energy

It's been over 20 months since we had to buy gasoline, because in Sept 2024, we traded in our 12 year old Subaru Outback for a Kia EV9. The Backstory We bought the Outback in October 2012. We needed something a big…

I firmly believe that Batteries are probably the closest thing to a silver bullet when it comes to our clean energy future. They are going to be the things that let us deploy a lot of solar, and use it through the night.…

Sean Dague would like to use his refrigerator to lower your energy bills. A few years ago, after buying a fridge, the Dutchess County resident did something few people do: He read the manual. (He’s a software engineer at…

There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford…

Thursday I got home at 7:30, and started squaring away a few things. I checked the weather to figure out if I could leave out a package for the mailman the next day, and noticed a giant string of thunder storms to the…

As I've said before, we did a piece of this trip 10 years ago, in the same Subaru Outback we took this time. 10 years ago it was a new car, purchased in 2012. Now it is not. So inevitably, once we're 50 km over the…

It's a 5 hour drive from Bar Harbor to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, plus a border crossing that went very quickly. We set out early to make sure we had plenty of time to settle in once we got there. One thing I…

The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way…

Photo by Cindy Shebley on Pexels.com Rooftop solar was overlooked. Now it's closing a New England power plant. New England ISO spent the time to deeply model the actual impacts of rooftop solar, and what actual hour by…

In Bar Harbor we stayed in a Inn outside of town, largely because it had both an indoor and outdoor pool and my daughter has gotten into swimming this year. That seemed to weather proof us for some activities. The room…

Osaka University in Japan is beginning a joint research project with civil engineering company Toda to develop the world's largest floating wind turbine. As Nikkei Asia reports, the goal is to have an experimental wind…

Analysts say there’s a lesson in that: The new jobs at these green factories may function as a political game-changer. “That may be an implicit long-term strategy for the Democrats: With domestic manufacturing likely in…

Weather conditions affect how much power can be carried on transmission lines, and high-tech DLR sensors attached to transmission lines give grid operators like National Grid real-world information on weather and thus on…

CHPE is expecterd to deliver 1,250 megawatts of clean energy, or enough to power 1 million New York City homes — about 20% of the city's electric demands.Power cable lines will be installed underground and underwater for…

One of the current challenges in the field of Journalism is that there are currently 6 PR staff for every 1 Journalist , and the PR staff are much higher paid. Which means that a lot of reporting on more technical areas…

The news isn't good for 2018. US CO2 emissions are estimated to be up 3.4% from last year, from a new Rhodium report . The details of that report are really interesting. Unpacking those in order, we're doing a good job…

Last summer about this time we made a big decision. We were going to work with Dandelion (a new geothermal company in the area) and replace all our Fuel Oil based forced air heating and hot water system with a Geothermal…

If automakers complied with the rules solely by improving the fuel economy of their engines, new cars and light trucks on the road would average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 (the charts here break out standards…

In looking for information related to my ny-power demo (which shows the realtime CO2 intensity on the New York power grid), I discovered Electricity Map . This is doing a similar thing, but at a global scale. It started…

Back in November we decided to stop waiting for our Tesla Model 3 (ever changing estimates) and bought a Chevy Bolt EV (which we could do right off the lot). A week later we had a level 2 charger installed at home, and a…

In November 2017 we replaced our Fuel Oil Heating system with a Geothermal one from Dandelion and bought a Chevy Bolt EV, which we're using as the primary car in the house. That for us means about 1000 miles a month on…

This talk by Jesse Jenkins at UPENN is one of the best looks at what doing deep decarbonization of the grid really looks like. Jenkins is a PhD candidate at MIT researching realistic paths to get our electricity sector…

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." Over the last year we've done a lot to our house to make it much less energy intensive, bought an electric car, and got involved in…

Filed under: kind of insane code, be careful about doing this at home. Recently we went electric, and got a Chevy Bolt to replace our 12 year old Toyota Prius (who has and continues to be a workhorse). I had a spot in…

On Monday, August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will pass over the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming etc.). The California balancing authority area will be affected by a partial eclipse between 9:02 AM and…

I've been going on a tear this week and converting most of the lighting in our house to LED lighting (I am going to write this up in detail later). There are a lot of reasons to change out bulbs to LEDs, and I'm going to…

In 1979, Jimmy Carter, in a visionary move, installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. This symbolic installation was taken down in 1986 during the Reagan presidency. In 1991, Unity College , an…

About the time that Susan and I started dating, Susan when to a book signing with a friend for Dare to Repair. It's a basic manual of home repair written to a target audience of the recently divorced woman who'd always…

Back in October I had a chance to talk with some Central Hudson (our local power company) reps at an IEEE conference. During that conversation I was disappointed to find out that there weren't any near term smart meters…

A quite interesting Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman a couple weeks ago that I missed makes the point that China is starting to shift their economy hard in the direction of green endeavors. Well, folks. Sputnik just went up…