Our riches don’t matter
People in developed countries may think that we are rich enough to be able to pay increasing amounts for oil and other types of energy as petroleum becomes increasingly scarce. Our riches, however, don’t matter much. In order for each individual country to maintain affluence and economic growth, we need to be able to maintain [...]
We need to open our eyes!
We need to open our eyes to the fact that we large scale energy transformation programs will become necessary in order to transform global energy systems on a large scale. Those of us who are already aware of this need to inform politicians and high level business leaders about this. This is the only possible [...]
What all this is about…
We are facing the global peak in oil production. The majority of oil producing countries are already well past their peaks and a few large producers struggle to increase production to accomodate to global demand. Yet world political leaders have failed to grasp the importance of this fact. We use energy to run our global [...]
The importance of competent and honest people
A Swedish investment bank HQ Bank has recently lost its permit by the government to run a bank. The reason is its too high risk level. One board member, Catharina Lagerstam, was appointed in April and she did an independent valuation of the holdings by the board meeting in May, at which she said that [...]
A Strategy and a Plan that Combines Many Aspects
A debate is on-going in the New York Times about the future of energy in the US. Bill Gates wrote one article that focused on the need to increase the spending on energy technology research. This article was followed by a reply written by Richard Rosen, a senior fellow of the Tellus Institute in Boston. [...]
Storage of Electricity From Renewable Sources
One of the issues that arise as countries invest in technologies to generate electricity from renewable sources is the need to store electricity in order to bridge the times when there is no wind or no sunshine. During strong winds there are also large volumes of energy that are currently lost. There are numerous ideas [...]
Need to work out the details
Too few resources are invested in the development of strategies for Global Energy Transformation and we spend too much time discussing the technical merits of single technology ideas, without having made an overall map of the transformation landscape. When we discuss smart grids, for instance, we have not yet developed an overall picture of the [...]
The GE Ecomagination Challenge
GETI was pleased to be able to take advantage of the GE Ecomagination Challenge and submit our idea for developing systems integrators. If you’re not familiar with it, you can see the GETI entry here. http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_a_view_idea.bix?c=ideas&idea_id=3FE45133-213F-4C3B-AA0E-8FDFD0E3083B. Perhaps for the many energy concerned of you, you may want to submit your own entry. If you feel [...]
…and then there is management…
The American Energy Innovation Council, headed by business leaders such as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, argues that the reason for the lack of progress in areas of renewable energy is the low level of federal funding in this area. http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Bill-Gates-and-the-Energy-Research-Dilemma.html I believe that this is true, but [...]
Important Contributions
Some countries make important contributions to Global Energy Transformation by developing free sofwtware and methods for various aspects of renewable energy projects. RET Screen International is an example of one such software that has been developed by the Canadian government. http://www.retscreen.net/ang/home.php Now also on-line communities emerge that support users of this sofware, such as the [...]
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Mats Visits GWU June 21
