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shipwreck in museum

Interview with Samuel West, founder of the Museum of Failure

By Dan Drollette Jr | Jan 16, 2023

Society needs to embrace the idea that most of the first tries at a new technology—such as those for renewables—will fail at first. But that’s good, so long as one learns from the experiences and moves on to the next iteration, until the technology succeeds.

How my Gen Z students learned to start worrying and dismantle the Bomb

By Frida Berrigan | Jan 15, 2024

A life-long opponent of nuclear weapons—raised during the Cold War—reflects on intergenerational lessons about activism, and teaching college students to embrace their curiosity, and their fear, on the way to saving the world.
1890s photo of Nikola Tesla in lab

Introduction: Why some renewable technologies will perish—and others succeed

By Dan Drollette Jr | Jan 16, 2023

The Inflation Reduction Act contains $370 billion to cut carbon emissions. What new, climate change-fighting technologies will come of all this money? And what will determine which of those renewable technologies will succeed and which will fail?

Germany’s Energiewende: The intermittency problem remains

By Christine Sturm | May 20, 2016

We often hear about Germany’s audacious ‘energy turn-around,’ or Energiewende, from fossil fuels to renewables. But how has it really worked in practice, from the viewpoint of someone who has worked for more than two decades for both Germany’s utilities and large, energy-intensive industries? What lessons can the United States take from observing the German experience?