2018

Google's Makani Energy Kite is reportedly nearing take off, and among those watching the fledgling technology is a former director of ARPA-E, the government incubator that nurtured the kite's early development.
The kite has the potential to disrupt…

Expert: Require Autonomous Vehicles To Be Electric

Transportation planners have long seen the arrival of autonomous vehicles as potential dream or potential nightmare, depending largely on two factors:
If they're electric and shared, it's a dream come true, all but eliminating accidents and insurance…

Trump Has Slowed Climate Progress 1 To 2 Percent

For all his talk of saving the coal industry from the Chinese hoax of climate change, President Donald Trump has exerted only marginal drag so far on the nation's progress toward the emission-reduction goals set by Barack Obama.
Some of Trump's…

Having discovered surprising reasons why nuclear power plants are more expensive in the West, a new MIT study offers a prescription for lowering those costs.
Idaho National Laboratory Fellow David Petti said he was surprised to discover that the high…

Innovation Is Making Solar Panels Harder To Recycle

Solar panels are becoming less and less recyclable as the need for recycling them looms more and more.
The United States installs 7 million pounds per day of solar panels, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a pace that secures…

California Is Drilling For Negative-Carbon Oil

The State of California is developing a protocol to credit fossil-fuel drilling operations when they use CO2 to enhance oil recovery and leave the CO2 underground permanently.
"We are hopeful that we’ll get to something around zero-emission or…

Solar installers could offer rooftop customers even more savings by bundling solar panels with heat pumps and other electric appliances, according to a recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
RMI studied the carbon benefits and financial costs…

California's residential solar installations plunged in 2017 for the first time in recent history, and some experts believe Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity is to blame.
New solar installations in California's residential sector dropped 18.6 percent…

Much Of The Grid Clean Enough To Electrify Home Heating

In some American cities the electric grid is already clean enough that carbon emissions would drop if homes converted to electric heating, according to a new study by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
The cost of electrification remains an obstacle for…