“Batteries are a little bit like bacon. Everything is better with batteries,” quipped Michelle Taylor of Queensland utility Ergon Energy at session on energy storage at Clean Energy Week in Brisbane. “There’s no doubt that storage linked with the appropriate interface mechanism presents fantastic opportunities for the customer and utility,” the utility’s technology development manager added more formally. Y ...

Acta Power, a developer of hydrogen fuel cells, has announced that its energy systems will be put on trial by one of the largest telecommunications organizations in the Philippines. Acta has teamed with SMS Global Technologies, a technical support company, to facilitate these trials and show off the capabilities of its hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells have been gaining popularity in the telecommunications se ...

In an effort to curb energy bills, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is using Kitakyushu City as a test bed for a hydrogen storage system integrated with controller software, solar panels and industrial CHP (Combined Heat and Power) backup. The City of Yokohama, Toyota City, and Keihanna are also part of the Japan Smart City Portal experiment, which began in 2010 and ends in 2014. In Kitakyush ...

SoftBank and Bloom Energy announced today they will begin offering fuel cells this fall as an alternative off-the-grid power source in Japan. The 50-50 joint venture will target corporate offices, data centers, hospitals, government centers and other large buildings that would benefit from multiple power sources. Each fuel cell system generates enough electricity to power 500 homes. The cells also offer a w ...

The reorganisation of the NSW power sector has moved up a notch with the planned sale of the national electricity meter arms of Ausgrid and Endeavour Energy. The proposed sale comes hard on the heels of the industry regulator, the Australian Electricity Markets Commission, calling for metering to be hived off from the energy distributors as part of a broader industry overhaul. It also comes as Victoria's me ...

TNB will implement the Fuel Cost Pass-Through (FCPT) mechanism next year as a process to determine electricity tariff more efficiently for the consumers. Deputy Minister of Energy, Green Technology and Water Datuk Seri Mahdzir Khalid said the TNB mechanism was among the components in the Incentive-Based Regulation (IBR) under the electricity tariff rate determination programme. "The Energy Commission is in ...

Australian scientists are currently studying the use of titanium dioxide, a chemical widely used as a whitening pigment, which could help store energy produced by renewable sources. The researchers said titanium dioxide which was widely used as a whitening pigment in toothpastes, plastics, sunscreens and many more applications could prove a major boon for renewable energy sector. Chemist Yun Liu, a scientis ...

In a radical strategy to contain power bills, households would get lower rates in return for enduring short, but sharp, price increases when demand is at its highest. They could also be paid to go without air-conditioning. EnergyAustralia, which has 2.8 million customers in southeast Australia, is trialing charging households more than 12 times the normal price of power up to 14 times a year in two-hour "dy ...

Lesser-developed countries — with limited, inefficient, or ageing power plants, and significant supply gaps — like Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Uzbekistan, should be supported for interventions that could focus on priorities for reducing line losses; installing proper metering, billing, and collection systems; and improving the efficiency of power plants, according ...

Around the world, governments and businesses are constantly being called upon to make big investments in solar, wind, and geothermal energy, as well as biofuels. But, in the US, unlike in Europe and Asia, discussion of hydrogen energy and fuel cells as systemic, game-changing technologies is largely absent. That needs to change: these clean, renewable energy sources promise not only zero-emission baseload p ...