Energy & Industry

Last week, after months of rhetoric and hype, the first shots were fired in what has been billed as Arizona’s solar war, when Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, proposed a new rate structure that is far less favorable than the current one for homeowners with rooftop or backyard solar. Arizona’s Corporation Commission, the […]

It’s a bit like Christmas time for energy geeks, and Halloween for environmentalists. Every summer, bp, née British Petroleum, releases its Statistical Review of World Energy, a big fat pile of data detailing the world’s energy production, consumption and trade. Energy geeks revel in it. Nowhere else can one find so much up-to-date information in […]

Peter Stehr is an apple farmer. But when he had a heart attack in 2002, he decided he needed to diversify his income, so he and some associates got a loan and put up a few .6 megawatt wind turbines in his orchard. Today, one of them still spins over a row of apple trees, […]

On a bat-streaked evening in April, I found myself on a bridge over the Colorado River, just outside Moab, holding a bright sign, contemplating the twilight of the fossil fuel age and the darkness of celebrity environmentalism. I was tired and sunburned, having arrived there after an eight-day float trip through Desolation Canyon with the […]

To environmentalists, it must have looked, at last, like progress. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was finally getting serious about the potential risks posed by hydraulic fracturing — wherein pressurized water, chemicals and sand are fired into rock formations to release natural gas or oil. Residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, had been complaining for years that […]

Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing, a blog about science Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family […]

In the winter of 2005, I took a tour of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, a two-gigawatt power plant near San Clemente, Calif., 70 miles south of where I live. I was willing to entertain, if only for the sake of a story, that nuclear power offered a solution to impending climate catastrophe, as […]

The Albuquerque ambience, as we rolled into town to cover a tribal energy conference, was tinted with doom. It was 7:30 on a June evening, and the car thermometer read 99 degrees. To the north, a massive plume of smoke rose up from the newly ignited Jaroso fire, joining the plumes of the Tres Lagunas […]

In Coal Basin — a narrow drainage that meets the Crystal River at Redstone, Colo.– roads wind high into snow-capped peaks. In the early 1900s, and again starting in the 1950s, miners pried coal from these mountains, easing 100-ton loads down the switchbacks. Now the mineshafts are closed, but the tangle of roads, along with […]