September 25th, 2024
Via MIT Technology Review, an article on efforts to connect the U.S.’s grids: Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the Houston-based energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest, delivering clean electricity […]
Read more »What Happens When A Concrete Jungle Becomes A ‘Sponge City’
September 6th, 2024
Via High Country News, a look at how engineering for flood resilience can address storms heightened by climate change. The living roof of the H2 Hotel in Healdsburg, California, both cools the building and mitigates rainwater runoff.John D. Ivanko/Alamy Stock Photo In early February, meteorologists warned Southern Californians that a supercharged storm was headed their way, […]
Read more »September 3rd, 2024
Via The Economist, a report on grid-scale batteries: Decarbonising the world’s electricity supply will take more than solar panels and wind turbines, which rely on sunshine and a steady breeze to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it about. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an […]
Read more »Using Market Power To Save Great Salt Lake
August 29th, 2024
Via PERC, a look at how water markets could be utilized to help rescue Great Salt Lake: When the sculptor Robert Smithson began laying down rocks at a place called Rozel Point, a nub of shoreline encircling the Great Salt Lake, he had no idea that one day his twisting, turning creation called Spiral […]
Read more »May 13th, 2024
Via The Economist, a look at how power grids are at last becoming smarter and more efficient: The rise of artificial-intelligence (ai) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, ai can also give a fair bit back, by helping transform ancient, overloaded and dumb […]
Read more »Surging Power Demand Spurs Smarter Electric Grid Use
April 10th, 2024
Via Cipher News, a look at how surging power demand is spurring smarter electric grid use Demand for electricity is shooting up in the United States following two decades of relatively flat electricity use — and yet building more transmission lines to bring new sources of energy online is a slow, bureaucratic process. This tension is pushing the power […]
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