The steel towers loom in the distance, like shiny toy soldiers arranged in formation. As our boat approaches, the dizzying size of the machines becomes clear. A few minutes later, I’m standing right next to one, holding the guardrails and craning my head to take it all in. The boat bucks like a rollercoaster as giant…
For the past sixteen months or so, it’s felt as though our planet has been shaking us by the shoulders, trying to wake us up to the fact that we’ve kicked the thermostat into overdrive. The good news is, America finally seems to be listening. According to a new report by the Department of Energy, wind and solar…
Evoking the famous imagery created for the Works Progress Administration, a lovely series of posters created by the US government depict the country’s ongoing renewable energy revolution. And it’s definitely a place I want to live.
Last year saw a lot of wind turbines and farms being built. So many, that as of 2015, the wind industry has installed 75 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity. That’s enough to power 19 million American homes.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott seems determined to push his country back decades on environmental policy. In his latest scheme, Abbott has ordered Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation to stop investing in wind and small-scale solar energy.
When it comes to renewable energy, Denmark is officially kicking ass. Yesterday, Denmark’s wind farms produced 116% of national electricity demands, allowing the country to export power to Norway, German, and Sweden. According to The Guardian, that figure had risen to 140% by early Friday morning.
There's been plenty of criticism of wind power over the past few years, as adoption grows and potential side effects emerge. That hasn't stopped energy progressive Denmark, which set a world record by generating a huge 39 percent of its electricity via wind in 2014.
Back in March, we learned Ikea had purchased an Illinois wind farm big enough to power all its US stores. Well, that was small potatoes. Today the company announced its largest investment in renewables ever: The acquisition of a much larger wind farm in Texas.
Facebook's first data center powered solely by renewable energy is now in operation in Altoona, Iowa. The center was expected to open in 2015, so it's ahead of schedule.
Weather is annoyingly fickle, and so is the wind. If massive offshore wind farms are going to become reality, we need better ways to store the extra energy from windy days for the windless ones. One a bizarre-sounding idea floating around: giant balloons of compressed air stored deep underwater.
In a post today on Facebook, the company's Data Center Energy Manager Vincent Van Son announced that its new data center in Iowa will be powered solely by wind energy drawn from a nearby farm. That's right: Our insatiable hunger for online validation is indirectly helping to support sustainable energy.
As wind energy has expanded over the years, engineers have raced to build larger and larger turbines—designed to take advantage of as much wind as possible. But the architect Renzo Piano and an energy company in Italy are trying to make a smaller turbine—one that's suitable for the average yard.
Looking for an alternative to turbines for capturing wind energy, Belatchew Arkitekter has proposed adding a hairy addition to Stockholm's Söder Torn. It would serve as more than an architectural toupee, capturing energy through the movement of all those tiny straws.
The idea of harnessing the energy from wind by using ground-based stations linked up to atmospheric turbines is gaining traction. Trouble is, they're expensive, unwieldy, and prey to low winds. Moreover, why go to all the trouble of building massive wind turbines when something much simpler exists? Such is the…
For off-shore wind farms to become an economically feasible alternative energy source, each turbine needs to be big. Like, really big. That's why the latest turbine blade from Siemens is gigantic—just a hair shorter than the wingspan of an Airbus 380.
Theoretically, there's easily enough wind and solar energy available to replace the 400 gigawatts of power that are currently provided by fossil fuels. But clouds roll in and winds die down — meaning we can't count on always having enough renewable energy.
Wind is a clean, renewable energy source, but there isn't nearly enough of it down here on the ground. But high in the sky, there are furious jet streams of powerful wind just waiting to be harvested by floating turbines.
The Tornado Tower is a design for a performing arts center in Taipei, Taiwan, and man is it crazy. That huge bubble on top is where the theater sits, and the whole thing harnesses the wind for energy.
Like every year, the Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease are now live, tackier and wonkier than ever, with more than 20,000 lights, plus inflatable Santa, Elmo, Frosty Family, SpongeBob, Homer, and even Hulk.
In an effort to figure out the best areas to harvest wind energy, scientists from NASA's Earth Science Division have used several years of QuikSCAT satellite data to produce some pretty awesome looking wind power density maps. According to them, if the areas with high wind power-an average wind of greater than 30…
