标签：#Climate change and energy

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…

EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems…

There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water…

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried…

In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat…

This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature. The heat isn’t over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead…

In June 2024, a small company called Zanskar purchased a geothermal power plant in New Mexico that was failing fast. The water coming from the underground reservoir was getting colder by the day, making the plant uneconomical to run. Now, two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again, thanks to a new…

Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…

On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).…

It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat…

I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can…

Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…

Something stinks in California’s climate policies. Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air. It’s become wildly popular because…

It’s been hard to look away from headlines about the European heat wave this week. Temperatures are breaking records across the continent, and the weather is threatening lives, shutting down schools, and in one particularly ironic case, forcing the cancellation of a London Climate Action Week event about extreme heat. As the summer ramps up…

Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load. On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947.…

India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been some 3,000 human casualties in the…

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle. Some…

Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-­looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you can see the curvature of the Earth.…

Most of Kenya’s power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering universal electricity access by 2030 without driving up emissions. The ever-­improving economics of solar technology have helped. A couple of years ago, a panel cost about…

After three years of record-­breaking heat, this one is set to be yet another scorcher. Air-conditioning? Not going anywhere. The International Energy Agency projects that the number of AC units will triple by 2050. That’s good for health—one Lancet study estimated that AC prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths in 2019 alone—but bad for the planet.…