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
Electricity bills have been climbing across the US, but the AI boom is making it worse. A lot worse. New data centers are popping up everywhere to handle ChatGPT, Gemini, and countless other AI tools. And here’s the kicker: you’re helping pay for them whether you use AI
It’s already difficult to conceptualize the scale of wind turbines themselves. It can be even harder to wrap your head around how much energy they can supply. Just one gigawatt is enough energy to power between 750,000 to a million US homes.1 Here in the United States,
Grid-scale lithium-ion batteries are our current go-to chemical energy storage solution, but they present their own challenges in safety, sustainability, cost, and longevity. However, the competition is … heating up. New forms of thermal energy storage systems built using abundant, cheap materials are on the rise. One company is aiming to
Where there’s tech, there’s magnets. The strong magnets that generate their own magnetic field, AKA permanent magnets, aren’t only on your fridge. They’re in multiple places inside your fridge, and in your cell phone, headphones, and hard disk drive, too. Permanent magnets are also a critical
Hindsight is 20/20. And we can all clearly give thanks that 2020 is in the rearview. But if we had to pick one silver lining or winner for the year, the power grid would be a strong contender. A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh reports a 7.5% nationwide decrease in energy consumpti
The southwestern U.S. is in the throes of a “megadrought” so severe that we’ve broken the record — all 1,200 years of it. According to a study published earlier this year, soil hasn’t been this dry since the scientific record began around the year 800.1 This
Recently I’ve talked about my new net zero home I’m building, but not all net zero buildings have to be homes or houses. The same net zero, passive house concepts can be scaled up to large buildings, offices, and apartment buildings. In fact, I had a chance to
Summer’s been bringing on the heat the last couple weeks, and everything from the people to power grids have been trying to lay low. While most cities have been able to keep up with the demand for electricity, it’s led to questions about how do we tackle this
The solar power potential of the Sahara desert is absolutely massive. A solar panel in Algeria could generate 3x more electricity than the same solar panel in Germany.1 A 10,000 square kilometer solar farm in the middle of the desert would be enough to power the entire world,