Batteries are ancient, by today’s tech standards. Benjamin Franklin is the first person we know of to use the term, and the first published science on the topic dates to 1791. The days of metal disks stacked in brine are long gone (except in middle school science class). Lead-acid batteries in cars and golf carts are still common and will be for years, given their low cost. But the focus […]
Kansas City International Airport is no stranger to cleaner fuels. It began deploying compressed natural gas (CNG) buses back in 1997, providing natural gas on site with its own high-speed fueling station. This made the Aviation Department something of a pioneer in alt-fuel adoption. The next step, though, was a big jump in fuel efficiency, and in October of […]
Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC) announces the first placements of all-electric zero-emission Class-8 yard trucks into service under a new grant project. The project, “Electrifying Terminal Trucks in Unincentivized Markets,” is the result of partnerships from Kansas City to Chicago, whose goal is to electrify terminal trucks in our regional market. The first placements of four […]
Electricity is tied to our lives in a way you might not expect, and not in the sense of necessity or convenience. Instead, our daily behavior, waking and sleeping, dictates how utilities generate power. As we wake up, hit the lights, fire up the microwave or turn up the furnace, demand rises. Through the day, generation increases to meet our needs. Demand peaks in late afternoon and starts dropping at 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening as we leave the factory or […]
It’s probably an overstatement to call propane America’s most overlooked fuel. That said, it does kind of fly under the radar. For many of us, our only interaction with it comes when replacing a cylinder for the barbeque grill. But beyond the bottle cage at Lowe’s, and once you leave the city, propane is […]
It’s easy enough to find information about energy—sometimes too much information to get a handle on. So, when thinking about energy in the United States, it’s not a bad idea to simplify things; there’ll be time for details later. For electricity, think of The Big Five. The five biggest power sources provided 95.5% of all the electricity generated in the United States in 2019. They were, from biggest to smallest: […]
You have power. Your access to energy would have cracked human credulity for most of our species’ time on earth. For millennia, we elbowed away the margins of night with the smoking glow of wood, grass or buffalo chips. Just 200 years ago, whale oil and candles lit the homes of a slowly industrializing world—for those who could afford them. For those who couldn’t, wood […]
To the casual observer, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) appear nestled comfortably on the upslope of a growth curve that would turn other industries green – with envy, in this case. From a global grand total of about 20,000 EVs of all makes on the road in 2010, by 2019, the total number of plug-in hybrid (PHEV) […]
Since January, there’s been a lot of discussion, analysis and 151-proof worry about the COVID virus – understandably. Viral impacts have produced (in less than six months) the biggest economic implosion since the 1930s, public health lockdowns spanning the planet, and a global death toll of (at this writing) 434,388, with nearly 116,000 of those […]
So, when we talk about someone employed in “clean energy”, what does that cover? Like “manufacturing”, many things. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines and tracks employment by sector, but it’s not the most user-friendly resource. So, while BLS notes that there were nearly 6,000 wind turbine service techs employed in May of 2020, […]