adminMany hydropower plants are fed by reservoirs that are used by homeowners, boaters, swimmers, hikers, wildlife and others. The operating license issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission may have conditions that require a minimum water release to benefit wildlife, tourism and recreational activities.
adminNV Energy’s Jack McGinley recently put the U.S. geothermal industry’s current challenge in succinct terms: Geothermal is not competing with solar PV on cost, and when it comes to utility power procurements, “low cost wins.”
adminTwo innovators in highly efficient thermal energy storage materials believe that thermal storage could work as a standalone storage play, not just as part of a more familiar Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project designed for electricity generation.
Zoe SchlangerThis story was originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s official: No year on record has ever been as hot as 2015. And it broke the temperature record, just set in 2014, by an unusually large margin. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the news on Wednesday morning, after both agencies separately analyzed global temperature data and came to the same conclusion. 2015 broke temperature records by a wide margin, amid a wave of other more localized climate anomalies around the world.NOAA / NASA The record was set by a full tenth of a degree Celsius (or nearly a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit), a much larger margin than usual, as temperature records are commonly broken by…
Tracy HammondOn Nov 4th, Congressional Republicans beat back their Democratic opponents in nearly every part of the country. Because of this resounding victory, Republicans have a tighter control of Congress than they’ve enjoyed since America teetered into the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. (Hopefully this is not foreshadowing). Although Republicans already enjoyed a solid, governing majority in the House heading into the 2014 midterms, the party still managed to gain more than a dozen seats (a few contests sill remain too close to call, so a final tally isn’t yet known). The Senate—as is generally the case—is a bit tighter, but Republicans managed to pick up at least 8 seats with the possibility of a 9th if Bill Cassidy (R) defeats Mary Landrieu (D) in the Louisiana…
