Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11

Which we have plenty of here in Seattle. Although many of the Bullitt Center’s technologies are currently too expensive for widespread use (which is why it remains one of the world’s greenest buildings seven years after it opened), we can still make homes and offices more efficient at a low cost.

the Seattle area, where I live, we get about twice as much sunlight on the longest day of the year as on the shortest day. Parts of Canada and Russia get about 12 times more.

We already know how to take the salt out of seawater and make it drinkable, but the process takes a lot of energy, as does moving the water from the ocean to the desalination facility and then from the facility to whoever needs

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.

Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them…

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1950, more than 90 percent did, thanks to efforts like federal funding for dams, the creation of federal agencies to regulate energy, and a massive government project to bring electricity to rural areas.

I invested $50 million in the company. But its technology just didn’t work well enough—various technical challenges meant the plant couldn’t produce at nearly the volume it needed to be economical—and the plant I visited eventually shut down. It was a $50 million dead end, but I’m not sorry I did it. We need to be exploring lots of ideas, even know

You won’t save as much if you’re retrofitting an existing home, but switching to a heat pump is still less expensive in most cities. In Houston, for example, doing this will save you 17 percent. In Chicago, your costs will actually go up 6 percent, because natural gas there is unusually cheap. And in some older homes it’s simply not practical to fi