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…
Something that heavy does not tip. It leans, then it settles, then it keeps settling for days afterward while everybody stands back and watches it. That…
Three people, four days, and a roof at the edge of a fjord. What they left behind looks like a field of dominoes nobody knocked over.…
At four in the morning the sea out there is black and the deck lights do not reach it. A slick makes no sound and shows nothing in…
There is a real finding here and it is narrower than it sounds. Somebody counted reported leaks state by state, year by year, and set those…
Walk to the western edge of the field and the first thing you notice is what is missing. There is no tilt. Rows of dark glass run…
The order of events is the part worth holding onto. The machine stopped itself first. Its own systems saw something wrong and shut it down before…
Everyone quotes the rotor. It is the number that fits in a headline. The number that actually decides the design is a much smaller one, measured…
Four acres of flat water, and a switch thrown on a Wednesday morning in August. The pumps at the treatment plant had been running around the…
The turbine on top of this thing is ordinary. It is the same class of machine bolted to steel legs all over the North Sea, driven…
The room is full of instruments and almost nobody speaks. On one panel a needle climbs and settles, and a recorder draws a line that keeps…
The alarm goes off at half past two in the morning. Everyone ends up in the hallway in bare feet, and nobody can smell anything at all.…
A gravel pad, a derrick, a rack of pipe and a diesel generator humming at the lease edge. The road in was graded for someone else,…
Melting is the cheapest way to hold heat. Warming a solid stores energy slowly and gives it back slowly, while melting it absorbs a large amount…
Fourteen miles out in the Baltic the water is cold and flat, and until this past July nothing under it carried electricity toward the Polish shore.…
There is a lot of hydrogen at a nuclear station, and none of it is nuclear. It cools the generator, because a gas one fourteenth the…
The cell is a foil pouch you could hold in one hand. It is clamped between two plates, two tabs bent up into a pair of…
A crane vessel held its position over open water while 16,500 tons of steel hung beneath it. Eight piles, each wider than a bus, went into the seabed…
A solar panel is a heat engine that hates heat. Silicon converts light at a rate that drops as the cell warms, so the same sunshine…
Five miles off the Shandong coast the water is barely thirteen feet deep. That shallowness is exactly why engineers chose this spot, and it is the whole design in one…
The corridor is stripped down to clean orange sand for as far as anyone can see. In the middle of it there is a dark oval…
The bracket has teeth. You pick a notch, you torque the bolt, and that is the last decision anyone makes about it. Twenty five years of…
At nine on an April evening in British waters, a drilling crew was threading a stack of pressure control equipment down through the water column. It…
A floating array has almost no weight to hold it down. Plastic floats and thin modules sit on water that offers no friction, so the whole…
The deck is stacked like a shipping yard that learned to float. Five nacelles in a row, blades racked alongside, tower sections cradled and strapped. That…
The decline at the Angas mine runs down into the hill on a gentle slope, wide enough for a truck. Somewhere past 790 feet it disappears…
In a service bay outside Kansas City, a technician reaches for a quart of full synthetic and finds the shelf price close to double what it was in…
Sand is running out in a way most people never hear about. Not desert sand, which is too round and too smooth to lock together, but…
A crane on a floating hull is a bad way to place something precise. The deck rolls a foot and the hook, hundreds of feet up,…
Red clay, a hundred miles from the nearest ocean, in the spring of 1983. A crew is cutting the foundation for a reactor in Burke County,…
The steel casing sticks a few inches out of the dirt, threaded shut, the last operator long gone. The ground around it is bare and crusted,…
The hardest part of a gas project is not drilling it. It is the six months after the valves open, when everything that was fine on…
On a street of ordinary terraced houses, a smoke alarm trips before dawn. A homeowner finds the attic glowing orange from below the slates, and every…
The house sits below the ridge, and from the back garden three of the six machines are directly in line. The couple inside moved from room…
On a July morning in central Hungary the pumps at a large riverside station began fighting something they were never built to fight. The river had…
Hydrogen is not stored, it is contained. The gas is so light that the only way to move a useful quantity by road is to squeeze…
Nothing was blowing across northern Oklahoma that morning. There was no storm on the radar and no advisory out, and the air over the county was…
The problem at this cemetery had nothing to do with the dead. Every winter the water table came up through the peat and stood in the…
Stand where two county roads cross in eastern Colorado and there is very little to look at. Behind the fence sit two nearly finished wind farms rated at…
A boiling water reactor is a pressure cooker that has to stay exactly half full. Water is the coolant and it is also the thing that…
Heat is the easy half of the energy problem. Making it is trivial and moving it is manageable, and the hard part has always been holding…
The blue ring on the gas stove lights instantly and burns clean to look at. It is the picture the industry spent decades putting in front…
A low industrial building near the Washington coast, in a city better known for assembling airliners. Inside it, a tube about 60 feet long, wrapped in…
A loaded deck is not a neutral thing. Stack a working ship with cargo and you have not simply added weight, you have changed the shape the wind…
The opening in the concrete is a rectangle about 64 feet tall. The object going through it is 42 feet of forged steel weighing 551 tons.…
