Electricity
Resilience in Louisiana: Lessons from the Military and Islands
Three days after Hurricane Ida made landfall, roughly 2 million people remain without electricity in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even critical facilities, including sewage pumps in New Orleans and a hospital in rural South Louisiana, have seen outages. These and other incidents underscore just how dependent our civilization…
How the California Grid Can Become More Resilient to Wildfire
As the Bootleg Fire in Oregon continues to burn, the impacts of the largest US wildfire of 2021 have been felt well beyond the state’s border. Not only have the Bootleg Fire and other active fires blanketed skies with smoke as far away as New York City, but the…
Powering Rural Economic Development with Renewables
Despite serving only 13 percent of US electricity load, electric cooperatives loom large in conversations about the US energy system’s past, present, and future. The initial vision for nonprofit electric co-ops dates back to the New Deal, when the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 authorized the creation of co-ops…
Clean Energy Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
Both science and our everyday reality are now screaming an inconvenient truth: Our climate is changing and forcing us to urgently respond. To meet this challenge, we must both build resilient infrastructure capable of adapting to extreme, unprecedented weather and quickly transition our energy system away from the fossil fuels…
Ridehailing Drivers Will Go Electric—If We Build the Charging Stations
Michelle Pierce, a retired electrical engineer living in Southern California, is a passionate EV advocate. She started driving an electric vehicle for Lyft because she wanted to expose more people to electric vehicles and demonstrate the benefits of EVs. In 2017, Pierce rented a Chevy Bolt through the former Maven…
