The Huge Electric Leadership of a Small California Town

By Building Its Own Microgrid, Rural Gonzales Charts a Path to the Energy Future

If California is lucky, our energy future could look like a small town in the rural Salinas Valley.

Longtime readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that the town in question is Gonzales, the California municipal version of the Little Engine That Could. Its small, working-class population of just 9,000, many of them farmworkers, has ingeniously solved tricky local government problems, from universal broadband to health care access, and from economic planning to child development.

Now Gonzales is tackling one of our state’s most stubborn challenges: how to develop …

by Joe Mathews | February 16, 2021

The Dirty Industrial Rivalry That Determined Whether America’s Electricity Would Be AC or DC

The Public Battle Between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse Cost the Lives of Both Line Workers and Animals

by Ivy Roberts | June 5, 2019

Before new forms of technology became a regular fact of American life, the mingling of public hopes and fears around these innovations was more obvious than it is today. By …

The Invention of the Light Bulb Did Not Conquer the Night

A Museum Exhibit Explores How Painters Depicted Darkness Even as the World Embraced Artificial Light

By Jane Brox | November 19, 2015

For many of us in the modern world, light at the flick of a switch feels so natural that it’s difficult to imagine a time when even the meager flame …

Are Electric Companies Facing Extinction?

Solar Panels and Smart Meters Are Threatening an Industry That Doesn't Know How to Innovate

by Sean Casten | January 14, 2015

When the Supreme Court upheld the EPA’s right to regulate carbon and other emissions from power plants, it set off another round of complaint from the utility industry. Sure, this …

A Future Awash in LED Light

The Unexpected Rise of This Bright, Energy-Efficient Lighting Technology Spells the End for Edison’s Incandescent Lamp

by Hal Wallace | October 15, 2014

The Nobel Prize in Physics just awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for their work on blue light-emitting diodes—LEDs as they are commonly known—reveals the extent to …

electricity