The US Has Big Plans for Wind Energy—but an Obscure 1920s Law Is Getting in the Way

The reason for the Jones Act’s longevity, says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is that while it tends to benefit only a few people and businesses, the act goes unnoticed because there are many payers sharing the increased costs. The Jones Act is one in a string […]

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A Secret Key to Saving Species Is Blowing in the Wind

Every living thing spreads an invisible signature across its landscape, whether it’s a badger ambling through the grass, an oak growing in the forest, or an eagle soaring overhead. Fur, feathers, skin cells, spores, pollen—all of it is loaded with genetic information that floats away into a data-rich atmospheric soup. Scientists call this information environmental […]

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Tiny, Explosive ‘Jetlets’ Might Be Fueling the Solar Wind

Streaming out of the sun at a million miles an hour, the solar wind—a blistering plasma of electrons, protons, and ions flowing through space—is a decades-old enigma. Scientists know it once stripped Mars of its atmosphere, and some think it put ice on the moon. Today, it causes the glimmering Northern Lights displays and messes with […]

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Teaching ‘Selfish’ Wind Turbines to Share Can Boost Productivity

Exactly how much energy is gained depends on factors such as the farm layout and the site’s wind conditions. However, when tested at a commercial farm in India, the algorithm boosted the energy output between 1 and 3 percent, depending on the wind speed, which would be the equivalent of powering 3 million homes if […]

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The Race to Build Wind Farms That Float on the Open Sea

The makers of wind turbines have, for many decades now, labored to harness one of the mightiest forces in nature. They’ve moved from onshore to offshore sites, building ever larger rotors with huge blades, each one now longer than a row of 10 London buses. And they’ve stacked those rotors atop dizzying towers, constantly reaching […]

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Offshore Wind Turbines Could Mess With Ships’ Radar Signals

Solutions could include upgrading older shipboard radars to modern solid state systems that can be adjusted to eliminate some of the interference from the rotating blades. Another idea is to perhaps wrap the blades or towers in material similar to the radar-absorbing carbon or graphene polymers used on stealth aircraft to dampen some, but not […]

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