Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
Wind behaves strangely over mountains. It accelerates over ridges, curls into valleys, and shifts direction within meters — making it one of the hardest environments to…
People believed that irreversible damage had been done when wind turbines were planted along the Norwegian coast. Decades worth of flourishing growth was undone in months.…
Modern cities are wrapped in glass — towers, facades, and curtain walls stretching across entire skylines. Most of that surface does one thing: let light in,…
Most thermal materials make a choice: absorb heat or reflect it. That trade-off works fine in a stable climate — but not in a world where…
Along Norway’s western coastline, rare alpine plants have survived storms, salt spray, and brutal winters for centuries. Then something unexpected changed their habitat. Researchers studying vegetation…
Workers at a large solar site in England believed the fencing was working properly. The solar panels remained secure, and wildlife stayed outside the site. From…
Space mining has long carried the promise of a new gold rush — metallic asteroids packed with precious metals, orbiting close enough to reach without burning…
Wind turbines carry a high price tag in the quest for a cleaner world. Yet, they create death zones for bird populations in the very areas…
Meta has been pushing AI since Mark Zuckerberg founded FAIR (Facebook AI Research) in 2013. The company continues to stamp its global footprint with large-scale data…
Among all the vital skills it takes to be a pilot, they now have a new risk to deal with. Reports about a strange problem during…
Engineers are already working on a wind farm in the North Sea that doesn’t exist yet. There’s not one turbine in sight. But drilling crews are…
A hydroelectric dam in eastern Türkiye started offering up its ghosts. The process was a lazy one as the water dropped gradually. But then the scale…
Forests in central Sweden once echoed with the heavy wingbeats of capercaillie moving freely between feeding grounds. Then the turbines started appearing gradually. Roads cut deeper…
Solar panels change more than electricity production. They also reshape the ground below. At one solar park in Italy, researchers began studying the thin strips of…
For years, birds treated offshore wind farms like obstacles in the sky. Long rows of blades stretching across migration routes. Most researchers assumed birds would avoid…
A quiet lake in the Netherlands became the site of an unconventional environmental experiment. First came the floating solar panels. Thousands of them spread slowly across…
A Chinese energy company is planning something so large it could reshape an entire region’s power system. The project would stretch across open land thousands of…
Who would have thought a wind farm would pose a threat to UK air defense? The Fallago Rig Project is in the Ministry of Defense’s radar,…
Wind farms are built to catch wind. But what happens when one wind farm is large enough to rob the wind from another? That question moved…
Somewhere off the coast of China, a platform the size of a small city block is rising and falling with the ocean swells — and sitting…
Indonesia has announced plans for something no country has attempted before. Not one giant solar farm, not one national battery system. Instead, officials want to spread…
Captains navigating near offshore wind farms have been reporting worrying situations for years. Ships are vanishing, but not into the sea. Into a digital radar blind…
An English field hosting a quiet solar site was transformed twice. Rows of orderly panels were first on the scene. Then trucks made an unorthodox delivery…
A floating solar plant quietly snuck up on a reservoir in Albania last year. Its panels rested on an odd platform that used water itself as…
Denmark has started building something enormous in the North Sea. Not a ship. Not an island. The mighty project is called Thor, and once completed, it…
Workers began drilling beneath a Denver museum parking lot. They expected routine underground rock. The focus was on geothermal energy. So the drill entered the deep…
Offshore wind farms run on strict order. Precise schedules. Heavy steel. Predictable plans. Then, a “ghost” vessel appeared out of nowhere with no radio calls and…
The desert mirrors looked beautiful from the air. Rows of giant glass stretched across the landscape for miles. They tracked the sun all day. Together, they…
Workers preparing routes for Australia’s massive Snowy Hydro 2.0 project expected rock, soil, and engineering surveys. Instead, archaeologists started pulling stone objects from the Alpine ground…
In October 2016, Elon Musk stepped onto a stage in Los Angeles and unveiled what he called the last roof anyone would ever need — solar…
The Appalachian Mountains have stood for hundreds of millions of years — long enough that most geologists assumed they’d already given up their secrets. But a…
Somewhere beyond the reach of conventional turbine foundations — in waters too deep for steel to meet seabed — a new generation of wind energy is…
The global chemical industry — producer of medicines, fertilizers, plastics, and countless everyday goods — still runs almost entirely on fossil fuels. Changing that has long…
For more than a century, engineers designing wind turbine blades have relied on aerodynamic formulas dating back to the 1800s — equations they’ve known for decades…
Halide perovskites absorb and emit light better than almost any other known solar material — thin enough to coat a phone, flexible enough to wrap a…
Construction workers building Georgia’s Plant Vogtle nuclear facility uncovered a remarkably complete 40-million-year-old fossil. Buried beneath layers of Georgia soil sat the remains of a strange…
Frogs living beside Brazilian wind turbines are changing the way they call each other. Not because of predators. Not because of climate shifts. But because giant…
At first, this Minnesota solar plant seemed like just another energy project. Beneath the solar panels, native flowers slowly rebuilt lost habitat. Operators planted flowers beneath…
Fast-growing weeds were creating a problem at a huge solar farm. The plants spread rapidly underneath the solar panels, reducing their access to sunlight. Conventional methods…
Fragile and chemically complex, carbonaceous meteorites rarely survive the long fall to Earth intact. When they do, they account for just 5% of all meteorite falls…
In the Mojave Desert, three 450-foot towers concentrate sunlight to 990°F (537°C). Over 173,000 mirrors focus intense beams onto central boilers. This creates a glowing orb…
Burrito, a rescued donkey, patrols 33,600 solar panels at Volkswagen’s 9.5-megawatt facility in Chattanooga. He stands guard over 50 sheep, instantly alerting the flock to local…
Beneath the waves of Rhode Island, a silent transformation is overtaking America’s first offshore wind farm. What started as a clean energy project is now teeming…
Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that one of Europe’s largest wind farms violated Sámi Indigenous rights. This comes after reindeer migration routes were disrupted. The 2021 verdict…
Hundreds of birds are falling from the sky at solar farms across the American Southwest. Pelicans, hummingbirds, grebes, and other species suddenly dive toward the panels…
Wild foxes began slaughtering livestock at the Shoalhaven Community Solar Farm in New South Wales. Two llamas were deployed as “livestock guardians.” It’s a practice backed…
Offshore wind farms are accidentally reshaping the North Sea’s biological landscape. Beneath the surface, turbine foundations act as artificial reefs. These steel structures host mussels and…
Massive solar arrays are accidentally turning barren deserts into lush, flammable grasslands. This ecological shift creates a ‘green’ paradox that threatens the infrastructure itself. Solar panels…
Light is one of the most studied phenomena in physics — and yet it still surprises. At the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, researchers running mathematical calculations…
When a team of German physicists set their simulations running on one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, they were hunting for flaws — atomic-level imperfections at…
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