“Be passionate,” was the key advice from Dian Grueneich to anyone interested in energy efficiency. Ms Grueneich is the commissioner at the State of Californian Public Utilities Commission, and she has been instrumental over the last two decades in ensuring that California’s energy use per capita has not increased while the state’s economy has grown rapidly. On Wednesday she received an award from her efforts from the Alliance to Save Energy, at its EEGlobal conference in Paris.

As several of the speakers at the conference noted, energy efficiency is not usually regarded as the most exciting of subjects. Saving is never as glamorous as spending, even though the latter gets us into such trouble.

On Energy Source:

A new dawn for uranium prices? Another opaque market, another demand surge predicted

Energy R&D: Public funding vs markets Why aren’t markets enough?

Opec oil supply guru Conrad Gerber has died after 30 years of peering into the opaque world of the cartel’s production

Timeline to disaster Two new studies say the world will probably exceed its carbon budget

‘We should be planning to adapt to a world of 4°C climate rises’ But how?

Abandoning oil to meet 2050 emissions targets If supply won’t do it, targets should

Volatility: Stock markets vs oil and other commodities Oil most closely tracks the equity markets

Exxon profits down 58% Lower oil prices are again the culprits

Elsewhere:

US climate bill: Will Californian offshore drilling be opened up in exchange for getting cap and trade through? New Yorker mentions a possible scoop in passing (TNR)

Oil: US energy demand for February was revised downwards by 780,000b/d to 18.706m b/d (Platts)

Efficiency: Aerospace companies try to increase efficiency, from better engine design to ‘winglets’ (NY Times)

Investment: A rough transcript of an interview with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who invests in many new energy ventures (R-squared blog)

Nuclear: Interview with Southern Company chief executive David Ratcliffe on the challenges facing the nuclear industry (Scientific American)

The uranium trade resembles the diamond market in some ways: it is rather opaque and mysterious, and also lends itself to “it can only go up” narratives. In the case of diamonds this narrative is, “Asians will earn more and more money and buy more and more engagement rings, and meanwhile no one is building new diamond mines.”

In uranium it boils down to, “Asians are building more and more nuclear power stations to solve their energy problems, and meanwhile no one is building new uranium mines.”

Once again, it is a new dawn for uranium prices and uranium miners, according to a report by RBC Capital Markets.