energy

Battle of the Currents: AC vs. DC

Cal-ISO facilitates the management of power lines throughout the state. It’s not the only company to do it, though managers say this facility is the most up-to-date. Its control room likes like something out of a movie, where specific desks are charged with big tasks -- like wholesale brokering of energy into California and management of emergency power line failures.

Gassing up the power in a data center.

Fujitsu held an open house at its research labs in Kanagawa, southwest of Tokyo. Researchers demonstrated new technologies, including a small, flexible sheet that uses differences in temperature to generate small electric charges.

After years of silence regarding its energy use, the search giant energetically reveals all.

On March 8, IDC Energy Insights launched the Worldwide Quarterly Smart Meter Tracker, a new data product tracking global deployments and shipments of Smart Meters. Unlike FERC and the EIA, which count both retrofitted electromechanical meters and meters with one-way communications, IDC's tracker focuses on truly 'advanced' metering and communications solutions; IDC defines a "smart meter" as a solid-state electric meter with integrated two-way communications.

IBM and Cable & Wireless are set to collaborate to offer a ‘smart energy cloud’ to support the UK’s new energy meter rollout.

Japan's major electronics companies took stock of their problems on Monday, as the country struggles to come to terms with the scale of devastation following Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami.

For almost 100 years, the lightbulb was simply a lighting device: when a current passed through it, photons came out. Over the last few decades, that has changed. The electronic ballast in a modern fluorescent fixture has almost as many power electronics in it as your cell phone. And, with the emergence of L.E.D.'s, the lightbulb will make the leap to full-fledged I.T. appliance, capable of intelligent automated control and energy management. That transformation is a microcosm of changes in all machines that we use to live our lives: cars are more CPU than engines; HVAC systems have more computing power than an old-fashioned IBM mainframe; and your television set has morphed into another access point for the Internet.

As the beginning of 2011 approaches it's time to look back at 2010 and see which clean energy blog posts in the IDC Energy Insights community were the most popular - partially because it's expected, partially because it's fun and partially because we can infer which topics were the most important to our followers.

If wind is ever to be a significant part of the energy equation in this country we'll need to take it offshore -- into the deep oceans. Large offshore wind objects could harness about more than 4,000 GW of electricity according to a massive report on wind energy from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Cisco this week said it will acquire Arch Rock Corporation, a privately held developer of IP-based wireless network technology for smart grids.