A venerable energy-storage technology is getting a new lease on life thanks to a clever redesign and an agreement between the power industry and environmentalists. “Pumped storage is getting a second look. The sleeping giant is waking up for several reasons,” said Dan Reicher, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and a former U.S. [...]
Scientists have three main theories for the persistent decline in the numbers of monarch butterflies: • loss of their food supply to the herbicide glyphosate, • hazards along their four-generation-long migration from the Midwest and Canada to the mountains of Mexico, or • effects of climate change. “We accept that there’s probably some combination of [...]
A company soon to settle in West Virginia has developed a battery that offers four days of full discharge using some of the cheapest, most available elements on earth. “They are now building and will soon deliver a next generation battery. It’s based on iron, water and oxygen. You couldn’t imagine a simpler supply chain,” [...]
The U.S. has half the technology it needs to decarbonize its power and transportation sectors by 2050, according to a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “We have about half the commercial technology that we need to decarbonize,” said George Crabtree, the leader of the national labs’ efforts to develop next-generation batteries for transportation and [...]
The number of carbon capture and storage facilities planned across the globe grew by 44 percent in 2022—an impressive sounding surge for an industry but only a tiny fraction of the CCS development needed for the world to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by mid century. “Although the increasing deployment of CCS we see is encouraging, [...]
Germany was once a leader among nations in the development of wind energy, but after 2015 it curtailed wind investment as it relied increasingly on natural gas imported from Russia. “Had the country followed the same trajectory of growth in annual installations as the rest of Europe, installed wind-power capacity would have been 32 gigawatts [...]
Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled a personal interest in environmental protection and an intention to boost the level of China’s clean energy ambition in a speech before a Communist Party congress on Sunday, according to an analyst from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Many observers have derived from Xi’s speech that [...]
Two former U.S. energy secretaries agreed on almost everything at a joint appearance Wednesday, including the opportunity to tell Germany ‘I told you so.’ Trump’s second energy secretary, Dan Brouillette, brought up Germany right off the bat at Columbia University’s Global Energy Summit in New York. “We felt very strongly that Germany had become too [...]
The Low-Activity Waste Facility melters, shown here during delivery and installation in 2010, weigh 300 tons and are designed to vitrify 5,000 gallons of low-activity waste each day — or 1.75 million gallons each year — during full operations. DOE In 2023 the Department of Energy will begin transforming the toxic soup stored in tanks [...]
Neither the U.S. government nor its drillers are responsible for the high prices Europe is paying to import American natural gas, an industry expert said this week. Anna Mikulska, who studies the geopolitics of natural gas, said the price derives from the seller’s response to the market. “U.S. is a big supplier of European natural [...]
