Youtube/Screen capture This video (see below) gives an overview of the construction of Sheffield Wind, a 40MW wind farm in Northern Vermont, and of how it affected some of the locals. Keep in mind, the video was produced by the company that built the wind farm – it’s more a promo video than a documentary piece – so you won’t find anyone saying anything negative in it, which is unrealistic… You could be building a hospital for sick children and some...
Flickr / CC BY 3.0 In the same way that solar panels are getting more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, wind turbines are also getting better at harnessing the wind. There are two main levers that engineers can pull to squeeze out improvements: 1) Modifying the physical characteristics of the turbines, such as the shape of the blades, the components inside th… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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IBM Supercomputers Help Vestas...
Walmart stores via Flickr / CC BY 2.0 As Americans, we’re conditioned to think big. Big houses, big cars, big screens. Big, centralized power plants that blast energy to our big cities and big suburbs. But there’s a compelling argument to be made for breaking with that paradigm, and starting to think smaller. Of course, that applies to all of the above, but let’s focus on power generation…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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YouTube /Video screen capture There may be no more potent symbol of our propensity to manipulate nature than a dam — and perhaps no greater testament to changing attitudes than in knocking them down. For nearly a century, Washington’s Condit Dam strangled the White Salmon River, forming a lake which profoundly reshaped the landscape and tipped the local ecosystem’s delicate balance, that is, until last week. In what may be the most dramatic dam removal operation...
There are now so many story lines that one can look at when examining the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline–among them pollution, greed, and a pervasive lack of leadership. The one that I gravitate toward is accountability. For instance, is President Obama accountable for his words in his 2008 campaign, when he promised to help “end the tyranny of oil?” And is the national media accountable when they misreport the facts about the pipeline? Take CNN’s Steve...
The following piece, by Dana Nuccitelli, originally appeared in Skeptical Science . Now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study results are in, and have confirmed the accuracy of the surface temperature record (see here and here ), those “skeptics” who spent years disputing the accuracy of the record despite all the evidence pointing to… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Yes, We’re Still Causing Climate Change &...
phault via Flickr / CC BY 2.0 Cape Wind was supposed to be the nation’s first offshore wind farm. It was announced over ten years ago, and after fighting through miles and miles of bureaucratic red tape, it was finally approved by the Department of the Interior earlier this year. But after fielding — and overcoming — complaints from rich neighbors who worried it would spoil their coastal views, utilities who claimed they didn’t want to buy the electricity, and...
