by Jeff Ihnen | Jul 29, 2024 | Energy Rant
For 50 years ending in 2000, electrical loads in the United States expanded at an average of 5.1% per year. For the next 20 years, the growth was essentially zero. Projections for the coming five years are roughly 1% per year (compounded annual growth rate, CAGR)....
by Jeff Ihnen | Jul 19, 2024 | Energy Rant
“Americans used to spend little energy worrying about whether the lights would come on at the flick of a switch, or how much that electricity cost. For a growing number of people, those days are over.” Those are the first two sentences of an article published in The...
by Jeff Ihnen | Nov 4, 2020 | Energy Rant
In this week’s Energy Rant, we’re covering part three of good, perfect, and real carbon targets. In Part I of this series, we examined how various storage technologies work, their pluses, and minuses. In Part II, we put numbers to generation and storage...
by Jeff Ihnen | Oct 28, 2020 | Energy Rant
In this week’s Energy Rant, we’re covering part two of good, perfect, and real carbon targets. Last week we looked at grid-scale energy storage options for a couple of them, namely hydrogen and flywheels; I asked, “What could go wrong?” To be fair, my...
by Jeff Ihnen | Oct 21, 2020 | Energy Rant
I recently delivered an electrification presentation for Wisconsin Public Utility Institute’s Energy Utility Basics course. While introducing myself, I said, “I’m an engineer, and I can’t help it.” I also said the answer to the question, “Can we ___?” is...
