For wind power, 2011 was a great year. California added more new wind energy to the grid than any other state, according to a report published Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Energy. A number of other states received high honors as well. These include Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Colorado, which churned out at [...]

When attempting to evaluate the overall health of the U.S. electric grid, one potentially important metric relates to outages – how often and how long customers are without power. But, data related to disruptions in electricity service are largely unavailable. In fact, many states do not require utilities to report data related to the impact [...]

Yesterday, Hurricane Irene weakened to become Tropical Storm Irene – but not before leaving at least 4 million homes without power and causing fuel shortages along the United State’s Atlantic coast. This hurricane brought on-land wind speeds of more than 85 mph in the continental United States, and maintained its hurricane status through most of [...]

Earlier this month, I attended at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Energy Sustainability Conference in Washington, DC.  During the conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Paul Denholm, a senior analyst at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Denholm is a member of the Energy Forecasting [...]