October 27, 2018

Weekend reads: Arizona's battle for solar energy; Dyson joins the EV market

It's the weekend! Kick back and relax with these must-read stories from around the web: 

The Battle for Solar Energy in the Country’s Sunniest State (The New Yorker) In late September, the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that receives donations from fossil-fuel companies, published a blog post titled “California Billionaire’s Renewable Energy Initiative Makes Arizona Ballot.” The billionaire in question was Tom Steyer, whose year-long effort to pass Proposition 127, an amendment to Arizona’s constitution that would require power companies to generate fifty per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, has faced aggressive opposition from the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, or A.P.S.

Dyson to Join Electric Vehicle Revolution With First Car Launch in 2021 (Good News Network) Dyson, the renowned British tech company responsible for revolutionizing vacuum cleaners, has just announced that it will soon begin manufacturing electric cars. The company is set to begin construction on an automotive factory based out of Singapore in December. With completion of the facility projected in 2020, Dyson representatives say that they expect to launch their first car in 2021.

Creating the Optimal Experience in Higher Education through Lighting Controls (Forbes) The lighting controls market is seeing a shift to more advanced control offerings and growth overall. The improved controllability of LEDs over legacy lighting technologies and growth of LEDs has helped drive adoption of lighting controls. Beyond the additional energy savings that lighting controls provide, networked lighting controls are LED-based lighting systems with sensors and controllers that are connected, allowing the devices to communicate and transmit data.

This Tiny Home is Powered Entirely by Coffee, and You Can Rent It for $10 a Night (The Weather Channel) Dunkin' Donuts unveiled their multi-million dollar advertising tagline "America Runs on Dunkin'" more than 12 years ago, and now, that tagline can be applied to a house. Cue the Home that Runs on Dunkin', a custom, fully functional and transportable tiny house built to run entirely on a biofuel created out of recycled coffee grounds, the company announced in a press release.

These huge new wind turbines are a marvel. They’re also the future. (Vox) The declining price of solar power gets more press, but there are big things happening in wind technology too. And I mean big. The math on wind turbines is pretty simple: Bigger is better. Specifically, there are two ways to produce more power from the wind in a given area.

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