electricity
Transmitting Power
Over at my home base, Wired.com, I wrote a short piece on the importance of the transmission of electricity. It was pegged to the anniversary of the completion of the first long-distance power line, which ran the 14 miles from Willamette Falls to Portland, Oregon.
That is not to say that power transmission was not already [...]
On Bloom Energy: Marketing Matters
One of the consistently strange things about the green tech world is that people continue to believe that science and technology are all that matter.
It’s just not true. Innovation in business models and in the political realm are at least as important as coming up with a slightly more efficient solar cell — or delivering [...]
What’s Peak Demand?
Martin LaMonica spotted a great stat from an FCC hearing at MIT. The great state of Massachusetts uses 15% of its power generating capacity for just 88 hours per year, or about one percent of the time.
Those power plants tend to be the dirtiest and the most expensive. At times of peak demand, utilities [...]
Jacob’s Ladder
An explanation would kind of ruin it. (If you really need more, it’s called Jacob’s Ladder)
Just stare at that video and note that it caught the attention of Guy Kawasaki and the twitterverse. There is a reason that electricity scared and titillated the masses for decades. We know how this all works and it’s still [...]
Taking the Petroleum-Electric-Radioactive Cure
“Today, flea markets are the only places where there is the remotest chance to obtain a radioactive device designed to purify the air, apply to the body, or add radon to drinking water,” wrote Paul Frame of Oak Ridge Associated Universities in an article on Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas from the late 80s.
It’s a [...]
A Vision for the Energy Web in 2001
Wired 9.07: The Energy Web
"In recent years, a series of technological breakthroughs – and, more important, a critical mass of scientific ideas – has begun to coalesce around a new model for an energy system that would better serve the needs of the near future, while enabling power producers as well as consumers to lessen [...]
The Insensitive Strength of the Automobile
In 1907, the Chicago Post observed:
“it is too soon to lament the horse. We have not yet come to the day when we must decide whether to pet him, as the dog, or eat him as the amiable cow. Our sentiment for the noble beast will remain, and with the heaviest work undertaken by insensitive [...]
Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity
Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for. It once held great mystery and excitement, at least for the geeks of the mid-19th century, like Clifford Pyncheon, a bed-ridden felon with an interest in metaphysics, in the passage below. After all, electricity had been associated with lightning [...]
The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry
The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.
In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that [...]
What about the C in RE < C?
After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
