Ed note: This post originally appeared on the original home of Anthropology in Practice. It seemed appropriate to share in light of the SciAm cities feature – particularly as I’m traveling. See you Friday! As the sun sinks over the Hudson River, New York City doesn’t power down. Lights flicker on and soon the famous [...]

At 1 P.M. on February 28, 2010 a jaw-dropping 22 percent of the electricity being used in the state of Texas was supplied by the wind. Today, Texas is home to more than 10,000 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity—more than the next three largest wind states (Iowa, California and Washington) combined. In the course of [...]

Every day, at least 400 million Indians lack access to electricity. Another nearly 700 million Indians joined their fellows in energy poverty over the course of the last few days, or roughly 10 percent of the world’s population. Oddly enough, some of the formerly energy poor—rural villagers throughout the subcontinent—found themselves better off than their [...]

The smart grid. Sounds good, right? But what exactly is it? And does that mean we have a dumb grid now? "The grid, it is smart today," Laura Ipsen, a senior vice president at Cisco, told the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-e) conference on March 2. "The weaving of IT [information technology] and [...]

The television show “Revolution” is getting ready to start, with its plot based on the failure of the electrical grid. That’s nothing new, though — the most recent Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Spiderman movie, “The Amazing Spiderman,” came out this summer, each with significant events or  themes involving infrastructure systems. Half of the [...]

Today’s suggestion? Get used to it. Days of unspeakable heat? The heat taking the usual storm systems and turning them excessively violent? Lack of investment in infrastructure making recovery from those storms lengthy and piecemeal? Check, check, and check. Remember the “Snowstorm of 88” narratives we all grew up listening to? The next generation of [...]