I got an exclusive backstage look at Disney World expecting a polished sustainability tour. Then I watched old beer bottles get ground into sand, stood in an overgrown solar field built for native bees, and traced food scraps through a closed loop recycling system that once helped power the parks.…
You know what an offshore wind turbine looks like. A giant pole, three blades, bolted to the seafloor. The catch is it only works in shallow water, around 80 meters or less. That rules out most of the ocean, which is where the strongest, steadiest winds actually are. A Swedish company called SeaTwir
What if all the heat your car engine, a factory, or a power plant throws away could run the grid instead? A new engine turns that waste heat into electricity, even the low-grade stuff today's best systems struggle with. It has no moving parts, and the wild part is who built it. Dr. Lonnie Johnson, t
For over 200 years, we've been generating electricity essentially the same way: by boiling water. And it's worked! Today, steam turbines power the vast majority of the world's electricity. But this technology, which has powered us since the industrial revolution, might not be up
In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula's grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse.1 Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers
Perovskite solar cells could hit 35% efficiency and cost half as much as silicon, but they're still years away from your roof. Meanwhile, silicon panels just lost their 30% federal tax credit in the US, making them suddenly more expensive. So here's the $20,000 question:
Perovskite solar cells are smashing efficiency records and starting to hit the market, but what if the real future of solar is a material you’ve probably never heard of? It’s called kesterite, and new research suggests it could match perovskites’ efficiency without any toxic lead in the stack.
What if you could power cities just by mixing river water with seawater? Around 15,000 TWh of energy pours into the oceans each year as freshwater blends with saltwater at river mouths. That amounts to roughly half the energy the world consumes in electricity every year.12 And we
What if solar panels could generate twice the power for a fraction of the cost, making them cheap enough that you'd actually want them on your roof? Researchers in Australia may have just pulled it off. This is a solar cell made with both perovskites and graphene, the
Why are the world's most efficient solar panels learning to sweat? When it comes to solar, you'd assume more sun equals more power, but the truth is that solar panels actually hate being hot. In fact, for every single degree the temperature rises, these panels lose
What if I told you there's a way to get up to 30% more power from the same solar panel footprint? No breakthrough chemistry. No quantum physics. Just one simple change that’s finally starting to catch on. They're finally putting solar cells on both sides
Every time a subway screeches to a stop, we usually chalk it up to another moment in the daily grind … if we even notice it. Commuters pour out, new riders pile in. Just another day on the rails. But what if that screech, that everyday chaos, could do more than