Energy Department

The University of Maryland received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy on Monday for research on environmentally friendly cooling systems. The grant was part of $92 million awarded to 43 projects that the department says will speed innovation in "green" technologies. "These innovative ideas will play a critical role in our energy security and economic growth," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a statement. "It is now more important than ever to invest in a new, clean energy economy."

Employees at General Motors' plant in White Marsh have an unusual workplace benefit. Anyone who drives an electric car can plug it in to charge while they work. At the plant, which produces transmissions and electric motors, workers can park their electric vehicles — or EVs — in any of eight spaces under two solar-powered canopies in the employee lot. "You encourage the use of EVs and give employees some benefit," said William Tiger, plant manager for General Motors Baltimore Operations.

WASHINGTON -- Energy Secretary Bill Richardson will propose in a speech tomorrow six steps to reduce electricity disruptions in severe weather, including federal investigations of power blackouts such as the ones that hit New York and other cities this month, department officials say.Richardson's speech is scheduled for a convention in San Francisco of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, whose members serve on state public service...

With 369,000 square feet under roof, it would seem McCormick & Co.'s sprawling distribution center in Belcamp would have an eye-popping power bill, with some 3,300 light fixtures and a refrigerated storage area big enough to drive forklifts in and out. But in the past year, the 81/3-acre Harford County warehouse has generated more power than it has consumed, making it the first "net-zero-energy" building in Maryland and one of a small but growing...

Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington. Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, a small group of scientists has continued to work on cold fusion, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the results of the original experiment in 1989, showing that energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of water.

WASHINGTON -- Diagrams of nuclear weapons are available to anyone with access to the Internet, and earlier this month the United States government published an accounting of every bit of bomb fuel it ever made, and where it all went, down to nearly the last ounce.The Energy Department even has an Internet web page where people hungry for nuclear secrets can search through abstracts of once-classified documents and learn how to order the full documents for free.If they are brief enough, the government will fax the documents out.So what's left for the bomb-makers to keep secret?

The Energy Department sold 23 trucks for 17 cents each, a $9,000 copier for a nickel and a drilling rig for $50,000, just a few examples of hundreds of deals that squandered government resources, federal investigators have found. The sales, which included motor homes, laboratory equipment and cranes, occurred at the Energy Department's Nevada Test Site, the sprawling installation north of Las Vegas where nuclear bombs were once tested underground. Sales were made under a federal program intended to give economic help to communities around Energy Department sites, but the agency did not attempt to determine the fair market value of the items and never confirmed that they would assist the local economy, according to an audit by the Energy Department's inspector general.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department for nearly 20 years ignored warnings about security risks at nuclear weapons laboratories as dangers "languished for years without resolution or repercussions" against responsible officials, congressional investigators conclude in a scathing report.With the laboratories under heightened scrutiny because of allegations that China stole nuclear weapons secrets, the General Accounting Office documented its warnings in 32 reports over the past 19 years, listing nearly 50 recommendations it claimed were mostly neglected.

Behind locked doors in a nondescript Jessup industrial park, workers using secret techniques conjure a material that has promises to supercharge many 21st-century technologies. Called graphene, it's a fine, fluffy black powder that could soon become part of everything from mobile phones to aircraft, circuits to electric car batteries. Graphene is another form of graphite - the stuff in an ordinary pencil. It is just a sheet of carbon that's a single atom thick, but the so-called nanomaterial is one of the strongest and most conductive materials in the world, as much as 200 times stronger than steel.

With 369,000 square feet under roof, it would seem McCormick & Co.'s sprawling distribution center in Belcamp would have an eye-popping power bill, with some 3,300 light fixtures and a refrigerated storage area big enough to drive forklifts in and out. But in the past year, the 81/3-acre Harford County warehouse has generated more power than it has consumed, making it the first "net-zero-energy" building in Maryland and one of a small but growing...

Behind locked doors in a nondescript Jessup industrial park, workers using secret techniques conjure a material that has promises to supercharge many 21st-century technologies. Called graphene, it's a fine, fluffy black powder that could soon become part of everything from mobile phones to aircraft, circuits to electric car batteries. Graphene is another form of graphite - the stuff in an ordinary pencil. It is just a sheet of carbon that's a single atom thick, but the so-called nanomaterial is one of the strongest and most conductive materials in the world, as much as 200 times stronger than steel.

The U.S. Department of Energy has given Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. a little more time to get approval of its amended "smart grid" proposal from state regulators so that the utility can keep a $200 million grant tied to the program. In a letter to the Maryland Public Service Commission -- which had rejected BGE's earlier proposal in June -- the energy department said it will not make a decision on whether to divert the federal stimulus grant to another program until Aug. 16, instead of the initial July 30 deadline.

The University of Maryland received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy on Monday for research on environmentally friendly cooling systems. The grant was part of $92 million awarded to 43 projects that the department says will speed innovation in "green" technologies. "These innovative ideas will play a critical role in our energy security and economic growth," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a statement. "It is now more important than ever to invest in a new, clean energy economy."

WASHINGTON - Fifteen phony products - including a gasoline-powered alarm clock - won a label from the government certifying them as energy efficient in a test of the federal Energy Star program. Investigators concluded the program is "vulnerable to fraud and abuse." A report released Friday said government investigators tried to pass off 20 fake products, and only two were rejected. Three others didn't get a response. The program run by the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to identify energy-efficient products to help consumers.

WASHINGTON -President Barack Obama's plans to lead America from recession rest in part on a task bigger than a moon shot and the Manhattan Project, as complicated as any feat of economic engineering in the nation's history. His goal, which past presidents have spent more than $100 billion chasing with limited success, is to replace imported oil and other fossil fuels with a so-called "clean energy economy" powered by the wind, the sun and bio-fuels. The stakes are high. If Obama succeeds, he could spark a domestic jobs boom and lead an international fight against climate change.

CHICAGO -- Just hours after Illinois won a national competition for a cutting-edge clean coal project, the Department of Energy cautioned yesterday that costs were getting out of hand and it wasn't ready to sign off on the $1.8 billion FutureGen power plant. "Projected cost overruns require a reassessment of FutureGen's design," read a statement from Energy Department official James Slutz. He said the department would provide more details next month on plans to restructure FutureGen. The downcast statement quickly soured the party atmosphere in Mattoon, Ill., which hours earlier had been picked by a consortium of utilities, coal companies and the Energy Department as the site for the plant designed to test whether abundant coal can be used to make power with little pollution.

WASHINGTON -- More than a year after Congress told the Energy Department to harden the nation's nuclear bomb factories and laboratories against terrorist raids, five of the 11 sites are certain to miss their deadlines, some by many years, the Government Accountability Office has found. The Energy Department has put off security improvements at some sites that store plutonium because it plans to consolidate the material at central locations, but the GAO said in a Senate briefing that that project is also likely to lag. A copy of the briefing materials was provided to The New York Times by a private group, the Project on Government Oversight, which has long been pushing for better security at the weapons sites.

WASHINGTON - An effort by the Energy Department to cut billions of dollars and several years off the schedule for cleaning up radioactive bomb wastes is illegal, a judge in U.S. District Court has ruled, because it would leave shallowly buried wastes that Congress said could be safely disposed of only in a deep "geologic" repository. The radioactive waste is stored in tanks, many of which are rusting, at government nuclear reservations in Idaho; in Hanford, Wash.; and near Aiken, S.C. The original plan was to clean out the tanks and solidify the wastes, but the department faced major technical problems and cost overruns.

WASHINGTON -- More than a year after Congress told the Energy Department to harden the nation's nuclear bomb factories and laboratories against terrorist raids, five of the 11 sites are certain to miss their deadlines, some by many years, the Government Accountability Office has found. The Energy Department has put off security improvements at some sites that store plutonium because it plans to consolidate the material at central locations, but the GAO said in a Senate briefing that that project is also likely to lag. A copy of the briefing materials was provided to The New York Times by a private group, the Project on Government Oversight, which has long been pushing for better security at the weapons sites.

The Energy Department approved giving federal loan guarantees to finance new nuclear plants yesterday, but the industry won't be able to take advantage until Congress approves billions more to fund the program - something that is not expected until at least 2009. Despite that delay, the decision could help Baltimore's Constellation Energy Group kick-start development of a new reactor it hopes to put adjacent to its Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Lusby. Constellation said the loan guarantees are essential to its plans to build a standardized series of advanced nuclear plants for itself and other utility buyers nationwide.