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Jan. 13, 2024 10:00 am ETA wind and power transmission project, called the largest of its kind in the country, has raised $11 billion in financing, kicking off a year when many utilities are expected to step up much-needed spending on the power grid.Pattern Energy Grouphas started construction on its SunZia project, a wind farm in central New Mexico, where more than 900 wind turbines will generate over 3,000 megawatts of clean energy. A 550-mile transmission line will bring the power to some three million people in…

December 1, 20234min readThe U.S. should back away from updating its obsolescent nuclear weapons, in particular silo-launched missiles that needlessly risk catastropheBy The Editors Credit: Adrián AstorganoThe U.S. is planning to modernize its unwanted, unneeded and unsafe nuclear triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons. Perfectly poised to refight the cold war, these overhauled bombs will waste $1.5 trillion and threaten life on Earth for the century to come. We should rethink this miserable folly rather than once…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is far from a show with growing pains—as we’ve said many times already, its first season landed with a confidence of what it wanted to do in ways few Star Trek debuts ever have before it. But it is a show where growing is inevitable: it’s a prequel about Kirk’s Enterprise before Kirk’s on it, so we are constantly anticipating the steps towards that future. But that’s not going to stop Strange New Worlds from examining what that growth means for everyone involved.Will We See More of Uhura's…

The federal government is missing a crucial link in its plan to greatly expand access to high-speed internet service in rural America: enough workers to get the job done. Fiber splicers—the workers who install, maintain and repair wired broadband networks—are in short supply. “We’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off,” says Jason Jolly, chief executive of Fiberscope LLC, a Sullivan, Mo.-based company that does contracted fiber-splicing work. Mr. Jolly says his five-person crew has been…

President Joe Biden's Intelligence Advisory Board now includes a top climate scientist. Biden recently announced the appointment of Kim Cobb, an earth sciences professor at Brown University and a lead author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in 2021, to the White House council that's tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of the nation's intelligence community. The council provides recommendation to the White House, and presidents have both followed and ignored its…

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the ochre rocket thundered into the sky around 1:47 A.M. ET, cleaving the darkness with a searing column of crackling fire and sending shudders through the ground near Cape Canaveral, Fla. Bound for the moon, it carries an uncrewed space capsule and a bounty of scientific payloads. But its most profound cargo is a psychic slice of the “American Dream”—a promise that, at least in spaceflight, the U.S. remains exceptional, with capabilities, ambitions and…

Solar accounts for about 4% of U.S. power generation. President Biden and other advocates of green energy are trying to boost that number significantly. To make that happen, though, the U.S. would need to build a supply chain almost from scratch. At the moment, the U.S. has little or no manufacturing for almost any component needed to produce solar energy. China, which can produce solar components less expensively, controls more than 80% of the supply chain, dominating the manufacture of solar panels and…

American leaders once wanted China to be rich: “strong, peaceful and prosperous,” as President George W. Bush said in 2002; “strong, prosperous and successful,” as President Barack Obama said in 2009.Times have changed. In the last 10 years, the U.S. has come to see China as a competitor rather than a partner, bent on displacing the U.S. as leader of the global economic and geostrategic order. This has two somewhat unsettling implications. First, while the U.S.…