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Think Progress has an article on pumped hydro storage in the US - The Inside Story Of The World’s Biggest ‘Battery’ And The Future Of Renewable Energy.

The largest battery in the world has sat quietly in George Washington National Forest along the Virginia-West Virginia border for nearly 30 years. A five-hour drive from the nation’s capital, it sits in the middle of the Appalachians, tucked behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. ... The Bath County Hydro Pumped Storage Facility is not really a battery in the common sense of the term, but it is the largest pumped storage facility in the world. It stores a lot of energy, which helps 60 million people in 13 states (and DC) served by the regional transmission organization, PJM Interconnection. ...

Europe continues to invest heavily in pumped storage, with skyrocketing renewable output and decent capacity. There are 40 pumped storage facilities in the U.S., and Bath County is one of the youngest, even though it remains the largest in the world. Rocky Mountain Hydroelectric Plant in Georgia is the newest, commissioned in 1995. Development in the U.S. has been slow because the facilities are expensive, hard to site, and hard to build.

Inhabitat has a post on advances in water harvesting from fog using biomimicry - MIT Develops Advanced Fog Harvesting Material That Pulls 5x More Water From Thin Air.

Plants and certain animals like the fog beetle can survive in very arid regions because they’ve developed ways of absorbing minute amounts of water from the atmosphere. Learning from their example allowed us to develop fog harvesting technologies – basically giant nets that trap moisture in the foggy mist, and funnel all of the tiny droplets into a container where they add up to water we can drink. Now, scientists at MIT have created an advanced fog-harvesting material that enables these giant mist catchers to generate five times more water ...

Preliminary tests suggest that the new, smaller-pored material can improve efficiency five times in mild fog conditions, making the system far more feasible and practical than existing versions. The team is currently carrying out a year-long test in Chile to study the durability and water yield of different configurations. “Chilean investigators have estimated that if just 4 percent of the water contained in the fog could be captured, that would be sufficient to meet all of the water needs of that nation’s four northernmost regions, encompassing the entire Atacama Desert area,” states the same release.

While Im conducting funeral services, Ive been lax in noting the demise of electric car company Better Place, which has gone out of business - Better Places Failure Is Blow to Renault. Tesla motors appears to be adopting some of their business model - Building an EV Ecosystem: Why Tesla Will Likely Succeed Where Better Place Failed.

The financial collapse of electric-car venture Better Place Ltd., which filed for liquidation over the weekend, is a blow for French automotive group Renault SA, RNO.FR +2.37% which helped the Israeli company develop its novel battery-switching system for electric cars.

Founded by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi in 2007, Better Place developed a system where electric-car owners could drive their vehicles into a network of stations around Israel ILCO.TV +0.05% and replace the cars battery with a new one in about the same amount of time it takes to fill a gasoline tank on a regular car.

The "quick drop" system was supposed to remove one of the main obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles, namely the several hours it takes to recharge a flat battery.

Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn had championed Better Places technology as one of the pillars of the French auto makers ambitious €4 billion ($5.17 billion) electric-vehicle strategy. The first cars equipped with Better Place technology were Renault Fluence Z.E. sedans.

Bloomberg reports that South Korea is looking to build a new tidal power plant in Jindo - South Korea Plans 200-Megawatt Tidal-Power Plant by 2016.

South Korea plans to build a tidal- energy plant on the southern tip of the peninsula by 2016, saving an estimated 330,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

South Jeolla province signed an initial agreement with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEP), Korea Midland Power Co. and five other companies to build the 200-megawatt plant in Jindo, the provincial government said in an e-mailed statement without giving cost estimates.

The US DOEs Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has an article on a new process for creating biofuel from algae - Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab.

Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energys Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journal Algal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae. ...

PNNL scientists and engineers simplified the production of crude oil from algae by combining several chemical steps into one continuous process. The most important cost-saving step is that the process works with wet algae. Most current processes require the algae to be dried — a process that takes a lot of energy and is expensive. The new process works with an algae slurry that contains as much as 80 to 90 percent water.

Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) are traditional energy sources. Not only is burning fossil fuels bad for our environment but these energy sources will not last forever, because they are finite energy resources that will eventually become exhausted. The renewable energy seems like the right solution to replace them on the long-run but our society still needs to make certain steps to avoid future energy crisis.

The recommend steps would no doubt be:

1) Investing more in energy efficiency concepts and technologies because using energy more efficiently can be just as beneficial as finding new ways to produce energy.

2) Modernization of current energy infrastructure. Without modernization there is no progress, and energy is no exception, particularly if our society wants to adapt new clean energy technologies.

3) Reforming regulatory measures to promote efficiency and clean energy. Adequate legislation will attract more investors and also push economy forward.

4) Education of entire society on possible ways to reduce energy waste World leaders must stop ignoring the benefits of energy efficiency. Some recent reports claim that U.S. alone could be using 50% more energy than it uses today by just adopting the right efficiency measures and reduce its energy waste.

Energy efficiency always starts at home from TVs, air conditioners as well as other electrical appliances. Every home is part of a larger energy system which means that our homes need to become more energy efficient. This means running your appliances at the optimal time of the day, and only when you really need them.

Well - its almost to impossible to escape this royal wedding nonsense tonight, so I may as well survey some well respected figures for their opinions of this over-the-top medieval pageantry.

Dan Rather wonders why the saturation media coverage of what isnt really a news event when lots of real news goes unreported in these days of declining newspaper circulation and splintering TV viewer populations - ...And in Other News.

The next time you hear about another round of layoffs at a TV news division, the closing of a bureau, the decision not to cover a foreign story with full force, remember this week of silliness in April.

Remember the millions of dollars, hundreds of staff and hours of coverage spent on a wedding in London when crises around the globe and here at home festered. Remember the unseemly pas de deux between the press and a reality TV show huckster peddling racially-fraught falsehoods, as both interviewers and the interviewee seek a bump in ratings.

And then please take a moment to remember the eight American soldiers and one contractor killed by an Afghan soldier at the Kabul airport in a war too easily forgotten. Remember the hundreds likely being killed in Syria and Libya, not to mention the death and unrest plaguing countries like the Ivory Coast, which almost never earn more than a mention on our most-watched newscasts.

Remember those who have the least amongst us, struggling after more than a year of unemployment, a long commute they can no longer afford, or the diagnosis of a medical condition that could kill them and bankrupt their family.

The networks couldnt ignore the devastating storms that killed hundreds in the South, but you had the odd juxtaposition of that news being delivered by anchors sitting in front of Buckingham Palace.

Theres always the question, is the audience chasing the news or the news chasing an audience? I have nothing against the royals or their wedding. It is a legitimate news story, a big event for one of Americas most stalwart allies. We have had a lot of bad news lately, and if you are someone who finds this diversion interesting and exciting, then I think thats great.

What bothers me is the hypocrisy. The idea that we cant afford to throw resources at an important foreign story, but can afford to spend this kind of money on a story like the royal wedding is just plain wrong. The idea that we cant break into regularly-scheduled programming for an address by the president is wrong as well. When the topic was the "Birther Story" (better referred from here on out by the first letters of those two words), the networks jumped right in.

As a journalist, you like to be the one asking the questions. But its time that some of our news executives gave some answers of their own.

Guy Rundle at Crikey thinks the hoopla is a conservative reflex trying to cling to tradition in the face of of the erosion of collective spirit in recent decades - A boringly genuine marriage.

Down on the Mall – the tree-lined avenue that joins Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square – they’ve put out more flags: huge Union Jack banners on each pole, flapping in the coolish wind. Hundreds of metal safety barriers are up — a double layer of them, unlike 1981, when they did not believe that at least two metres of space were required between royals and commoners — and they’re lined with tents, small brightly coloured one- and two-person numbers.

There’s a touch of Scott’s last expedition about these strings of pods, with people huddled in, surviving on iron rations (shortbread and Earl Grey) and updating their blogs. There’s a lot of teenage girls here, hanging out in an ironic/unironic way, ribbons in their hair, and Wills ‘n’ Kate T-shirts ironically punked up. The occasional teenage boy hanger-on with them, hoping that some of the overflow of pagan fertility rite will slop his way.

But above all, it’s women of a certain age, tending the flame and putting on the kettle — cheerfully mad, decked out in red, white and blue plastic boaters, and wearing Wills ‘n’ Kate tea-towels like capes, conferring superpowers. In any tribe though, the father may well give away the bride, the means by which it is done is secret women’s business.

In the most patriarchal of countries, the personification of power and national being is a grey-haired 80-something matron, who may well have another 15 years on the clock, and these women, with their T-shirts and bye-byes, are her honour guard.

We walk slowly down the Mall, and at the entrance to Clarence House, we’re stopped to let someone swing into the drive:

“Someone’s coming in,” a woman says excitedly, her Wills ‘n’ Kate springy-head-antenna bobbling excitedly.

Yes they are. A truck of Portaloos parts the crowd. There’s hundreds of the things. They’ve really gone over the top with the poop coops — they run the whole length of the Mall, like a phalanx of horse guards standing at attention.

They really are scared of public pooping — not unreasonable given the British tendency to let it go anywhere (recently it was found that parts of the National Gallery stone were being worn away by people letting their small children take a leak against the side of it).

Me, I think a river of effluent down the Mall gutters would give the whole thing a delightfully medieval turn. Something has to. Our Kate is no Diana, although the eating disorder appears to be coming along nicely. The carriage (she was originally to arrive by car) will be less magical, the veil less diaphanous, and the marriage boringly genuine. How bourgeois can you get?

Indeed, that’s the whole problem. At the heart of this ceremony, which is meant to bind us together as one nation somehow represented, bodied forth, by the bodies of a young couple, it cannot help but be observed that the marriage is, well, more than a little yecch. The Middleton — Middleton! — family is from Bucklebury, a home counties town, 80 kilometres out of London, the haute-bourgeblah, living-death belt, neither city nor country, to which they retired after making a fortune from a business selling party supplies by mail order. Good God. How is it possible that Prince Philip is still alive after that news? Prince William could have married a shop assistant, a Hapsburg princess, a Glasgow crack whore, or a woman named Lurlene doing 30-to-life in Arkansas, and they all would have been more romantic matches than the girl from the big neo-Georgian house, who, even in real life, looks like she was drawn by an illustrator of chicklit novel covers.

The melancholy fact is that working with this sort of material, the wedding cannot be other than underwhelming. The overall effect is not to raise Kate up, but to draw William and the royals down. Wills himself hasn’t helped, losing his looks in his mid-20s.

He started that decade of his life as a Greek God; now, balding and with the in-breeding showing, he could be mistaken for the junior partner in a Jaguar dealership, having been invalided out of the Green Howards after getting fragged in Basra.

So there is the distinct feeling among many that we are not so much attending a fairytale wedding, as being dragged to the hitching of some cousins we never really knew, and who look like they’ll start talking about how great Andrew Bolt is, at the reception, shortly before the free piss runs out.

That feeling is spread pretty evenly across the country. Even on the afternoon before the event there were good possies to be got right up against the barrier on the Mall, a sign that there’s been a less-than-frantic rush to be part of it. The same is true of street parties, those gingham and teapot ceremonies in which tables are run down the middle of street, to be bombed by the Luftwaffe; this time around, there are only a fraction of these being planned, compared to 1981.

Tempting as it would be to blame this on the echtness of the wedding itself, it can’t be sustained. Nor is it the result of buyer’s remorse on the last wedding. Diana’s fairytale turned into a local production of Liaisons Dangereuses, in which the only one who wasn’t aware she was a patsy, was the patsy herself, subject to the tender mercies of the sort of dysfunctional German family clusterf-ck usually only found in late Fassbinder. The whole thing left a sour taste, and laid bare the process of monarchy, i.e. mostly as a racket. If the 1981 wedding gave monarchy a brief boost, the marriage was worth 100 republican conventions as a teachable experience.

So folks won’t get fooled again. But above and beyond all that, they can’t feel connected to it as they did 30 years ago, because they don’t feel as connected to each other. We have now had three decades of a single social-economic system, administered by Thatcher, Major and Blair, and only mildly mitigated by Gordon Brown, and that is one that put individualism at the heart of British life, a society in which collective being had hitherto been dominant.

Until 1980 the primary political struggle had been over the form collective life would take — socialist, elevating equality, or conservative, elevating tradition. Thatcher changed that, releasing energies good and bad, but above all dissolving the very society she thought she was defending — that of “Victorian values”. The great paradox of the last century was that UK Labour was the guardian of more of that than Thatcher was — just as the European “bicycle” monarchies have only been able to survive in social democracies.

Social democracy mirrors monarchy in affirming that there are social values and institutions that should remain outside the market maw — that having such “sacred” values is essential to having a society in which shared meaning is possible. Both stand against the neoliberalism of the last decades, which is a form of nihilism, dissolving not only meanings (because the market expresses everything in terms of everything else, quantitatively), but the capacity for connection in which self is dissolved.

The more you entrench a society like that, the more you entrench a permanent “solitude together”, in place of collective life, and a mild and persistent melancholy that goes with it — to be obliterated, when too much, by booze or Jesus.

By nationhood too, but where the atomisation process has gone too far, that sense of shared life cannot be retrieved, and many ceremonies become expressions of a rather forlorn yearning for what can no longer be felt (Anzac Day is a supreme example of this). The Brits are not yet at that point, but give them another 20 years, and such ceremonies may feel absurd rather than mysterious. Those flags on the Mall flap in the wind almost petulantly; those pod-tents are cocoons, woven to the barriers, shielding their charges from the harsh world until morning. When, with the clatter of hooves, and rain on the streets, the colony wakes once more.