The search for the ultimate wind forecasting model got a boost at the end of 2008 when DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory began collaborating with a Portuguese research institute, INESC Porto, to develop a new platform for making such predictions.
When the U.S. Patent Office published patent application number 11/626,810 in July 2008, few people noticed—at first. Soon, however, the metering-technology community was abuzz, mostly with outrage. If the Patent Office grants the patent and all its claims, other utilities would be legally forbidden from using any of the methods described, without first obtaining a license from the patent holders.
Energy issues took center stage this summer. To get a reality check, we sought out Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank focuses on the interplay between energy policy and national security.
Chelsea Sexton is one of the country’s leading plug-in vehicle advocates. She led protests against GM’s decision to scrap thousands of EV-1s, and appeared in the Oscar-nominated film Who Killed the Electric Car? She formed advocacy group Plug-In America, and led the creation of the Automotive X PRIZE in 2005. Fortnightly caught up with Sexton in June to discuss the electric vehicle market, and utilities’ role in developing it.
When Spanish utility giant Iberdrola announced last June that it would acquire Maine-based Energy East for $4.5 billion, it signaled a potential surge in major foreign owners buying into U.S. utility companies. Fortnightly spoke with Pedro Azagra, director of corporate development for Iberdrola S.A. in Bilbao, Spain, to get an update on the acquisition, and his impression of U.S. merger-approval processes.
As president and CEO of ISO New England, Gordon van Welie has his feet planted firmly on each of two sides of a cultural divide. First, as a transmission system operator, van Welie must keep the lights on and the wires humming. At the same time, he must run a regional market—an ongoing experiment in freewheeling capitalism in an industry fraught with more long-term uncertainty than perhaps any other.
When Patrick Moore left Greenpeace—the environmental advocacy group that he helped to create in the early 1970s—some activists labeled him a traitor and a corporate shill. It didn’t stop him, however, from becoming one of the environmental community’s most outspoken advocates for nuclear power development—and one of the harshest critics of anti-nuclear activists. Fortnightly caught up with Moore in February to discuss the state of anti-nuclear advocacy in America.
Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt suggests science and market forces will eliminate the climate-change problem with minimal effort.
Freakonomics author Steven Levitt compares the carbon buildup to horse manure in the 1890s. “Everything we know from the past and what I know from talking to scientists tells me technology is likely to be the solution,” he says.
Oracle’s software guru Guerry Waters eats and breathes the new infrastructure.
Oracle’s Guerry Waters is one of the country’s leading gurus on smart-meter technology—a business sector with huge potential for addressing today’s environmental problems.
Ratepayer advocate Michael Shames has been fighting utilities for a quarter century.
Calling himself the “world’s greatest consumer,” utility watchdog Michael Shames helped in 1981 to create the Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN), where he has served as executive director since 1985. That may make Shames one of, if not the longest-serving ratepayer advocates in the country.