Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
The Tule Wind plant is one example of how renewable energy sources can actively manage the regional electricity transmission grid by functioning within the challenging ridgelines…
Maui’s grid faces a problem. The island uses power 24/7. However, the wind does not always produce as much. It can surge unexpectedly. At other times,…
A fish about the length of a pencil slides headfirst into a test pipeline. On the other end, a small steel runner is already spinning. Somewhere…
A flatbed trailer pulls up to a loading dock in Louisiana, Missouri, carrying what used to be a wind turbine blade. It arrived in pieces, sawed…
The Richard B. Russell Dam spans the Savannah River dividing line separating Georgia from South Carolina and serves as a key energy plant. A creation of…
Wind turbines have been growing in size for years. Rotor sizes are increasing through growth in both rotor diameters and lengths of the blades and output…
A gray composite blade sits bolted into a steel frame the size of a shipping container. It does not spin. Instead, hydraulic rams push it down,…
A diver’s flashlight sweeps over a flat stretch of sand, and nothing moves. No crevice, no shadow, no place for a fish to hide. Just open…
A wind turbine blade is built to survive everything. Twenty five years of gusts, ice, heat and load reversal, bending millions of times without a crack…
Recently, there have been severe hailstorms in Texas, causing four-inch hailstones to fall, accompanied by gusting winds of over 50 miles per hour, through utility-scale solar…
Solar panels and farms generally don’t mix. Farmers need electricity, but they also need land to grow crops. The two often compete for the same space.…
A vineyard in the Sierra foothills does not look like a power plant. But walk between the rows at a small farm in Somerset, California, and…
Sevenoaks District Council developed water plans regarding the redevelopment of a landfill that is capped on Otford Road as a municipal solar farm. The proposed renewable…
A small owl stands at the mouth of a concrete block burrow, blinking in the glare. Its head swivels, tracking a shadow sliding across the gravel.…
An eel does not swim through a dam. It gets pulled. Downstream migrants follow the current, and at a hydropower plant the current goes through the…
Most electrical grids have alternatives when conditions change. A large power plant can increase output, and energy can often be imported from a nearby area to…
The ridge country of Converse County, Wyoming, east of Casper, hums with turbines from dawn until the wind drops. Bolted onto steel poles among them sit…
Hiwassee Dam was converted by engineers at the Tennessee Valley Authority into an enormous battery amid the picturesque mountain terrain of western North Carolina. Built on…
Large, abandoned industrial sites are typically best known for what they manufactured. Years after manufacturing ceased, the roads, structures, and excavations may still exist at the…
The field looks whole from the road. Row after row of dark panels still stand upright on their steel posts outside a stretch of Nebraska farmland.…
A falcon lands on a rust streaked ledge, hundreds of feet above a power plant roof. Below her, turbines hum and transformers tick. She is not…
Wildlife biologists studying resident pronghorn in southwest Wyoming documented behavioral modifications due to a large solar power facility. Five years of GPS data gathered from these…
Solar panels can change the water beneath them — and that’s just the start. Scientists began trying to find out what would happen if large parts…
Typhoon Faxai came ashore over Chiba in the dark. Beneath the wind, more than fifty thousand solar panels lay moored flat on a reservoir. They had…
A nozzle no wider than a pencil lead hovers above a retired solar cell. A thread of liquid traces the silver lines across its face. Within…
The glow showed up first, a flicker against the dark tree line that nobody on the ground could explain. Trucks rolled toward a peninsula lined with…
Offshore energy companies based in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, towed a massive floating wind turbine back to port for maintenance. The disconnection and towing of the floating structure…
There is a small problem when you say “wind turbines” and “eagles.” People tend to associate them with each other in negative ways. This is the…
A block of wind turbine blade sits inside a sealed vessel of hot water, no bigger than a deck of cards. It does not look like…
The carcass searchers came back again and again, working outward from each tower base in a widening circle. They walked the same ground beneath one turbine…
Inside a Japanese treatment plant, truckloads of sludge get burned down to ash. The leftover powder looks like cold gray dust. For decades, much of it…
Water treatment engineers working with a sun-tracking floating solar park experiment at Rotterdam’s Kralingen water storage facility for drinking water found out that the submerged pontoons…
Pronghorn were already present within portions of the landscape southeast of Yerington, Nevada, before plans for the Libra Solar Project were finalized. Environmental surveys later documented…
A rectangle of dull gray metal sits inside the core of a retired wind turbine generator in Boone, Iowa. It looks like scrap. It is the…
A small rod stands on a rooftop in Spain. It does not turn, it does not have blades, and it never faces into the wind. When…
The panel has been on a roof for a quarter century. Its glass face is hazed, its aluminum frame is oxidized at the corners, and the…
Clean energy experts from Canada have set up a small-scale floating solar array that generates 7 kilowatts of power in a privately owned pond in Ilderton,…
A desert wash cuts directly across the Jove Solar Project footprint. Solar farms can run together at large scale. Installation of fences then occurs. Next comes…
The bird leaned toward the spinning shape on the screen, then stopped. It was a great tit, a wild songbird brought indoors at a Finnish research…
A manatee is a tropical animal living at the northern limit of where it can survive. It is large, which helps, but it carries almost no…
The blocks went in over a few days, stacked by the tens of thousands onto roughly 8,800 square feet of sandy seabed. Their first job was…
The environmental scientists who have been studying three similar floating solar panels found that there were many life forms dwelling below the photovoltaic panels in the…
Researchers studying the floating wind turbine FLOATGEN off the shore of Le Croisic in France found that underwater mooring cables serve as artificial reefs. Through surveys…
The ground beneath a solar farm is easy to forget. It sits in moving shade, crossed by wires, and for much of the industry’s short history…
Pull a retired panel off a roof and it looks spent. The glass is yellowed, the cells are cracked, and the frame is bent out of…
A long-term study carried out by Dutch marine biologists 7.4 miles from The Hague found that grey and harbor seals use an artificial solar farm floating…
The truck left the port at Searsport in the early morning, carrying a single piece of freight 240 feet long. At Stockton Springs, a railroad trestle…
Researchers at Nagasaki University conducted water sampling across multiple depth layers—surface, middle, and bottom—near floating wind turbines fixed off Japan’s Goto Islands and at control stations.…
A grinder in Earlham, Iowa chewed through three retired blades and produced a pale, fibrous material. Workers folded that material into a concrete mix, poured it…
Four floating solar platforms have been installed within the lagoon of Tumaraa by the energy providers of French Polynesia in order to conduct experiments for the…
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