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Patrick Cassidy was working as a carpenter when he saw the newspaper notice about job opportunities at Vineyard Wind in the summer of 2019. The country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm was being built 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, the island he’d called home since 1995, and he was curious. He enjoyed his work, and he was good at it, but he liked the idea of a more regular paycheck — and maybe even paid time off.

In the ongoing effort to reduce emissions, retire coal, and support the growth of renewables, countries around the world continue to choose high-efficiency natural gas to complement renewables and smooth the path to lower emissions. Take Greece, for example, a country that’s impressively built out wind and solar in recent years but still uses a good deal of coal and even oil in power generation.

“We have an energy crisis,” said Rafał Kasprów, CEO of Poland’s Synthos Green Energy (SGE), last Thursday in Washington, D.C. “The solution we need,” he said, is innovative technology — “and we already have it: SMRs.” Kasprów was speaking at an event to celebrate the signing of a new $400 million technical collaboration agreement to advance the development and deployment of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300 small modular nuclear reactor.

When she was a little girl, every Friday for six years of her childhood in Columbus, Ohio, Devon Shepherd’s family would get in their minivan and drive to the airport to watch planes take off and land. Shepherd marveled at how amazing they were. What makes them fly? she often wondered.

Six to ten feet below the ground, 12-inch pipes carry natural gas all over America. They wind around electrical conduits and water mains. They bear the weight of daily commutes, delivery trucks, and city buses. And a lot of them are leaking. “Some of these pipes have been in the ground for over 100 years, and they’re only getting older,” says Alexander Duncan, a roboticist at GE Research. “Nobody really thought through how to service them. So it’s now a massive and costly problem for the national infrastructure.”

As an electrical engineering major at Howard University in the 1980s, Colin Parris received a tricky assignment: Build a small burglar alarm that would turn on a light when a switch was opened. He painstakingly assembled a board with 300 wires, reattaching them every time they got jiggled out of place in his locker. He estimates the project took 40 to 50 hours.

Then Parris was asked to use an 8-bit microprocessor to complete the same assignment. With 10 wires connected to LED lights and a small amount of programming, he built his second burglar alarm in about three hours.