Business

Dozens of institutional investors in U.S. renewable energy projects pulled out of the market when the nation’s liquidity reserves dried up late last year. Some left the renewable market sector in search of more lucrative investment opportunities. Others found themselves unable to take advantage of the attractive tax credits because they themselves lacked profits against which to use the credits. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, approved February 13, changed the investor ground rules — again.

Congress looks at what “smart grid” means and comes up with mixed definitions. The one thing everyone agrees on: The smart grid is going to be expensive.

The most lasting effect the Three Mile Island nuclear accident had on me was what it taught me about crisis communications—lessons that served me well over the 25-plus years that followed and especially after the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States.

Nuclear loan guarantees in the 2005 Energy Policy Act have proven to be a failure: not just too little, but far too late.

UCLA management guru Sam Culbert calls annual employee performance reviews “bogus” and not conducive to good company management. Get rid of them, he says.

Few companies consider carbon in their supply chain decisions, says an Accenture study. Should purchasers require carbon reductions from suppliers as part of their business model?

North Dakota garnered most of the Department of Energy’s earmarks in March’s omnibus appropriations bill.

It’s not easy being a regulator as the nation faces several daunting energy challenges—integrating renewables, carbon constraints, reliability, and security into an elderly grid that is barely able to keep up with its current mission of moving power from generator to load.

ELECTRIC POWER, the world’s most comprehensive conference covering power generation, will be presented at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Chicago May 12 through May 14.

What do you do when your research institution is losing roughly half a million dollars annually as a result of multiple electricity outages — and electricity demand keeps rising? If you’re the Illinois Institute of Technology, you turn the challenge into a campuswide learning experience by teaming with the Galvin Electricity Initiative and other experts to design and construct a prototype Perfect Power System (PPS). Even during its implementation, the PPS promises to provide more reliable and sustainable electricity to the university at a lower cost than it had been paying.