Energy Information Links
Energy Bulletin
Popular Mechanics - Underwater Tidal Turbines
World's Largest Tidal Turbines
Feds Ponder Mississippi River Turbines
The Smart Grid: An Introduction
Repower America
Wind investment in Texas shows China's clout in field Turbines will be shipped across Pacific
The interactive animations below were created by the University of Illinois's Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) project. TCIP is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability at the Department of Energy. The project aims to create a more intelligent, adaptive power grid that offers increased security and reliability. In hosting these lessons, OE hopes to promote better understanding of the operation of the power grid.
Power and Energy in the Home - Discover how making simple changes in your energy consumption habits can save money. Click on the graphics to turn off a light or switch to energy-efficient appliances, and watch the running kilowatt-hour meter to see how these changes affect the electricity bill.
The Power Grid – Take control of the grid and learn how different resources affect generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption. See how the system reacts to the changes you make. Be careful not to cause an outage!
Power Economics and Emissions - Learn how to balance electricity needs, costs, and environmental impact in the grid. When "Residenceburg" and "Industryville" use less electricity, their costs go down—and so do the carbon emissions of power production.
Technology has reached a point where many of the alternative renewable sources of energy are now affordable and viable for our use. And more are being developed by private industry. Investing in this technology will be good for these businesses, as well as creating jobs building and installing wind turbines, river turbines, solar roofs, solar panels, other renewable energy technology.
The oil companies have figured it out – they’re already diversifying their business portfolio – now the country must do the same.
China recently invested $100 billion in a wind turbine farm in Texas. The stimulus bill provided an investment of $4 billion in renewable energy. Do we want to send China our utility payments? Of course not.
Each region of our country provides viable sources of alternate energy from different sources – i.e. wind in the Midwest, solar in the south west.
By implementing these various technologies on a regional basis, we can begin our transition to a more energy independent economy. These current technologies, however, will not be sufficient to provide the energy we now use, much less the energy we will require in the future. Other technologies are under development and government should assist in funding this research. One of the most promising appears to be underwater turbines that could provide up to 130,000 gigawatt-hours per year — about half the yearly production of the country's dams.
China is aggressively pursuing renewable energy and building a manufacturing base to pursue this technology. These are manufacturing jobs that we must create here.
Government is and should continue to support tax rebates for homeowners to purchase renewable technology that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
A government - private partnership to implement renewable energy technologies will create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country in installation, building and in research and development.
Investment in electric vehicles and high speed transportation are critical to reducing and, one day, ending our addiction to oil.
We need a renewal of America. While the rest of the world concentrated on revitalizing their infrastructure, we allowed ours to decay. We need to spend wisely on projects that build on our long term goals.
We need to dedicate our energies to bringing America into the 21st Century.