Plug-In Solar Panels Are Popping Up in U.S. Backyards

Ten U.S. states have legalized systems that can be plugged into standard wall outlets. The technology typically does not require permits or electricians.

 

Alex Ottoboni, wearing a black T-shirt, is holding a solar panel on his balcony.
Alex Ottoboni with his balcony solar panel at his condo in the San Francisco Bay AreaCredit…Poppy Lynch for The New York Times

 

By Ivan Penn and Claire Brown,  The New York Times

After watching a YouTube video about solar panels that can be plugged into a regular electrical outlet, Melani Jackson plopped four panels in the backyard of her Salt Lake City home.

 

In the six months since, she has lowered her electricity bill by about $77 in total. While that’s not a large sum, she is happy to have banked those savings, which required little effort on her part.

“I just really appreciated the idea of being able to do something to cut even just a few dollars off my energy bill plus just become a little bit more environmentally friendly,” Ms. Jackson, 35, said.

Millions of Americans worried about rising energy costs might soon follow in her footsteps as states start allowing homeowners and renters to plug in solar panels on balconies, in backyards and other places. Plug-in systems are much smaller and cheaper than rooftop build-outs — some costing just a few hundred dollars a panel. Permits are not required in the states that allow their use, and people can often install them on their own.

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Antora snags $550M for heat batteries to run data centers and factories

Rows of white batteries in front of a factory, with a beige building between with an Antora sign
Antora Energy’s thermal batteries at the Poet bioprocessing facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota (Antora Energy)

The startup Antora Energy just raised $550 million to build and deploy more of its heat-storing batteries for powering data centers and cleaning up factories.


By Maria Gallucci, CanaryMedia 

On Thursday, San Jose, California–based Antora said it closed a Series C funding round co-led by climatetech investor G2 Venture Partners and the VC firm Eclipse, which backs manufacturing-focused startups. That brings Antora’s total corporate and project financing to around $1 billion, the company says, adding that the latest infusion will enable it to expand domestic production of its thermal batteries and accelerate the buildout of large-scale projects.

Eight-year-old Antora has likened its technology to an enormous toaster. Electricity runs through a large resistance heater to warm big blocks of solid carbon to extremely high temperatures for days on end. The blocks release controlled blasts of high-intensity light that can be used to either produce power on demand or generate steam for industrial processes.

Just two months ago, Antora began booting up its first commercial-size system: a 5-gigawatt-hour thermal battery at Poet’s biofuels plant near Big Stone City, South Dakota. The project will turn cheap wind energy into steam the plant needs to convert corn into ethanol, displacing some of the facility’s reliance on coal-fueled boilers.

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A new Colorado River plan requires water cuts for three states

An overlook above Lake Mead, one of the two biggest reservoirs on the Colorado River, near Boulder City, Nevada. (Caroline Brehman/Reuters)

By 

Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the Colorado River by about 20 percent over the next two years — and could ultimately face even larger cuts, according to three officials familiar with negotiations over a long-awaited federal plan to rescue the depleted waterway.

The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation described in an Environmental Impact Statement early on Friday morning, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado River, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.

Friday’s announcement outlines a broad 10-year framework for operating the river’s dams and reservoirs. It calls for more specific operating plans to be developed every two years and offers a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.

The framework does not consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — though it does allow for voluntary reductions. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin.

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Clean energy advocates see opportunity in state races

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Rethinking how wind turbine blades are made

Wind turbines in rural AmericaSNEHIT PHOTO/Shutterstock

By Nate Williams, Slashgear 

For years now, the U.S. Department of Energy has had one major roadblock to the streamlining of wind turbine installation: the sheer amount of work it takes to manufacture blades. Thanks to 3D printing, the DOE has a new approach that could dramatically change the speed at which these lightweight blades are designed and built.

 

Rather than relying exclusively on the traditional process of creating a full-scale plug before manufacturing a blade mold, researchers are finding ways to use large 3D-printed molds to make manufacturing faster, more affordable, and even more flexibility in the design of future blades. The best wind turbine blade design is currently the three-bladed horizontal-axis rotor, but that very well could change if experimental blades could be more accessible.

 

This 3D printing effort is currently moving in various different directions, including the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office and Advanced Manufacturing Office alongside national laboratories and various private-sector partners. Wind energy already supplies more than 10% of U.S. electricity and generating enough power for tens of millions of American homes. With these advances, the DOE could take the nation’s renewable energy infrastructure to entirely new heights, and it’s also worth noting that the U.S. is also home to many large wind turbine manufacturers.

 

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Population shift from farmlands seen as contributor to wildfires in France and Spain

By Raymond Zhong,  Reporting from London for The New York Times

The giant wildfires in France and Spain are the countries’ largest on record, and at roughly 100,000 acres each, the blazes are bigger than all but six of last year’s wildfires in the American West.

Studies have shown that global warming is driving Southern Europe’s recent increase in sprawling, fast-moving fires that create their own weather and can be all but impossible to put out. But experts say there’s another factor behind the continent’s large fires, one rooted in societal changes that could be hard to reverse.

In parts of Europe, a generational shift away from farming has replaced patchworks of pastures and plowed fields with untamed vegetation that burns intensely during hot, dry summers like this one.

“Climate change needs to be taken into account, but also the social changes are very important,” said Emilio Chuvieco, a professor of geography at the University of Alcalá in Spain. “There is no simple solution to big problems.”

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