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Keynote: American Renewable Energy Day Part II

Rated Feb 24 2009 • 0 reviews • activism, video, coal energy • blip.tv

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National Renewable Electricity Standard Introduced in the...

Rated Feb 24 2009 • 1 review • environment • globalwarmingisreal.com

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Rainbow legs on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Rated Feb 24 2009 • 1 review • photography • flickr.com

Rainbow legs
by Automania on flickr.com

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Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice -- latimes.com

Rated Feb 23 2009 • 1 review • business, video, global warming, methane • latimes.com

Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice
By Margot Roosevelt
February 22, 2009

From the page: "Methane levels in the atmosphere have tripled since preindustrial times. Human activities, including rice cultivation, cattle raising and coal mining, account for about 70% of releases, according to recent studies. Natural sources, like tropical wetlands and termites, make up the rest. But those estimates had not incorporated the bubbles Walter was probing on an autumn morning on the Seward Peninsula.

That gurgling gas could change the entire model for predicting global warming. And lakes are not the only methane source: Newly discovered seeps -- places where methane leaks to the surface -- from the shallow waters of Siberia's vast continental shelf are also likely to upset previous assumptions.

Walter's work "has gotten a lot of attention," said John E. Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. "She found direct evidence of methane releases in high-latitude lakes. That was not fully realized before."

In a field where the science often seems opaque, Walter's research has a flashy side. She enjoys igniting methane seeps with a cigarette lighter, leaping away as the gas flares as high as 20 feet.

"It's fun," she says. "And it is informative."

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National Smart Grid Juggernaut Rolls On: Reid to Unveil...

Rated Feb 23 2009 • 1 review • politics, smart grid, energy efficiency • earth2tech.com

National Smart Grid Juggernaut Rolls On: Reid to Unveil Energy Bill This Week
Written by Josie Garthwaite
February 23rd, 2009

From the page: "Congressional wrangling over the stimulus package helped take the ideas of a national smart grid and utility decoupling out of wonky obscurity, but stopped short of mandating their implementation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to go further, to bulk up the federal muscle behind a grid buildout. The Nevada senator told a gathering of political, business, energy and labor heavyweights in Washington, D.C., today that he plans to introduce an energy bill late this week that, if passed, would expand government authority for siting transmission lines. It would, he said, put an end to an era in which one state can "hold up forever something that needs to be done for the good of the country."

More importantly, such a move would make it easier to build infrastructure for carrying energy from places with abundant wind, solar and geothermal energy resources to population centers with higher demand for electricity. He said the bill will be bipartisan, but did not disclose a Republican co-sponsor."

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Decoupling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rated Feb 23 2009 • 1 review • business, energy efficiency • wikipedia.org

From the page: "In public utility regulation, decoupling refers to the disassociation of a utility's profits from its sales of the energy commodity. Instead, a rate of return is aligned with meeting revenue targets, and rates are trued up or down to meet the target at the end of the adjustment period. This makes the utility indifferent to selling less product and improves the ability of energy efficiency and distributed generation to operate within the utility environment.

Ideally, utilities should be rewarded based on how well they meet their customers' energy service needs. However, most current rate design instead places the focus on commodity sales, tying a distribution company's recovery of fixed costs directly to its commodity sales.
In order to motivate utilities to consider all the options when planning and making resource decisions on how to meet their customers' needs, the sales-revenue link in current rate design must be broken. Breaking that link between the utility's commodity sales and revenues, removes both the incentive to increase electricity sales and the disincentive to run effective energy efficiency programs or invest in other activities that may reduce load. Decision-making then refocuses on making least-cost investments to deliver reliable energy services to customers even when such investments reduce throughput. The result is a better alignment of shareholder and customer interests to provide for more economically and environmentally efficient resource decisions.
As an added benefit, breaking the sales-revenue link streamlines the regulatory process for rate adjustments. Contention over sales forecasts consumes extensive time in every rate case. If the sales-revenue link is broken, these forecasts carry no economic weight, so the incentive to game forecasts of electricity sales is removed and rate cases become less adversarial."

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Jellies Rising on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Rated Feb 23 2009 • 1 review • photography, marine biology • flickr.com

Jellies Rising
by Automania on flickr.com

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GOP Governor accuses Republicans of "gratuitous political...

Rated Feb 23 2009 • 1 review • politics • dailykostv.com

GOP Governor accuses Republicans of "gratuitous political griping"

From the page: "John Huntsman, the Republican Governor of Utah, tells MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell that the GOP response to President Obama's economic recovery legislation is "gratuitious political griping."

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