A power outage left many major American cities in the dark on August 14, 2003. The blackout was apparent from the perspective of space in this pair of DMSP satellite images.
In a patchwork of agricultural fields outside Seville, Spain, stand two heliostats, which generate solar power by concentrating sunlight to heat water into steam, which is used to generate electricity.
Snow and ice serve to accent human activities in this photograph taken by the Space Shuttle mission STS-98 crewmembers on February 17, 2001. The Souris River stretches across the photograph from left to right, with the upstream Rafferty Dam Reservoir frozen over on the far left. Two power plants, the Boundary Dam Power Station and the Shand Power Station, can be identified by the smoke plumes and shadows of those plumes. The river is frozen over upstream of the Boundary Dam Power Station, but thermal loading from the plants has warmed the water in the Boundary Dam Reservoir so that it remains nearly ice free. Downstream of the reservoirs, thermal loading is sufficient to maintain open flow in the Souris River.