Planet Relations

Roughly one year ago, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced a nine-step policy plan for transforming the Bay Area into the “Electric Vehicle Capital of the U.S.”  Where do we stand with the officially named Bay Area EV Corridor [...]

Following in the wake of the $3.4 billion smart grid stimulus funding, the Department of Energy yesterday announced roughly $30 million in grants to seven hydroelectric facilities nationwide. The projects will produce about 187,000 MWh/year, enough to power more than 12,000 homes. An important theme of the announcement was the incremental generation potential of the [...]

Earlier this week, the Dept of Energy announced the recipients of $151 million in funding from the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). In August 2007, Congress established the ARPA-E within the Dept of Energy to help “overcome the long-term and high-risk technological barriers in the development of energy technologies.” In April, President Obama [...]

UPDATE: Grant awards (pdf) by category, state, or map-overlay. The White House held a press briefing on Monday evening to announce that President Obama would be awarding $3.4 billion in Smart Grid grants. Administration officials included Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change; Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser [...]

According to the newly released Clean Tech Job Trends 2009 report issued by research firm Clean Edge, energy efficiency provides the most bang (i.e., jobs) for your buck. The report attributes stimulus dollars and increased recognition by companies, utilities, and governments that energy efficiency is a cost effective method for dealing with volatile energy prices [...]

The first deadline for smart grid stimulus funding (Funding Opportunity Number 58) from the Department of Energy has passed and it appears, from public statements made by the utilities themselves, that the program may already be close to oversubscribed. According to greentechgrid, “…the rough tally of publicly announced grant requests now stands at a total [...]

This whole week, National Public Radio is examining the costs, the politics, and other challenges of upgrading the country's electricity grid. From discussing the state of the grid to siting much-needed new transmission lines to how best to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable power, the series covers the important issues faces our nation's energy [...]

This site has been largely ignored since I took a full-time position back in September 2008 with KEMA, Inc., a global technical and management consulting firm focused on the energy industry. As I wondered how best to archive old content including past articles that I'd written for green building publications, these pages have remained static. [...]