Insight

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka, ARRA or the stimulus bill) will fund renewable energy, smart grid, and energy efficiency projects. But the protocols are neither fully defined nor easily navigated.   ScottMadden anal...

Project management deliverables are increasingly more difficult to achieve. The life cycle for projects is straightforward and repeatable for projects of all sizes, but pressure to start later and end sooner affects every stage of large capital project ...

Although much more developed in Europe, Carbon markets are developing in the United States. Whereas these markets are mandatory in Europe and there is a homogeneous set of carbon accounting and trading protocols, the U.S. markets are fragmented, regiona...

Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) is a gas-fired power generation technology that converts coal (or other feedstock) into gas and uses the gas, rather than the coal, for thermal combustion. The combined cycle feature captures the heat loss f...

Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources (energy, water, and materials) while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment during the building's lifecycle, through better siting,...

Solar energy is becoming a booming business. In 2000, the total annual manufacturing output of all solar companies was about 300 MW; by 2005, the solar industry manufacturing output rose almost fivefold to more than 1,500 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) m...

Biofuels are derived from biomass which includes trees, crops, algae, and other plants, as well as agricultural and forest residues. Biofuel has been produced for over a century; early transportation pioneers such as Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel envisio...

Fuel cells represent a radically different approach to energy conversion, one that could replace conventional power generation technologies like engines and turbines in applications such as automobiles and power plants. Like batteries, fuel cells produc...