The Remarkable Grid Powering China's Clean Energy Olympics

If you’ve been watching the Winter Olympics, or even just scrolling past memes about the Olympic games that started earlier this month, you’ve probably seen what look like nuclear cooling towers looming in the background while skiers and snowboarders hurtle through the air of the event space, located in Zhangjiakou, a mountain city in China’s Hebei province.

The scene is not, in fact, a nuclear power plant, despite the similarity to nuclear cooling towers. The Big Air Shougang venue is set up on the site of a now-shuttered Shougang…