Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
In eastern Oregon, solar farm service trucks are going about their night shift work, but at a crawl. Drivers have to comply with a strict speed…
Black islands on a reservoir appeared in satellite images taken years apart in central India. There were some new things that showed up on the top…
Rain falls on a solar panel and mostly smears the dirt around. That is the everyday reality of solar panels tilted at the sky. Water spreads, dries,…
Federal regulators have just completed a final environmental assessment for a major hydro energy project 35 miles east of Rawlins, Wyoming. The site is the Seminoe…
A commercial fishing vessel would travel for several days in offshore waters of the Gulf of Maine. Onboard researchers did more than map the ocean floor.…
Picture a small boat on the gray North Sea, a gloved hand dipping an empty bottle over the side. Inside is nothing but plain seawater. No shark breaks the…
A major offshore wind farm is going up 27 miles off Virginia Beach. Workers are based on support vessels as they hammer 176 steel foundations into…
For many years, the New Haven landfill served a single purpose. Trucks brought waste; it would fill; and after that, the site would be capped and…
A grassy mound sits beside the highway on the edge of New Haven. For decades it swallowed the city’s garbage. Then it was sealed, planted over, and left alone.…
In North Carolina, a concrete hydroelectric dam generates clean energy while migratory fish go about their lives in the water downstream. For decades, the reduced water…
A wind farm runs right through a strong day and comes in far under what the wind should have given it. Every mechanical check passes. The…
The wildlife camera footage showed sheep grazing on vegetation beneath the solar panels. It also revealed that they were just one part of an ecosystem operating…
There is a place in the California desert where the ground is almost perfectly flat. Not flat like a field. Flat like a table. Rain fills it…
Boaters who live in California know that the annual Slab Creek recreation releases mean the start of whitewater season. The South Fork American River has scheduled…
A crane lifted the last of three blades into place on a flat coastal site in Shandong province. The rotor it completed measures 1,017 feet across, which is…
An excavator is working through dry scrub in southern Sri Lanka. The scrub does not look like much from a road. It is thorny and gray and it grows on…
Across the Texas prairie, large stretches of open land have been transformed by solar development. Large areas of open land are often developed when solar projects…
Migratory fish along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River have faced the same problem for more than one hundred years. American shad and river herring are two species that…
A researcher glues a small transmitter onto the fur behind a seal’s head and lets the animal go. Months later the tracks come back as lines on…
Owls find their prey at lower levels over New York’s open grasslands. Northern Harriers also use these open spaces to locate their prey. Both need wide…
A lobster boat leaves Point Judith in the dark with an extra passenger and an empty cooler. The traps that come up are ventless wire, which means…
The row of spinach runs flat and dark green between two lines of steel posts. Above it, a panel the size of a door tilts slowly to follow the light.…
The great prairie chicken has lived on the grasslands of Wisconsin for many years. Each spring, males will go out into the open fields, expand the…
A milling machine went down a rural lane in Normandy in late May and started chewing the road surface out. Underneath it were photovoltaic panels, bolted…
The fish had been in the lakes long before people developed roads, cities, and dams. Some fish can live for more than 100 years and return…
A gate opens on a solar field in middle Tennessee and there are cattle standing between the rows. Ten cows and their calves, grazing in the…
A shape the size of a bench turns just under the surface of the reservoir beside the Chernobyl plant. Visitors film it, and the footage travels…
Fish have had to navigate the waters of the lower Snake River for millions of years. Salmon and steelhead travel long distances upstream to reach their…
In Kemmerer, a small town in southwest Wyoming, the coal era is slowly ending. For generations, a nearby power plant burned coal to light the region.…
efore dawn in a quiet Norwegian village, a man lay fast asleep in his bed. Just outside, a 443 foot container ship was bearing straight down on…
Heavy machinery is clearing a section of pine forest in Oregon for a utility-scale solar energy project. The project will see around 405,000 solar panels installed…
One winter morning, a drone lifted off over the eastern shore of Lake Huron. Below it, near a nuclear plant, the water held a dark, swirling…
On a Florida summer night, a nest stirs beneath the sand and dozens of hatchlings claw their way up. For millions of years, one simple rule has…
There’s a large-scale project being constructed in Kern County, California, with the aim of converting the state’s sunshine into power for 180,000 homes. Thousands of acres…
The standard objection to a large solar farm is that it takes ground out of the living world and hands nothing back. Two sites in southern…
At first, nobody had noticed anything out of the ordinary with the Leaburg Canal in relation to Springfield, Oregon. For over sixty years, the canal has…
Engineers have been seeking new methods to assist the native species migrating upstream past this point for several years. Recently, researchers tested an unconventional method using…
There is no floating solar on any of the eleven reservoirs in this study. Not one panel. The whole thing was run on a computer. Researchers took…
In Madison County, Ohio, a solar facility is changing the way energy companies interact with farmland through a new partnership. Normally, the shaded ground beneath arrays…
The National Weather Service out of Milwaukee/Sullivan recently released an operational review and detailed an anomaly persistently popping up on radar screens. Doppler scan operators monitoring…
The California sea lions did not use a map to locate the fish at Bonneville Dam. All they had to do was learn when “dinner” would…
A notice goes up at the county office, and word moves faster than any turbine gets built. Neighbors start doing arithmetic about what the view is…
As the expansion of green energy across the United States changes agricultural landscapes, power companies are encountering unplanned-for complications. The Sherco Solar facility in Becker, Minnesota,…
Florida’s Gulf Coast was struck by Hurricanes Ian, Helene, and Milton within just a few years. These disasters caused widespread disruption across the region. Several coastal…
On a Saturday in the middle of July, people on Nantucket started picking things up off the sand. Shards of white fiberglass, some with a honeycomb foam…
In a hall in the hills of Provence, nine curved pieces of stainless steel are waiting to be joined. Together they will form a single ring,…
The more offshore wind farming expands, the more we see its effect on the atmosphere and the shifts in localized weather patterns. Researchers from the University…
For many years, the thousands of miles that migratory fish traveled every year along the St. Croix River were filled with obstacles. Dams cut off ancient…
A heron lands on a solar panel in the desert, twelve miles from the nearest water. Field crews have recorded exactly that, and the image is hard to shake.…
The North Sea is a great location for wind farming. The gusts are steady and unobstructed, and clean energy has been flowing to millions of homes…
The Pulse Newsletter
Once a week we send our best reporting on energy, climate and nature. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
