Nora Brownell's Energy Blog

Sharing Ideas on Energy Regulation and Technology

Every organization involved in the energy sector uses the Internet to do research, find new business or to see what their competitors are doing. Sharing that information though is tough work, especially if the people doing the work are from different parts of the organization. Social Bookmarking tools like delicio.us can break down at least the technological barriers of sharing energy information.

RSS feeds in the North American Energy Sector

Most energy organizations in North America don't use RSS or Really Simple Syndication to push information to web users. That means that energy professionals who rely on these websites must check them a few times a day for updates. Of course, RSS is not very useful if you don’t have much information to share. But that's not the case with energy companies, RTOs and ISOs and national and state government agencies.

Sharing Energy Information in Simple English

Welcome back from your Labor Day Holiday or three week vacation abroad. Are you wondering what happened while you were gone? If you use RSS or Really Simple Syndication, all of the news would be waiting for you in your news reader. If you don't use RSS, then you'll have to go to your favorite websites and reconstruct what happened. Not very efficient and wastes time and money.

LEDs and Demand Response Technologies- options to runaway electricity consumption

This is the last of a three-part post on my take of investor and energy technology conferences that I attended in the US and Japan. The attendees included :

1) Light Emitting Diodes called LEDs,
2) Demand Response Technologies
3) Grid Monitoring, and
4) Storage capacity (nice for solar particularly).

I'll focus on LEDs and Demand Response technologies in this post.

Did Electricity Deregulation really fail?

Yesterday I read an article in the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, entitled Deregulation Burns Out which is based on a 14 page study by the Tellus Institute entitled "A Failed Experiment: Why electricity regulation did not work and could not work." I think the article misses the point on energy deregulation. I provide some food for thought in this post.

No Lack of Interest in US Energy Sector from Investors and Technology Firms

What I saw at the US and Japan conferences was very encouraging, especially if we really embrace the concept of an updated and restructured US and North American energy sector and markets. First, there is an enormous amount of money that would like to invest in the US energy sector from large and small private equity funds in the the US and abroad.