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California residents are urged to conserve electricity Thursday, as the cold snap in much of the United States is creating a shortage of natural gas. "A shortage of natural gas triggered by extreme cold weather in much of the United States and Canada is impacting fuel supplies to Southern (California) power plants and reducing electricity generation," the California IndependentSystem Operator Corporation (ISO), said in a statement issuing a statewide Flex Alert. "While the natural gas shortage is only impacting Southern California power plants, statewide electricity and gas conservation will help free up bothelectricity and gas supplies for Southern Californians."

Europe’s electricity system is not living up to its promises, according to a French advisory body to the prime minister, which published a report on Tuesday (28 January) largely blaming renewable energy subsidies for this failure. The EU’s energy policy hinges mostly on power management. However, the European electricity system does not function, according to a French government advisory body, the General Commission for Strategy and Forecasting (Commissariat général à la stratégie et à la prospective—CGSP), which presented the findings of the study on 28 January. …

We may worry about hackers taking down the electrical grid, says Eugene K. Chow at The Week, just like we worry about, for example, bikers hitting frail old ladies crossing the street. But both threats are overblown. Like biker-on-old-lady violence, cyberattacks are so rare that they’re notable — we fear them and talk about them precisely because they don’t happen very often. But the true threat lies elsewhere, with more common villains. On the street, of course, it’s cars. In the nation’s electricity infrastructure, it’s squirrels. Chow explains: Even squirrels are proving to be, well, a squirrelly problem. No one...

Americans may look back in a few decades and see that 2007 was the year that production of electricity peaked in the United States and our nation began powering down. This may make many on the environmentalist left -- including President Barack Obama's top science and technology adviser -- very happy. But it will not make life better for you, your children or your grandchildren. According to data published by the Energy Information Administration, the United States generated a total of approximately 4,157 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2007. We had never produced that much before. We have never...

The growing popularity of environmentally friendly motoring in America has led to a new phenomenon, “charge rage”, as the owners of electric cars compete for places to plug in their cars. While the owners of electric cars may care about climate change, they appear to be less solicitous of their fellow ecologically-motivated motorists. Angry notes have been left on windscreens and drivers have returned to their cars to find that they have been unplugged.

“Towards the extraction of ‘live’ electricity”: Report from Open Power Association [번역] From Open Power Association Report OO6 by Ugo Abundo and Luciano Saporito, these excerpts are google translated from the original Italian: Best wishes for the new year 2014 from the staff of hydrobetatron.org/Open Power! May you be peaceful and happy, and make the most of your projects in the spirit of “open” and sharing, possibilente … Dear friends, In this latest report, compiled by Ugo Abundo, is communicated in an articulated manner the state of the art of the important work of our team. In particular, it is...

A record-setting bout of bitter cold weather swept down through the Midwest and across most of the country in early January. The Northeast region reacted with upward spikes in wholesale natural gas and power prices as generators and other customers struggled to procure natural gas supplies. In the Mid-Atlantic region, record-high winter peak demand along with unexpected outages of power plants and natural gas equipment drove peak electricity prices even higher than in New York and New England. The sharp rise in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic natural gas and power demand also spurred record-high natural gas storage withdrawals. The PJM Interconnection's...

A new bill would lift Michigan's cap on electric market choice. Proponents of the bill say the current cap prevents most of Michigan customers from using competition to lower their electric rates, which are the highest in the region and well above the national average. House Bill 5184 is sponsored by Rep. Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake. The state's current electric competition cap was established in 2008 when Public Act 295, the "Clean, Renewable and Efficient Energy Act," was signed into law. Under the act, Michigan's two largest electric utilities, Consumers Energy and Detroit Edition, were returned to a quasi-monopolistic status. It...

I spoke to someone yesterday that I have not seen since 1996. I met him at the Barbican in London, he was an Inventor and I was an inventor and we were both displaying products, i then met him a few months later at the Southampton Science fair and we went out for a few beers. So he worked in electronics and when I met him yesterday he told me something that I could never imagine and still cant believe it but it does seem true as I did a couple of searches and thing are happening as he told...

In 1990, Germany’s bown coal-fired power stations produced almost 171 billion kilowatt hours of power. At the time, many old eastern German plants were still in operation. It was a situation that the German government wanted to change, with the aim being that of radically reducing the output of the CO2-polluting lignite plants, but that’s not happening. In 2013, it rose to 162 billion kilowatt hours, the highest level since reunification in 1990, according to preliminary figures from AGEB, a collection of industry associations and research institutes. […] Power output from anthracite coal also rose, by eight billion kilowatt hours...

The Year in Energy: 10 Big Energy Stories of 2013                 As 2013 comes to a close, it's time to look back at the big energy stories of the year. Here's my top 10 stories from 2013...1. Japan taps methane hydrates with explosive implications for the future of global energy supplies.The Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry announced in March that a team aboard a drilling ship pearched above the Eastern Nankai Trough had extracted methane gas from hydrates trapped 1,000 feet below the sea floor surface. Methane hydrates, also known as clathrates or...

High energy bills may top the political agenda in the UK, but households all over Europe are feeling the squeeze. Since 2010, both gas and electricity prices have risen markedly, largely due to rises in wholesale prices on the back of the tentative global economic recovery and expectations of higher demand. Electricity prices fell in the first half of the year, but this was simply a case of energy suppliers cutting prices after large increases in January. The dip in gas prices has lasted longer, but even they are on the up again. But as the chart below shows, Europe...

Bulb Ban: As of Wednesday, the manufacture and import of 60- and 40-watt incandescent light bulbs will be illegal — one more setback in the fight against government interference into the daily lives of the American people. First they came for our light bulbs. Before the onset of ObamaCare and its mandate to buy health insurance as a condition of citizenship, there was the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), one of the first things Democrats took up on retaking the House of Representatives in the 2006 elections. A well-intentioned President George W. Bush signed the incandescent bulb...

Here’s something of a mystery for all of you amateur sleuths out there. As has already been determined, America is experiencing a fossil fuels energy boom unlike any in living memory right now. Just yesterday, Erika ran down some of the numbers, with significant expansion being seen in domestic production of shale oil and natural gas. In the midst of all this plenty, you should all be kicking back and enjoying those sweet, lower energy bills, right?Oddly enough… no. In November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Electricity Price Index hit 202.284, an all-time record and nearly 20% higher than just...

The Cost Of Green: In the midst of an unparalleled energy boom, U.S. electricity prices have skyrocketed to new highs. This paradox is a result not of the free market, but of runaway government "green" regulation. Unnoticed by virtually everyone except the sharp-eyed folks at CNSNews.com, new federal data show that electricity prices have never been higher. In November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Electricity Price Index hit 202.284, an all-time record and nearly 20% higher than just six years ago. This might strike some as strange, given the private-sector shale-fracking boom going on in the Midwest, Northeast and Texas,...

The Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to modernize the nation’s power grid, with the goal of changing the way Americans use energy. Your electric bill will go way up, unless you allow the utility to control your energy load at times of peak demand. “Smart grid” technology involves a wireless, two-way flow of information between individual homes and the power plant. This allows the utility to charge more for electricity, depending on when it is used; and it enables the utility to manage energy for the consumer, to reduce the impact on the grid.

(CNSNews.com) - Turning on the Christmas lights on a house or a Christmas tree this November cost Americans more on average than it has before, as the seasonally adjusted electricity price index hit an all-time high in the United States in November, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average price for a kilowatt hour of electricity also set a record for the month of November, according to BLS.

Obamacare isn’t the only new government program suffering problems. San Francisco is getting jolted by its new Community Choice Aggregation program, which the U.S. Department of Energy defines in general as, “a state policy that enables local governments to aggregate electricity demand within their jurisdictions in order to procure alternative energy supplies while maintaining the existing electricity provider for transmission and distribution services.” CCAs allows cities or counties to opt out of electric service from their local monopoly utility and form a cooperative to buy cheap green power in the market. In California, the monopolies are Pacific Gas & Electric,...

Exxon Mobil says the drive for higher living standards around the world will keep demand for electricity and transportation fuels growing even as economies get more efficient and governments put a price on pollution. The company's annual long-term energy outlook, released Thursday, predicts world energy demand will grow 35 percent by 2040 as electricity and modern fuels are brought to some of the billions of people in the developing world who currently live without power or burn wood or other biomass for cooking and heating. Those growing needs will be somewhat offset by a slow decline in consumption in the...

If you want a 40 or 60-watt incandescent light bulb, you’d better get one by Christmas, because they will not be manufactured after January 1, 2014 and will be increasingly scarce. The 40 and 60-watt light bulbs sell more than any other light bulbs, but they are being phased out as their incandescent 75 and 100-watt brethren were phased out at the beginning of 2013.