renewables
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Wind turbine suffers catastrophic failure; no one is irradiated
Last month, a wind turbine on a North Dakota wind farm suffered a "catastrophic failure" when "oversight" and "human error" — features of energy infrastructure which scientists suggest are unavoidable — led to the enormous turbine falling off its mount. The most recent reports indicate that so far the only casualties are a wide swath […]
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Los Angeles to slather its rooftops with solar panels
Here's a crazy idea: apply the same incentives that have made Germany the world leader in rooftop solar power to a place that is actually sunny. Also, use the power generated from these panels to zero out the electricity costs of people in low-income housing, so the city has more money for education. Those are […]
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Japan could rebuild faster with renewables, says report
In the wake of severe natural disasters, how is Japan going to get its electrical infrastructure back online? The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability has an answer, and it's anything but business as usual. By deploying a mix of renewables and energy efficiency technology, they argue, Japan's need for electricity could be met three […]
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Google goes all in on solar — to the tune of $168 million
Google has saved you from getting lost, running out of email storage space, and not knowing trivial facts about 90s TV shows. And now it’s going to help save you from a dystopian Mad Max future by investing in solar energy. The company just bet $168 million on solar tech, in the form of the […]
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Wind turbines kill birds, but they don’t have to — here’s how to do better [VIDEO]
Here's a stomach-churning video of a wind turbine karate-chopping a vulture. Watching it will probably change the way you look at wind turbines. (Seriously, bird-lovers be warned: It is intense.) This video, originally captured by a tourist in Greece, vividly illustrates what happens 440,000 times a year, according to the American Bird Conservancy. If that […]
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How one nerd zeroed out his energy bill with solar panels [VIDEO]
George Musser, a physics editor at Scientific American, has dreamed of powering his home with solar panels ever since he was a little boy. And now he does! In New Jersey, no less. His story is a part of Beyond the Light Switch, a totally rad documentary filmed by Detroit Public Television that criss-crosses the […]
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New wind now costs the same as new coal — the tiebreaker is one of them kills you
The radical environmentalists at Bloomberg have declared that the world's best new wind projects now produce electricity that costs about the same as electricity produced from new coal-fired power plants. A lot goes into these calculations, but here's the bottom line: wind costs $65 a megawatt-hour, while power from new coal-fired power plants costs about […]
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California goes balls to the wall on renewables
As of 2020, California will be getting fully one third of its energy from renewable sources. So says a bill passed yesterday by the state assembly. It's a "renewable portfolio standard" so aggro that it makes a WWE elbow drop to the throat look like a tiddlywinks match played by pink cloud-people in a straight-to-DVD […]
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Getting to 100 percent renewables in 20 years
Boffins at the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London have calculated just how much fossil fuel we have to burn to get to the point that we never have to burn them again. Their paper, "A Solar Transition is Possible," argues that in a best-case scenario, "a renewable energy infrastructure could double present […]