Echelon’s Steve Ngyuen, the fellow I interviewed for my book’s chapter on intelligent building management, spent a few minutes describing “light harvesting” to me — the idea of making use of the sun’s light the way buildings are designed, thus …
Daylighting Collaborative and Intelligent Building Design Read More »
A friend from the UK asked for my take on a new Swiss movie on Jimmy Carter’s efforts to reduce the United States’ dependence on oil at the end of the 1970s. He points out, “I am sure it will …
I had a chance conversation with Nick Roberts, VP Sales of GlobalNES recently – a company in renewables that boasts an interesting angle. GlobalNES offers to arrange financing for, engineer, and install a range of commercial-sized clean energy systems – …
Unique Approach to Renewables Contracting – Global NES Read More »
Part of the reason that Bill Paul is so bullish on Northern Africa as a financial center for rrenewable energy is obvious: the Sahara Desert. Especially ripe for concentrated solar power, the desert is the solution to Europe’s thirst for …
In the process of writing my book on renewables I read quite a few others, including Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (2009) by Dr. David JC MacKay. This is a fanstically worthwhile project by a professor of physics …
The Ammonia Fuel Network’s Executive Direct John Holbrook was good enough to send me a few DVD’s in which Bill Leighty made presentations on the numbers that surround ammonia a fuel. I was struck by a number of things. First, …
Ammonia Fuel Network — Great Presentation on Energy Storage and Transmission Read More »
Like hydrogen as a fuel, liquid ammonia is a carrier of energy, as opposed to a source of energy. When we create ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen, we add energy to form a compound that can later be broken …
For anyone who may be interested, here’s a link to an article Shannon Combs wrote on an apparent breakthrough at the University of Illinois in the use of gallium arsenide in photovoltaics.
The migration to renewable energy is complicated by a great number of factors in the renewable energy “triumvirate” -technological, economic, and political. The chart below shows one of many different dimensions of this complexity: land use – which, when you …
In response to my complaint about Deloitte’s recent market research study on electric vehicles in which it was clear (to me at least) that they had surveyed irrelevant people as thus missed the mark with their conclusions, a gentleman named …
