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It’s been just over a week since one of the 350-foot-long blades of a wind turbine off the Massachusetts coast unexpectedly broke off, sending hunks of fiberglass and foam into the waters below. As of Wednesday morning, cleanup crews were still actively removing debris from the water and beaches and working to locate additional pieces of the blade.
The blade failure quickly became a crisis for residents of Nantucket, where debris soon began washing up on the island’s busy beaches. It is also a PR nightmare for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, which is already on the defensive against community opposition and rampant misinformation about its environmental risks and benefits.
The broken turbine is part of Vineyard Wind 1, which is being developed by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The project was still under construction when the breakage occurred, but it was already the largest operating offshore wind farm in the US, with ten turbines sending power to the New England Grid as of June. The plan is to bring another 52 online, which will produce enough electricity to power more than 400,000 homes. Now both installation and power generation have been paused while federal investigators look into the incident.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about why this happened, what the health and safety risks are, and what it means for this promising clean energy solution going forward. But here’s everything we’ve learned so far.
What happened?
Vineyard Wind
On the evening of Saturday, July 13, Vineyard Wind received an alert that there was a problem with one of its turbines. The equipment contains a “delicate sensoring system,” CEO Klaus Moeller told the Nantucket Select Board during a public meeting last week. Though he did not describe what the alert said, he added that “one of the blades was broken and folded over.” Later at the meeting, a spokesperson for GE Vernova, which manufactured and installed the turbines, said that “blade vibrations” had been detected. About a third of the blade, or roughly 120 feet, fell into the water.
Two days later, Vineyard Wind contacted the town manager in Nantucket to explain that modeling showed the potential for debris from the blade to travel toward the island. Sure enough, fiberglass shards and other scraps began washing up on shore the next day, and all beaches on the island’s south shore were quickly closed to the public.
On Thursday morning, another large portion of the damaged blade detached and fell into the ocean. Monitoring and recovery crews continued to find debris throughout the area over the weekend. The beaches have since reopened, but visitors have been advised to wear shoes and leave their pets at home as cleanup continues.
Why did the blade break?
During GE’s second quarter earnings call on July 24, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik and Vice President of Investor Relations Michael Lapides said the company had identified a “material deviation” as the cause of the accident, and that the company is continuing to work on a "root cause analysis" to get to the bottom of how said deviation happened in the first place.
The turbine was one of GE’s Haliade-X 13-megawatt turbines, which are manufactured in Gaspé, Canada, and it was still undergoing post-installation testing by GE when the failure occurred — that is, it was not among those sending power to the New England grid. This was actually the second issue the company has had at this particular turbine site. One of the original blades destined for the site was damaged during the installation process, and the one that broke last week was a replacement, Craig Gilvard, Vineyard Wind’s communications director, told the New Bedford Light.
How did Vineyard Wind respond?
By Vineyard Wind’s account at the meeting last week, the accident triggered an automatic shut down of the system and activated the company’s emergency response plan, which
included immediately notifying the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and regional emergency response committees.
Moeller, the CEO, said during the meeting that the company worked with the Coast Guard to immediately establish a 500 meter “safety zone” around the turbine and to send out notices to mariners. According to the Coast Guard’s
notice log, however, the safety zone went into effect three days later. In response to my questions, the Coast Guard confirmed that the zone was established around 8pm that night and announced to mariners over radio broadcast.
Two days after the turbine broke, on Monday, Vineyard Wind contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for aid in modeling where the turbine debris would travel in the water. The agency
estimated pieces would likely make landfall in Nantucket that day. Vineyard Wind put out a press release about the accident and subsequently contacted the Nantucket town manager. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting last week, Moeller said the company followed regulatory protocols but that there was “really no excuse” for how long it took to inform the public, and said, “we want to move much quicker and make sure that we learn from this.”
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has
ordered the company to cease all power production and installation activities until it can determine whether this was an isolated incident or affects other turbines.
By Tuesday, Vineyard Wind said it had deployed two small teams to Nantucket in addition to hiring a local contractor to remove debris on the island. The company later
said it would “increase its local team to more than 50 employees and contractors dedicated to beach clean-up and debris recovery efforts.”
GE Vernova is responsible for recovering offshore debris and has not published any public statements about the effort. In response to a list of questions, a GE Vernova spokesperson said, “We continue to work around the clock to enhance mitigation efforts in collaboration with Vineyard Wind and all relevant state, local and federal authorities. We are working with urgency to complete our root cause analysis of this event.”
Did anyone get hurt?
There have been no reported injuries as a result of the accident.
What are the risks now?
Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova have stressed that the debris are “not toxic.” At the Select Board meeting, GE’s executive fleet engineering director Renjith Viripullan said that the blade is made of fiberglass, foam, and balsa wood. It is bonded together using a “bond paste,” he said, and likened the blade construction to that of a boat. “That's the correlation we need to think about,” he said.
One of the board members asked if there was any risk of PFAS contamination as a result of the accident. Viripullan said he would need to “take that question back” and follow up with the answer later. (This was one of the questions I asked GE, but the company did not respond to it.)
That being said, the debris poses some dangers. Photos of cleanup crews posted to the Harbormaster’s Facebook page show workers wearing white hazmat suits. Vineyard Wind said “members of the public should avoid handling debris as the fiber-glass pieces can be sharp and lead to cuts if handled without proper gloves.”
Though members of the public raised concerns at the meeting and to the press that fiberglass fragments in the ocean threaten marine life and public health, it is not yet clear how serious the risks are, and several efforts are underway to further assess them. Vineyard Wind is developing a water quality testing plan for the island and setting up a process for people to file claims.GE hired a design and engineering firm to conduct an environmental assessment, which it will present at a Nantucket Select Board meeting later this week. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has requested information from the companies about the makeup of the debris to evaluate risks, and the Department of Fish and Game is monitoring for impacts to the local ecosystem.
How is the cleanup going?
As of last Wednesday morning, Vineyard Wind had collected “approximately 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads, and several larger pieces that washed ashore.” It is not yet known what fraction of the turbine that fell off has been recovered. Vineyard Wind did not respond to a request for the latest numbers in time for publication, but I’ll update this piece if I get a response.
Has anything like this happened before?
Yes. In May, a blade on the same model of turbine, the GE Haliade-X, sustained damage at a wind farm being installed off the coast of England called Dogger Bank. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting, a spokesperson for GE said the Dogger Bank incident was “an installation issue specific to the installation of that blade” and that “we don’t think there’s a connection between that installation issue and what we saw here.” Executives emphasized this point during the earnings call and chalked up the Dogger Bank incident to “an installation error out at sea.”
Several blades have also broken off another GE turbine model dubbed the Cypress at wind farms in Germany and Sweden. After the most recent incident in Germany last October, the company used similar language, telling reporters that it was working to “determine the root cause.”
A “company source with knowledge of the investigations” into the various incidents recently told CNN that “there were different root causes for the damage, including transportation, handling, and manufacturing deviations.”
The backlash was swift. Nantucket residents immediately
wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines. “I know it's not oil, but it's sharp and maybe toxic in other ways,” Select Board member Dawn Holgate told company executives at the meeting last week. “We're also facing an exponential risk if this were to continue because many more windmills are planned to be built out there and there's been a lot of concern about that throughout the community.”
The Select Board plans to
meet in private on Tuesday night to discuss “potential litigation by the town against Vineyard Wind relative to recovery costs.”
“We expect Vineyard Wind will be responsible for all costs and associated remediation efforts incurred by the town in response to the incident,” Elizabeth Gibson, the Nantucket town manager said during the meeting last week.
The Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe is
also calling for a moratorium on offshore wind development and raised concerns about the presence of fiberglass fragments in the water.
Meanwhile, environmental groups supportive of offshore wind tried to do damage control for the industry. “Now we must all work to ensure that the failure of a single turbine blade does not adversely impact the emergence of offshore wind as a critical solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis,” the Sierra Club’s senior advisor for offshore wind, Nancy Pyne,
wrote in a statement. “Wind power is one of the safest forms of energy generation.”
This story was last updated July 24 at 3:15 p.m. The current version contains new information and corrects the location where the turbine blades are produced. With assistance from Jael Holzman.
The concept of virtual power plants has been kicking around for decades. Coordinating a network of distributed energy resources — think solar panels, batteries, and smart appliances — to operate like a single power plant upends our notion of what grid-scale electricity generation can look like, not to mention the role individual consumers can play. But the idea only began taking slow, stuttering steps from theory to practice once homeowners started pairing rooftop solar with home batteries in the past decade.
Now, enthusiasm is accelerating as extreme weather, electricity load growth, and increased renewables penetration are straining the grid and interconnection queue. And the money is starting to pour in. Today, home battery manufacturer and VPP software company Lunar Energy announced $232 million in new funding — a $102 million Series D round, plus a previously unannounced $130 million Series C — to help deploy its integrated hardware and software systems across the U.S.
The company’s CEO, Kunal Girotra, founded Lunar Energy in the summer of 2020 after leaving his job as head of Tesla Energy, which makes the Tesla Powerwall battery for homeowners and the Megapack for grid-scale storage. As he put it, back then, “everybody was focused on either building the next best electric car or solving problems for the grid at a centralized level.” But he was more interested in what was happening with households as home battery costs were declining. “The vision was, how can we get every home a battery system and with smart software, optimize that for dual benefit for the consumer as well as the grid?”
VPPs work by linking together lots of small energy resources. Most commonly, this includes solar, home batteries, and appliances that can be programmed to adjust their energy usage based on grid conditions. These disparate resources work in concert conducted by software that coordinates when they should charge, discharge, or ramp down their electricity use based on grid needs and electricity prices. So if a network of home batteries all dispatched energy to the grid at once, that would have the same effect as firing up a fossil fuel power plant — just much cleaner.
Lunar’s artificial intelligence-enabled home energy system analyzes customers’ energy use patterns alongside grid and weather conditions. That allows Lunar’s battery to automatically charge and discharge at the most cost-effective times while retaining an adequate supply of backup power. The batteries, which started shipping in California last year, also come integrated with the company’s Gridshare software. Used by energy companies and utilities, Gridshare already manages all of Sunrun’s VPPs, including nearly 130,000 home batteries — most from non-Lunar manufacturers — that can dispatch energy when the grid needs it most.
This accords with Lunar’s broader philosophy, Girotra explained — that its batteries should be interoperable with all grid software, and its Gridshare platform interoperable with all batteries, whether they’re made by Lunar or not. “That’s another differentiator from Tesla or Enphase, who are creating these walled gardens,” he told me. “We believe an Android-like software strategy is necessary for the grid to really prosper.”That should make it easier for utilities to support VPPs in an environment where there are more and more differentiated home batteries and software systems out there.
And yet the real-world impact of VPPs remains limited today. That’s partially due to the main problem Lunar is trying to solve — the technical complexity of coordinating thousands of household-level systems. But there are also regulatory barriers and entrenched utility business models to contend with, since the grid simply wasn’t set up for households to be energy providers as well as consumers.
Girotra is well-versed in the difficulties of this space. When he first started at Tesla a decade ago, he helped kick off what’s widely considered to be the country’s first VPP with Green Mountain Power in Vermont. The forward-looking utility was keen to provide customers with utility-owned Tesla Powerwalls, networking them together to lower peak system demand. But larger VPPs that utilize customer-owned assets and seek to sell energy from residential batteries into wholesale electricity markets — as Lunar wants to do — are a different beast entirely.
Girotra thinks their time has come. “This year and the next five years are going to be big for VPPs,” he told me. The tide started to turn in California last summer, he said, after a successful test of the state’s VPP capacity had over 100,000 residential batteries dispatching more than 500 megawatts of power to the grid for two hours — enough to power about half of San Francisco. This led to a significant reduction in electricity demand during the state’s evening peak, with the VPP behaving just like a traditional power plant.
Armed with this demonstration of potential and its recent influx of cash, Lunar aims to scale its battery fleet, growing from about 2,000 deployed systems today to about 10,000 by year’s end, and “at least doubling” every year after that. Ultimately, the company aims to leverage the popularity of its Gridshare platform to become a market maker, helping to shape the structure of VPP programs — as it’s already doing with the Community Choice Aggregators that it’s partnered with so far in California.
In the meantime, Girotra said Lunar is also involved in lobbying efforts to push state governments and utilities to make it easier for VPPs to participate in the market. “VPPs were always like nuclear fusion, always for the future,” he told me. But especially after last year’s demonstration, he thinks the entire grid ecosystem, from system operators to regulators, are starting to realize that the technology is here today. ”This is not small potatoes anymore.”
If all the snow and ice over the past week has you fed up, you might consider moving to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, or Atlanta. These five cities receive little to no measurable snow in a given year; subtropical Atlanta technically gets the most — maybe a couple of inches per winter, though often none. Even this weekend’s bomb cyclone, which dumped 7 inches across parts of northeastern Georgia, left the Atlanta suburbs with too little accumulation even to make a snowman.
San Francisco and the aforementioned Sun Belt cities are also the five pilot locations of the all-electric autonomous-vehicle company Waymo. That’s no coincidence. “There is no commercial [automated driving] service operating in winter conditions or freezing rain,” Steven Waslander, a University of Toronto robotics professor who leads WinTOR, a research program aimed at extending the seasonality of self-driving cars, told me. “We don’t have it completely solved.”
Snow and freezing rain, in particular, are among the most hazardous driving conditions, and 70% of the U.S. population lives in areas that experience such conditions in winter. But for the same reasons snow and ice are difficult for human drivers — reduced visibility, poor traction, and a greater need to react quickly and instinctively in anticipation of something like black ice or a fishtailing vehicle in an adjacent lane — they’re difficult for machines to manage, too.
The technology that enables self-driving cars to “see” the road and anticipate hazards ahead comes in three varieties. Tesla Autopilot uses cameras, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk has lauded for operating naturally, like a human driver’s eye — but they have the same limitations as a human eye when conditions deteriorate, too.
Lidar, used by Waymo and, soon, Rivian, deploys pulses of light that bounce off objects and return to sensors to create 3D images of the surrounding environment. Lidar struggles in snowy conditions because the sensors also absorb airborne particles, including moisture and flakes. (Not to mention, lidar is up to 32 times more expensive than Tesla’s comparatively simple, inexpensive cameras.) Radar, the third option, isn’t affected by darkness, snow, fog, or rain, using long radio wavelengths that essentially bend around water droplets in the air. But it also has the worst resolution of the bunch — it’s good at detecting cars, but not smaller objects, such as blown tire debris — and typically needs to be used alongside another sensor, like lidar, as it is on Waymo cars.
Driving in the snow is still “definitely out of the domain of the current robotaxis from Waymo or Baidu, and the long-haul trucks are not testing those conditions yet at all,” Waslander said. “But our research has shown that a lot of the winter conditions are reasonably manageable.”
To boot, Waymo is now testing its vehicles in Tokyo and London, with Denver, Colorado, set to become the first true “winter city” for the company. Waymo also has ambitions to expand into New York City, which received nearly 12 inches of snow last week during Winter Storm Fern.
But while scientists are still divided on whether climate change is increasing instances of polar vortices — which push extremely cold Arctic air down into the warmer, moister air over the U.S., resulting in heavy snowfall — we do know that as the planet warms, places that used to freeze solid all winter will go through freeze-thaw-refreeze cycles that make driving more dangerous. Freezing rain, which requires both warm and cold air to form, could also increase in frequency. Variability also means that autonomous vehicles will need to navigate these conditions even in presumed-mild climates such as Georgia.
Snow and ice throw a couple of wrenches at autonomous vehicles. Cars need to be taught how to brake or slow down on slush, soft snow, packed snow, melting snow, ice — every variation of winter road condition. Other drivers and pedestrians also behave differently in snow than in clear weather, which machine learning models must incorporate. The car itself will also behave differently, with traction changing at critical moments, such as when approaching an intersection or crosswalk.
Expanding the datasets (or “experience”) of autonomous vehicles will help solve the problem on the technological side. But reduced sensor accuracy remains a big concern — because you can only react to hazards you can identify in the first place. A crust of ice over a camera or lidar sensor can prevent the equipment from working properly, which is a scary thought when no one’s in the driver’s seat.
As Waslander alluded to, there are a few obvious coping mechanisms for robotaxi and autonomous vehicle makers: You can defrost, thaw, wipe, or apply a coating to a sensor to keep it clear. Or you can choose something altogether different.
Recently, a fourth kind of sensor has entered the market. At CES in January, the company Teradar demonstrated its Summit sensor, which operates in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, a “Goldilocks” zone between the visible light used by cameras and the human eye and radar. “We have all the advantages of radar combined with all the advantages of lidar or camera,” Gunnar Juergens, the SVP of product at Teradar, told me. “It means we get into very high resolution, and we have a very high robustness against any weather influence.”
The company, which raised $150 million in a Series B funding round last year, says it is in talks with top U.S. and European automakers, with the goal of making it onto a 2028 model vehicle; Juergens also told me the company imagines possible applications in the defense, agriculture, and health-care spaces. Waslander hadn’t heard of Teradar before I told him about it, but called the technology a “super neat idea” that could prove to be a “really useful sensor” if it is indeed able to capture the advantages of both radar and lidar. “You could imagine replacing both with one unit,” he said.
Still, radar and lidar are well-established technologies with decades of development behind them, and “there’s a reason” automakers rely on them, Waslander told me. Using the terahertz band, “there’s got to be some trade-offs,” he speculated, such as lower measurement accuracy or higher absorption rates. In other words, while Teradar boasts the upsides of both radar and lidar, it may come with some of their downsides, too.
Another point in Teradar’s favor is that it doesn’t use a lens at all — there’s nothing to fog, freeze, or salt over. The sensor could help address a fundamental assumption of autonomy — as Juergen put it, “if you transfer responsibility from the human to a machine, it must be better than a human.” There are “very good solutions on the road,” he went on. “The question is, can they handle every weather or every use case? And the answer is no, they cannot.” Until sensors can demonstrate matching or exceeding human performance in snowy conditions — whether through a combination of lidar, cameras, and radar, or through a new technology such as Teradar’s Summit sensor — this will remain true.
If driving in winter weather can eventually be automated at scale, it could theoretically save thousands of lives. Until then, you might still consider using that empty parking lot nearby to brush up on your brake pumping.
Otherwise, there’s always Phoenix; I’ve heard it’s pleasant this time of year.
Current conditions: After a brief reprieve of temperatures hovering around freezing, the Northeast is bracing for a return to Arctic air and potential snow squalls at the end of the week • Cyclone Fytia’s death toll more than doubled to seven people in Madagascar as flooding continues • Temperatures in Mongolia are plunging below 0 degrees Fahrenheit for the rest of the workweek.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Interior Secretary suggests Supreme Court could step in to kill offshore wind
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum suggested the Supreme Court could step in to overturn the Trump administration’s unbroken string of losses in all five cases where offshore wind developers challenged its attempts to halt construction on turbines. “I believe President Trump wants to kill the wind industry in America,” Fox Business News host Stuart Varney asked during Burgum’s appearance on Tuesday morning. “How are you going to do that when the courts are blocking it?” Burgum dismissed the rulings by what he called “court judges” who “were all at the district level,” and said “there’s always the possibility to keep moving that up through the chain.” Burgum — who, as my colleague Robinson Meyer noted last month, has been thrust into an ideological crisis over Trump’s actions toward Greenland — went on to reiterate the claims made in a Department of Defense report in December that sought to justify the halt to all construction on offshore turbines on the grounds that their operation could “create radar interference that could represent a tremendous threat off our highly populated northeast coast.” The issue isn’t new. The Obama administration put together a task force in 2011 to examine the problem of “radar clutter” from wind turbines. The Department of Energy found that there were ways to mitigate the issue, and promoted the development of next-generation radar that could see past turbines.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is facing accusations of violating the Constitution with its orders to keep coal-fired power stations operating past planned retirement. By mandating their coal plants stay open, two electrical cooperatives in Colorado said the Energy Department’s directive “constitutes both a physical taking and a regulatory taking” of property by the government without just compensation or due process, Utility Dive reported.
2. New permitting bill would prevent Trump from yanking wind permits
Back in December, the promise of a bipartisan deal on permitting reform seemed possible as the SPEED Act came up for a vote in the House. At the last minute, however, far-right Republicans and opponents of offshore wind leveraged their votes to win an amendment specifically allowing President Donald Trump to continue his attempts to kill off the projects to build turbines off the Eastern Seaboard. With key Democrats in the Senate telling Heatmap’s Jael Holzman that their support hinged on legislation that did the opposite of that, the SPEED Act stalled out. Now a new bipartisan bill aims to rectify what went wrong. The FREEDOM Act — an acronym for “Fighting for Reliable Energy and Ending Doubt for Open Markets” — would prevent a Republican administration from yanking permits from offshore wind or a Democratic one from going after already-licensed oil and gas projects, while setting new deadlines for agencies to speed up application reviews. I got an advanced copy of the bill Monday night, so you can read the full piece on it here on Heatmap.
One element I didn’t touch on in my story is what the legislation would do for geothermal. Next-generation geothermal giant Fervo Energy pulled off its breakthrough in using fracking technology to harness the Earth’s heat in more places than ever before just after the Biden administration completed work on its landmark clean energy bills. As a result, geothermal lost out on key policy boosts that, for example, the next-generation nuclear industry received. The FREEDOM Act would require the government to hold twice as many lease sales on federal lands for geothermal projects. It would also extend the regulatory shortcuts the oil and gas industry enjoys to geothermal companies.
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3. Siemens bets $1 billion on gas turbines
A chart showing which manufacturers are providing the turbines for America's gas projects. GEM
Take a look at the above chart. In the United States, new gas power plants are surging to meet soaring electricity demand. At last count, two thirds of projects currently underway haven’t publicly identified which manufacturer is making their gas turbines. With the backlog for turbines now stretching to the end of the decade, Siemens Energy wants to grow its share of booming demand. The German company, which already boasts the second-largest order book in the U.S. market, is investing $1 billion to produce more turbines and grid equipment. “The models need to be trained,” Christian Bruch, the chief executive of Siemens Energy, told The New York Times. “The electricity need is going to be there.”
While most of the spending is set to go through existing plants in Florida and North Carolina, Siemens Energy plans to build a new factory in Mississippi to produce electric switchgear, the equipment that manages power flows on the grid. It’s hardly alone. In September, Mitsubishi announced plans to double its manufacturing capacity for gas turbines over the next two years. After the announcement, the Japanese company’s share price surged. Until then, investors’ willingness to fund manufacturing expansions seemed limited. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin put it, “Wall Street has been happy to see developers get in line for whatever turbines can be made from the industry’s existing facilities. But what happens when the pressure to build doesn’t come from customers but from competitors?” Siemens just gave its answer.
4. Josh Shapiro pushes for ‘selective’ approach to data centers
At his annual budget address in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro touted Amazon’s plans to invest $20 billion into building two data center campuses in his state. But he said it’s time for the state to become “selective about the projects that get built here.” To narrow the criteria, he said developers “must bring their own power generation online or fully fund new generation to meet their needs — without driving up costs for homeowners or businesses.” He insisted that data centers conserve more water. “I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centers and the impact they could have on our communities, our utility bills, and our environment,” he said, according to WHYY. “And so do I.” The Democrat, who is running for reelection, also called on utilities to find ways to slash electricity rates by 20%.
5. Consumer Reports’ top cars are all hybrids or EVs for the first time
For the first time, every vehicle on Consumer Reports’ list of top picks for the year is a hybrid (or available as one) or an electric vehicle. The magazine cautioned that its endorsement extended to every version of the winning vehicles in each category. “For example, our pick of the Honda Civic means we think the gas-only Civic, the hybrid, and the sporty Si are all excellent. But for some models, we emphasize the version that we think will work best for most people.” But the publication said “the hybrid option is often quieter and more refined at speed, and its improved fuel efficiency usually saves you money in the long term.”
THE KICKER
Elon Musk wants to put data centers in space. In an application to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX laid out plans to launch a constellation of a million solar-powered data centers to ease the strain the artificial intelligence boom is placing on the Earth’s grids. Each data center, according to E&E News, would be 31 miles long and operate more than 310 miles above the planet’s surface. “By harnessing the Sun’s abundant, clean energy in orbit — cutting emissions, minimizing land disruption, and reducing the overall environmental costs of grid expansion — SpaceX’s proposed system will enable sustainable AI advancement,” the company said in the filing.
A chart showing which manufacturers are providing the turbines for America's gas projects. GEM