Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
The Carrizo Plain is an intense combination of beautiful and brutal. One diminutive fox found out the hard way that it was a death trap. Hiding…
There are thousands of turbines in the California desert. Their job is to generate and dispatch clean power. One of the green energy giants growing in…
Modern wind turbines are marvels of engineering designed to withstand extreme conditions. From ice storms to gale-force winds, they’re built to function at the same time…
Building a multimillion-dollar wind farm anywhere is a massive engineering feat. Imagine what it takes to get one up in frozen Antarctica. Just finding the right…
Drive past a big solar farm and it can look like the deadest place on earth. Rows of dark panels stretch to the horizon over what…
There’s a silent exodus going down in the Arctic snow. Land that has served as ancestral reindeer calving grounds for generations is being deserted. Instead, pregnant reindeer…
The unpredictable choppiness of the English Channel belies the stability of the engineering beneath. The historic tunnel connecting England and France is a construction marvel. But…
The black-naped Indian hare has evolved perfectly to handle life in the open wild. It relies on camouflage and speed to dodge predators. So when a…
Every time you turn on a gas burner or flip a heating switch on a cold morning, there is a chance the fuel behind it made…
Imagine every work day meant enduring temperatures below freezing for the whole shift. Engineers at Casey Station in Antarctica have a complex job on their hands.…
Picture a modest house on a street where electricity bills arrive every month like a small emergency. The roof holds no solar panels, even though the…
On a windswept island off the coast of Norway, rows of tall turbines turn slowly in the salt air, doing exactly what they were built to…
From a distance, offshore wind turbines are a vision of serenity. Their motion is calm and quiet as they go about their business of harvesting energy…
In a flat corner of western Germany, not far from the Dutch border, a giant concrete tower rises over a small, cheerful fairground. The tower is…
Picture a parrot small enough to sit in your palm, barely 40 grams, the green of new leaves with a slash of royal blue across its…
Picture the giant spinning blades of a wind turbine. Now imagine being a rabbit or a squirrel catching sight or sound of one for the first…
Far out in the North Sea, more than fifty kilometres from the nearest beach, there is a stretch of water that the people who work there…
A subtle revolution is happening deep in Colombia. More than a quarter of a million solar panels at El Paso are quietly going about their job.…
Picture a flat, sun blasted basin in the California desert, the kind of place most people would call empty. For thousands of years it belonged to a…
The promise was electric. A wind generator with no blades, no gears, no spinning parts at all — just a thin ribbon trembling in the breeze, supposedly many…
Picture a busy port on the eastern edge of Thailand, cranes swinging over rows of steel containers stacked six high in the humid heat. Most boxes…
Massive steel towers are ruling over vast parts of the North Sea. Harvesting wind for clean energy is their noble purpose. But beneath the harsh waves…
It was never supposed to be a home for anything. A solar farm is built to make clean power, not to shelter wildlife, and a vast field…
Miles of dark solar panels in the desert gleam like an oasis from above. Migrating birds make their way down at their peril. For years, scientists…
Picture a coastline where the water stretches to the horizon and not one drop of it is safe to drink. For billions of people that is…
It’s a whole other world on the floor of the North Sea, and there’s a transformation going on. The Borssele wind farm stands peacefully above the…
Wind energy is reaching new heights across the world. Millions of homes are now powered by wind. Yet, like so many clean energy options, wildlife is…
The numbers arriving at the docks are hard to absorb. U.S. oil exports jumped to 5.2 million barrels a day in April, more than 30 percent above…
The vast, underwater desert of the North Sea is a landscape hidden to all but a minute few. Then imagine the stillness shattered by something human-made,…
America’s first offshore wind project was hardly welcomed with open arms. Skeptics’ greatest fear was that local fisheries and ecosystems would be destroyed. A groundbreaking seven-year…
Just after dawn, a solar farm in the English lowlands is almost silent. Long rows of dark panels stretch across the grass, and a thin mist…
Harbor seals in the North Sea got GPS-tagged and tracked for science. Researchers were blown away when they picked up brand-new organized behavior. Instead of moving randomly…
Farmers in Indiana have a new “crop.” It’s not a plant, though. It’s clean, reliable solar energy. Giant photovoltaic panels are multiplying in the fields, replacing…
Far below the turmoil of the North Sea surface, the ocean floor is being transformed. A multimillion-euro engineering revolution sees massive turbines doing more than just…
The giant wind turbines of the Karnataka plains are operating as they should, and clean energy is flowing. But in the sky above and on the…
On a warm summer night, in the middle of a field of solar panels, something unexpected was unfolding in the dark. Bats, dozens of them, were…
Offshore wind turbines are a vital weapon in the fight against climate change. But they also incite battles we can’t see. Crises continue long after the…
Off the north coast of Scotland, where the wind turbines never seem to stop turning, something strange happened a few years ago. A crew on a…
In the depths of the Baltic Sea, an acoustic revolution is playing out. Wind turbines towering over the horizon are going about the business of delivering…
Nature and green technology are dueling it out in an acoustic battle. In Poland, normally quiet mornings are being broken by a strange, modern hum. In…
Earth is receiving cosmic dust from an ancient supernova. Dust falls every night. Mostly dirt, ash, smog. But something else has been raining down for thousands…
Cormorants began to draw attention as seabirds gathered around an offshore Dutch wind farm. Many were so fascinated by it that it seemed as if they…
Mike Brubaker has been fishing in Kotzebue’s lagoon all his life, as have his family members. When the water became an unhealthy-looking shade of green in…
Princeton, Iowa sits on the banks of the Mississippi River with roughly 1,000 residents and, until recently, a single aging well drilled in 1963 as its…
It has become common for seabirds that normally nest near open water to appear in deserts, where there is often little or no water at all.…
Protecting wildlife during energy development is becoming increasingly important. As the demand for power continues to grow, societies must find ways to expand clean energy while…
Birds tend to fly into wind turbines by mistake. There are a few reasons for this. One major reason why birds cannot easily spot wind turbines…
At the time, it simply made sense to do so. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s busiest, sits next to a solar park converting unused space…
A working train line in western Switzerland is now running over something unusual: solar panels embedded between the rails. On a 100-meter stretch near the village…
After more than 30 years of tightening emissions rules on home heating equipment, the Bay Area is closing in on a landmark vote that could make…
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