Explore the Energy section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of clean power, storage solutions and emerging technologies.
New Jersey state regulators are reconsidering placing floating solar farms on public water resources. One project on the Wanaque Reservoir is back in development after the…
In Ivory Coast on the African continent, millions of farm workers harvest tons of cocoa pods each year. Only the seeds are needed, being directed into…
Stand at the bottom of the wall and look straight up. What runs from the pavement to the parapet is not glass and not stone. It…
A scrapyard will buy almost anything that came off a wind turbine. Steel tower, cast iron hub, copper windings, aluminum housings, all of it has a price…
Eastern Montana is one of the preferred locations for female softshell turtles to lay eggs. They appreciate the region’s gravel shores, channels, and clean river sand.…
Stand in the middle of the row and look up. Half the roof is glass and half is something darker, laid across the arch in one continuous…
Just after sunset the gravel between the rows starts moving. Something small and pale slides out from under a steel frame, ears far too big for…
State wildlife officials are working along the Upper Mississippi River to rescue one large-species endangered fish. The lake sturgeon was once abundant throughout Illinois. From the…
On a dark plain in north Texas, a wind turbine stands a few hundred feet tall and mostly silent. Around the base of the tower, the…
Floating wind turbines off the coast of California have to be anchored in thousands of feet of water with heavy mooring lines. The environment is restless,…
The ground on this hillside is not soil. It is crushed rock and spoil, graded flat by machines and packed hard enough to drive a truck across.…
The water in this channel is not calm and has never been calm. It runs hard one way for six hours, goes slack, then runs hard the…
Military convoys are a common sight on the 7,500 acres that make up the Fort Custer Training Center in Michigan. The grounds incorporate mineral-rich wetlands called…
A hydroelectric dam in Washington had to make a plan for Chinook salmon aiming upstream to spawn; otherwise, they would have run out of river. There…
The truck came round the bend and then it stopped coming round the bend. What was behind it kept going, swinging wide across two front yards. A…
Encino Reservoir has been out of service since 2002, but it sits between Ventura Boulevard and the Santa Monica Mountains. LADWP is planning a 10-acre floating…
At dusk the grass between the solar panels fills with midges. This is exactly the kind of place a bat should be working, low over open…
The thing parked over the bicycles is the wrong size for a building. It is too long, too smooth, and it tapers the wrong way, thick at…
A new floating solar array is being tested at the Rice Research and Extension Center in Stuttgart, Ark. The installation consists of 96 floating panels on…
There is a ring of loose rock around the foot of every offshore wind turbine. It is there for one reason, which is to stop the current from…
Federal agencies have installed hydrophones tethered to the seabed in the Pacific Ocean, miles offshore in deep waters. The mission is to evaluate deepwater regions for…
A major solar energy development in California’s San Joaquin Valley is facing state and federal environmental review. The Chalan Solar and Battery Energy Storage (BESS) Project…
The conditions arrived before the equipment did. Somebody at the state wildlife agency read the site plan, looked at what that ground already does in winter, and wrote…
One of the largest solar installations ever in the state has just been approved in Klamath County, Oregon. The decision means that hundreds of thousands of…
In the golden hills east of San Francisco, a golden eagle tips its wings into the afternoon wind. This ridge has belonged to eagles and hawks…
Field botanists had an important job to do in a dry stretch of the Mojave Desert before construction crews were allowed to break ground on a…
Mauna Kea is one of Hawaii’s tallest mountains — over 13,000 feet high. Atop it lies an observatory designed for studying the sky. Astronomers can study…
Point a solar cell at the sun and it works. Point the same cell at a ceiling light and it usually does almost nothing, because a lamp…
Environmental DNA testing around 11 wind turbines in the North Sea delivered surprising results. Water was sampled off the Norwegian Coast and analyzed for genetic traces.…
Offshore wind farms have generated electricity for years, while seaweed farming has remained largely experimental. A vessel entered the Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm and collected…
Stand at the foot of a wind turbine in western Poland and the loudest thing is not the blades. It is a low hum, rising from the ground.…
A pine forest in Irbene, Latvia, is the site of the RT-32 radio telescope dish, which has been doing its job scanning for cosmic signals for…
In mid-March 2024, extreme hailstorms struck Fort Bend County, Texas, home to more than 1.2 GW of solar capacity. The storms damaged the Fighting Jays Solar…
At the back of a Catholic cemetery in Torrington, Connecticut, a wide field runs off toward the trees. For years it held nothing, too far from…
Five industrial-scale turbines are operating 12 miles off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea. Instead of the standard pylons that mount them to the…
The storm formed in the western Pacific Ocean and intensified rapidly. It had sustained winds greater than Force 17 (Beaufort) and gusts greater than 70 m/s…
A wind turbine is a wing that happens to go in circles. Everything it does depends on one curved edge meeting the air at the right angle. Now…
Thousands of lakes beneath the Atlantic flyway bird migration route are being assessed for floating solar array viability. While energy planners consider 16,000 bodies of water…
Detectors are spread across a plain in western Argentina, covering an area roughly 30 times the size of Paris. Built on this scale, the site measures…
Just after dawn on the high desert of northern New Mexico, a pronghorn walks toward a solar fence. It does not wheel around and bolt, the…
Before a retired solar panel can be called anything official, somebody breaks it into pieces smaller than a fingernail. The pieces go into a sealed bottle…
There is a single floating wind turbine 10 miles from shore in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France. Below the surface, natural reef structures…
Conditions on the White River below Beaver Dam have recently drawn attention from both anglers and dam managers. Anglers are spending more time on this stretch…
Sweden has polar satellites scanning its pine forests for heat spikes. Thermal sensors detect when a fire breaks out, and an automated system alerts emergency services…
Millions of birds migrate back and forth over the western U.S. each year. Few people ever get to witness these migrations. Migration occurs mostly at night.…
Just after dawn on Interstate 84 near Pendleton, Oregon, a driver drops into a long dip in the road. For a heartbeat, the whole hillside ahead flares…
In the Midwest, spring evenings are usually quiet, but specialized detectors recently picked up lots more noise than usual. A two-year ecological study involved researchers installing…
The first cell came through in the late afternoon and the last one arrived in the dark, and the whole sequence took under twelve hours. What…
Far offshore, California plans on deploying deep-water floating wind turbines. These systems will operate in much deeper waters than many existing offshore wind farms. The moorings…
The outer continental shelf is mostly a desert of sand. Flat and shifting, and almost entirely without anything hard to hold onto. A mussel needs a wall…
The Pulse Newsletter
Once a week we send our best reporting on energy, climate and nature. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
