More batteries installed. More markets opening up. And grid storage making itself indispensable in unanticipated ways. For too long, the rhetoric around what storage can do for the grid vastly outweighed the actual doing. This year, the industry closed that gap more than ever before. Exceedingly few batteries actually live up to the vision
California’s fire season is back. Yet if this past week is any indication, our emergency response remains woefully inadequate. When disaster strikes we are far from being energy resilient, ensuring reliable access to electricity for our most vulnerable communities. Climate fires are California’s new normal. Dangerous combinations of high (20-60 mph) sustained winds and
Energy storage is no longer an asset class that utilities can ignore. One of the biggest criticisms of renewable energy has been its inherently intermittent nature. Solar energy plants don't produce power at night, and wind turbines don't produce power without wind, so utilities need fossil-fuel or power plants to keep the grid running.
Here’s what passes for humor in the climate movement sometimes: emailing one of my colleagues a few months ago, in the midst of some strategic questions about a new campaign, I said oh, well, if we get it wrong it’s not like it’s the end of the…. Oh. It’s not helpful to think of
Scientists disagree on the timeline of collapse and whether it's imminent. But can we afford to be wrong? And what comes after? “It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our societies because of climate change.” These are not the words of a tinfoil hat-donning survivalist. This is from a paper
None of us can be unaware of the debates raging about global warming and climate change, but it often seems like there's more smoke than fire. With all the arguing back and forth about emissions targets and lifestyle changes it can be easy to dismiss it all as 'too complicated' and to not know
There are not many political messages that can slip through a closed window or a locked door, but that’s just what happened last week in Australia’s biggest city. Climate change didn’t just come knocking; it slithered in under every crack, filling houses and offices across Sydney with the acrid smell of burning forests. The
Corbyn and Berry best informed on issues as leaders battled to top each others’ commitments With Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage refusing to take part, Channel 4’s climate debate was a pretty straightforward affair, with the leaders of the Greens, Labour, Plaid Cymru, Scottish National party and Liberal Democrats competing to outdo each other
On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been
You can hear—and smell—them everywhere you go in the world’s poorest countries. Diesel-burning back-up generators wail through neighborhoods at all hours, cough noxious pollutants into the air, and account for a disproportionate amount of consumers’ spending on electricity. For decades, back-up generators have been the only real alternative to unreliable electric grids. But what