Cities & Planning

They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.

For the last quarter century, those of us hoping we could slow global warming were anxious to see a quick conversion to electric vehicles (EVs). If we could get most people using electric vehicles, and have the energy coming from clean sources, we could radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The problem was that EVs were […]

Your neighborhood watering hole is more important than you think.

Economists calculate that the world's corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for what they put out.

Producing food locally boosts food security and self-sufficiency, especially in urban areas. Beacon Food Forest and Tilth Alliance are advancing urban agriculture in Seattle, joining an international trend.

Two years ago, sodium-ion battery pioneer Natron Energy was busy preparing its specially formulated sodium batteries for mass production. The company slipped a little past its 2023 kickoff plans, but it didn't fall too far behind as far as mass battery production goes. It officially commenced…

State Sen. Norm Needleman championed the 2021 legislation designed to lure major data centers to Connecticut.

If we want prosperity for all, electricity must be cheap and consistent. The energy transition cannot leave ordinary people behind

A water-based battery design from China boasts increased safety and double the power, promising advancements in electric vehicle technology.

Hydrostor, a leader in compressed air energy storage, aims to break ground on its first large-scale plant in New South Wales by the end of this year. It wants to follow that with an even bigger facility in California.

A gravity battery is a type of electricity storage device that stores gravitational energy, the energy stored in an object resulting from a change in height due to gravity, also called potential energy. A gravity battery works by using excess energy (usually from sustainable sources) to raise a mass to generate gravitational potential energy, which is then lowered to convert potential energy into electricity through an electric generator. One form of a gravity battery is one that lowers a mass, such as a block of concrete, to generate electricity. The most common gravity battery is used in pumped-storage hydroelectricity, where water is pumped to higher elevations to store energy and released through water turbines to generate electricity.[1]

Every day, we are powering our lives using pumped storage hydropower—a unique and relatively unknown source of energy storage.

‘Aqueous batteries with high energy density are possible, offering a development option for grid-scale energy storage, and even electric vehicles’: researchers.

A new initiative invited student groups to design and plant gardens that will promote wildlife, and cultivate their visions for the future.

The 10 weekends of Bicycle Weekends for 2024 have been announced, with only 32 hours of opening up the street for walking, biking and rolling each weekend.

Project 529 bike registry now available to police agencies across B.C.

Following the successful implementation of a pandemic-prompted street patio in Columbia City, a group of community members formed Friends of Ferdinand Festival Street and are trying to find a way to make it permanent.

The number one local obstruction to curbing traffic violence is commerce and merchant groups.

How much difference can one person make? Just ask these grassroots conservationists, who’ve won an award for saving species

Seattle is growing. How do we make room for new housing and create the kind of city we want to live in? Seattle Mayor Harrell’s newly released Comprehensive Plan Major Update draft reflects the administration’s best take on how we should grow the city over the next 20 years, how we understand and mitigate the

Despite delays connecting the 2 Line to Seattle, hundreds rode the rails this weekend as the eight stations opened after years of construction.

Should Sound Transit spend an additional 10 months studying tweaks to stations in the South Lake Union area? The Sound Transit board is set to make that decision in May.

Throughout my career as a public transit planner, I’ve dealt with city planners and developers who are quite sure that bus service of any kind is irrelevant to city building. Most city planning professionals get little training in public transit, and for years, much of that training came laced with assumptions that rail is the […]

Two housing projects -- one in Wedgwood and one in Capitol Hill -- are running into similar issues around tree retention, parking, and scale.

Decarbonizing rail transportation is a political problem as much as a technological one.

With trout season opening on Washington’s lowland lakes this Saturday, April 27, the timing was perfect to go fishing around on the history bookshelf to

Buoyed by its light rail station and master plan, the Spring District has seen more than 2,000 homes, 4 million square feet of office, and 8,000 parking stalls recently delivered or in development.

Founder Owen Pickford reflects on a decade of The Urbanist and urges urbanists to chip in to keep this institution strong. Please make a donation during our spring member drive.

Delivering 35 new family-sized homes, Shared Roof features a unique financing model catering to a range of incomes, built-in community, and hip cafes spilling into a public courtyard. Is the model replicable? The developer thinks so.

For an office design, the financial services giant made a floor of its New York office fit the new way people work.