Lifeboat Foundation

Not good!

Workers took the Keystone oil pipeline offline on Thursday after it spilled 5,000 barrels of oil in rural South Dakota, officials said.

A TransCanada crew shut down the pipeline at 6 a.m. Thursday morning after detecting an oil leak along the line, the company said. The leak was detected along a stretch of the pipeline about 35 miles south of a pumping station in Marshall County, South Dakota.

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Lockheed Martin has been awarded an Air Force Research Laboratory contract to develop and produce high-energy fiber laser weapons for tactical fighter aircraft.

Citizens’ Assembly hears how Denmark became one of most efficient countries in world.

Building solar and wind farms has started to become a cheaper proposition than running aging coal and nuclear generators in parts of the U.S., according to financial adviser Lazard Ltd.

On Saturday, a record 24.6% of total electricity came from wind power sources in the 28 countries of the European Union. The majority of this wind electricity was generated offshore (91.3%) vs onshore (8.7%).

With Europe moving into the high wind production winter period, we expect a new season of records being broken. And with massive scale construction continuing for offshore wind farms, these records of 2017 will soon look quaint.

The amounts of electricity generated were enough to power 197 million European households or 68% of all industrial electricity needs. Europe has about 500 million total people, with a land mass very close to that of the USA.

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Physicists have proposed a way to test quantum gravity that, in principle, could be performed by a laser-based, table-top experiment using currently available technology. Although a theory of quantum gravity would overcome one of the biggest challenges in modern physics by unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, currently physicists have no way of testing any proposed theories of quantum gravity.

Now a team of seven physicists from various countries, S. Dey, A. Bhat, D. Momeni, M. Faizal, A. F. Ali, T. K. Dey, and A. Rehman, have come up with a novel way to experimentally test quantum gravity using a laser-based experiment. They have published a paper on their proposed test in a recent issue of Nuclear Physics B.

One reason why testing quantum gravity is so challenging is that its effects appear only at very high-energy scales and their corresponding tiny length scales. These extreme scales, which are very near the Planck scale, are roughly 15 orders of magnitude beyond those accessible by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), by far the world’s highest-energy experiment.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=uzwMQB1Vw0I

Struggling to steer its economy away from oil dependence, Saudi Arabia announced an audacious plan to build a $500 billion super-city that is intended to become a world-class business hub.

Saudi Arabia is moving toward a “new generation of cities,” said Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of the Middle Eastern kingdom, during one of his rare appearances before the press on October 24. The first of its kind, the city, to be named Neom, would be powered by green energy and have no room for “anything traditional,” he said.

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Superior batteries are on the way, and they could disrupt power markets within the next decade—Sooner Than You Think.

Last week saw the launch of the world’s first floating offshore wind farm. Located in the North Sea off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland, the wind farm consists of five enormous horizontal-axis turbines that together can generate 30 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough to power about 20,000 homes.

The wind farm is called Hywind, and it’s been in the making for over 15 years, spearheaded by Norwegian energy firm Statoil. Key facts about the turbines and their location include:

Continue reading “The World’s First Floating Wind Farm Is an Incredible Feat of Engineering” »