dirty electron will run your lights just as well as a clean one. As a result, without some policy intervention—such as a price on carbon, or standards that require a certain volume of zero-carbon electrons in the marketplace—there’s no guarantee that the company that invests in sending you clean electrons will actually make money.

between blue-sky research into novel scientific concepts (also called basic research) and efforts to take scientific discoveries and make them useful (what’s…

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As a result, America’s power grid relies on railroads and pipelines to move fuels over long distances to power plants, and then on transmission lines to move electricity over short distances to the cities that need it.

Some of the best inventions have emerged when scientists start their research with an end use in mind; Louis Pasteur’s work on microbiology, for example, led to vaccines and pasteurization. We need more government programs that integrate basic and…

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None of the existing fusion reactors are designed to produce electricity that consumers could use; they’re…

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Today, fossil fuels account for two-thirds of all electricity generated worldwide.

technical challenges we have in energy, where the most important measure of success for any idea is the ability to reach…

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Geoengineering is a cutting-edge, “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” kind of tool. The basic idea is to make temporary changes in the earth’s oceans or atmosphere that lower the planet’s temperature. These changes wouldn’t be intended to absolve us of the responsibility to reduce emissions; they’d just buy us time to get our act together.

The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the…

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