International Business Times: Tesla, SolarCity Power Entire Island With Clean, Solar Energy Within a Year
Elon Musk’s Tesla has just officially acquired SolarCity, but the two have already solar-powered a complete island, it was revealed Tuesday.
The island of Ta’u in American Samoa, located more than 4,000 miles from the U.S. West Coast, had long suffered power rationing and outages. However, the island is now powered by clean energy, SolarCity said in a post about its latest project with Tesla.
Ta’u has a solar power and battery storage-enabled microgrid that can supply nearly 100 percent of the island’s power needs from renewable energy. It is powered by a microgrid of 1.4-megawatt solar array and 6 megawatt-hours of battery storage from 60 Tesla Powerpacks. The project was completed within a year.
Autoblog: Thanksgiving Traffic in 2016 Is Going to Be Even Crazier Than Last Year
Traffic could be dicey this Thanksgiving Day holiday, thanks in part to low gas prices and a strong economy. Over a million more Americans will hit the road this holiday weekend than last year, AAA announced in their annual Thanksgiving Day travel report.
This year could be the busiest year on the roads during Thanksgiving since 2007. AAA says rising wages and increased employment rates are contributing factors, as well as low gas prices. A gallon of the good stuff may cost 11 cents more a gallon right now than it cost in 2015, but Americans have still saved more than $28 billion so far at the pumps this year over last year. All that spendable cash and cheap fuel means 48.7 million American will travel 50 miles or more from their homes in the next few days; 89 percent will do so by car.
New York Times: Trump, in Interview, Moderates Views but Defies Conventions
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.
But in a wide-ranging hour-long interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times -- which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules -- Mr. Trump was unapologetic about flouting some of the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.
InsideClimate News: Obama Halts Arctic Oil Leases and Undoing It Won't Be Simple for Trump
No new offshore oil and gas leases will be offered in the Alaskan Arctic through 2022, according to a new five-year plan for offshore drilling released Friday by the Obama administration. President-elect Donald Trump could overturn the ban, but that could take years and may not draw much industry interest if oil prices stay low.
The Interior Department's five-year plan laid out all of the proposed auctions for drilling rights on the outer continental shelf of the United States. It allowed for no leases between 2017 and 2022 in the Beaufort or Chukchi seas, Arctic waters north and west of Alaska.
A prior draft of the plan included the potential for offshore drilling in both the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas when it was released in March. The current plan limits potential leases in the next five years to the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet off south-central Alaska.
Autoblog: Trump's Potential New Press Secretary Is Attacking Elon Musk for Some Reason
A group called the Citizens for the Republic (CftR) has a real problem with Elon Musk. No, really. With Electrek's help -- which says CftR is "full of misinformation about Tesla, electric vehicles, and solar energy" -- let's try to figure out what is going on.
Here's what we know about Citizens for the Republic. It calls itself, "a national organization dedicated to revitalizing the conservative movement." It was founded in 1977 by Ronald Reagan, faded out and was then brought back to life and is currently headed by Laura Ingraham, who serves as the group's national chairman and just might be President Trump's new White House press secretary. While CftR claims that its mission is to "ferret out corruption that wastes taxpayer dollars and continually undermines the American people in favor of the powerful and profitable," the reality is that they're a wee bit one-sided.