Enlarge / An offshore wind farm in the UK. (credit: Dave Hughes) After years of delays, the federal government has approved what will be the third offshore wind project in the US—and the largest by far. Vineyard Wind, situated off the coast of Massachusetts, will have a generating capacity of 800 Megawatts, dwarfing Block Island […]
Enlarge (credit: VCG / Getty Images) On Monday, the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab released a report entitled “Halfway to Zero,” referring to a goal of a zero-emission US electric grid. The report’s headline claim is a bit bogus, in that we’ve not cut our emissions in half relative to any point in […]
Enlarge (credit: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Fallout from Texas’ statewide power outages in February continues to spread. Today, the Texas House of Representatives is scheduled to debate a bill that would require power producers to bear the costs of services that help keep the electrical grid stable. If the bill passes, it would “unfairly shift […]
Enlarge / Lots of California’s water delivery system is exposed to the air. (credit: NSF) A major factor driving the growth of solar power in the US has been the economics of large, utility-scale solar projects. The scale of plants ensures that their developers can buy components in bulk; use larger, more robust hardware; and […]
Enlarge / Miraculously, the video at issue did not accuse wind turbines of causing cancer. (credit: Pictures Alliance / Getty Images) Our editor-in-chief obviously hates me. That’s the only conclusion I could reach after he asked me to watch an abysmal attack video targeting renewable energy—a video produced by a notorious source of right-wing misinformation. […]
Enlarge / Wind turbines can apparently operate in Antarctica, so it’s not clear what Texas’ problem is. (credit: Tien Lai, NSF) This morning, as the jet stream brought frigid air south to the central United States, Texas residents found themselves facing rolling blackouts as statewide grid struggled to meet demand amidst a large shortfall in […]
Enlarge (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images) In many areas of the United States, installing a wind or solar farm is now cheaper than simply buying fuel for an existing fossil fuel-based generator. And that’s dramatically changing the electricity market in the US and requiring a lot of people to update prior predictions. That’s motivated […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) A few years ago I started writing regularly about electric cars and the batteries that power them—technologies that are helping humanity transition away from reliance on fossil fuels. And as bad news continued to pile up about the harms caused by climate change, I started to think harder […]
Expand (charge: TLPOSCHARSKY / / Flickr) Renewable energy costs have dropped to the stage at which, for a lot of Earth, solar and wind energy is now less expensive than fossil fuel-generated power. However, the variability of the power sources might make handling them in an electrical grid hard –an obstacle which can precise prices […]
Expand / Former Energy Secretary Ernst Moniz discusses in an ARPA-E occasion in 2016. (charge: DOE / / Flickr) In 2009the US Department of Energy began financing energy research via the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (or even ARPA-E) program. The goal was to take more risks than conventional national efforts and assist innovative renewable energy […]