Archive for the 'Infrastructure' Category
Harvard’s $39B Endowment Is Reportedly Buying Up California’s Vineyards—and Their Water Rights
December 13th, 2018Via: Fortune: Harvard University’s endowment is reportedly buying up vineyards in California’s wine country, along with the water rights belonging to those properties. Instead of making the land purchases in its own name, Harvard is using a wholly owned subsidiary—named Brodiaea after the scientific name for the cluster lily—to buy vineyards. Harvard created Brodiaea in […]
Texas Is About to Create OPEC’s Worst Nightmare
November 24th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: The map lays out OPEC’s nightmare in graphic form. An infestation of dots, thousands of them, represent oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico. In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices […]
FCC Approves SpaceX Application for Massive Satellite Constellation
November 15th, 2018Via: Ars Technica: SpaceX today received US approval to deploy 7,518 broadband satellites, in addition to the 4,425 satellites that were approved eight months ago. The Federal Communications Commission voted to let SpaceX launch 4,425 low-Earth orbit satellites in March of this year. SpaceX separately sought approval for 7,518 satellites operating even closer to the […]
Wikileaks: Amazon Atlas
October 11th, 2018Via: WikiLeaks: Today, 11 October 2018, WikiLeaks publishes a “Highly Confidential” internal document from the cloud computing provider Amazon. The document from late 2015 lists the addresses and some operational details of over one hundred data centers spread across fifteen cities in nine countries. To accompany this document, WikiLeaks also created a map showing where […]
The World’s Most Beautiful Battery
October 7th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: High in the Austrian Alps, a utility has adapted a 70-year-old facility to store solar and wind energy for when it’s needed most.
Flint Water Crisis: Michigan Health Director Ordered to Manslaughter Trial
August 22nd, 2018Via: Ars Technica: A judge on Monday ordered Michigan’s top health official, Nick Lyon, to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter charges in two deaths linked to the Flint water crisis. Genesee District Judge David Goggins determined that there was probable cause that Lyon committed involuntary manslaughter against Robert Skidmore and John Snyder in 2015. The […]
Stacking Concrete Blocks Is a Surprisingly Efficient Way to Store Energy
August 19th, 2018I like to follow these relatively low-tech methods of energy storage, even though they don’t seem to catch on. It’s interesting to see a modern take on old ideas. The Energy Vault (below) is a similar concept to the Ares, which stores energy by moving a mass up a hill on rails. The Energy Vault, […]
The San Onofre Nuclear Plant Is a ‘Fukushima Waiting to Happen’
August 17th, 2018Via: San Diego Union Tribune: Southern California Edison is keeping 3.6 million pounds of lethal radioactive waste at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear plant in San Clemente. The waste poses a significant threat to the health, safety and economic vitality of the region’s more than 8 million residents. But Edison’s plan for storing it is […]
Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet
August 17th, 2018Via: Reason: A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into […]
The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery
July 29th, 2018Via: New York Times: Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century. […]
