The Sun and the Wind

For a century and a half, catching the sun and the wind was a curiosity – a French inventor’s steam engine driven by mirrors, a Vermont mountaintop turbine that shed a blade in a gale, a delicate silicon wafer built to power satellites because nothing on Earth could afford it. Then, in the span of a single generation, the price of solar electricity fell by more than ninety percent, wind turbines grew taller than cathedrals, and the two oldest sources of power on the planet became the cheapest…