Energy

Energy

Batteries and storage, solar, wind, nuclear and fusion, and the race to keep the grid powered around the clock.

A turboprop cargo aircraft powered by a hydrogen engine flying against a clear blue sky

Energy

China just flew the world's first megawatt-class hydrogen engine, on a cargo drone

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A modern clean fuel plant with tanks and pipes that turns carbon dioxide and water into jet fuel under a blue sky

Energy

America just opened its first commercial plant that makes jet fuel out of carbon dioxide and water

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A small superconductor disc levitating above a magnet in a cloud of cold vapour

Energy

A 33-year superconductor record just fell, edging us closer to electricity that flows without loss

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A crew burying a thick power cable in a trench along a waterway

Energy

A 336-mile power cable buried under a lake and a river now lights up a fifth of New York City

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A compact clean small modular reactor power plant with modern industrial buildings under a blue sky

Energy

After years of hype, small nuclear reactors are finally being poured in concrete rather than slideshows

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A large industrial direct air capture plant with rows of big fans pulling carbon dioxide from the air

Energy

America is switching on its first big machines built to vacuum carbon straight out of the sky

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The glowing interior of a magnetic mirror fusion device with hot plasma held inside a metal chamber

Energy

A Wisconsin startup pulled electricity straight out of a fusion plasma, and it was just enough to light a few bulbs

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of large grid-scale battery storage containers in a field under a blue sky, the kind of site sodium-ion batteries are designed for

Energy

America's biggest carmaker is quietly betting that the batteries of the future will be made from something as cheap as table salt

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The Fermi 1 nuclear power plant on the flat shore of Lake Erie near Detroit in the 1960s, a boxy reactor building by the water

Energy

A reactor built to be the future of atomic power partly melted down near a major city in 1966, brought down by the very part meant to keep it safe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The long Keokuk Dam and powerhouse stretching across the wide Mississippi River in 1913, water spilling over its gates

Energy

A dam built to light a distant city in 1913 was an engineering marvel, and it quietly erased a wild stretch of the Mississippi forever

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Shippingport atomic power station on the bank of the Ohio River in Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, a domed reactor building beside the water

Energy

America's first atomic power station was really a submarine engine on land, and its greatest achievement was learning how to make it disappear again

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A wide aerial view of gray coal ash slurry flooding a Tennessee valley and river after the 2008 Kingston dike failure, burying land and homes

Energy

America's biggest coal ash flood buried a Tennessee valley in 2008, and then quietly went after the very men who were hired to clean it up

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Aerial view of green circular center-pivot irrigation fields watered by the Ogallala Aquifer spread across the flat Great Plains

Energy

A hidden ocean of ancient water beneath the Great Plains turned a near-desert into America's breadbasket, and now the country is pumping it dry faster than the rain can ever refill it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A dry reddish riverbed of the Puerco River winding through arid New Mexico high desert scrub and mesas near Church Rock under a wide sky

Energy

In 1979 a broken dam sent 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into a river on Navajo land, the biggest such spill in US history, and the country barely noticed

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A 1969 California beach coated in thick black crude from the Santa Barbara oil spill, with an offshore oil platform on the hazy horizon

Energy

In 1969 a blown-out oil well fouled the California coast with three million gallons of crude, and the disaster helped give birth to Earth Day and the modern environmental movement

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Storm King Mountain rising steeply above the Hudson River under a dramatic sky

Energy

A power company planned to hollow out a mountain on the Hudson River for a giant hydro plant, and the 17-year battle to stop it accidentally created modern environmental law

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Cleveland LNG explosion of 1944, a residential street reduced to burning rubble and smoke under a dark sky

Energy

In 1944 a storage tank of super-cold liquefied gas in Cleveland cracked open, flooded the sewers with invisible vapor, and blew a whole neighborhood off the map in minutes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The abandoned streets and boarded houses of Times Beach, Missouri awaiting demolition

Energy

A Missouri town paid a man to spray oil on its dusty roads, never knowing it was laced with one of the deadliest chemicals known, and the whole town had to be bought out and wiped off the map

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An infrared view of a huge methane plume billowing from the Aliso Canyon gas facility above Los Angeles

Energy

A single old well above Los Angeles blew out and spewed an invisible river of gas for nearly four months, becoming the largest methane leak in American history and driving thousands of families from their homes

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A geyser of gas and water erupting from the ground during the Hutchinson gas explosions

Energy

Natural gas escaped from a storage cavern and traveled seven miles underground before erupting in geysers of fire in a Kansas town, and no one could work out how until it was too late

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The wide waters of Passamaquoddy Bay on the Maine coast at low tide

Energy

In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt tried to power part of Maine with the ocean itself, damming the giant tides of Passamaquoddy Bay, until Congress killed the dream and left a ghost town behind

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The completed Shoreham nuclear plant beside Long Island Sound, silent and never operating

Energy

Long Island built a nuclear power plant for six billion dollars, licensed it and loaded the fuel, then sold the whole thing to the state for one dollar without ever selling a watt of its power

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

Lava from Kilauea glowing near the Puna Geothermal Venture plant in Hawaii at night

Energy

Hawaii built its only geothermal plant to harvest the heat of an active volcano, and in 2018 that volcano nearly destroyed the Puna Geothermal Venture as lava buried its wells and swallowed the neighborhood next door

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The B Reactor building at the Hanford Site in the Washington desert near the Columbia River

Energy

A secret city in the Washington desert made the plutonium that destroyed Nagasaki, and today Hanford is the most contaminated place in America, home to the country's largest and most expensive cleanup

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, with its containment domes on the rugged California coast above the Pacific

Energy

California spent decades leading America's fight against nuclear power, then a heat wave and two mothers who ran the reactors helped convince the state to save Diablo Canyon instead of closing it

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A wind turbine rising over the rebuilt prairie town of Greensburg, Kansas at sunset

Energy

An EF5 tornado flattened 95 percent of Greensburg, Kansas and killed eleven people in 2007, and the town rebuilt itself as the greenest in America, now powered entirely by the wind that destroyed it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Rotor sails, tall white spinning cylinders, on the deck of a modern cargo ship at sea

Energy

A German engineer bolted two spinning towers to a ship in 1924 and sailed it to New York, then cheap oil buried the idea, until rotor sails came back to cut cargo emissions

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A colossal Victorian steam engine with a huge flywheel in an 1876 exhibition hall, the Corliss engine

Energy

When a US president and the emperor of Brazil turned two cranks in 1876, they woke the Corliss engine, a silent iron giant that single-handedly powered an entire world's fair

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large 1930s American schoolhouse in an oil-boom town, evoking the site of the New London School explosion

Energy

In 1937 an odorless gas leak blew up a Texas school and killed nearly 300 children, and the New London School explosion is the reason natural gas has its rotten-egg smell today

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large early electric dynamo generator driven by a steam engine inside an 1880s power station, like Pearl Street Station

Energy

When Edison switched on his Pearl Street Station in 1882, he did not just light a few blocks of Manhattan, he invented the electric utility and the whole business of selling power

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large 18th-century beam steam engine of the kind James Watt built, with a rocking beam, brass fittings and iron cylinder

Energy

James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but the fix he dreamed up while repairing a broken model made steam power efficient enough to drive the Industrial Revolution

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Niagara Falls thundering over the cliff in clouds of mist with an old stone hydroelectric powerhouse on the riverbank

Energy

Nikola Tesla had been mocked and nearly ruined, but in 1895 his alternating current was chosen to harness Niagara Falls, and the modern electrical grid was born

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Onagawa nuclear plant on higher ground behind a tall concrete seawall as dark waves break against the Japanese coast

Energy

Closer to the 2011 earthquake than Fukushima, the Onagawa nuclear plant should have been doomed, but one engineer's stubborn insistence on a taller seawall decades earlier saved it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of the Bath County pumped storage upper reservoir held by a dam high in forested Appalachian mountains, with a lower lake in the valley

Energy

The biggest battery in America is not made of lithium but of two lakes on a Virginia mountain, and the Bath County pumped storage plant has quietly powered millions for forty years

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Rows of solar panels raised on tall frames over a lush field of leafy greens and tomato plants, a farmer walking between them, an agrivoltaics farm

Energy

Farmers were told they had to choose between growing food and hosting solar panels, but a Colorado experiment called agrivoltaics is proving the same acre can do both, and better

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A California town engulfed by the Camp Fire under a dark orange smoke-filled sky, houses and pines burning as a road leads into the smoke

Energy

A single worn hook on a 97-year-old power line snapped one November morning in 2018 and started the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and erased the town of Paradise in hours

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Palisades nuclear plant with its containment dome on the wooded shore of Lake Michigan at dawn

Energy

Workers were tearing the Palisades nuclear plant apart for scrap when Michigan told them to reverse course and switch it back on, the first dead US reactor ever brought back to life

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Moss Landing battery storage facility on fire at dusk with a huge dark smoke plume rising over the California coast

Energy

California built a giant battery at Moss Landing to prove clean power was safe, then it caught fire, emptied a town, and rained heavy metals on a wildlife estuary

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Carbfix site at the Hellisheidi geothermal plant in Iceland, steam rising over a black lava field where CO2 is turned into stone

Energy

Iceland found a way to turn carbon dioxide into stone, and it happens in under two years instead of a thousand

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The three-bladed Gedser wind turbine on its concrete tower on the Danish coast in the late 1950s

Energy

The self-taught Dane whose windmill became the template for every modern turbine

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Plumbbob manhole cover test site, a 1957 Nevada nuclear shaft capped with a steel plate, with instrument towers

Energy

Did a nuclear test fire a steel cap into space at 66 km/s?

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Cuyahoga River fire, an industrial river ablaze with flames and black smoke beside steel mills and a railroad bridge

Energy

The river so dirty it caught fire, and the day America finally noticed

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The narrow Fenix rescue capsule emerging at a floodlit Chilean mine head as the Chilean miners are brought up

Energy

Given up for dead, then a note came up from half a mile down

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Four glowing incandescent light bulbs on a wire in a 1950s reactor building, as at EBR-1

Energy

The nuclear age began with four light bulbs glowing in a hut in the Idaho desert

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A long red segmented Pelamis sea snake wave energy machine floating on ocean swells offshore

Energy

A giant red sea snake once floated off the coast turning waves into electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A lonely abandoned concrete lighthouse on a frozen Arctic coast under a grey sky, a Soviet nuclear lighthouse

Energy

The Soviet Union built a thousand nuclear lighthouses, then walked away and left them in the snow

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A gloved hand holding a sealed capsule glowing blue in the dark, evoking the Goiânia accident cesium source

Energy

A glowing blue powder looked like treasure, and it was one of the deadliest things on Earth

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The secret Mayak nuclear complex in the Ural Mountains, site of the 1957 Kyshtym disaster

Energy

The world's third-worst nuclear disaster happened in 1957, and the Soviets hid it for thirty years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia turned into a vast mirror reflecting the sky and clouds

Energy

The world's biggest mirror hides the white gold that powers electric cars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The vast black surface of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad, a natural lake of asphalt under a tropical sky

Energy

There is a lake of tar in Trinidad that you can walk across, and it never runs out

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The small SL-1 reactor building standing alone in the snowy Idaho desert in 1961

Energy

One man pulled a control rod too far, and America's only fatal reactor accident followed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The tall cylindrical Brent Spar oil storage buoy floating alone in the grey North Sea

Energy

Shell tried to sink an oil platform in the Atlantic, and a continent of angry drivers stopped it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A rigid winged Makani energy kite with rotors flying high in the sky on a long tether

Energy

Google built a flying wind turbine on a string, proved it worked, then let it go

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Yanar Dag hillside in Azerbaijan with natural gas flames rising along the slope at night

Energy

In Azerbaijan a hillside has been on fire for centuries, and no one ever lit it on purpose

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Workers welding a huge steel section of the Big Inch pipeline across open country in 1943

Energy

U-boats were sinking America's oil tankers, so the country buried a 1,250-mile pipeline to beat them

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A lone stone marker in a remote New Mexico forest clearing over the Project Gasbuggy nuclear test site

Energy

In 1967 the US set off a nuclear bomb underground to frack gas, and it worked too well to use

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The elevated silver Trans-Alaska Pipeline zigzagging across Arctic tundra on metal support legs with mountains behind

Energy

Hot oil would have melted the Arctic ground and sunk the pipe, so engineers cooled the permafrost with thousands of heat pipes and let the line zigzag through earthquakes

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The snowy houses of the Drake Landing Solar Community with rows of solar thermal collectors on the garage roofs in winter

Energy

A Canadian town banked summer sunshine underground all year and used it to heat 52 homes through brutal winters, almost without fuel

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant, a barge moored at a snowy Arctic port town

Energy

Russia towed a nuclear power station across the Arctic on a barge to light up its most remote town, and critics call it Chernobyl on ice

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The long concrete seawall and turbine powerhouse of the Sihwa Lake tidal power station with seawater rushing through

Energy

South Korea built a wall that turned a bay into a dead, poisoned lake, then fixed its mistake by making it the largest tidal power station on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A Kashagan oil field production island of steel rising from a frozen Caspian Sea with a gas flare burning against a grey winter sky

Energy

Engineers spent more than $50 billion taming the world's most dangerous oilfield, then watched its own poison gas crack the pipelines apart within weeks

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The vast below-sea-level desert basin at the heart of the Qattara Depression Project

Energy

Engineers wanted to flood an Egyptian desert with the sea to make power forever, and one plan called for digging the canal with 213 nuclear bombs

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The vast underground machine hall cavern of Cruachan Power Station inside Ben Cruachan

Energy

Hidden inside a Scottish mountain is a power station that works like a giant battery, dug out by tunnellers, 36 of whom died

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The glowing central tower of the Crescent Dunes solar plant ringed by mirrors in the desert

Energy

A billion-dollar solar tower built to store the sun in molten salt and run all night just sold out of bankruptcy for seven million

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The four cooling towers of Calder Hall nuclear power station in 1956

Energy

The Queen opened the world's first nuclear power station in 1956 as a gift of peace, but its real job was making plutonium for the bomb

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A 1970s nuclear pacemaker device beside a chest X-ray showing an implanted pacemaker

Energy

In the 1970s doctors put a speck of plutonium in people's chests to power their pacemakers, and some are still ticking decades later

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A Victorian inventor beside an early Charles Fritts solar cell array on a New York rooftop in 1884

Energy

A New York inventor put working solar panels on a rooftop in 1884, while the city wired itself to coal, and the world ignored him for seventy years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The long La Rance tidal barrage stretching across a wide estuary in Brittany with a road on top

Energy

France built the world's first tidal power station in 1966, running a city on the pull of the moon, and then almost no one ever copied it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Spindletop gusher of 1901 erupting a tall black fountain of oil high above a wooden drilling derrick in Texas

Energy

Everyone laughed at the self-taught dreamer who swore oil lay under a low Texas hill, until the day it erupted 150 feet into the sky and made the modern world run on oil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large industrial ammonia plant with tall towers and pipework at dusk, where nitrogen from the air becomes fertilizer

Energy

A single chemical reaction makes bread out of thin air and feeds half the world, yet the genius behind it also invented poison gas, and it now devours a chunk of the planet's energy

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A 19th-century Danish experimental windmill beside a folk school building, representing Poul la Cour's wind power work

Energy

A village schoolteacher in 1890s Denmark cracked the science of wind power and split water into hydrogen to light his school, a century before the rest of the world caught up

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large polished cone-shaped 19th-century solar concentrator aimed at the sun with a small central boiler in a stone courtyard

Energy

In 1878 a French teacher made a block of ice using nothing but sunshine, won a gold medal in Paris, then watched cheap coal bury his solar engine for a hundred years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Smith-Putnam wind turbine, a huge two-bladed steel machine on a lattice tower on a Vermont hilltop in 1941

Energy

In 1941 a giant two-bladed wind turbine on a Vermont hilltop fed a megawatt of power into the grid, decades ahead of its time, until a blade snapped off and killed the dream

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Charles Brush's giant 144-blade wooden wind turbine on a tall tower behind a Victorian mansion in Cleveland in 1888

Energy

In 1888 Charles Brush lit his Cleveland mansion with a giant backyard windmill, the first automatic wind turbine to make electricity, decades before anyone called it wind power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Edwin Drake in a top hat standing before a wooden oil derrick beside a creek, the first oil well at Titusville in 1859

Energy

Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in 1859 and gave the world the petroleum age, then failed to patent his idea, lost his savings, and died so poor the state had to grant him a pension

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Scientists on a wooden balcony watching instruments above the dark graphite reactor of Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor

Energy

In 1942 a refugee physicist, Enrico Fermi, lit the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction inside a squash court under a Chicago football stadium, a crude pile of graphite and uranium called Chicago Pile-1 that quietly opened the atomic age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Stacked carbon blocks inside an insulated chamber glowing brilliant white and orange hot, a thermal battery storing energy as heat

Energy

A new kind of thermal battery stores cheap renewable electricity by heating blocks of carbon until they glow white-hot, hotter than lava, then turns that light back into power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A compressed air energy storage plant at the surface, with compressor buildings and pipes above an underground salt cavern

Energy

Compressed air energy storage banks surplus electricity by pumping air into vast underground salt caverns, then lets it rush back out through a turbine when the grid runs short

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Large insulated cryogenic storage tanks and turbines at a liquid air energy storage plant under a clear sky

Energy

Liquid air energy storage turns spare electricity into a tank of air chilled to minus 196 degrees, then lets it boil back to power a turbine when the grid runs short

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A floating ocean thermal energy platform on a calm tropical sea with a large pipe descending into deep blue water

Energy

The sea stores the sun's heat near its surface, and ocean thermal energy turns the gap between that warm water and the cold depths into round-the-clock electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A floating wind farm of turbines on the open sea far from shore, the Hywind Scotland project

Energy

Wind turbines used to need shallow water to stand up, until an oil company floated five of them in the deep North Sea and built the world's first floating wind farm

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A space solar power satellite with vast panels in orbit above Earth, beaming energy down to the planet

Energy

A billionaire quietly funded a decade of space solar power research, and in 2023 a Caltech team beamed sunlight down from orbit to Earth for the first time in history

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A small lab-grown diamond battery cell containing carbon-14, held in tweezers under bright laboratory light

Energy

Scientists in Bristol found a way to turn the most stubborn kind of nuclear waste into a tiny diamond battery that powers itself, safely, for thousands of years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Steam rising from The Geysers geothermal field power plants in the forested Mayacamas Mountains of California

Energy

The Geysers, the biggest geothermal field on Earth, was running out of steam, until a nearby city began pumping its treated sewage 40 miles uphill to turn the dirtiest water into clean power

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Skiers on the green rooftop ski slope of CopenHill, the Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant

Energy

Copenhagen turned a trash-burning power plant into CopenHill, a 90-meter artificial mountain with a 400-meter ski slope on its roof, and made the thing every city hides its proudest landmark

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Rows of long parabolic mirror troughs in the Egyptian desert, evoking Frank Shuman's solar plant of 1913 near Cairo

Energy

A working solar power station was already pumping water from the Nile in the Egyptian desert in 1913, decades before the world believed solar power could work

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Cam-shaped floating wave energy devices, like Salter's Duck, nodding on grey ocean swells

Energy

A device that could turn nine-tenths of a wave into electricity was shut down in a closed meeting in 1982, on a cost estimate later found to be wrong by a factor of ten

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

An early 1900s businessman in a suit standing in the turbine hall of an electric power station, like Samuel Insull

Energy

The man who made electricity cheap enough for everyone built the modern power grid, then became the most hated businessman in America when his empire collapsed

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Grand Coulee Dam, an immense concrete gravity dam on the Columbia River with water spilling over it

Energy

The dam that helped win the war and build the atomic bomb also drowned one of the greatest salmon runs on Earth and a Native nation's heart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Larderello geothermal field in Tuscany, white steam rising from vents and cooling towers among green hills

Energy

The entire geothermal industry began in 1904 with five light bulbs glowing in a Tuscan valley so hellish it is said to have inspired Dante

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Ardnacrusha hydroelectric power station, a 1920s concrete power house beside a canal on the River Shannon in Ireland

Energy

A broke new nation bet a fifth of its entire budget on a single power station on the Shannon, and used it to switch on a whole country

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Cragside, a grand Victorian mansion on a wooded Northumberland hillside at dusk with a few windows glowing from early electric light

Energy

The man who armed the world's navies built the first house ever lit by water, a Victorian smart home run by its own lakes

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Lakeview Gusher of 1910, a towering black fountain of oil erupting from a wrecked derrick in the California desert

Energy

The biggest accidental oil spill in history gushed for 18 months in 1910, and at the time people came to admire it as a sign of good fortune

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The 1991 Kuwait oil fires, rows of burning oil wells under a sky blackened by smoke

Energy

Retreating troops set 700 Kuwaiti oil wells on fire in 1991, turning day to night, and experts said they would burn for years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant reflected in a calm river at dusk

Energy

The most infamous nuclear plant in America, Three Mile Island, is being switched back on to feed the AI boom, decades after its 1979 meltdown

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The huge spherical fusion target chamber of the National Ignition Facility studded with laser ports

Energy

For a fraction of a second, 192 lasers recreated the heart of the sun and, for the first time, fusion gave back more energy than it took

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Manhattan skyline in total darkness during the 2003 Northeast blackout, lit only by car headlights

Energy

A tree brushed a power line in Ohio and a silent software bug did the rest, blacking out 55 million people across the Northeast

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Chernobyl divers in wetsuits wading through a flooded basement corridor of pipes by flashlight

Energy

Three men waded into the flooded basement under Chernobyl's burning reactor, and the legend that they died doing it is wrong

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Smoke rising from cracks in the ground along an empty road, the landscape of the Centralia mine fire

Energy

John Lokitis kept mowing the lawns and painting the benches of his hometown long after the Centralia mine fire had emptied it, because the coal beneath the streets has burned since 1962

By Bruno Teles · June 27, 2026

Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21 2010, black smoke rising from the platform above the water before the rig sank

Energy

Eleven workers died when Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, and BP's emergency response plan for the spill listed walruses as local wildlife to protect

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Frozen streets and iced-over homes in Texas during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, the Texas power grid failure leaving millions without electricity in deadly sub-zero temperatures

Energy

Texas kept its power grid deliberately isolated from other states for 80 years to avoid federal rules, and when Winter Storm Uri hit in 2021 that decision killed 246 people who had nowhere to borrow electricity from

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Aerial view of Itaipu dam spanning the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay, massive concrete structure with spillways releasing white water into the river gorge below

Energy

Brazil flooded the largest waterfall on earth to fill the Itaipu dam's reservoir in 1982, and a pedestrian bridge collapsed killing around 80 people who had come to say goodbye to Guaira Falls

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Vast field of silver heliostat mirrors angled toward a central tower rising above the Mojave Desert floor under an intense California sun

Energy

The Ivanpah solar plant was built in the Mojave to show concentrated solar power could replace fossil fuels, but biologists found birds igniting in midair above its 173,000 heliostats

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An aerial view of a vast open-pit uranium mine in Gabon surrounded by equatorial rainforest with deep excavated terraces of reddish-orange rock

Energy

Nature ran a self-sustaining nuclear reactor in Gabon for 300,000 years before humans invented fission, and the fuel was already spent when we found it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A 1950s laboratory scene with researchers in white shirts and ties demonstrating a small solar panel powering a toy on a workbench in warm sunlight

Energy

The first practical solar cell was born in 1954, and it was far too expensive for anyone to use

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A row of small white 1990s wind turbines standing in calm shallow blue sea near a low green Danish coastline under a soft sky

Energy

The world's first offshore wind farm was tiny, and it has already been taken down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A geothermal drilling rig on a volcanic plain in Iceland with a tall plume of white superheated steam roaring from the wellhead against snow and dark lava

Energy

A drill in Iceland hit magma by accident, and the steam that roared back was the hottest ever tapped

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall slender chimney tower rising from the centre of a vast circular transparent glass canopy on a dry plain under a bright sky

Energy

A tower rising from a giant glass canopy turned warm air into electricity for seven years, until a storm toppled it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Rows of white industrial battery units lined up in the dry South Australian outback with wind turbines turning on the horizon

Energy

Elon Musk bet he could build the world's biggest battery in 100 days or it would be free, and South Australia took the deal

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Windscale nuclear reactor complex with two large concrete cooling towers rising above the Cumberland coastal plain in northwest England, 1950s atomic age industrial facility before the 1957 fire

Energy

In October 1957 a fire burning inside a British nuclear reactor for three days poured radioactive iodine across northwest England, and Harold Macmillan ordered the government inquiry suppressed

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The giant curved parabolic mirror wall of the Odeillo solar furnace gleaming in the sun, reflecting the sky and surrounding mountains

Energy

A wall of mirrors in the French Pyrenees focuses sunlight to 3,500C, hot enough to melt almost anything

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Piper Alpha oil platform engulfed in fire at night in the North Sea, massive orange and red flames with thick black smoke rising into a dark sky

Energy

On Piper Alpha on July 6, 1988, the night shift pumped gas through a valve sealed only by a maintenance permit that had not been cancelled, and 167 men died

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Jimmy Carter Chalk River nuclear reactor 1952, US Navy officer at 1950s reactor control panel with analog dials and warning lights in nuclear research facility

Energy

Jimmy Carter was the naval lieutenant who crawled into Canada's first melted nuclear reactor in 1952, and twenty-seven years later he was the president who handled Three Mile Island

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A vast underground turbine hall cavern deep inside a mountain with huge green generators and tiny workers for scale under dramatic lighting

Energy

A hollowed-out Welsh mountain hides a power station that can answer a nation's kettles in sixteen seconds

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A dense yellow-grey smog engulfing a London street in December 1952, Victorian brick buildings barely visible, a red double-decker bus with its headlights on emerging from the London fog

Energy

The Great Smog of 1952 killed twelve thousand Londoners in five days, the government blamed influenza, and the future prime minister delayed clean air legislation by three years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An early 1800s voltaic pile, a tall stack of copper and zinc discs with brine-soaked cloth, on a wooden bench

Energy

A feud over why a dead frog's legs twitched led Alessandro Volta to stack metal and brine into the first battery, and switch on the electric age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wide river meeting the blue sea at an estuary with a power plant on the shore where the waters mix

Energy

Where every river pours into the sea, the simple mixing of fresh water and salt releases energy, and engineers have spent decades chasing this hidden blue power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A Rendille pastoralist woman stands before rows of white wind turbines on the arid Lake Turkana plains in northern Kenya

Energy

Africa's largest wind farm promised clean energy to the continent, but the 1,180 people of Sarima village were each paid $140 and told to leave their land

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An inventor in a lab coat examining a flexible thin-film solar panel beside a row of batteries in a laboratory

Energy

A self-taught son of an immigrant scrap dealer, with no science degree, became one of the most prolific inventors in American history, and Stanford Ovshinsky's battery quietly powered a generation of hybrid cars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A massive retro-futuristic Project Orion spaceship riding a nuclear blast upward into a starry sky above Earth

Energy

In the 1950s American scientists seriously planned to ride atomic bombs into space, and Project Orion was a spaceship that would blast itself toward the planets one nuclear explosion at a time

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Dover Sun House of 1948, a modernist home with a tall wall of solar collector glass in the snow

Energy

In 1948, decades before solar power was fashionable, an immigrant scientist named Maria Telkes heated an entire house through a New England winter using nothing but sunshine and salt

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The thin glowing blue band of the ozone layer along the curved edge of Earth seen from space

Energy

In the 1980s scientists found a growing hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, the world banned the chemicals tearing it apart, and the sky is slowly healing itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Wind turbines on a volcanic ridge of El Hierro island above the Atlantic

Energy

A tiny Canary Island called El Hierro is trying to run entirely on wind and water, using the crater of a dead volcano as a giant battery for its electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A Lakota solar installer beside solar panels on a Pine Ridge home

Energy

A fifth-generation descendant of the Lakota war chief Red Cloud is fighting a new battle on the Pine Ridge reservation, where Henry Red Cloud turns sunlight into heat, jobs and a kind of freedom

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A geothermal energy plant with steam over the Rift Valley in Kenya

Energy

While rich nations still burn oil and gas, Kenya quietly built a grid that runs mostly on clean power, drawing nearly half its electricity from geothermal energy pulled out of the Great Rift Valley

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A hydroelectric dam in a green Himalayan river valley in Bhutan, the source of the country's carbon-negative power

Energy

Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country on Earth and measures success in Gross National Happiness, and it quietly turned its Himalayan hydropower into one of the world's biggest sovereign bitcoin mines

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A wind-powered cargo ship at sea with two tall rigid wing sails on its deck

Energy

Sail vanished from the seas a century ago, but giant computer-controlled steel wings are rising over cargo decks again, and these wind-powered cargo ships are cutting fuel by up to a third

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A dugout home dug into a red desert hill in Coober Pedy, the underground opal town in the Australian outback, with mounds of mined earth around it at golden hour

Energy

In the Australian outback the heat is so brutal that more than half of Coober Pedy lives underground, an opal town that quietly swapped its diesel generators for sun and wind

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

South Asian children sitting at small desks inside a wooden boat that serves as a floating classroom on a river in Bangladesh, with solar panels on the roof and a teacher beside them

Energy

In Bangladesh the floods shut the schools every year, so an architect put the classrooms on solar-powered boats that sail to the children and bring the lessons to them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small Austrian town with red roofs and a castle on a hill, surrounded by green forested hills, with a biomass heating plant and wood-chip silos at its edge

Energy

A dying Austrian town was bleeding money on imported fuel, so it stopped buying energy from the outside world and learned to power itself on the wood from its own forests

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Two children playing on a seesaw that doubles as a water pump in a tropical savanna village, with low buildings and the flat Colombian Llanos grassland behind them at golden hour

Energy

Scientists were told nothing could grow on Colombia's barren eastern plains, so they built a village that runs on sunlight and accidentally grew a rainforest of 8 million trees

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A person stands at the salt-encrusted edge of the shrinking Salton Sea, looking out at the water, with white exposed lakebed in every direction and mountains in the distance

Energy

Everyone wrote off California's shrinking Salton Sea, then geologists found 18 million tons of lithium in the brine and the children breathing its toxic dust became America's clean energy problem

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A power station engineer at a control panel on the final day of Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the last coal power station in Britain

Energy

Peter O'Grady spent 36 years running Britain's last coal station; he was also the one who clicked it off at 15:35 on September 30, 2024, ending 142 years of coal power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A maternity ward at night lit by a solar powered light, with a midwife and a mother holding her newborn

Energy

An American doctor went to Nigeria to study why mothers die in childbirth, and found the answer was sometimes as simple as the lights going out, so she built a suitcase full of sunlight

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Several large white wind turbines standing across green farmland on a flat Danish island with the sea in the distance

Energy

Dared to go fully green in ten years, a windswept island of Danish farmers bought their own wind turbines and made Samsø the first place on Earth to run on renewable energy

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Reindeer grazing on a snowy upland in Norway with wind turbines on the ridgeline behind them

Energy

Norway built Europe's largest onshore wind farm on the Sami's reindeer pastures, its own Supreme Court ruled it a violation of their rights, and still the turbines kept turning for years

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An aerial view over a dense Pakistani city where flat concrete rooftops are covered with rows of solar panels stretching to the horizon

Energy

While its national grid sank into debt, Pakistan became one of the fastest solar nations on Earth, as millions of families bolted cheap Chinese panels to their roofs to escape soaring power bills

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An older woman in a colourful sari soldering a circuit board for a solar charge controller in rural India

Energy

A college in rural India takes illiterate grandmothers nobody else would hire and turns them into solar engineers in six months, then sends them home to electrify their own villages

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A young man standing beside a tall handmade wooden windmill built from bicycle parts and a fan blade in a rural African village

Energy

A famine pulled 14-year-old William Kamkwamba out of school in Malawi, so he taught himself from a library book and built a windmill out of scrapyard junk to light his family's home

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An enormous concrete hydroelectric dam spanning a wide river gorge in the Ethiopian highlands, with white water rushing from the spillways and a large reservoir behind it

Energy

One of the world's poorest countries just switched on Africa's largest dam, a 5 gigawatt wall across the Nile that Ethiopia built almost alone, doubling its power and alarming Egypt downstream

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small hydrogen exploration drilling rig and metal derrick standing in green rolling rural French countryside at dawn with mist over the hills

Energy

The clean hydrogen the world is spending billions to manufacture may be sitting under our feet already, and in France geologists think they have found 92 million tonnes of it brewing naturally underground

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A modern advanced nuclear power plant with clean white buildings on a wide flat Wyoming plain at dusk

Energy

Bill Gates is building a nuclear reactor cooled by liquid sodium on the site of a retiring coal plant in Wyoming, with a molten-salt battery that lets it ramp up to power 400,000 homes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A vast solar power satellite with huge panels orbiting above the blue Earth against black space

Energy

Solar power is beaten by night and clouds, so the new plan is to put the panels in orbit where the sun never sets and beam the energy back to Earth by microwave, a feat just tested in space

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A glowing concentrated solar power tower ringed by thousands of mirrors in the Atacama desert at dusk

Energy

Solar power has one obvious flaw, the sun sets, so in the Atacama desert Chile built a tower ringed by 10,600 mirrors that stores the sun's heat in molten salt and keeps making electricity long after dark

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An aerial view of a vast floating solar farm of dark panels on steel platforms stretching across the open sea at dawn

Energy

China just switched on the world's largest floating solar farm in the open sea, 2.3 million panels riding the waves 8 kilometres off its coast to power 2.6 million homes from water instead of land

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of powerful tidal currents swirling through a narrow channel between rugged Scottish islands

Energy

Off the northern tip of Scotland sits the world's largest tidal power station, turbines bolted to the seabed that spin with the pull of the moon to make the most predictable renewable energy on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A tall concrete energy storage tower in flat farmland at sunset with heavy blocks suspended inside its steel frame

Energy

China built the world's first commercial gravity battery, a 148-metre tower that stores electricity by stacking 35-tonne blocks made from coal ash and old wind turbine blades, and is now building eight more

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A grid-scale battery storage facility with liquid tanks beside a desert solar farm at sunrise

Energy

China just switched on the world's first gigawatt-hour flow battery, storing its power in tanks of liquid vanadium that cannot catch fire and are built to last 30 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A glowing ring of orange plasma inside a tokamak fusion reactor

Energy

China's "artificial sun" held a 100-million-degree plasma steady for 1,066 seconds, almost 18 minutes, becoming the first reactor ever to break the 1,000-second wall

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A tall sand battery silo in a snowy Finnish landscape

Energy

Finland switched on the world's largest sand battery in June 2025, a 100 MWh store holding 2,000 tonnes of soapstone that cuts a town's heating emissions by nearly 70 percent

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

An aerial view of a belt of solar panels across desert dunes

Energy

China is building a 400 km solar great wall across a desert it once called the Sea of Death, aiming for 100 GW by 2030 to help power Beijing

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A colossal offshore wind turbine above a grey sea

Energy

China just built a 26 MW offshore wind turbine with a 310-metre rotor, smashing the old 20 MW record while Western makers stalled near 18 MW

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

An experimental nuclear reactor in the Gobi Desert at golden hour

Energy

In the Gobi Desert China just got the only reactor on Earth to breed uranium-233 from thorium, six decades after the US built the idea and walked away in 1969

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A geothermal drilling rig in the Utah desert at golden hour

Energy

Fervo's Cape Station in Utah is on track to send its first 100 MW of 24/7 geothermal power to the grid in late 2026, scaling to 500 MW by 2028

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A vast solar farm with sheep grazing between the panel rows

Energy

Inside the world's largest solar farm, where 20,000 sheep keep the grass down

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Grid-scale battery storage containers next to a substation

Energy

The world's largest battery will run on rust, an iron-air design that holds a charge for 100 hours instead of four

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Battery cells on a production line with salt crystals in the foreground

Energy

China is putting a battery made from salt into cars in 2026, and at about 19 dollars a kilowatt-hour it undercuts lithium by more than half

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026