Every locale has its mix of energy options and environmental sensitivities. Being there is essential. Selections from 30 years of international reporting …

BOLIVIA  For “Lighting Up the Andes” Spectrum sent me to Bolivia’s Cordillera Réal in 2004 to track a pioneering concept: using solar-powered LEDs to illuminate remote off-grid villages. The Canadian promoters’ business model blending ecotourism and development financed the pricey equipment, and sowed deep conflict with local indigenous communities.

CHINA  State Grid Corporation of China — the world’s 2nd largest company — is building an ultrahigh-voltage power transmission network whose scale and scope remain unimaginable for grid operators everywhere else. My on-the-ground reporting in 2018 gave Spectrum readers a rare inside look at China’s grid technology and its contested domestic politics. It was my third reportage from China. In 2005 I’d revealed the two-wheeled electric cycling revolution challenging China’s official infatuation with the automobile. That article, “China’s Cyclists Take Charge”, helped Spectrum’s special China issue win a National Business Journalism Award. Two years later I covered growing use of coal gasification for Technology Review, tracking huge coal-to-diesel installations in Inner Mongolia that Western experts had bet would never be built. “China’s Coal Future” showed that water consumption — several barrels worth for every barrel of hydrocarbons produced — would ultimately limit the technology’s proliferation in China’s arid northern coal belt.

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KENYA  The first year’s tomato harvest would nearly payback the technology purchase underpinning Kenyan farmer Patrick Gicheru’s success: a solar-powered irrigation system. A model of simplicity, the package consists of a solar panel, a lithium battery pack, and a controller that supports the pump as well as a few LED lights, a mobile phone charger, and a flat-screen TV. In a 2021 feature for Spectrum I explained why such technology was poised to transform the lives of more than 40 million small-hold farmers across sub-Saharan Africa. Most, like Gicheru a year earlier, live mere meters above groundwater yet lack the means to tap it.

LIBYA  A Scud missile plant outside Tripoli transformed into a 300-kilovolt substation provided the stranger-than-fiction backdrop for “Closing the Circuit” — my 2008 feature for Spectrum on the international project seeking to link Europe and North Africa’s power grids. I found Libyans eager to escape from years of isolation, paving over the past as they pushed forward.

JAPAN  In 2004 workers at Toyota’s Tsutsumi assembly plant were turning out 400 Prius sedans a day — an early dividend from Toyota’s pathbreaking bet on hybrid technology. “Hybrids’ Rising Sun” in Technology Review showed that Toyota had already mastered the next big leap in automotive technology, and why Detroit and Stuttgart would be playing catch-up for another decade-plus. In contrast, Japan proved incapable of sustaining its early lead in solar power. In 2014 Technology Review sent me back to profile how Japan built and lost its dominance in photovoltaics, and might be repeating that pattern.

IRAQ  “Rooftop Solar Takes Hold in the Aftermath of ISIS” describes the grid failures and excellent sunlight making Iraq an ideal spot for rooftop solar, and the challenges proponents must overcome to tap that opportunity. Their biggest barrier: Iraqi leaders’ focus on tapping more oil and gas. As Kurdish renewable energy expert Othman Hama Rahim succinctly put it: “We have oil.” 

TURKEY  Turning solar heat into power lost its edge amid the recent glut of cut-rate Chinese solar panels, but in “Profile: Hittite Solar Energy” I revealed how a Turkish start-up aimed to put solar thermal energy technology back in the game. By selling steam instead of power in markets where gas-fired steam is pricey the Istanbul-based firm planned to go where photovoltaics couldn’t.

FRANCE  Paris-based nuclear equipment and services giant Areva’s technology for reprocessing spent reactor fuel looked enticing when the Bush Administration set to relaunching the U.S. nuclear sector. By recovering plutonium and uranium and vitrifying the remainder, the French system promised to reduce the need for unpopular nuclear waste repositories such as the now-cancelled facility at Yucca Mountain. In ”Nuclear Wasteland”, published by Spectrum in 2007, I followed the radioactivity trail in France’s reprocessing system and found some hidden holes.

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GERMANY  Climate change concerns span Germany’s political spectrum, and that consensus propels its shift from fossil and nuclear energy to renewables. Get up close, however, and competing commercial and environmental interests buffet what Germans call the energiewende. In 2009 their energy transition was headed off the rails, as I showed in a feature analysis for Spectrum: “Germany’s Green Energy Gap.” Four years later, in “Germany Jumpstarts the Supergrid”, I captured an energiewende with its mojo back. The most dramatic sign: a redesign of the balkanized power grid to handle large, shifting flows of wind and solar power. High voltage direct-current or DC lines functioning as electrical wormholes would hustle bulk energy across a sclerotic AC grid. The plan marked the most radical shift in power systems since Thomas Edison conceded defeat to AC-advocate Nikola Tesla — too radical to accept for contemporary US grid experts.

CANADA  Melting billions of barrels of hard tarry petroleum trapped in Alberta’s oil/tar sands leaves a heavy environmental footprint. Investment was booming in 2003 when I wrote my exposé,  “Digging a Carbon Hole for Canada” [PDF], and I showed that financial levers such as carbon trading and taxes were unlikely to end the party. Many Canadians at the time were not ready to see their homegrown cash-machine impugned, including the editor-in-chief at the influential business magazine that commissioned and then spiked this story. So feisty Calgary-based AlbertaViews took it up, combining my text with gifted photography. Time has proved my angle to be prescient.

BANGLADESH and INDIA  In 2019 I reported a pair of stories marking the energy development paths in two of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing countries. Bangladesh pioneered the use of solar power to electrify rural communities. “Bangladesh Scrambles to Deliver Electricity to Its 160 Million Residents” shows how energy insecurity and big financing from India, China and Russia led it to drop solar in favor of big coal and nuclear. “The Pros and Cons of the World’s Biggest Solar Park” explored massive economies of scale and equally large headaches in India as the country erected sprawling solar plants.