Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
State regulators in control of energy installations in Minnesota recently approved a site permit for a 150-megawatt solar facility. Hundreds of acres of rural land will…
As offshore wind development moves into deeper waters, scientists are beginning to study environmental changes that extend beyond electricity generation. A major research campaign off the…
The heavy waves of the Yellow Sea are putting experimental solar platforms under pressure. This ocean action weakens metal frames and can even tear floating rafts…
Those same dams have supplied Seattle with power since the early 1920s; today they remain one of Seattle’s largest providers of non-carbon emitting energy. However, it…
More than 200 solar facilities in China are being analyzed through high-resolution satellite imagery. An unexpected environmental shift is happening in the drylands. The vegetation under and…
A milkweed stem was growing in the band of shadow thrown by a tilted solar panel, and something was sitting on it. Not a bee. Not…
From the air one field southwest of Houston reads as a lake of broken glass, row after row of it. A few miles off, a second array of…
Agrivoltaics is a buzzword in renewable energy, and the practice is intended to boost agricultural efficiency. However, a trial in New York State indicated late-season compromises…
A retired solar panel does not look like an ore body. Dark blue squares, an aluminum frame, a sheet of glass, and a junction box on…
The availability of land for energy installations is dropping as the industry expands. The increasing demand for electricity is pushing solar power installations further into open…
The ground near Florianópolis was flat and the panels were brand new. Regular inspections started almost immediately after commissioning. Within weeks, something was wrong. Technicians began…
The blade is already longer than a subway car when it arrives, and its walls are thick with resin locked glass fiber that no ordinary furnace…
The panel comes up the belt face up, cells still catching the light. Somebody bolted it down a long time ago and never thought about it…
The dismantling of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado was good for the environment. The vegetation started recovering as soon as more than 800…
The seabed off Long Island is sand, and it goes on like that for miles. Rippled, featureless, and thin on anything that needs somewhere to hide.…
An acoustic recorder is capturing the soundscape almost 100 feet underwater near the Port of Naples. The sounds picked up so far around a floating wind…
Bare dirt will not stay put on a graded roadside slope. So whoever builds there has to decide what covers it, and for fifty years the…
White-tailed deer are capable of clearing fences more than five feet in height. But landing safely on the other side does not necessarily mean the deer…
A radar does not see a tornado. It sees air moving toward the antenna and air moving away, side by side, in a tight pair. Find…
The storms arrived overnight, and they arrived three times. By dawn the fields were flattened, the grass was shredded and the ground was white with stones.…
For over a hundred years, the operation of two dams has shaped how water flows across parts of Northern California. Part of the Potter Valley Hydroelectric…
Point an instrument at the open sea and there is nothing there to measure. No hills, no buildings, no terrain to bend the air around. Which…
Satellites have been tracking 675 wind farms in China with thermal sensors. The surface temperatures of more than 90,000 operating turbines were monitored from orbit for…
The strip of ground between two railway rails has never had a use. Ballast, drainage, the space a maintenance crew walks along, and nothing else. On…
Something out of the ordinary is happening on one of Oregon’s rivers. One of the state’s hydroelectric power plants stopped generating electricity in July and will…
An animal built to run does not need to be fast if it sees the threat early enough. Pronghorn have enormous eyes for their body size,…
Put a solar farm on farmland and you normally lose the farm. Panels sit low, rows run close, and the ground underneath goes to gravel or…
A cod farming operation located near the fjords (deep, narrow inlets) of Norway raised fish for many years in the cool waters of the region. In…
The liquid had already been charged by sunlight. Its molecules had been rearranged, atom for atom, so that the energy sat locked inside their chemical geometry rather than…
The Gobi Desert is shaded in some places by thousands of solar panels. One utility-scale facility was put under field monitoring, which recorded underground dynamics that…
A blade off a retired turbine is longer than most airliners. It was built to hold its shape through twenty years of ice, hail and gale.…
A few miles out into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal, there is a collection of three floating wind turbines that generate electricity. The…
A concrete channel runs in from the Baltic, and everything the plant needs comes down it. Millions of gallons an hour of cold seawater, pulled in…
The night was running fine, the sea was open, and the ship was making a steady nine knots. Ahead of her stood a steel tower in a farm…
The Hanford Site, a former plutonium-production complex in Washington State, delivered a wildlife surprise recently. Researchers monitoring photographs captured by field crew at the federal reservation…
Each one is about the size of a garage door. Two panes of glass on a steel post, a small motor on each axis, and a…
As we head into September, parts of the Southern Plains will likely continue to feel like they are stuck in the heart of summer. Much warmer-than-normal…
Five solar farms in Arizona, Illinois, and Massachusetts were monitored with automated camera networks for five years between 2019 and 2024. Researchers analyzed thousands of hours…
Eleven miles off the Norfolk coast, a steel tube runs down through sixty feet of water into the seabed. Below the waterline it is not really…
California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant is located directly on the ocean shore near San Luis Obispo. Here, enormous waves from the Pacific Ocean collide constantly with…
A rig on farmland in the southwest corner of Norway, pulling rock up in cylinders. The survey work said the ore body ran a few hundred…
A sea cucumber cannot swim away from heat. It sits on the bottom of a shallow pond, and in a Chinese summer that bottom can pass…
Wildlife biologists studying sharp-tailed grouse near wind farms in South Dakota’s grasslands fitted 119 females with solar-powered transmitters. The birds were monitored across multiple breeding seasons…
From the access road the array looks clean. Up close there is a grey haze on the glass, thin enough that you would rub a finger…
A drop of water rolls down a dark square on a laboratory bench in Seville. It does not spread and it does not soak in, because…
The two-megawatt Floatgen floating wind turbine 12 miles off the coast of France became the site of an insightful marine wildlife study. Automated cameras were installed…
A row of panels throws a long stripe of shade across the ground at midmorning. Underneath it the vegetation is knee high and messy, grasses and…
The American Midwest’s farming lands are being repurposed for clean energy. The solar farms appearing in previously open fields are creating new environments for wildlife. One…
The water arrives through channels wide enough to drive a truck down. It comes off the strait between two port towns and runs straight into the…
Anyone driving the interstate between Las Vegas and Los Angeles has seen it. Three pale towers standing on a dry lake bed, and when the array…
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