Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who serves on Scientific American’s board of advisors, will be President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Nobel laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. While Moniz has yet to win a Nobel, he served on the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear [...]

The future of energy will be on display at the fourth annual summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA–e. But which future? Energy innovators from start-ups, the national laboratories, universities and even oil companies will gather for three days to hear from the nation’s best about the future of energy.  The [...]

President Barack Obama secured a second four-year term in yesterday’s vote. What is the likely outcome of that historic event on energy and environmental issues? Simply put: more of the same. Let me rephrase that slightly. Obama will likely stay the course on his current energy and environmental policies. That means more executive orders like [...]

Take a hurricane moving up from the south. Mash in a colder storm moving in from the west. Add a ridge of high pressure extending through the atmosphere above the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and Greenland, blocking the typical flow of the jet stream. That’s the recipe for what will become “Post-Tropical Storm Sandy” or, as [...]

Advanced lithium-ion batteries may be all the rage for electric cars, but that doesn’t mean one no longer faces drain anxiety when sitting in the audience of an energy conference taking notes on a laptop while a speaker extols their virtues. Sadly, my battery (and at least one other reporter’s) went kaput while attending the [...]

The world is waiting for a clean revolution, a shift away from the greenhouse gas-emitting, mountain-leveling, air-polluting, fossil-fuel burning way of life. The world may have to wait a long time if past energy transitions are anything to go by, according to environmental scientist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba—especially since fossil fuel energy [...]

Can cleaner sources of energy not only power our economy but also drive a recovery from the Great Recession? That’s the question confronted by policymakers across the U.S.—and by debaters in the Intelligence Squared series held March 8 at New York University. The list of political proponents of a clean, green energy economy is long, [...]

Are surface winds around the world really slowing down? That’s the suggestion of a new study in Nature Geoscience. The authors built on previous studies indicating such a trend by analyzing surface wind data from 822 wind stations in Europe, Asia and North America. The study concludes that the widespread "atmospheric stilling" has more to [...]

Beginning with the Obama administration’s $70-billion commitment to ramping up the U.S.’s reliance of wind, water and solar power (not to mention hybrid vehicles) in February through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and ending with December’s international climate conference in Copenhagen, this year promises to be pivotal in the worldwide development and adoption of [...]

Hawaii has been working for more than a year to map out concrete plans to harness the abundant—though unpredictable—winds that blow across the state’s numerous islands. As the state and its utilities draw up plans for wind farms and other green-energy facilities to help meet the goal of pulling 70 percent of power from clean [...]

…well, not exactly. But, it could happen soon thanks to a nanogenerator created by Dr. Zhong Lin Wang and his team at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga. Watch my short video to see how. Video: Shannon Alderman: Producer/Editor. Robynne Boyd: Writer/Editor

The vision is beautiful, if not somewhat tried: a large cluster of 360 foot tall towers encircled with long, slightly cupped blades, similar to airplane wings, spinning in the wind like a wind vane. The result? An outpouring of clean electricity at the Megawatt (MW) scale. That’s what Harry Ruda, CEO of Wing Power Energy, [...]

For wind power, 2011 was a great year. California added more new wind energy to the grid than any other state, according to a report published Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Energy. A number of other states received high honors as well. These include Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Colorado, which churned out at [...]

The Santa Rita jail can’t afford to lose power. With the safety of thousands of inmates and facility staff at stake, the jail requires that large amounts of electricity be constantly available. This is why, over the past decade, the facility has teamed up with private and public organizations to successfully transform the 113-acre mega-jail [...]

In Plugged In’s never-ending efforts to get you to use the latest technology to connect you to your world in a nontechnological way, I have recently run across two fabulous online undertakings focused on connecting you physically to your physical world. The first is this unbelievably lovely website called Wind Map, showing you a moving, realtime [...]

Earlier this month, I attended at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Energy Sustainability Conference in Washington, DC.  During the conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Paul Denholm, a senior analyst at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Denholm is a member of the Energy Forecasting [...]

I am here at home in Maplewood, New Jersey, four days after an angry wind whipped through the trees, sending my entire family downstairs into the living room for the night. There we huddled, tucked under covers on mattresses hauled down from higher, more exposed floors of our house while we listened to the roar [...]