Yendon Egerton Road, southeast of Ballarat, about a quarter to seven on the morning of Friday the fifteenth of May. Residents heard what they described as…
Inside a standard 40-foot shipping container on a university test pad in the Netherlands, iron pellets sit in trays filled with water and open to the…
Cracked salt flats stretch to the horizon in the far west of Gujarat, near the Pakistan border. Across them is going up the largest renewable energy…
A residential street in south Jackson, Mississippi, ordinary single story houses, a January morning. One of them is gone. The blast took the structure apart in…
A worked out gravel pit south west of Munich, flooded, green water, conveyors still running on the bank. Floating on it are rows of solar panels,…
A tidal flat on the Vietnamese coast where the Mekong finally gives up its silt, brown water over soft mud. Twice a day the water leaves…
A wind turbine blade is commonly about 170 feet long, roughly the length of an Olympic swimming pool. Most retired ones end up in a landfill,…
An oversize permit contains one clearance number for every structure on the route. That number is the vertical distance from the road surface to the lowest…
A wooded hillside in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, steep, second growth, no road within half a mile. Somewhere under the leaf litter is a steel…
A flat green field on the southeast side of Milwaukee, hard up against the fence line of the city airport. It looks like pasture that nobody…
Federal water 27 miles east of Virginia Beach, flat gray, nothing on the horizon in any direction. A jack up stands on four legs driven into…
A concrete cylinder on the Somerset coast, open to the sky, with a pit in the middle of its floor. Hanging above it is a forged…
Gravel to the horizon on the edge of the Gobi, north of a city in far western China. Rows of panels run across roughly 33,000 acres,…
Open water in the northern South China Sea, about 85 miles southeast of Shenzhen. A wind turbine stands here in 446 feet of water, and no…
A concrete bay at a national laboratory complex in eastern Idaho, early on a June morning. Inside a rig roughly the size of a large household…
A vacuum vessel in Oxfordshire shaped less like a doughnut than a cored apple. Inside it the machine made and destroyed more than 1,100 separate plasmas…
A quay on the Ems estuary in the northern Netherlands, stacked with steel. Tower sections stand on end in rows. Nacelles sit under covers. Blades lie…
A February morning on the Loire, well before the day shift arrives. A transformer on the outer electrical ring of a French nuclear station begins to…
Inside a working electrolyzer the environment is hot, acidic and saturated with oxygen. Metal sitting in that atmosphere is held at a voltage that would strip…
A berth on the Baja California coast, floodlit, a tanker alongside. Loading arms swing out over the water and lock onto the ship’s manifold. Gas chilled…
A hillside in central Virginia, two ponds held apart by an earthen dam maybe thirty feet across. Blueberry rows run down toward the water on one…
A working harbor on Spain’s north coast, trawlers alongside, a cluster of low industrial buildings behind them. In one of those buildings sits a reciprocating engine…
Flat reclaimed ground in eastern Germany, the floor of a lignite region that stopped digging. Out of it rises a steel lattice frame that looks more…
A scatter of low islands in a peat marsh north of the Loire estuary, in western France. The commune sits barely above sea level, and its…
A wet apron at a regional airport in southern Quebec, low cloud, a small white helicopter warming up. Behind the pilot, where two passengers would normally…
A corner of a wheat field outside a small town in central Oklahoma, flat brown ground, a fence line and nothing else. A squat rusted wellhead…
A reservoir in the hills of a Philippine island, olive green water, forest on the ridges above it. This is not a lake. It was built…
Flat farmland in the far east of Romania, black soil turned over for winter, no hills in any direction. Sixteen white towers stand across it, each…
A working port on the Baja coast, arid hills behind it, a tanker alongside a jetty. Loading arms are coupled to the ship’s manifold, and frost…
Flat farming country in western Victoria, a wheat and sheep district, roughly 186 miles northwest of Melbourne. Rows of dark blue panels run to the horizon…
The corner of two county roads on the high plains of eastern Colorado, brown grass in every direction. A steel substation sits in the middle distance.…
A long flat stretch of coast on the Sea of Japan, a low snow sky, a plant spread across more than a square mile of it.…
A single track railway in the western Swiss mountains, pasture on both sides, a station a short walk away. Between the rails, where there is normally…
A jack up vessel standing on four steel legs in the southern North Sea, 43 miles from the nearest English beach. Hanging from its crane is…
A plant room under fluorescent light, concrete floor, a pump the size of a small car sitting on a pad. It has not run in weeks.…
A saw cut square in a city street, traffic cones around it, a steel housing sitting in the hole. Inside the housing is a stack of…
Open water about 53 miles northwest of the nearest German island, and nothing in any direction but towers. Sixty four of them now, the last one…
A gravel yard in South Carolina, chain link, low berms, and a painted steel post holding a warning sign. Stuck under the flange of that post…
Scrubland in southwest Utah, pale rock, low ridges, and almost nothing growing on it. Under that ground the rock sits at around 520 degrees Fahrenheit. It…
Flat water at the southern end of the Gulf of Suez, an hour or so before dark. Three tugs are pulling a barge toward a new…
A concrete pad in eastern China with a steel wellhead standing on it, fenced and otherwise unremarkable. Below it the ground drops away for nearly a…
A row of six machines along a ridge in southern Alberta, all facing the same way except one. That one is visibly turned aside. Its rotor…
A production deck in the Santa Barbara Channel, with rows of valve trees standing in the salt air. The paint on the risers is new. The…
A yellow steel tube standing upright in the swell about two miles off a headland west of Bilbao. Only the top of it is above water.…
A canal runs through farmland east of the valley floor, carrying water to almond groves and tomato fields. For most of its length it lies open…
A machinery room in a nuclear plant, a pump the size of a small car, a scheduled test on an ordinary Wednesday. The pump is supposed…
A building the shape of a prefab office block stands on dry ground in the southern end of California’s Central Valley. There is no flame anywhere…
Open water in the deepwater Gulf, a long way from anything, with a squared off platform standing on four columns. The seafloor under it lies more…
The seawater comes in through a channel cut into the coast, and everything in it arrives with the water. Weed, plastic, small fish, sand. A bank…
The jig takes both ends of the strip, folds it toward itself, holds it, and lets go. Then it does it again. It ran that way…
