Builders of some of the largest wind power installations have come up against a problem: with more than 50 or 100 turbines in a facility, the effect of the upwind turbines on wind speed farther downwind becomes harder and harder to predict. According to an article in Wednesday's MIT Technology Review, wind facility developers wanting to install several hundred turbines at a go may be faced with disappointing power output unless our computer models get a lot better.
We got pretty excited here at ReWire the last time we heard some news about supercapacitors out of UCLA, and so did you -- almost 20,000 Facebook users "liked" our report on a breakthrough in using graphene to store electrical power.
This week, another UCLA team reports it may have found a way to address a persistent problem with supercapacitors: limitations on their effective size.
More than half of the Mojave Desert biodiversity "hotspots" identified in a study published this week are under threat from utility-scale renewable energy development and related transmission corridors, with as much as 17 percent of the habitat in those hotspots sitting directly in the footprint of proposed energy and transmission projects.
The California Independent System Operator (CaISO) has declared a Flex Alert for the southern San Francisco Bay Area after unknown vandals caused heavy damage to a substation in San Jose. The Flex Alert covers the Silicon Valley area and Santa Clara County and is expected to last until midnight tonight.
The proposed Palen Solar Electric Generating System east of Desert Center could be visible from as far away as the Mojave National Preserve, Mount San Jacinto, and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, according to preliminary calculations by ReWire. The project, proposed by BrightSource Energy and Abengoa, is currently being evaluated by the California Energy Commission.
Senator Barbara Boxer has slammed a preliminary ruling by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission backing a Southern California Edison (SCE) proposal to restart the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station along the San Diego County coast. The Senator has called for a full investigation into the structural flaws that led to both remaining units of the ailing plant being shut down last year.
- Wind Power
- PV and Solar Thermal
- Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)
- Watts and Watt-Hours, Kilo and Mega
- 'Enough To Power X Thousand Homes'
- The Grid
- Distributed Generation
- Conservation and 'Negawatts'
- Grid Storage
- PACE Loans, Feed In Tariffs and Net Metering
- Base Load and Peaking Power
- Capacity Factor
- Renewable Portfolio Standards
- Transportation and Renewable Energy
- Biomass
- Geothermal
