Energy Innovations 2017

Because it seems likely that there is money to be made by reducing fossil fuel use, and energy use in general, there is currently an intense amount of entrepreneurial activity surrounding all aspects of our energy supply and usage. This book is an attempt to make some sense of the overwhelming amount of information about this activity streaming down the web (and in the scientific and engineering journals). It is a result of three months in early 2015 of combing through entrepreneurial websites, news items in the press, and a variety of other sources (all well documented in the book) to see what new and exciting developments are occurring in energy. The result is a fascinating look at the types of changes in our energy mix in the near future through over 250 vignettes of innovative energy projects, many in their earliest stages, organized by type of energy activity being considered. Sections of the book include energy efficiency, energy storage, improving the grid, novel energy applications, photovoltaics, solar thermal, hydro/tidal/wave energy, wind, geothermal, nuclear, vehicles, biofuels and synfuels, hydrogen, hydraulic fracturing, carbon sequestration, energy governance, and energy finance and economics.

Dr. Emil Morhardt is Roberts Professor of Environmental Biology in the W. M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges, members of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He has been writing and teaching about energy, other natural resources, and climate change at the Colleges for nearly two decades. During the two decades prior to that he was a Senior Vice President and Director of Western Operations of a large environmental consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area whose clients included electric and gas utilities, petroleum companies, major water suppliers, the Electric Power Research Institute, the National Park Service, the USEPA, and several branches of the US military. He began work in this field shortly after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law, participated in developing the implementation guidelines for several federal agencies, and was one of the authors of California's first joint federal and state NEPA/CEQA report.