Via The Economist, a look at how power grids are at last becoming smarter and more efficient: The rise of artificial-intelligence (ai) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, ai can also give a fair bit back, by helping transform ancient, overloaded and dumb […]
Read more »Via Cipher News, a look at how surging power demand is spurring smarter electric grid use Demand for electricity is shooting up in the United States following two decades of relatively flat electricity use — and yet building more transmission lines to bring new sources of energy online is a slow, bureaucratic process. This tension is pushing the power […]
Read more »Via Wired, a look at how idle electric vehicles could act as massive batteries for homes and the energy grid. But the technology to pull this off is tricky: WITH MOST ELECTRIC vehicles parked at work or home all day, you may wonder whether you’ll save that much by having one. But what if someone told you […]
Read more »Courtesy of Anthropocene, a look at how the carbon-free promise of solar and wind teeters on high voltage wires: Adjusting for inflation, a barrel of oil today costs around the same as it did in the 1970s Oil Crisis. Solar photovoltaic modules over the same period now cost 500 times less—and prices are still falling, about […]
Read more »Via MIT Technology Review, a look at how VPP technology can let millions of electric vehicles feed electricity back to the grid when necessary, helping China deal with extreme weathers and power shortages: The first time I heard the term “virtual power plants,” I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the […]
Read more »Via Heat Map, a report on reconductoring - an incredibly exciting solution that could solve one of our most urgent obstacles to getting more renewables on the grid: permitting new power lines: Ask any climate wonk what’s holding back clean energy in the U.S. and you’re likely to get the same answer — not enough power lines. But what […]
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