Tag Archives: Clean Energy

Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Consumers

The German Renewable Energy Act (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, EEG) was designed to encourage cost reductions based on improved energy efficiency from economies of scale over time. The Act came into force in the year 2000 and was the initial spark behind … Continue reading

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Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany

2015 is knocking at the door. I just got The Economist’s “The World in 2015” special issue both in print and digital form. It’s full of numbers, predictions and stories. Most of its numbers and predictions are optimistic extrapolations of … Continue reading

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Yes We Can 3: The Alcohol Debate

This will be the last in the series of blogs on EROI that started with John Morgan’s guest blog (November 4). The set of data in all three blogs was based on a paper by Weißbach et al. that suggested … Continue reading

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Yes We Can 2: The Weißbach Paper

A few weeks ago, John Morgan wrote a guest blog here (November 4, 2014) called “The Catch-22 of Energy Storage and EROI.” My conversation with him started by way of a Twitter discussion of David MacKay’s paper on the long … Continue reading

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Yes We Can! :(

Yesterday (November 4th) was Election Day in the US. It ended in a big victory for the Republicans, with a matching defeat for the Democrats and President Obama. It will be much more difficult for the President to push an … Continue reading

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Guest Blog: John Morgan: The Catch-22 of Energy Storage and EROI

As I mentioned in my blog on October 21st, I have invited John Morgan to post a guest blog about EROI. This week, he has generously agreed to re-post the article that I mentioned, with an added postscript addressing questions … Continue reading

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Back to the Sustainable Energy Transition: The Physics of Sustainability and Some Tweets About it.

In the last blog I strongly advocated simplifying the conversation about climate change, focusing on how we can get from the present “business as usual” scenario to an “environmentally friendly” scenario that will not result in an environment inhospitable to … Continue reading

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Income Inequality – Climate Change

I just came back from a very intense week in Israel. I went there in the “middle” of a war between Hamas and Israel, which paused for a cease-fire a day after my arrival. This war has been between a … Continue reading

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Energy Storage Selection

This will be the last blog to deal directly with storage technologies. I listed the various technologies in the July 29th post, then followed that up last week, mainly focusing on estimates of future capacity and the investments that will … Continue reading

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The Economics of Energy Storage

Two of the last three blogs (July 15 and July 29, 2014) discussed the role that energy storage plays in the transition to more sustainable energy sources. In my last blog, I tried to discuss the available technologies. This week, … Continue reading

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