Today, GE announced a new power plant that is 61 percent efficient and can quickly ramp up to produce power, allowing it to make up for variations in power output from wind turbines.

Here's why this matters:

Wind power is variable. It depends on how fast the wind is blowing. These fluctuations could destabilize the grid and cause blackouts, especially as more wind turbines are attached to the grid. To make up for this variability, grid operators turn to natural gas peaking power plants that are designed to quickly ramp up power production. The problem with these plants is that they are very inefficient—the best ones from GE convert only 46 percent of the energy in natural gas into electricity, and older ones can have efficiency as low as 28 percent. So-called baseload natural gas power plants are far more efficient, but they take too long to change power output to keep up with changes in the wind.

The new generator can change power output quickly, and it can generate about two times more power from a cubic foot of natural gas than old, inefficient peaking plants. It's also more efficiency than even baseload plants. The new power plant could make the inefficient ones unnecessary, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The higher efficiency could also reduce power costs.

A startup is selling a new kind of energy efficient light bulb that costs half as much as a light emitting diode (LED) and, unlike compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), contains no mercury. The light bulb works like a cathode ray tube television: it emits electrons that light up a coating of phosphors on the inside of the bulb causing them to glow. The company says that the bulbs are more efficient than either CFLs or LEDs. To keep up with the alphabet soup theme for lighting technology, the new bulbs are called ESLs (for electron stimulated luminescence).

The first bulb, developed by Vu1 Corporation, is the equivalent of a 65-watt incandescent flood bulb and costs $20. They can be ordered directly from the company here. A version of the bulb that looks like a conventional incandescent bulb will go on sale later this year.

Mercury from compact fluorescent light bulbs is an issue, but it's not as bad as the company makes it sound in a press release. Although mercury in high enough doses can cause health problems, the amount of mercury in a CFL is relatively small—just 4 milligrams compared to 500 milligrams in old mercury-containing thermometers. Because burning coal releases mercury in to the atmosphere, using CFLs, which can reduce electricity consumption, actually decreases the amount of mercury released to the atmosphere, according to the EPA. While Vu1 says that the EPA recommends airing out a house for 24 hours if a CFL breaks, that's dated information. New EPA guidelines recommend airing out a room for 5 to 10 minutes before cleaning up the bulb, and then for "several hours" after it's cleaned up.

Still, having a bulb you can just throw away in ordinary household garbage would be nice. Not that you should have to throw many of the new bulbs away--they're meant to last 10,000 hours.

One of the smart things the Chinese have done—for decades now—is to take waste heat from coal power plants and use it to heat homes and businesses, something that's done in the United States, but not widely. The system works by using some of the steam produced at a power plant to heat water, which is distributed in pipes through a city to radiators or floor heaters (pipes in the floor). Called cogeneration, it's a relatively easy way to get far more use out of the energy in coal or other fossil fuels.

But as it turns out, cogeneration can make it more difficult to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. When cities depend on heat from power plants, there's a limit to how much grid operators can lower power output from coal plants, while still providing enough heat. Especially in winter, then, power grid operators have to keep coal plants running, even when there might be sufficient wind power to shut them down, or at least turn them way down. As a result, some of the wind power can't be used.

To use more wind power, the grid operators in northeast are building "pumped hydro" systems, which use excess wind power that's generally produced at night, to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Later, when there's less wind power, the water flows downhill and spins turbines to generate power again. This way, spikes in wind power that couldn't be absorbed by the grid because of the minimum power requirements at coal plants can still be used by spreading the power generated throughout the day. But adding storage for wind power will drive up costs, a major challenge for technology that is already more expensive than coal-fired power plants.