Houston is the mecca for the entire North American ENERGY industry.
FTFY
Houston learned it's lesson after the oil bust of the 80's. The city has diversified to encompass all aspects of energy and technology. Most of the big energy companies have large plays in every possible renewable out there trying to be the first to make that breakthrough that'll bring cost parity to fossils.
As to the OP I suspect Houstonians use significantly more electricity than Costa Ricans as over 90% of the homes have some form of A/C while I suspect that average for Costa Rico to be somewhat lower.
Compare the number of miles driven and/or the number of distinct trips to the number of REPORTED accidents.
FTFY
On my daily commute I cannot begin to count the number of near missis due to incompetent driving. I am continually amazed at the ways people can find to avoid paying attention to the road. That said they'll have to pry my steering wheel away from my cold dead hands before I cede control to the computer. That is why self-driving cars will take a while not technology.
Of course, from the customer point of view, if it prevents a security breach to an important account, it's well worth the extra trouble.
That's the problem. You can't prove it prevented a security breach so most users just see it as a PITA extra step and definitely NOT worth the extra trouble. My experience has been the harder it is to access something the less people use it. It's so hard to do some simple tasks on my current corporate network that at least half the office brings in their own laptops to get their work done. They just expense a WiFi hotspot and use it in the office.
the distribution and storage are extremely lacking.
THIS! West Texas is a wind power gold mine. It is not, however, a large population center. Almost all the power generated from the wind farms in West Texas go to Dallas. The problem was while everybody was building wind farms nobody was increasing the grid capacity to Dallas. These wind farms were actually shunting excess electricity into the ground because electric storage was cost prohibitive. The Texas Public Utility Commission (PUCT) launched an initiative in 2008 to expand transmission capacity. That was completed in 2013. Last year another project was approved to connect Texas' grid with the rest of the nation's. And storage technology has improved significantly in the last five years as well. If storage tech can become even more cost effective I suspect an explosion of solar/wind.
Also Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister!
My first thought when I saw the headline was that the BBC is throwing this out there to distract from the Jeremy Clarkson fracas.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
