In press with Bioscience Magazine We, scientists, have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any great existential threat. In this paper, we present a suite of graphical vital signs of climate change over the last 40 years. Results show greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, with increasingly damaging effects. With few exceptions, we […]
What Good are City Clean-Energy Targets?
By Stephen Abbott In the absence of federal action, the US has seen a groundswell of local efforts and leadership in the fight against climate change. In addition to various states and corporations, many cities in the US have committed to power their own operations with renewable energy. In fact, 132 US cities and counties have gone even further […]
Texas grid forced to call for energy emergency
A heat wave across parts of Texas forced the state’s grid operator to call for energy conservation on Tuesday and sent electricity prices soaring past $9,000/MWh. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued an Energy Emergency Alert (EEA1) around 3 p.m., when operating reserves dipped from at least 3,000 MW to below 2,300 MW. […]
Monetizing microgrids
The following is a contributed article from Megan Kerins and Ana Sophia Mifsud, senior associates at Rocky Mountain Institute. As the energy industry transitions toward more distributed energy resources, electric utilities face a critical choice: embrace this opportunity or perceive it as a threat. This is especially true in the Caribbean where energy resilience is driving renewable microgrid […]
Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater
As populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement dwindling freshwater supply. Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called “thermally […]