If you walk inside this new one-bedroom apartment outside Salt Lake City, you might not recognize the large object around the corner from the fridge. Roughly the size of a refrigerator itself, it’s a battery. The apartment complex, which will include 22 buildings and 600 units when complete, is the first to put batteries inside […]
Researchers Say ‘Anti-Solar Panels’ Could Generate Power at Night
There is free energy raining down on Earth in the form of sunlight, but harnessing all of that energy has proven difficult. The sun only shines during the day, and those solar panels are useless at night, or at least they are right now. Researchers from the University of California Davis suggest you could generate […]
Too much wind and solar raises power system costs
The following is a contributed article by John Reilly, a co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and an energy, environmental and agricultural economist. If solar panels and wind turbines keep getting cheaper, why bother building anything else? Because as we add more solar panels […]
First US steel plants powered by wind, solar energy are coming for industry with big carbon footprint
The steel industry has a massive carbon footprint, as much as 6% to 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Rocky Mountain Institute study. A new Nucor steel microplant in Missouri is trying to put a dent in that number. Nucor’s micromill in Sedalia, Missouri, is set to be the first U.S. steel plant to […]
Three-story water battery cuts university’s energy usage by 40 percent
The University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) in Queensland, Australia, is on a mission to become completely carbon neutral by 2025, and a huge early addition to its energy systems is boding well for these lofty ambitions. Switched on in September, a new three-story “water battery” is already producing enough juice to power the campus’ […]