• "Fibrous" steel withstands extremely cold temperatures

    Steel is very strong, except that in cold temperatures it becomes brittle; new method of making steel withstand cold temperatures could make steel structures in Arctic areas, like ships or oil rigs, cheaper to construct

  • San Francisco aggressively to promote use of electric vehicles

    The City on the Bay to help build charging infrastructure throughout the city and the suburbs to make use of electrical vehicles viable

  • Wind boom in the United States

    New wind project in ten states brings U.S. wind power capacity to more than 18,000 MW, or enough to serve the equivalent of five million homes

  • Smarter electric grid key to saving power, I

    Power providers and technology companies are making the electric grid smarter; it will stop being merely a passive supplier of juice; installing smart controls in homes would allow consumers to decide how much energy they need at what price

  • Partnership to produce sugarcane-based diesel

    High corn prices have driven California-based biofuel specialist Amyris to join with a Brazilian company to produce sugarcane-based diesel

  • Straw power planned

    With more and more companies turning to biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels, a debate has erupted over the food-energy trade-off involved; a Welsh company bypasses this debate by planning to generate energy from straw

  • Modernizing the U.S. electrical grid

    The U.S. Department of Energy will invest $50 million in demonstration project aiming to improve efficiency in the U.S. electricity grid

  • How much water is needed to produce various types of energy?

    Most of the energy we consume requires the use of water for its generation; water is a dwindling resource, so researchers wanted to know how much water is required to produce different types of energy

  • NTR invests in SES

    Irish renewable energy company buys controlling interest in SES; SES is developing two of the world’s largest solar generating projects in the Imperial Valley and Mojave Desert

  • Paris airport first in Europe to use geothermal power

    Paris-Orly airport sits on a hot water table where the water temperature reaches 74 degrees C (165 degrees F) at a depth of 5,500 feet; management thought it would be a good idea to build a geothermal station to exploit this source of energy

  • Ontario invests in harnessing river flow for energy

    New York City already has it: A Free Flow Turbine in the East River which will generate 10 MW when the project is completed; now Ontario wants to place a three-blade, horizontal-axis turbine on the floor of the St. Lawrence River

  • Energy from vortices

    When water flows over an underwater obstacle, whirlpools or vortices form alternately above and below it; the vortices create a tugging effect, so the result is an alternating force that yanks the object up and down; Wolverines researchers want to harness the power of vortices to generate energy

  • USGS says Bakken Formation holds large recoverable oil, gas reserves

    U.S. Geological Survey assesses Bakken Formation to Hold 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil — 25 times more than 1995 estimate; in addition, assessment also identified 1.85 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas, and 148 million barrels of natural gas liquids

  • Next-generation nuclear fuel may be too hot to handle: report

    It sounded like a good idea: Enrich the uranium used to power nuclear reactors further so that operators will be able to extract more electricity from a given amount of fuel; trouble is, burn-up rates above a certain point would violate U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safety standards unless new methods were devised for packaging the fuel

  • The future of U.K. nuclear power

    In the last five years the U.K. government has been vigorously promoting the idea of a U.K. nuclear power revival; John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform explains the government’s policy