I was a teenager on a cruise when I first saw ocean pollution up close. Late at night, I heard a noise over the railing. I looked down and saw crew dumping garbage into the ocean. A stream of trash stretching off toward the horizon. That image stuck with me.
For over 200 years, we’ve been generating electricity essentially the same way: by boiling water. And it’s worked! Today, steam turbines power the vast majority of the world’s electricity. But this technology, which has powered us since the industrial revolution, might not be up to supplying us
In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula’s grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse.1 Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers call
This is Vertical Harvest. Sitting on half an acre of land, it produces as much food as an equivalent 250-acre farm. That’s a 500 times more efficient use of land than traditional farming. But if vertical farming is so great, why isn’t it more popular? And where and
I have some regrets. A few years ago, I set out to build my dream net zero energy home. I’ve been living here for a little over two years now, and so far, I’ve been more than satisfied. I have enough solar and battery storage to balance out
Ever since Donut Lab announced their miracle solid-state battery, the internet has been absolutely certain about what it is. A capacitor. Vaporware. A scam. Except when you actually dig into those explanations, a lot of them start falling apart. Here’s what Donut Lab is actually claiming: more energy per
Perovskite solar cells could hit 35% efficiency and cost half as much as silicon, but they’re still years away from your roof. Meanwhile, silicon panels just lost their 30% federal tax credit in the US, making them suddenly more expensive. So here’s the $20,000 question: what’s
What if the most efficient way to heat and cool your home…might not actually be the best choice for you? Geothermal heat pumps are the gold standard for efficiency. They’re also the most expensive upfront investment you can make in your home’s HVAC system. So, are they
When Spain’s power grid failed on April 28th, 2025, it quickly became a very serious issue. Not only for the economic impacts, but life-or-death serious due to multiple, indirect deaths associated to the blackout. Emergency services, transportation, communication and other vital services were halted during this power outage. Not
Your lights just flickered. Not for long. Just a split second. You probably didn’t think much about it, but somewhere a battery may have just saved your city from a blackout. I’m not talking about keeping your phone charged or your EV running. These kinds of batteries are
If you believe half of what you hear about heat pumps, you’d think they’re a $20,000 scam that stops working the second it gets cold outside. But here’s what the skeptics don’t mention: modern heat pumps work in temperatures down to -26°C (that’s
NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly associated the failure of Northvolt to their sodium ion battery production issues, but their challenges weren’t chemistry specific. That section has been removed. I’ve got sodium batteries right here in my hands, but three sodium battery companies went bankrupt in
