A combination of climate-fueled extreme weather events and a reliance on fossil fuels could raise the electricity bills of many Floridians this spring. Three of the state’s largest utilities — Florida Power & Light (FPL), Duke Energy and Tampa Electric Company (TECO) — have asked the state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) to approve rate hikes […]
In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City, shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of people, damaging more than 69,000 apartments or homes and killing 44 people in the city alone. Now, new research shows the trauma of the storm had a lasting impact on children who were in the womb […]
In a visit to Puerto Rico Monday, President Joe Biden pledged an initial $60 million to help the U.S. territory prepare for hurricanes and other storms that have been made more extreme by the climate crisis. His visit comes five years after Hurricane Maria devastated the island’s infrastructure and killed nearly 3,000 people and around […]
By Will Gorman, Bentham Paulos, and Galen Barbose Hurricane Ian’s catastrophic winds and flooding are likely to bring long-lasting power outages to large parts of Florida. The storm is the latest in a line of hurricanes and extreme heat and cold events that have knocked out power to millions of Americans in recent years for […]
The storm was downgraded to a tropical storm Thursday morning as winds weakened to 65 mph. Ian continues to batter Florida as it marches north. More than 2.6 million Florida energy customers are still without power Thursday, according to the tracker PowerOutage.us. The storm is poised to become one of the costliest storms in U.S. history, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Hurricane Kay, which is currently churning off the coast of Baja California, could be the rare Northeast Pacific hurricane to impact the northern Mexican peninsula as well as drought-ravaged Southern California. The storm could bring relief to a state baking under a record-breaking September heat wave, but heavy rainfall poses risks as well. “[I]t’s never […]
Tropical storms are increasingly forming and making landfall before the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season as ocean temperatures warm, a new study published in Nature Communications finds. The study’s publication comes as NOAA considers moving the official June 1 start date up to May 15. As reported by The Washington Post: The start date is […]
Scientists are constantly working on ways to innovate wind turbines to make them more efficient and resilient. From designing wood turbine towers with a smaller carbon footprint to investigating ways to reuse old wind turbine blades, there are a lot of impressive wind energy feats underway around the world. Now, researchers have found a way […]
Watching the news, it sometimes feels like we are surviving one disaster after another, from record-breaking hurricanes to megadroughts to a global pandemic. It turns out that this feeling is backed by data. A new UN report found that the number of medium-to large-scale disasters in the past two decades is actually five times more […]