How We Happened to Sell Off Our Electricity is James Meek's dissection of the systematic re-privatisation of the UK power industry.
Are you an enemy of liberal principles if you question the fact that, when local electrical engineers dig up the roads in London, they’re working for East Asia’s richest man, the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing? In north-east England, they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund.
posted by scruss
on Jan 10, 2013 -
20 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
When New York State sentenced convicted murderer William Kemmler to death, he was slated to become the first man to be executed in an electric chair. Killing criminals with electricity “is a good idea,” Edison said at the time. “It will be so quick that the criminal can’t suffer much.” He even introduced a new word to the American public, which was becoming more and more concerned by the dangers of electricity. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”
posted by monju_bosatsu
on Oct 12, 2011 -
54 comments
The failure to fix electricity infrastructure in Afghanistan. IEEE Spectrum published a
damning investigation into the ongoing incompetence, corruption, and waste of the
USAID and its murky
cost-plus contracts, some 'so vague that it did not require the contractor to provide "specific deliverables with concrete delivery dates."' [from
here] Not surprisingly, they spend a
lot of money.
previously
posted by thandal
on Oct 8, 2011 -
5 comments
The best wind in America is in Wyoming. It is a door-snapping, heart-pounding wind that barrels in from the west, chasing the truckers along Interstate 80 as they race to make Omaha by nightfall. It is sometimes described with words ordinarily associated with dark chocolate or exceptional pinot noir. It has been called dense, world-class, consistently extraordinary, special, and fabulous..
Advocates of wind power though are faced with a conundrum. [more inside]
posted by storybored
on Oct 3, 2011 -
29 comments
Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization. [more inside]
posted by Bangaioh
on Jul 30, 2011 -
31 comments
Around
one year ago we saw some of the recent events in solar power. At that time solar panels topped out at a peak efficiency of around 290W for a 1.99 x 0.99 meter 72-cell module, with a lone rare and expensive
315W module that was used to build team Germany's
solar decathlon winning house. Since then prices have dropped a lot, and China is advancing in commodity tech.
[more inside]
posted by thewalrus
on Mar 3, 2011 -
80 comments
Space-based Solar Power beamed down to earth sounds pretty far out, but the technology is further along than many suppose, the sun never sets in space, and space is a Saudi Arabia of unlimited energy for the nation with the technology to harness it. PG&E (California) in conjunction with
SolarEn has
announced a 200MW space solar project to be up by 2016.
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 20, 2009 -
87 comments
Internet Archive - probably the single largest depository of Open Source content (and the Wayback Machine) - has transitioned its data center from racks of Linux machines to a Sun MD, basically a 3
petabyte data center housed in a liquid cooled shipping container, currently sitting in Sun's Santa Clara campus court yard. Sun and IA have put together an interesting
interactive tour of how it works and what it looks like.
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 25, 2009 -
37 comments
Sparks of Life. "That the electric 'spark of life' figured prominently in debates over the nature of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is well known. Less well known is the fact that prior to this period, gunpowder was often identified with the substances that were necessary to life, if not as a vitalistic spirit, then as an essential element in the animation of the body. The idea of a spark of life went back to ancient times, likening living beings to the glowing embers of a fire. In the Old Testament, for example, the wise woman of Tekoah begs for the life of her son, pleading 'they will stamp out my last live ember.' But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this vital flame was often equated with gunpowder. There was fire in the blood: not electric, but pyrotechnic fire."
posted by homunculus
on Feb 20, 2009 -
11 comments
Popular Science has named
Nanosolar the
#1 innovative product of the year. Finally, cheap and ubiquitous solar power has arrived, “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” The only problem is demand, so they're building
the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility in San Jose. See 96 other innovations in PopSci's
Best of 2007.
posted by stbalbach
on Nov 17, 2007 -
25 comments
CARMA, released
today, is a map/database that shows the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in every country on Earth, showing not only the worst but the best. Find out how much CO2 comes from electricity plants in a particular city, county, congressional district, company, town, ZIP code, or an individual plant.
posted by stbalbach
on Nov 14, 2007 -
13 comments
