I've been a little busy lately and don't have time for a full-blown blog post, so again we'll have to settle for some quick hits that I've taken note of lately:

• Recently I've been reading Greg Pahl's fascinating book, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook.  It's full of fascinating practical information about medium-scale renewable energy projects, which citizen groups and municipalities can undertake.  Pahl is a champion of Community Supported Energy (CSE), a co-operative model of renewable energy production not unlike the more popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).  Most CSAs I'm familiar with are well behind the technological curve and could benefit tremendously from even simple web-based technology for facilitating membership signup and horizontal communications; I'm sure the same could be said for CSEs.  (I've been thinking about websites for community supported agriculture for a long time, but I never seem to get the chance to put together a good CSA website solution.)
• OpenADR is an open-source demand-response system.  As far as I know demand-response is really making its presence felt only in the enterprise and commercial sectors, so hopefully OpenADR will help expand the market to include a wider swatch of commercial buildings as well as some residential buildings.  (h/t Earth2Tech)
• OpenPDC appears to be a promising open-source platform for aggregating and analyzing the health of the electrical grid, courtesy of the TVA.  (h/t Earth2Tech, again)
• PeoplePower is working on an open source wireless home automation network solution, which could be a great improvement on the elegant, but somewhat hobbyist-only, solution that is Tweet-A-Watt. (h/t Earth2Tech for the hat trick)
• EcoFactor is developing a smart thermostat, meant to reduce energy needed for space heating.  I'd be fascinated to see those algorithms!  (h/t - guess who?)
• Scientific Conservation, Inc. has recently released software to predict building energy use accurately.  The idea is to provide additional motivation for efficiency retrofits, by demonstrating return on investment more effectively than traditional modeling approaches.  That's well and good, but it makes me wonder whether or not it would be possible to use the tool in concert with a large database of information about buildings - from a municipal government's licensing board, let's say.  That would make it possible to identify a large set of buildings which would benefit from retrofits rapidly, and to prioritize the retrofits based on current or projected energy use.
• Mariah Power has released an incredibe iPhone application to measure wind speed in your backyard, to assess the feasibility of placing a turbine there.

I'm beginning to think I should pull together a library of open source projects on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like.  That could be a fun project for the holidays!