Fossil fuel growth has stalled while wind and solar are growing.
Solar and wind energy grew quickly enough in 2023 to push renewables up to 30% of global electricity supply and begin pushing fossil fuels off the power grid, the Ember climate consultancy concludes in a report released May 8. Continue reading →
Scientists still have a lot to figure out, but the idea of sourcing critical minerals from seaweed is too tantalizing not to look into. Photo by Upix Photography/Alamy Stock Photo
Plenty of links to articles about the importance of various types of seaweed in our pages, but in Hakai Magazine the environmental journalist Moira Donovan asks and provides a cogent answer to the most basic question:
The highly efficient devices are the darlings of the environmental movement. Here’s why.
Heat pumps, which both warm and cool buildings and are powered by electricity, have been touted as the answer to curbing greenhouse gas emissions produced by homes, businesses and office buildings, which are responsible for about one-third of the emissions in New York State. Continue reading →
People wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP)
Seven years and many bus stories among us recall the old buses. Noisy, smoke-belching, hot and crowded. Time to retire the old ones and at least lessen the noise and belching. Thanks to Sarah Spengeman and Yale Climate Connections:
Fast-growing cities need electric buses if the country is to meet its climate goals.
Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that arrives earlier to wait for a smoother, cooler ride in a new model. This has fed a new problem: overcrowding. Fortunately, more new buses are on the way. Continue reading →
Aided by tax breaks and carbon credits, scores of plants are being developed or are now operating that remove CO2 from the air. Such facilities are considered necessary to limit global warming, but critics have questions about the high costs and where the captured carbon will go.
Texas is by far the top emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States: The oil-rich state releases twice as much carbon dioxide as the runner-up state, California, and as much as the entire country of Germany. Continue reading →
States are considering ‘climate superfund’ laws to hold Big Oil accountable
One prong of the climate fight involves installing so much renewable energy that fossil fuel use actually declines dramatically—a few places are finally showing that’s possible, like sunny Germany which last week said emissions in 2023 dropped more than ten percent. Continue reading →
With supply chains finally open, solar provided most of the nation’s new electricity capacity last year.
Solar accounted for most of the capacity the nation added to its electric grids last year. That feat marks the first time since World War II, when hydropower was booming, that a renewable power source has comprised more than half of the nation’s energy additions. Continue reading →
The drilling rig at ExxonMobil’s first lithium well, in southwest Arkansas. EXXONMOBIL
Thank you, Fred Pearce. It is not easy to trust ExxonMobil or any other petroleum company to do the right thing, but this sounds better than most of what we hear about their common practices:
The Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas was once a major oil producer. Now, companies hope to extract lithium — a key metal for electric vehicle batteries — from its underground brines using technologies they say could reduce mining’s carbon emissions and water use.
The town of Smackover, Arkansas, was founded a hundred years ago when a sawmill operator got lucky: his wildcat oil well yielded a gusher. Continue reading →
For the first time, in 2022, Scottish renewables generated more power than the country used, new government figures show.
The growth of wind power, coupled with a small drop in electricity consumption, meant that the volume of electricity produced by renewables in Scotland was equal to 113 percent of demand. Continue reading →
As studies show far more natural hydrogen underground than believed, well-funded efforts to drill for the gas are underway around the globe. Boosters see a plentiful green replacement for fossil fuels, but skeptics say its large-scale use may not be practical or cost-effective.
A remote community of mud huts and corrugated iron roofs in the arid savannah of West Africa could be a trailblazer for a new form of carbon-free energy. Continue reading →
To reach its climate goals, the U.S. will need to build solar arrays on some 15,000 square miles of land, an area larger than Maryland. Continue reading →
We have linked to articles about nuclear energy before, but this one is more like a cheat sheet for a yes opinion on the option than earlier articles we have read:
This article will convince you of that nuclear is the best source of energy.1 Don’t read it if you need your mind to remain anti-nuclear. If you are against nuclear, I recommend you to precisely write down your concerns and what it would take for you to be convinced that nuclear is great, otherwise you might move the goalposts subconsciously.
To do justice to the topic, the article had to cover all the important aspects of nuclear energy, and as a result is long. I chose to publish it in one piece despite that so all the relevant information is in one place, and I can update it over time and you can bookmark, reference, and share it. Continue reading →
The scientific journal Nature shows up in exactly one search result among thousands of posts here. And that one, because photos have such a wide audience. We have not linked to their articles because, since 1869, they are written by and oriented to highly credentialed scientists. A look at ten influential articles makes the point. And we can only respect what they do, even if we wish more of us could digest more of the science. Now that they offer some articles in audio version, this may make the science more accessible to those who hear better than they read. Judge for yourself, if you want to pay to play. The audio version of the article below (available on YouTube above) is free, but unless you have a subscription the written version is available for a small charge:
Rooftop solar panels in China. Tandem cells could boost power density in crowded urban areas. Credit: VCG/Getty
Firms commercializing perovskite–silicon ‘tandem’ photovoltaics say that the panels will be more efficient and could lead to cheaper electricity.
On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic (PV) materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Surrounded by unkempt grass and a weed-strewn car park, the factory is a modest cradle for such a potentially transformative technology, but the firm’s chief technology officer Chris Case is clearly in love with the place. “This is the culmination of my dreams,” he says.
A man rides an ebike in Hermosa Beach, California. Photograph: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
From one point of view ebikes could be viewed as just one more form of entertainment drawing energy from the grid. But an argument can be made that this increase in load on the grid is decreasing other carbon footprints. On top of that, maybe more people on bikes is its own gain:
Sales surge as cities and states look to cut pollution from cars and improve options for Americans to get around
After several years of false starts, electric bikes are finally entering the American mainstream, amid booming sales of a multiplying number of models on offer and as more states offer incentives for people to ditch their cars and shift to two, motor-assisted, wheels. Continue reading →
Planes account for roughly two per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions—if all the world’s aircraft got together to form a country, they’d emit more than the vast majority of actual nations. Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty
If have had precisely one direct experience with otherwise elusive alternative aviation fuel. It was during my first of multiple work trips to Paraguay. The fuel was made from sugarcane, and while I am still here to write about it, the experience was among the most harrowing of my lifetime. I only have time and space here to mention that I spent an unexpected night in the Chaco. I highly recommend visiting the Chaco, but I do not highly recommend traveling with experimental fuel. That said, read on:
The Treasury Department is about to announce tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel, which raises the question: What fuels are actually “sustainable”?
Sometime in the next few weeks, the Department of the Treasury is expected to decide who—or, really, what—will qualify for a new set of tax credits. Continue reading →
The energy transition will lead to wide-ranging transformations across economies. | MONTAGE ILLUSTRATION BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE; PHOTOGRAPHS BY UNSPLASH
How the Bezos Earth Fund hopes to seed economic transformation
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST economic obstacles to the needed rapid transition in energy supplies and the challenges of deforestation driven by climate change? Continue reading →
Cylindrical battery cells undergoing tests in the UK. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
Thanks to Bill McKibben, in his newsletter–“A Corrupted COP New revelations show just how bad the oil countries really are“–for more details on this bad news but also for pointing us to better news that has implications for so much of the decarbonization opportunity set:
BloombergNEF breaks down the biggest annual drop in its lithium-ion battery price survey since 2018.
As the auto industry grapples with how to make affordable EVs, the task may get easier by one key metric. Battery prices are resuming a long-term trend of decline, following an unprecedented increase last year.
The giant parts for wind turbines await pickup at a pier in New London, Conn. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times
Wind has always been there for the taking in so many places, the challenges of nimbyism notwithstanding. Now the turbines are arriving to harness it for the New York metropolitan area. Our thanks to Patrick McGeehan and the New York Times for sharing the story:
Parts of what will eventually be the towers of wind turbines out in the ocean. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times
New York’s best bet for entering the era of offshore wind power is stacked up at the water’s edge in Connecticut.
The pier on the Connecticut coast is filled with so many massive oddities that it could be mistaken for the set of a sci-fi movie. Sword-shaped blades as long as a football field lie stacked along one edge, while towering yellow and green cranes hoist giant steel cylinders to stand like rockets on a launchpad.
It is a launching point, not for spacecraft, but for the first wind turbines being built to turn ocean wind into electricity for New Yorkers. Crews of union workers in New London, Conn., are preparing parts of 12 of the gargantuan fans before shipping them out for final assembly 15 miles offshore. Continue reading →
The Tromsø sorting office of the Norwegian postal service Posten Bring is heated by heat pumps. The city is located almost 140 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty
Previous stories we have linked to about heat pumps have raised our expectations and hopes, but also raised the question of whether they will catch on. Here is the start to an answer:
A Department of Energy report promotes a new system that could remake the energy grid.
On any given Monday in Vermont, Josh Castonguay, the vice-president of innovation at that state’s Green Mountain Power utility, told me, he studies the forecast for the days ahead, asking questions like “What’s it looking like from a temperature standpoint, a potential-of-load standpoint? Is there an extremely hot, humid stretch of a few days coming? A really cold February night?” If there is trouble ahead, Castonguay prepares, among other things, Vermont’s single largest power plant, which isn’t exactly a power plant at all—or, at least, not as we normally think of one. Continue reading →
For those who might say too little too late we say this still counts as good news worth reading, so thanks to Yale Climate Connections:
Organikos 