing; she became a VP at Grey Advertising. She told me about her experience at a practice round for the PGA Championship (that starts today …
Marketing Can Be Shameless, and the Products It Promotes Can Be Harmful Read More »
Tagged with: catastrophic climate change, electric transportation, energy storage, loss of biodiversity, marketing, ocean acidification, renewable energy and all the peripheral technologies, smart grid, sustainable ag, the fossil fuel boys knew 35 years ago that their business model (extracting the last molecule of petroleum out of the ground and burning it
Making Tough Choices Re: Fossil Fuels
Frequent commenter MarcoPolo took some level of umbrage with my post in which I mentioned that the largest public university in the U.S. had divested itself from fossil fuels. His main point: damaging the oil companies’ profits would send the economy …
