Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
Researchers in Wyoming have picked up that flying insects tend to gather in high numbers around white wind turbines. They studied a 17-mile stretch of a wind…
At 1:52 on a Friday afternoon, a neighbor on Head of the Bay Road in Plymouth, Massachusetts, looked up at a familiar silhouette and saw something…
The red-colored blades already installed on seven wind turbines at Hollandse Kust West in the North Sea disrupt the uniform appearance the uniform appearance of a…
Chalk and sand seabed off the Sussex coast, about 60 feet down, flat in every direction. A steel monopile comes out of it carrying a wind…
Solar panels are not known for their aesthetics, and this is one of the reasons why there is resistance to their adoption. Conventional panels have to…
A plant floor in eastern Iowa, and a bulk sack of white fiber that used to be a wind turbine. The blade came down after two…
A pumpkin patch has grown into a popular fall destination in California’s Central Valley. Sunlight powers the solar panels that help generate electricity for the farm’s…
Engineers in Beijing have come up with a wind turbine application whereby the blades change color according to the season. Installations in extreme climates come with…
An insect spends most of its life beneath the surface of the water before ever taking flight. It has become the focus of a rather unusual…
Forty five feet down in the Moray Firth, on a seabed of rippled sand that runs flat for miles. A steel frame settles on the bottom…
A panel is lying face up on a steel bench, the size of a door. A head moves above it, and a thin green line crawls…
Urban stormwater management ponds are increasingly repurposed for floating solar installations to generate clean power without using valuable land. Researchers monitored an Orlando stormwater pond where…
Swim under one of these and look up. The surface overhead is not plastic anymore. It is furred, shell against shell, in a layer thick enough…
The Bureau of Reclamation has decided to temporarily increase flows below Lewiston Dam. This decision was made because river conditions can increase disease risk for migrating…
A new kind of solar panel changes colors as it starts heating up, and not much is lost in terms of efficiency in the process. The…
A brackish lake in South Holland, cut off from the sea by a dam, flat as a table. Something is floating on it that does not…
A working deck the size of a city block, out in the southern North Sea. A steel tube 275 feet long hangs off a crane, turning…
Above Iowa is an “invisible highway” along which billions of bats and birds travel southward every fall. It is an expansive nocturnal migratory corridor in the…
A lobster boat leaving Point Judith in the dark, twice a month, with a doctoral student aboard. The traps come up around a pair of wind…
When Chinook salmon begin returning to the Snake River each fall, thousands of fish gather below Hells Canyon Dam to complete the final stage of their…
Solar glass meets aesthetics in new technology that turns a normal photovoltaic panel into part power producer, part optical illusion. Engineers found a way to print colored,…
Armenia has added a new layer to one of its oldest traditions. On the slopes of Mount Aragats near Aghdzk, rows of solar panels sit above…
The cell looks like a small dark mirror, cracked at the edges and coated in a film it spent years baking under the sun. Inside it…
A blade this size is one object. Not a stack of parts bolted together, but a single shell of glass cloth and hardened resin, cured once…
In Wyoming, researchers are conducting a field study on how wind turbines affect nearby native pollinators. They tracked insects in the wild high-plains grasslands visiting flowers…
An oversize permit is not really permission to move something large. It is permission to move something large along one specific line drawn on a map.…
Switzerland recently opened a fruit tree orchard that combines fruit production with solar panels. This unique combination is being tested at an experimental farm near Conthey…
In Washington State, a small vertical-axis tidal turbine was monitored for months to evaluate fine-scale interactions with wildlife. An automated underwater tracking array delivered 109 days…
Wyoming serves as a prototype for a novel form of wind generation that differs substantially from the traditional tall-tower, long-blade turbine design. The new concept is…
Two blocks of one vineyard, the same soil, the same water, the same hands pruning them. One of them spends its summer under a steel canopy of narrow…
The blade came apart in a sealed steel reactor that holds about two gallons. A 30 foot turbine blade, built with the same molds, layups and…
The glass was almost clear, but it was generating electricity. Researchers in Western Australia glazed the roof and walls of a small greenhouse with working solar…
Canada’s Bay of Fundy lies in Nova Scotia’s Minas Passage. The region is notorious for producing the world’s highest tides. More than 100 billion tons of…
On a Saturday evening in July, something gave way 15 miles southwest of Nantucket. A 351 foot offshore wind turbine blade cracked, and a large section…
When wind turbines are installed in deep offshore waters, they have the potential to become support structures for artificial coral reefs. This has not been tested…
The blade has been sitting in a landfill outside Casper, Wyoming, for the better part of a decade. It arrived well over 100 feet long, sawn…
Old asphalt is not dry. That is the first thing to get wrong about it. A road binder starts out as a suspension, with hard sticky…
The southern North Sea floor is not a landscape. It is a surface. Sand, gravel and shell, graded flat and kept that way, because a century…
Along a small stretch of Norway’s coastline, salmon farms use electricity to run everyday operations. For years, that often meant relying on diesel generators to provide…
A solar module is a sandwich, and that is the whole difficulty. Glass on the front, cells in the middle, a plastic backsheet behind, the lot…
At the European Marine Energy Centre’s Fall of Warness test site in Orkney, Scotland, researchers completed 45 drifting acoustic surveys around Orbital Marine Power’s O2 tidal…
Strength and size are not the same property, and the gap between them is where this result lives. A muscle is a chemical machine, and the…
Rows of dark panels on rolling ground in southern Virginia, and between them, sheep. They are working animals here rather than scenery, and they are eating…
A cranberry bog in early November, flooded shallow and red, with the vines under the water. Lying across it is something long and white that does…
In July 2025, SkySails Power, a German energy developer, launched a first-of-its-kind airborne wind power system in Lukang, Taiwan. It is a pilot project that may…
A flat panel slides off the back of a truck in Cedartown, Georgia, and onto a belt. It spent years in a field, turning sunlight into…
Kite power generation is growing, and now Norwegian developer Kitemill AS is eyeing a site at an airport. The company has submitted a license application for…
A solar panel is a heavy sheet of glass with silicon behind it. That is not a criticism. Glass is why panels last 25 years outdoors.…
Dolphin detection was one of the main goals of a bright yellow research buoy named Marinus, which spent over 2 years observing the coastal waters of…
A river barge low in the water, moving upstream at walking pace. Three white objects lie along its deck, each one longer than the vessel is…
The Pulse Newsletter
Once a week we send our best reporting on energy, climate and nature. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
