Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid.
These are boom times for wind power. T. Boone Pickens, the wildcatter turned oil baron, is building the world’s biggest wind farm, in the dry scrub of the Texas Panhandle.
What do Russian rocket scientists know about wind power? A lot, at least according to entrepreneur Rick Halstead, who is creating a wind-turbine design company with a group of Russian engineers that previously built submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. Not exactly the most common resume bullet point, that one.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.