Why Energy Storage is About to Get Big – and Cheap
14 Apr, 2015
tl;dr: Storage of electricity in large quantities is reaching an inflection point, poised to give a big boost to renewables, to disrupt business models across the electrical industry, and to tap into a market that will eventually top many of tens of billions of dollars…
R e a d M o r e2014 Was a Good Year: Better Than You Remember
21 Dec, 2014
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. The Sony hack and surrender to fear. 2014 seems to be ending on a crappy note. My twitter feed is full of people expressing good riddance to the year. 2014 was better than that. I want to take a moment to…
R e a d M o r eSolar and Wind Plunging Below Fossil Fuel Prices
5 Oct, 2014
Asset management firm Lazard has a fascinating new analysis of renewable and other energy prices out. There are a huge number of insights in this, from an outside analyst whose primary interest is financial. (Those are, in my mind, the most objective analysts in this…
R e a d M o r eCarbon Prices Drive Clean Energy Innovation
11 Mar, 2014
I want to point out something I see commonly missed. Carbon prices accelerate innovation that brings down the price of green energy. So do renewable energy portfolio standards, green energy subsidies, and a whole swath of other climate policies. They do this by increasing the scale of…
R e a d M o r eThe Shrinking Dominance of the Big Dogs in Tech
12 Jan, 2014
"In 1981, the top ten technology companies represented 95% of the global IT market cap. Today, that share has fallen to 26% and the ratio continues to fall." Microsoft, IBM, DEC, HP, and so on were once titans. Apple, Google, and Facebook may be…
R e a d M o r eThe Sunlight is Where the Energy Poverty Is
14 Nov, 2013
The future world energy system will undoubtedly be a mix of many different energy technologies – nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and some fossil fuels for decades and decades to come. Yet I’m particularly optimistic about solar. One reason is its incredible price trajectory, a trait…
R e a d M o r eIncome, Energy Use, and Life Expectancy
14 Nov, 2013
One of the best indicators of human well-being is life expectancy. High life expectancy often means low infant mortality and typically correlates with ample access to food, medicine, shelter, and education, as well as low levels of disease and violence. Interestingly, during an economic development…
R e a d M o r eChina’s Tipping Point on Environment?
29 Jul, 2012
Chinese environmental protesters have won the cancellation of an industrial waste pipeline that would have dumped waste from a paper factory into the ocean near the town of Qidong. This is not the first such victory. The Guardian notes that: The protest followed similar demonstrations against projects in…
R e a d M o r ePricing Nature to Save the Planet
27 Jun, 2012
New Scientist, covering Rio+20, talks about putting a price on the natural world: Green economics, the theory goes, will work by quantifying nature and giving it a cash value. As Steiner put it: “Factoring natural capital into the bottom line will bring the real wealth…
R e a d M o r eIs Automation the Handmaiden of Inequality?
3 May, 2012
In Technology Review, Christopher Mims asks if the increasing automation of US industry has contributed to growing inequality, by bringing its gains to factory owners rather than workers. Here’s how I would interpret the odd coincidence of these two trends: in a perfectly capitalist system,…
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