5 Coming Breakthroughs in Energy and Transportation
The energy and transportation industries are being aggressively disrupted by converging exponential technologies. In just five days, the sun provides Earth with an energy supply exceeding all proven...
View ArticleWood Gets a Makeover to Provide Energy-Free Air Conditioning
Powering buildings costs America $430 billion a year and accounts for 40 percent of total energy use. Almost half of that is used for heating and cooling. Now scientists have given our oldest building...
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How to Deploy Tech Solutions to the World’s Greatest Challenges at Scale
“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” argued Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th century US lecturer, philosopher, and essayist. In other words, if scientists and engineers...
View ArticleThe Biggest Offshore Wind Project in the US Is Underway
From the steady growth in market share of electric cars to continuous improvement and expansion of solar energy technology, it appears the world is going renewable—the age of fossil fuels is slowly but...
View ArticleHow the US Will Get to a 50 Percent Renewable Electric Economy by 2030
By 2030, more than 50 percent of the US economy will run on electricity derived from renewables. What are the implications as we shift the US and global energy economies away from fossil fuels? For the...
View ArticleThe Newest Way to Go Green? Retrofit Your Old Car to Make It Electric
Thanks to a rapid decline in lithium-ion battery prices and increases in their energy storage density, we’re headed into the age of the electric car. So much so that some nations, including France,...
View ArticleThe Age of Solar Energy Abundance Is Coming in Hot
Every five days, the sun provides the Earth with as much energy as all proven supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas. If humanity could capture just one 6,000th of Earth’s available solar energy, we’d...
View ArticleHow Cheap Must Batteries Get for Renewables to Compete With Fossil Fuels?
While solar and wind power are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels in areas with lots of sun and wind, they still can’t provide the 24/7 power we’ve become used to. At present, that’s...
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The Promise of Direct Air Capture: Making Stuff Out of Thin Air
Imagine making fuel, plastics, and concrete out of “thin air.” That’s the promise of direct air capture (DAC), a technology that fundamentally disrupts our contemporary oil economy. Mimicking what...
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This Startup Wants to Store Grid Energy by Lifting Concrete Blocks
The energy transition is underway. It’s not just crucial for climate change that we kick our fossil fuel habit—it will soon be more expensive not to. In the UK, for example, it’ll soon be cheaper to...
View ArticleNew Tech Is Helping Nuclear Power Make a Comeback
Nuclear power has a lot going for it. It’s carbon-free, can produce huge amounts of power from relatively small amounts of fuel, and once plants are built, they’re cheap to run. But containing the...
View ArticleNew Battery Lets Electric Cars Go 200 Miles on a 10-Minute Charge
Electric vehicles could decarbonize one of the most polluting sectors of our economy, but they’re bedeviled by one major problem: range anxiety. A new battery design that can charge in just 10 minutes...
View ArticleIBM’s Plan to Design Solid-State Batteries Using Quantum Tech
Batteries are the key to decarbonizing both transport and the grid, but today’s technology is still a long way from living up to this promise. IBM seems to have decided its computing chops are the key...
View ArticleWorld’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Will Power 4.5 Million Homes
Renewable energy statistics just keep topping each other. Solar power is getting cheaper. Battery storage capacity is getting better. And wind farms are getting bigger. 2019 saw the world’s biggest (at...
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Microsoft’s Moonshot Plan to Reverse Its Lifetime CO2 Emissions by 2050
The alarming headlines about Australia’s bush fires over the last couple weeks have heightened the global outcry over climate change, and companies, NGOs, and governments are taking action. One of the...
View ArticleAI Is an Energy-Guzzler. We Need to Re-Think Its Design, and Soon
There is a saying that has emerged among the tech set in recent years: AI is the new electricity. The platitude refers to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence for driving advances in...
View ArticleThe World’s First Open-Source Nuclear Reactor Blueprint Is Coming Online
Nuclear power’s role in combating climate change is a contentious topic, but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur thinks he can sway the debate by releasing open-source designs for a small-scale reactor that...
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We Won’t Have Fusion Generators in 5 Years. But the Holy Grail of Clean...
Recent reports from scientists pursuing a new kind of nuclear fusion technology are encouraging, but we are still some distance away from the “holy grail of clean energy.” The technology developed by...
View ArticleThis Electric Tiny Car Can Be Rented for the Price of an Electric Scooter
On any given day, in any given city, the roads are packed with cars, motorcycles, scooters, and bikes. It’s been like that for decades. Recently, though, there’s been a Cambrian explosion of alt...
View ArticleThe US Government Just Invested Big in Small-Scale Nuclear Power
Amid the coronavirus lockdowns around the world, one of few positive pieces of news we’ve heard is that carbon emissions have dropped dramatically. The clearer skies and cleaner air have led to a...
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