wind
-
IKEA to go 100 percent renewable, starting with 67 wind turbines
Lots of companies talk about going green, but the scale of Swedish furniture retailer IKEA's ambition is breathtaking. In its quest to get 100 percent renewable, the firm skipped right over the usual, intermediate step of buying renewable power from a third party.
-
Wind turbines are about to become way more awesome
Wind power is pretty bad-ass to begin with, but conventional wisdom is that it's a "mature" technology that, unlike solar and other breakthrough energy technologies, won't be seeing much improvement in the coming decades. WRONGITY WRONG WRONG.
-
By God, Donald Trump will not let this wind farm stand
Not satisfied with making (more of) a mockery of the electoral process, Donald Trump is now going after wind power, vowing to use "any legal means" to block a planned windfarm near his golf course in Scotland. Trump claims it's not simple rich-white-guy opposition to renewable power, or the fact that he's worried the turbines […]
-
Crazy ideas for next-gen wind turbines
Is there any image that represents a renewable energy future better than a stately white wind turbine turning on a hillside? Well, don't get too used to it! Researchers are coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas to improve on the current turbine model, the Los Angeles Times’ Tiffany Hsu reports. Here’s what future wind turbines will look like:
-
Dudefest no more? Women are infiltrating cleantech
Men are running the show at most of the companies pushing renewables, efficiency, clean cars, and the smart grid -- but that's starting to change.
-
The race to build the world’s most improbably gigantic — and efficient — wind turbine
Modern wind turbines already have blades as big as the wings of jumbo jets, and the tips of them can move at up to 200 mph. Now Britain's Energy Technologies Institute wants to nearly double the generating capacity of the world's largest wind turbines by making the blades EVEN MORE PHENOMENALLY HUGE. Bigger turbines mean […]
-
Smaller generation incites largest renewable energy gains
While seeming counterintuitive, a focus on smaller-scale distributed generation enables more and faster development of cost-effective renewable energy. In April, I wrote about the illusion that we can “move forward on all fronts” in renewable energy development; rather, a bias toward centralized electricity generation in U.S. policy reduces the potential and resources for distributed generation. […]
-
Offshore wind power to explode to 17 times its current capacity in just six years
Offshore wind will reach 70.1 GW of capacity by 2017, says Pike Research. That's 17 times its current capacity, which is 4.1 GW, and amounts to several times the current maximum solar capacity of the most solared-out country in the world, Germany. Europe is currently in the lead on offshore power, but by 2017, China […]
-
An underwater grid for offshore wind, funded by Google
I have a feature story in the latest issue of Popular Science: “Hundreds of Miles of Wind Farms, Networked Under the Sea.” It’s about the Atlantic Wind Connection, a new project (funded, in part, by Google) that would lay high-voltage transmission lines beneath the sea floor along the mid-Atlantic coast, opening the area up to […]