Efforts should be focused on stopping output of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas which helps heat the planet, rather than moving to a source that can be regenerated, said Craig Mundie, the man who replaced Bill Gates as the world's largest software maker's futurist. Conservation and radical technologies, including new nuclear, could be key, he said.

The Obama administration wants to rebuild the national electric grid that delivers power to everyone's toasters and televisions. One reason is that the grid can't handle all the new solar and wind power the president wants to build to create a greener energy economy. Here's the problem: Solar and wind power are intermittent. Sometimes it's sunny, sometimes it's not, and it's the same for wind. But the grid needs constant and reliable sources of power.

To make use of this clean [renewable] energy, we'll need more transmission lines that can transport power from one region to another and connect energy-­hungry cities with the remote areas where much of our renewable power is likely to be generated. We'll also need far smarter controls throughout the distribution system--technologies that can store extra electricity from wind farms in the batteries of plug-in hybrid cars, for example, or remotely turn power-hungry appliances on and off as the energy supply rises and falls. If these grid upgrades don't happen, new renewable-power projects could be stalled, because they would place unacceptable stresses on existing electrical systems.

Behind the scenes in the U.S. and in Europe, the race is on to build the world's first deep-water wind farms, ones that would operate on floating platforms in waters hundreds of feet deep, like oil rigs found in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. There are gargantuan technical hurdles ...

N.C. State University was selected by the National Science Foundation to lead a $28.5 million research initiative to transform the nation's century-old power transmission system into a "smart grid" network that will be able to store energy from solar power, wind farms and other alternative resources.

A New Jersey company said last week that it has joined with Michael Nakhamkin, one of the top thinkers in energy storage, to develop ways to trap wind-generated power in underground reservoirs. Nakhamkin has helped develop technology to pull excess energy off the power grid - usually at night when usage has waned - to run compressors that pump air into sealed, underground caverns that once held oil, salt or natural gas. During periods of higher demand, the air is released and heated to run air expansion turbines. ..."We really think this is a game-changer for the renewables industry," said Roy Daniel, chief executive of Energy Storage and Power LLC, a joint venture between PSEG Energy Holdings and Nakhamkin.

The grand U.S. ambitions of Indian wind-turbine manufacturer Suzlon Energy Ltd. are facing mounting problems. The Indian company -- the world's fifth-largest wind-turbine maker by sales -- earlier this year acknowledged that 65 giant blades on turbines it had sold in the U.S. Midwest were cracking because of the extreme gusts in the region. The company is reinforcing 1,251 blades, almost the total it has sold in the U.S. Now, other problems are emerging, in part because the company quickly ramped up U.S. sales to meet burgeoning demand for alternative energy. ...

Wind power is unreliable. No one can turn up the wind every time electricity demand peaks. So some utilities are looking at ways to bottle up the wind's energy and store it underground for later use. "The wind blows a lot at 2 in the morning, so it makes sense to save it and use it at 5 in the afternoon when everyone comes home from work," said Georgianne Peek of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) uses off-peak electricity from wind farms or other sources to pump air underground. The high pressure air acts like a huge battery that can be released on demand to turn a gas turbine and make electricity. However, a good portion of the input energy is lost in this process, making CAES one of the least efficient storage technologies available.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has created a collaboration with the six leading wind turbine makers to promote advanced research and development. ...The agreement builds on the recently released DOE report '20 Percent Wind Energy in 2030' that examines the technical feasibility of harnessing wind power to provide up to 20% of the nation's total electricity needs by 2030.

While scientists are developing many creative schemes to store wind energy, most are either far-fetched or still years from completion. Some researchers hope to create hillside pumps, or compress air in enormous underground caverns, while others envision enormous flywheels spinning with the buzz of wind-generated energy until it is ready to be spat back out and used. Two not-so-far-fetched technologies have emerged as more real and immediate possibilities -- storing wind energy in batteries, and using it to produce and store hydrogen. ...Denmark, an age-old poster child for tapping into wind energy, is already well over the golden 20 percent threshold. And they do offer one solid piece of wind-savvy advice, as relayed by Rune Birk Nielsen of the Danish Wind Industry Association in an e-mail. "We have simply put up a lot of windmills," Nielsen said.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Edison Mission Energy, a unit of Edison International, said the 144-foot-long windmill blades it recently bought from Suzlon have begun to split at three wind-power sites it operates in the Midwest. Suzlon has recalled 1,251 blades from its top-of-the-line turbines, which represent the majority of blades the company has sold to date in the U.S.. Its troubles don't end there. A year ago, the company bought a controlling stake in a large German turbine manufacturer, REpower Systems AG, in one of India's biggest overseas acquisitions. ...Now, Suzlon can't get its hands on the blueprints. Hamstrung by a German corporate law, Suzlon must offer to buy out minority shareholders before it can demand REpower's designs. It's unlikely that the company could make a tender offer until 2009, say people with knowledge of the companies. ...Mr. Kher blamed the cracks on the Midwest's unexpectedly violent changes in wind direction. Though Mr. Tanti says that only 45 blades have cracked, Suzlon says it will add an extra lamination layer to almost all of the blades it has shipped to the U.S. To repair cracked blades and reinforce the rest, the company expects to spend $30 million.

As wind power becomes more common, its unpredictability becomes more of a problem. Sudden drops in wind speed can send grid operators scrambling to cover the shortfall and even cause blackouts; unexpected surges can leave conventional power plants idling, incurring costs and spewing pollution to no purpose. ...When wind farms were less common, grid controllers could essentially ignore their varying output, as it was all but indistinguishable from natural fluctuations in consumer use.

Wind 2008 -- the not so good news -- The Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is the independent system operator that manages the region's grid with oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT). As SGN reported in March 2008 (see Smart Grid News article link below), ERCOT operators had to react promptly on February 26 to balance load through demand response (DR) because of system reliability problems caused by wind intermittency. But systems reliability was not the only issue caught in the headlights by this event. The Wall Street Journal also spotlighted the economic impact; namely that the unexpected loss of wind generation caused wholesale power prices to soar from $299 per MWH to $1,055 per MWH in West Texas.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that DOE will invest up to $13.7 million, over three years (Fiscal Years 2008-2010), for 11 university-led projects that will focus on developing advanced solar photovoltaic (PV) technology manufacturing processes and products. These projects are integral to President Bush's Solar America Initiative, which aims to make solar energy cost-competitive with conventional forms of electricity by 2015.

While the US Department of Energy has spent $57.5 billion over the past 30 years for research & development on advanced energy technologies such as Ethanol, solar and wind power the nation's energy usage has not dramatically changed-fossil fuels today provide 85% of the nation's energy compared to 93% in 1973. Many technical, cost and environmental challenges must be overcome in developing and demonstrating advanced technologies before they can be deployed in the US with greater impact. Those were just some of the not-too-encouraging conclusions the Government Accounting Office told the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science and Technology today. ...· Wind technologies: DOE is assessing its long-term vision of generating 20% of the nation's electricity using wind energy by 2030. Its current R&D efforts, however, are focused on more immediate expansion of the wind industry, particularly on utility-scale wind turbines. One of DOE's targets is to increase the number of distributed wind turbines deployed in the United States from 2,400 in 2007 to 12,000 in 2015. Although wind energy has grown in recent years, from about 1,800 megawatts in 1996 to over 16,800 megawatts in 2007, the wind industry still faces investors' concerns about high up-front capital costs, including connecting the wind farms to the power transmission grid, the GAO said.

Remember the thrill of checking out your house from outer space with Google Earth? Now a Seattle company wants you to know whether there's enough wind to power it with renewable energy. 3Tier, a weather-consulting service geared toward renewable-energy developers, is expected to release a global wind map, available free on the Web. The company also aims to create a similar tool to portray the potential of solar energy, to be released within the next 18 months. ...For a wind project to be profitable, wind speeds must reach an annual average of 6 meters per second. But it also needs to be near transmission lines that reach population centers. ..."You can't just build a wind farm where it's windy. You need to get the energy out," he said.

As wind farms sprout across the country, they're kicking up a new quandary: how to zap the electricity to homes and businesses that need it. The USA's wind-power boom, especially in rural parts of Texas, the Midwest and California, is poised to outstrip the capacity of high-voltage lines to send the electricity hundreds of miles to population centers such as Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. ...Wind farms will have to compete to be among the lowest bidders to get on the grid, leaving others off. "Clearly we don't want to build wind farms and have them not run," says Horizon Wind Energy executive Denise Hill. ...A wind farm can be built in 18 months, while a transmission line can take five to 10 years.

Driven by soaring energy demands, the high cost of gas and oil and worries about global warming, an expansion of peaceful nuclear power increasingly appears to be inevitable. "I believe very strongly that new nuclear plants will be built in the U.S. in the coming decades to address problems with respect to higher energy demand, high prices and global warming," said Sudarshan Loyalka, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "I believe the nation has no other choice."

GWEC figures wind power's capacity in 2005 was about 24%-that is, wind turbines spin 1 hour out of 4, year-round. That will improve, but slowly. Bigger and taller turbines, in more favorable locations-especially offshore-will make wind turbines more efficient. But it will be a long time before wind power's paper strength starts to be reflected in real electricity generation. GWEC's own figures point to wind power creeping toward 30% efficiency over the next twenty years. Wind power may be the most mature horse in the renewable-energy stable. But even a thoroughbred is going to have a tough time catching up with the supertanker that is the fossil-fueled energy establishment.