In a recent post, A Beginners Guide to Blackouts, I drew attention to the fact that keeping the lights on in Britain was to a large extent dependent upon our ability to […]
How Energy Secure Are The EU And UK?
US Oil Dependency on Middle East has Hardly Changed Since 2007
The following graph shows US petroleum imports from OPEC countries starting in 1960. This includes both crude oil and petroleum products. Note: Indonesia left OPEC in 2008 but it is included here […]
Watching the Watchdogs: 10 Years of the IEA World Energy Outlook
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the energy watchdog of the industrial world. The developed nations of the world were caught off guard by the oil crisis of 1973. They then realized […]
$548 Billion In Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies “Rig The Game” Against Renewables
In the same week that a new study found that G20 nations, including Australia, were providing $US88 billion ($A102 billion) a year in subsidies just for fossil fuel exploration, another report – […]
LED Efficiency Soars in 2014
Light-emitting diode bulbs have long been far more efficient than incandescent or even compact florescent bulbs, but that gap has widened even more this year. The average efficiency of LEDs stood at […]
PG&E Takes Energy Storage to the Distribution Substation
California is the world’s biggest market for grid-scale energy storage — as long as that storage can be delivered in targeted packages that can work at the grid’s edge. That’s one lesson […]
Fixed Charges Policy and Benefits
There’s a lot of talk in California these days about imposing fixed monthly charges on residential electricity bills. The large investor-owned utilities in California have small or no fixed charges,[1] instead collecting […]
Oil Price Collapse and Causal Factors
A person might think that oil prices would be fairly stable. Prices would set themselves at a level that would be high enough for the majority of producers, so that in total […]
Oil Shocks And The Global Economy
Here I re-tread a well-trodden path, but with recent events in the oil market I thought a brief recap might be timely. I begin with a photographic illustration of a typical US […]
LNG-Dependent Japan Tries To Gain Leverage Over Pricing
Japan’s record purchases of liquefied natural gas (LNG) show no sign of slowing as the country continues to try and fill the energy shortfall created when it took its nuclear plants offline […]
Prometheus Institute 