Category: History
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Ever wonder why we use so much coal? America was built on it.
From old steamboats to the mines of Appalachia, to World War II, to the oil crisis of 1973,…
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How venture investors lost $10 billion in the cleantech collapse of 2011 (Part 1)
Clean energy is one of the largest business opportunities in history. But, in 2011, the US venture capital…
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How Edison’s protege made the power industry into a regulated monopoly (Part 3 of 3)
This is the third and final part in my series exploring the events that shaped the electric industry…
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AC vs DC: How better economics ultimately beat out a bizarre publicity campaign (Part 2 of 3)
This is the second in a three-part series on the origins of the modern power industry. Part 1…
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How Edison, Tesla, and other visionaries invented the modern grid (Part 1 of 3)
Take a moment to imagine a world without electricity. You will quickly realize how dependent our 21st-century lives…
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If we used this much fossil fuel in Edison’s time, we’d have already run out
We WILL run out of fossil fuels. In fact, we will run out of natural gas, coal, and…
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Local Energy can be expensive and hard today but so were websites in 1998
(Reading time: 4 minutes) Ask most experts and they’ll tell you that local energy systems like microgrids and community…
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A TED talk on accelerating the shift to clean energy
Electricity powers nearly every aspect of our modern, convenient lives. It’s so pervasive and easy that most of…