Despite my recent obsession with
Google+ coverage and Bay Area
BART protests, I found time this week for energy news as well.
- My colleagues and I are researching the coming clean tech crash, as subsidies and tax incentives for renewable energy technology expire. As Devon Swezey recently wrote in Forbes, "The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable."
- Australia, against all odds, has passed a carbon pricing scheme. Leigh Ewbank of Beyond Zero Emissions digs into the new policy, noting that a the CO2 price will require auxiliary policies to drive real innovation and deployment of clean energy technology.
- A new report (PDF) from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explains why ARPA-E is such a vital resource and should be fully-funded. "Cutting ARPA-E's budget would thwart future successes. A smaller budget would mean fewer projects, a more narrow range of risky projects, more hesitation to explore uncharted ares, and fewer opportunities to attract private sector investment."
- I enjoyed this piece on energy storage technology at The Energy Collective. "The enthusiasm for grid-connected energy storage is well-founded. The inability to store electric energy on the grid is, in many respects, the technological limitation that defined the design of our national power grid in the early 20th Century and that continues to account for its basic architecture today. The ability to generate electricity, to store it economically in large quantities, and to use it at a later time, would be the most disruptive technology to emerge on the power grid in the past 100 years."
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