Electricity generation

I'm surprised to note we haven't had a thread before this to talk about new technologies for generating electricity.

I went looking because I wanted to note
http://www.businessinsider.com/whirlpool-turbine-water-energy-turbulent-belgian-...

There seem to be a lot of schemes for small-scale hydro-electric projects for communities in UK. There was a recent report in the press that the Queen wants to install one on one of her estates (Balmoral or Sandringham perhaps — I can't remember) but of course there will be planning objections. Of course it's not free electricity as the video states because the capital costs need to be recouped. Personally I'm all in favour of the projects like this as long as they're self-financing. Unlike some large projects (offshore/onshore) which rely on huge government subsidies.

In the US, my bet is that it couldn't be done except on a larger scale, as water rights and stream modifications couldn't be tackled except by municipalities and larger. I wonder if Native Americans might have the authorities needed to install this kind of system on their lands.

I like the creativity behind it.

I'd like to see very micro hydro developed to harvest the kinetics of rainwater in downspouts. Not as a stand-alone, but to tie in to other battery storage systems like wind and solar.

>2 PossMan: Probably Balmoral - Scotland's geography being rather more amenable to that sort of thing that Norfolk's. I'm not sure that planning is such a big issue - microhydro is much less of a blight on the landscape than wind turbines. AIUI Scotland is well on the way to being more than self-sufficient in renewable energy, what with no shortage of wind and water, and a relatively low population density.

>3 2wonderY: Re the downspout idea: nice, but the numbers don't stack up I fear. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that if I harnessed all of the potential energy of the rain going from my roof to ground level, I'd get less than 0.5 kWh/year.

Downspout energy--enough to power a small lightbulb? I've wondered about a small ventilation fan on our roof--always running, it seems.

At least downspout turbine won't harm wildlife? Large commercial turbines such as those in Moses Saunders dam across St Lawrence River are largely responsible for extirpating the American Eel population in Lake Ontario (females leaving to spawn in Sargasso Sea = sushi). In my experience, investors, engineers, and governments proposing small, open turbines to capture power from wind, current, waves, etc. seem to be even less interested than the big guys in design, siting, and operation that would minimize impacts on fish and wildlife.

On the Ontario side of Lake Erie, developers proposed a WALL of wind turbines across one of North America's four major flyways. Consultants and experimental design seemed chosen to minimize damage detect by one monitoring study I followed. Much more so, I fear, when the damage is out of sight, i.e. underwater.

Trump deregulation gives developers even less reason to care if you kill an eagle or spawning fish--as long as you didn't INTEND to. (Grr...)

Ontario declared a moratorium on Great Lakes wind turbines--e.g., the Lake Erie wall--but American investors have successfully challenged the moratorium under NAFTA, never mind the US-Canadian Migratory Bird Treaty.

Renewable energy is great, but it must be chosen, designed and operated responsibly--and transparently. (No "trade secrets".)
______________________________

Hopefully, we'll have ever-safer choices in future:

Scientists Create 'Artificial Photosynthesis' To Generate Clean Energy
Matthew Loffhagen | 05 March 2018

https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/17946-artificial-photosynthesis-clean-e...

>6 margd: wonderful!

Also microbial fuel cell (MFC) batteries:

https://inhabitat.com/harvard-scientists-create-dirt-powered-bacteria-batteries/

eta: Discussed in Dirt! The movie

How Climate Activists Failed to Make Clear the Problem with Natural Gas

Bill McKibben

The climate movement’s biggest failure has been its inability to successfully make the case that natural gas is not a clean replacement for other fossil fuels. So as natural gas has boomed, U.S. emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, have increased dramatically.

Britain powers on without coal for three days

Just last week the UK grid recorded its first two-day period without using any power from the fossil fuel, which the government has pledged to phase out by 2025.

Coal accounted for less than 7% of the power mix last year, according to official figures.

However, experts warned that power generated by coal was largely being replaced by gas.

Use excess wind and solar power to produce hydrogen (Guardian)

With more electricity often generated than needed the excess could be utilised to generate the green power source

Siemens pilots the use of ammonia for green energy storage (Guardian)

As of 2018, the global production of hydrogen generates tremendous quantities of waste ... not a remotely green process at all, thus far. Time will tell. As a result, most articles in print on hydrogen typically skip over those awkward facts ... especially the Guardian, which in the past has also been overly optimistic on nuclear power.

This article in the Guardian manages to discuss natural gas production without mentioning fracking ... unfortunate, especially for UK citizens who are homeowners, since the UK monarchy recently insisted on its sole right to initiate fracking.

John the fireman, thank you for the above article on Siemens ... it looks like they are willing to do the hard work of reducing the entire development footprint for renewable technologies. Bravo.

Just toured hydropower dam on St Lawrence R. After 60 years, they need to replace turbines etc. Interesting that after all these years technology will give only a little boost in power they extract from the water--mostly due to lighter materials.

UK passes 1,000 hours without coal as energy shift accelerates

Ireland becomes world's first country to divest from fossil fuels

Both from the Guardian

Good news! A few thoughts:

In the US, a majority of those surveyed (51 percent) believe that 100 percent renewables is a good idea even if it raises their energy bills by 30 percent. In Ontario electricity bills increased 71%, a factor in Liberals' recent demise: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hydro-fraser-institute-study-1.42...

In NY, the call for "clean" energy rather than renewable kept at least one problem-plagued nuclear plant open past planned shutdown...

Demand can force renewables, but policymakers have a role in forcing a compatible grid? (In US at least?)

Utilities have a problem: the public wants 100% renewable energy, and quick
David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com | Sep 16, 2018

The industry is groping for ways to talk the public down.

...The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80 cities, five counties, and two states have committed to 100 percent renewables. Six cities have already hit the target.

The group RE100 tracks 144 private companies across the globe that have committed to 100 percent renewables, including Google, Ikea, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, GM, and, uh, Lego.

The timing of all these targets (and thus their stringency) varies, everywhere from 2020 to 2050, but cumulatively, they are beginning to add up. Even if policymakers never force power utilities to produce renewable energy through mandates, if all the biggest customers demand it, utilities will be mandated to produce it in all but name.

The rapid spread and evident popularity of the 100 percent target has created an alarming situation for power utilities. Suffice to say, while there are some visionary utilities in the country, as an industry, they tend to be extremely small-c conservative.

They do not like the idea of being forced to transition entirely to renewable energy, certainly not in the next 10 to 15 years. For one thing, most of them don’t believe the technology exists to make 100 percent work reliably; they believe that even with lots of storage, variable renewables will need to be balanced out by “dispatchable” power plants like natural gas. For another thing, getting to 100 percent quickly would mean lots of “stranded assets,” i.e., shutting down profitable fossil fuel power plants...

...market research and polling done on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities...The work was done by the market research firm Maslansky & Partners, which analyzed existing utility messaging, interviewed utility execs and environmentalists, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple of three-hour sit-downs with “media informed customers” in Minneapolis and Phoenix.

The results are striking. They do a great job of laying out the public opinion landscape on renewables, showing where different groups have advantages and disadvantages.

The takeaway: Renewables are a public opinion juggernaut. Being against them is no longer an option. The industry’s best and only hope is to slow down the stampede a bit (and that’s what they plan to try)...

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/14/17853884/utilities-renewabl...

A zinc air battery appears promising in cost reduction, battery life, safety and reliability:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/business/energy-environment/zinc-battery-sola...

A collection of next generation power collectors ~

How the humble lamp-post could help power our cities http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46064166

UK Government throws its weight behind offshore wind power expansion (Guardian)

Climate change: Government deal to boost offshore wind (BBC)

Clean energy for Africa by Africans makes appearance in South Sudan (ESI Africa)

Difficult to tell whether this is a completely objective article or whether it has an element of advertising. Maybe I should pop in to Eye Radio and ask to see their power system. But there's no doubt that solar power is becoming increasingly popular in Africa, even though it is often not being supported by governments with tax breaks or other enabling measures. My own house in Kenya runs completely on solar, and I'll be taking delivery of some new kit this week to expand it. There are also other forms of electricity generation which are becoming increasingly popular, eg in Kenya both wind and geothermal.

And another one about Africa:

Could electric vehicles be the future for Kenyan travel? (BBC)

Sneaking up on rhinos on safari just became a whole lot easier. With millions of Kenyans relying on solar power for their energy, a new company has started converting existing vehicles into solar-powered electric ones. So far the idea is being trialled on safari cars, but the Swedish company behind the idea wants to expand the idea across Nairobi's transport network.

The power switch: tracking Britain's record coal-free run (Guardian)

Britain is setting new records for going without coal-powered energy. In the latest milestone, it has gone for more than eight days without using coal to generate electricity – the longest such period since 1882. The coal-free run comes just two years after the National Grid first ran without coal power for 24 hours...

Yay Britain! Meanwhile, literally pouring gasoline here while the earth burns...
This is arguably Trump's greatest crime.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science
Coral Davenport and Mark Landler | May 27, 2019

...parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

And it continues:

Great Britain records two weeks of coal-free electricity generation (Guardian)

Great Britain has hit a new power milestone – lasting for a fortnight without using any coal power to generate electricity for the first time since the industrial revolution.

The system which supplies electricity across England, Scotland and Wales went for two weeks without coal at 3:12pm BST precisely, according to the National Grid Electricity System Operator.

The latest landmark comes less than a month after Britain’s first week without coal, underlining the dramatic decline in its use in recent years.

Coal has been used for electricity generation since 1882, when a plant opened in Holborn, London. However in 2018 the fuel made up just 5% of Britain’s electricity generation, a big decline from about 40% in 2012,..

This Swedish Cleantech Company Wants To Mass Produce Printable Organic Solar Cells
Jennifer Kite-Powell | May 27, 2019

Innovations in solar technology - from creating solar skins that are more aesthetically pleasing for homeowners to smart solar water bottles and solar storage advancements by using bacteria (electroactive microbes) to store energy - the future of photovoltaics and concentrated solar power remains in a state innovation.

...Mattias Josephson, CEO of Epishine, a Swedish cleantech company, says his company has made several roll-to-roll process breakthroughs which he believes is key to the tipping point to printing organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells.

Josephson says a long-term goal for their solar cells are factories with manufacturing machines in the size and scale of newspaper presses where each machine can print solar cells on rolls equivalent to one nuclear reactor per month.

...Epishine is using organic electronics - conducting and semi-conducting hydro-carbon-molecules with no silicon or metal. "Our active layer is based on polymers, which is long hydro-carbon-chains. Organic electronics is an .. interesting emerging technology where the first application you’ve seen on the market is organic light emitting diodes (OLED) where ‘O’ stands for organic electronics."

Epishine's thin, flexible and semi-transparent printed solar cells could be a part of building materials that generate electricity in structures.

...Today, the company is harvesting light and produces light energy harvesting modules that use indoor lighting to create energy to support low power devices currently powered by batteries...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2019/05/27/this-swedish-cleantech-com...

>25 margd: That's pretty darned exciting!

Clean electricity overtaking fossil fuels in Britain (BBC)

Why the age of electric flight is finally upon us (BBC)

Pope: World climate emergency demands 'radical energy transition' (Al Jazeera)

Cool running: supermarket fridges could help power UK (Guardian)

Tesco trials show chiller aisles offer possibility of being ‘virtual battery’ for National Grid

Kenya's first coal plant construction paused in climate victory (Guardian)

Owners failed to assess environmental and community concerns, court rules, while US ambassador wades into debate in support of coal power...

Kenya launches Africa's biggest wind farm (The EastAfrican)

Kenya on Friday inaugurated Africa's biggest wind power plant, a mammoth project in a gusty stretch of remote wilderness that now provides nearly a fifth of the country's energy needs.

The $680-million project, a sprawling 365-turbine wind farm on the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, is delivering 310 megawatts of renewable power to the national grid of East Africa's most dynamic economy...

Uhuru commissions Africa’s largest wind power project (The Star)

President Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday commissioned the Lake Turkana Wind Power farm, Africa’s largest wind power project.

The project has an installed capacity of 310 megawatts of clean, reliable and low-cost electricity.

At the same time, the President commissioned the 428-kilometre high voltage power transmission line...

Low-carbon energy makes majority of UK electricity for first time (Guardian)

Rapid rise in renewables combined with nuclear generated 53% in 2018

Every bit helps, but more importantly, Catholic solar could incentivize others in some pretty far flung places?

Churches see the (solar) light
David Poulson | 8/15/2019

Interest in powering Catholic parishes, schools and missions with the sun is surging in the wake of a solar deal recently announced in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

And church groups nationwide, including in Michigan and Minnesota, are keeping a close eye on the project.

“We’re pretty slammed,” said Page Gravely, the executive vice president for client services at Catholic Energies, a project of the Catholic Climate Covenant.

The group, in existence about two years and largely under the radar until recently, brokered the deal that enabled Catholic Charities to cut energy costs at a dozen Washington church buildings. The project also contributes to an energy program for low-income residents and to desperately needed maintenance at a Missionaries of Charity hospice.

“We are being good stewards of God’s earth and yet enabling our agency to work on its core mission and have cash flow to help the sisters maintain their mission,” said Mary Jane Morrow, the chief financial officer of Catholic Charities in Washington.

That beat selling the 5-acre site of the solar array in the city’s Northeast sector to developers who had been eagerly eyeing the parcel.

But the project’s greatest impact could be the grassroots interest it generates among other Catholic institutions. It is yet another factor driving diverse religious organizations’ increasing interest in solar...

http://greatlakesecho.org/2019/08/15/churches-see-the-solar-light/

>32 margd: That's wonderful. Our local Unitarian Universalist Society has been a leader for solar conversion in my community. Besides adding solar to their own property, they have been instrumental in establishing build co-ops for homeowners and businesses.

>32 margd: “We’re pretty slammed”

Could you translate that one for a poor foreigner, please?

> 34 translate slammed?

Given the context, I took it as:

To "be slammed" at work means to have a lot of work to do.
https://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/be-slammed

It's not common usage, though?

>35 margd:

Thanks, margd. I've not seen it before, anyway.

Trump wrong Again: Offshore Wind a “New Industrial Revolution”

the new offshore wind installations are a once-in-a generation new technology that will over the next decade and a half fuel a new industrial revolution. European concerns have credible plans to put in 65 gigawatts of new offshore wind by 2025....

the big surprise is the rapidity with which offshore wind has become a major sector in the United States, which has abruptly overtaken Asian countries, with 15.7 gigs of offshore wind and big projects now planned off New Jersey and New York.

Wind power is the future... there are six offshore wind projects the size of small nuclear power plants in the pipeline, mostly in China and Britain. That is, they are near to or more than 600 megawatts.

The costs of wind, both onshore and offshore, are falling rapidly...

Eight ways to reduce and offset your digital carbon footprint
By M.J. Kelly | July 2019

...While the internet’s data is essentially invisible, it is processed and stored in massive data centers all over the world. Those data centers are powered 24/7, just waiting to send information — videos, podcasts, music, news, memes, messages and everything the internet offers — to our digital devices. All that data that we’ve grown accustomed to having fast at our fingertips along with our always-on mentality ends up contributing to our digital carbon footprints.

...eight things you can do:
1. Adjust power settings
2. Lower your monitor brightness
3. Turn on strict tracking protection
4. Download instead of stream
5. Block video autoplay
6. Reuse your searches
7. Offset your digital carbon footprint
8. Get bored

....Short of a large number of us unplugging altogether, none of these steps will take a giant bite out of your digital carbon footprint, but they’re a start. Remember when we didn't recycle, turn the water off when brushing teeth, let it mellow when yellow or compost food waste unless we were farmers? Small actions can lead to bigger changes.

https://www.techradar.com/news/eight-ways-to-reduce-and-offset-your-digital-carb...

Can solar power shake up the energy market? (BBC)

A Golden Thread, a history of our relationship with the sun published in 1980, celebrates clever uses of solar architecture and technology across the centuries, and urged modern economies wracked by the oil shocks of the 1970s to learn from the wisdom of the ancients...

Global renewable energy initiative aims to bring a billion people in from the dark (Guardian)

Worldwide commission aims to end energy poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia by driving investment in new technology...

This device harnesses the cold night sky to generate electricity in the dark
Maria Temming | September 12, 2019

...The core of the new night-light is a thermoelectric generator, which produces electricity when one side of the generator is cooler than the other (SN: 6/1/18). The sky-facing side of the generator is attached to an aluminum plate sealed beneath a transparent cover and surrounded with insulation to keep heat out. This plate stays cooler than the ambient air by shedding any heat it absorbs as infrared radiation (SN: 9/28/18). That radiation can zip up through the transparent cover and the atmosphere toward the cold sink of outer space.

Meanwhile, the bottom of the generator is attached to an exposed aluminum plate that is continually warmed by ambient air. At night, when not baking under the sun, the top plate can get a couple of degrees Celsius cooler than the bottom of the generator.

a 20-centimeter prototype of the device on a clear December night in Stanford, Calif... produced up to about 25 milliwatts of power per square meter of device — enough to light a small light-emitting diode, or LED bulb. The team estimates that further design improvements, like better insulation around the cool top plate, could boost production up to at least 0.5 watts per square meter.

...may be useful for emergency backup power, or energy for people living off the grid...

A typical lamp bulb might consume a few watts of electricity...So a device that took up a few square meters of roof space could light up a room with energy from the night sky.

...help power remote weather stations or other environmental sensors. This may be especially useful in polar regions that don’t see sunlight for months at a time...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/device-harnesses-cold-night-sky-generate-ele...

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A.P. Raman, W. Li and S. Fan. Generating light from darkness. Joule. Published online September 12, 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2019.08.009. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30412-X

Highlights

A thermoelectric generator is built whose cold side radiates heat to the sky

Night-time power generation of 25 mW/m2 is demonstrated, sufficient for a LED

Pathways to performance > 0.5 W/m2 using existing commodity components exist

This approach is immediately practical for lighting and off-grid sensors

Context & Scale
Reliable energy access remains a challenge, particularly in off-grid regions throughout the world. While solar cells have enabled distributed power generation during the day, no comparable alternative exists at night. In this report, we demonstrate a low-cost, modular mechanism of renewably generating meaningful amounts of electricity at night by harnessing the cold darkness of space. We use a passive cooling mechanism known as radiative sky cooling to maintain the cold side of a thermoelectric generator several degrees below ambient. The surrounding air heats the warm side of the thermoelectric generator, with the ensuing temperature difference converted into usable electricity. We highlight pathways to improving performance from a demonstrated 25 mW/m2 to 0.5 W/m2. Finally, we demonstrate that even with the low-cost implementation demonstration here, enough power is produced to light a LED: generating light from darkness.

Summary
A large fraction of the world’s population still lacks access to electricity, particularly at night when photovoltaic systems no longer operate. The ability to generate electricity at night could be a fundamentally enabling capability for a wide range of applications, including lighting and low-power sensors. Here, we demonstrate a low-cost strategy to harness the cold of space through radiative cooling to generate electricity with an off-the-shelf thermoelectric generator. Unlike traditional thermoelectric generators, our device couples the cold side of the thermoelectric module to a sky-facing surface that radiates heat to the cold of space and has its warm side heated by the surrounding air, enabling electricity generation at night. We experimentally demonstrate 25 mW/m2 of power generation and validate a model that accurately captures the device’s performance. Further, we show that the device can directly power a light emitting diode, thereby generating light from the darkness of space itself.

Electrical industry's 'dirty secret' boosts warming (BBC)

It's the most powerful greenhouse gas known to humanity, and emissions have risen rapidly in recent years... Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is widely used in the electrical industry to prevent short circuits and accidents... Levels are rising as an unintended consequence of the green energy boom. Cheap and non-flammable, SF6 is a colourless, odourless, synthetic gas. It makes a hugely effective insulating material for medium and high-voltage electrical installations. It is widely used across the industry, from large power stations to wind turbines to electrical sub-stations in towns and cities...

October 23, 2019: The Seattle Times newspaper reports on how a successful process was developed in the USA to harvest lithium, a key ingredient in recently developed batteries:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/lithium-will-fuel-the-clean-energy-boom-th...

Bioluminescent trees to replace street lights? Still just theoretical.

Glow-in-the-dark trees could someday replace city street lights

Thinking of those powerful winds blowing through California right now, I'm checking out all the designs for wind turbines.

The typical design - Horizontal axis:


an alternative is the Vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT):


a discussion of the fresh look at this design:
Vertical wind turbines could produce 10x the power per acre as their horizontal counterparts

Vertical-axis turbines are cheaper to make and maintain, take up less space, and safer for birds and bats. The problem is that they are not very efficient. But they can be spaced much closer together and not cause inefficiencies in air flow for neighboring turbines.

A couple of rooftop designs featured here:
https://inhabitat.com/breaking-the-new-sanya-skypump-is-a-wind-and-solar-powered...

Marketed to homeowners:
This Mini Wind Turbine Can Power Your Home in a Gentle Breeze

"... a Nemoi turbine can power a four-person household at wind speeds of just 10-13 miles per hour. It’s also made of 95 percent recyclable aluminum, can be quickly assembled by one person, and is locally manufactured."

And then their is an O-wind turbine (omnidirectional):


O-Wind Turbine captures energy even in the middle of dense cities

Designed by Lancaster University students Nicolas Orellana and Yaseen Noorani, the O-Wind Turbine is made for high-density urban environments, instead of the open fields where turbines are typically placed.

This is because the architecture of tall buildings throws wind flow into chaos, making conventional turbines, which are only able to capture wind travelling in one direction, close to pointless.

In contrast, the O-Wind Turbine captures wind from all directions, and is designed to attach to balconies or the sides of buildings, where speeds are high.

Earlier this fall I watched a flock of geese flying through wind turbines to/from corn fields and water. What was harder to watch--a few of them reversed course to travel through the blades a second time. None killed that time. I did find a Great Blue Heron with (broken leg?), who could still fly... Tree Swallows and Hoary Bats figured largest among the morts reported. Shortear Owls apparently avoid the vicinity (infrasound?). Who knows the total ecological impact--developers sure don't hire consultants who would deliver comprehensive assessments (incl rodent release, ticks, Lyme Disease) or suggest design, siting, operations that would minimize the carnage...

>46 margd: Right! I was actually looking for an enclosed design. I thought I remembered one, but couldn't find it.

California solves batteries’ embarrassing climate problem
Batteries were increasing carbon emissions (d’oh!), but new regulations and tech have fixed it.
David Roberts | Dec 2, 2019

...if the only metric is financial benefit to the battery owner, batteries tend to charge with cheap, dirty power at night and discharge during the day for peak reduction (to reduce commercial demand charges) — that is, they tend to be operated in a way that increases emissions. (a relatively small amount, but counterproductive from climate standpoint)

...The solution is twofold: provide both the incentive and the information.

As for the incentive, under the proposal, new commercial-storage installations will still get the same amount of SGIP money — but only 50 percent will be paid up front. The other 50 percent will be paid out over five years based on demonstrated reductions in annual emissions, which must amount to 5 kilograms of CO2 for every kWh of capacity.

...(As for information) Even if storage-project owners want to reduce emissions, how can they? How can they know when to charge and when to discharge? Sometimes there are more natural-gas generators online and the grid is dirtier; sometimes more solar and wind are online and the grid is cleaner. The exact mix is constantly changing.

After much discussion, the working group decided that what was needed is a “GHG signal” — real-time information about the carbon intensity, or dirtiness, of the grid, as well as a 24-hour forecast about the expected carbon intensity of the grid, available to all battery operators. That’s the information they need to plan their operations.

...Best of all, WattTime is making its work open source in California...

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/2/20983341/climate-change-cal...

South Sudan: Govt. replaces small polluting generators with diesel-run plant despite signing Paris Agreement on climate change (Reuters)

South Sudan, a vastly power-short country where most businesses and households rely on diesel generators to keep things running, has opened a new fossil fuel power plant - one it is touting as a green solution for residents. The government and construction company said the plant will provide “much cleaner air” for residents of the capital as it displaces thousands of polluting small generators. Right now, “every household, every business has a generator running 24 hours to supply electricity. Now bringing all these in one pool ... the city will be much cleaner”...

The new power plant, which will run on diesel fuel as well, has scrubbers to reduce emissions compared to diesel-run generators, its backers said. But the installation of a fossil fuel plant comes as countries around the world move to cut reliance on fossil fuels to curb global warming in line with the Paris Agreement to cut climate change - a deal South Sudan signed. While the facility may reduce emissions compared to using generators, installing renewable power - from solar, wind, hydropower or other clean sources - would have been a cleaner and potentially cheaper choice, some say.

Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019 (Guardian)

Zero-carbon energy became Britain’s largest electricity source in 2019, delivering nearly half the country’s power and outstripping fossil fuels for the first time. Following a dramatic decline in coal-fired power and a rise in renewable and low-carbon energy, 2019 was the cleanest energy year on record for Britain...

Uganda's thirst for hydropower raises fears for environment (Guardian)

Murchison Falls is a magnet for tourism but energy projects, not least a possible dam, threaten the wildlife haven

Community-generated green electricity to be offered to all in UK (Guardian)

UK homes will soon be able to plug into community wind and solar farms from anywhere in the country through the first energy tariff to offer clean electricity exclusively from community projects...

Solar and wind generation outpaced coal in Europe last year (PV Magazine)

Renewables generated more electricity than coal in the EU for the first time ever in 2019, driving the sharpest reduction in the European power sector’s carbon emissions in three decades...

Solar Is Beating Out Coal in Australia, Pushing Down Emissions (Bloomberg)

Record-high renewables growth is transforming Australia’s electricity landscape, pushing out coal plants and lowering prices and emissions.

Solar and wind output during the fourth quarter within the five jurisdictions that make up the National Electricity Market increased 39% from a year earlier... That helped cut power-generation emissions 5% to the lowest in data going back to 2001 and slashed wholesale prices by almost a fifth...

Rigging the System Against Clean Energy (Bloomberg)

now, in the latest attempt by the Trump administration to obstruct the clean energy transition and artificially revive a dying coal industry, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — or FERC — has issued an order creating new rules that unfairly favor electricity from coal plants over cleaner and less costly alternatives...

Germany to phase out coal use by 2038 (Al Jazeera)

Ministers are clear coal mines will disappear and that renewable sources of energy are the answer... But experts say the pace of the government's plan is too slow...

New green technology generates electricity 'out of thin air' (phys.org)

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine...

Africa grapples with clean energy conundrum (BBC)

Africa is both the world's least electrified continent and the most vulnerable to climate change.

And as the continent with the world's fastest growing population, the decisions that African politicians make to boost power supplies could have an impact both locally and globally.

The conundrum is how to meet the demand for energy without making the climate situation worse.

There is a large amount of investment, much of it from overseas, going into renewable sources. But the continent also has untapped reserves of oil and natural gas, which it aims to exploit...

Carbon emissions fall as electricity producers move away from coal (Guardian)

Carbon emissions from the global electricity system fell by 2% last year, the biggest drop in almost 30 years, as countries began to turn their backs on coal-fired power plants.

A new report on the world’s electricity generation revealed the steepest cut in carbon emissions since 1990 as the US and the EU turned to cleaner energy sources.

Overall, power from coal plants fell by 3% last year, even as China’s reliance on coal plants climbed for another year to make up half the world’s coal generation for the first time.

Coal generation in the US and Europe has halved since 2007, and last year collapsed by almost a quarter in the EU and by 16% in the US...

World's wind power capacity up by fifth after record year (Guardian)

The world’s wind power capacity grew by almost a fifth in 2019 after a year of record growth for offshore windfarms and a boom in onshore projects in the US and China...

New renewable energy capacity hit record levels in 2019 (Guardian)

Almost three-quarters of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 uses renewable energy, representing an all-time record. New data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) shows solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world’s power, marking another record.

Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the US, with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world’s oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 was renewable...

Oil Companies Are Collapsing, but Wind and Solar Energy Keep Growing (NYT)

The renewable-energy business is expected to keep growing, though more slowly, in contrast to fossil fuel companies, which have been hammered by low oil and gas prices...

Britain breaks record for coal-free power generation (Guardian)

Britain has gone without coal-fired power generation for its longest stretch since the Industrial Revolution, breaking the existing record of 18 consecutive days this morning. The UK’s energy system has not used coal-fired plants for more than 438 hours, according to National Grid data, the longest uninterrupted period since 1882.

The 18-day stretch has broken the UK’s previous record, which was set on 4 June 2019, partly because of a collapse in demand for electricity during the coronavirus lockdown and because of greater use of solar power. The UK set a new solar power record on 20 April after solar farms generated more than 9.6GW of electricity for the first time...

The worldwide race to make solar power more efficient (BBC)

One of the few parts of the UK economy to have a good April was solar power...

Coal Demand Set for Biggest Annual Drop Since World War II (Bloomberg)

Global coal demand is heading for its biggest annual drop since World War II as economic activity plunges due to coronavirus lockdowns.

Burning coal to make electricity in several European countries has become unprofitable and socially untenable -- crowded out by cheap natural gas and the proliferation of renewable energy as well as powerful environmental movements. The pandemic has only hastened its demise...

Water-splitting module a source of perpetual energy (phys.org)

researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.

The platform... integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.

This sort of catalysis isn't new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input...

China Is Virtually Alone in Backing Africa’s Coal Projects (Bloomberg)

The country’s involvement in coal is isolating it further from the rest of the world...

Floating wind swells, hydrogen on a high and here comes the 150-hour 'aqueous air' battery ... (Recharge)

For a while here on the Great Lakes there were no end of proposals for renewable energy that would engineer the last of natural systems out of existence: a wall of wind turbines blocking major bird migration corridor across Lake Erie, aqueous batteries ripping up the benthos off Toronto, larval fish killing pump storage in Lake Michigan, eastern Ontario archipelago blanketed with wind turbines blinking red in sunsets and otherwise black night skies, coastal lakes paved with floating solar panels blocking primary productivity. It was looking pretty dystopian there for a while...

A new wind turbine farm has just been erected 10 km south of where I live on the ridge overlooking the Great Rift Valley, and another one is planned 10 km or so north. The second one will be very visible to me. It is being opposed by the local community on various grounds, mainly that there has not been a proper community consultation nor a credible assessment of the risks to humans, flora, fauna and environment. Energy-related projects in Africa, whether fossil-fuel or green, are usually only of potential benefit at the national level. They rarely benefit and usually disadvantage the local communities where they are sited.

Great to minimize carbon emission but care in siting, design, operation could also minimize side damage to ecosystems and landscapes...

You will most dislike the red-blinking lights at night...according to one NY survey. One would think a less intrusive way (that didn't attract birds and bugs) could be engineered to alert airplanes to potential hazard.

I trust they managed not to build in major bird/bat/butterfly migration corridor?

Yes, the lights will be very visible to us. Someone has described it as being like a disco with strobe lights all over the place (and he managed to include the word "fucking" three times in that sentence for emphasis). Currently when we look out over the valley at night we can see for a distance of up to 75 km in a 180 degree arc, and only twenty or so small pinpricks of light are visible.

It's a money-making project for the developers, and neither minimising carbon emissions, nor "siting, design, operation" are of much interest to them. The environmental and other surveys have been fudged. Bats and butterfies are not a major issue up here due to the wind strength, but birds are. We are concerned for vultures and birds of prey, and on several occasions we have seen flocks of several hundred storks and pelicans.

>72 John5918: The most agreeable consultant co. (according to a biologist in the biz) was chosen by our developer. Study design was something else: relatively small radius (= much reduced area) searched for mortalities, weekly "mort" survey minimized scavenger effect, ecosystem effects not studied (e.g., raptors/rodents/tick/Lyme pathogen), before-and-after study shortened. An owl species simply moved away from the area, apparently, but its habitat loss wasn't captured by the study...

Most affected in our area--that we know about--were swallows (in longterm decline) and 3 species of migratory bats. Wind turbines measurably decreased migratory bats REGIONALLY(!) in western US... Our swallow fledglings probably succumbed in the thousands, although rainy springs didn't help--the numbers never did recover. No accommodation for endangered turtles crossing the support roads proposed in one development. Sounds like your vultures might be soaring updrafts in the area? Storks would be migrating?

If close or geography might expose you to infrasound, you might want to keep sleep journal before flip is switched. Some people were able to influence operations after the fact. (Apparently, ~22% of people are sensitive to infrasound.)

(Property owners used to dark skies of L Ontario, said our turbines' red flashing lights looked like an airport... Later, I was shocked to see another pastoral island light up at night when switch was flipped.)

Britain's largest solar farm poised to begin development in Kent (Guardian)

Britain’s largest solar farm, capable of generating enough clean electricity to power 91,000 homes, is poised to receive the greenlight from ministers this week. The subsidy-free renewables park is expected to reach a capacity of 350MW by installing 880,000 solar panels – some as tall as buses – across 364 hectares (900 acres) of farmland in the Kent countryside...

Rapid shift to renewable energy could lead Australia to cheap power and 100,000 jobs (Guardian)

A rapid expansion of renewable energy over the next five years could establish Australia as a home for new zero-emissions industries, cut electricity costs and create more than 100,000 jobs in the electricity industry alone, a new analysis suggests.

The briefing paper by Beyond Zero Emissions, a climate change thinktank, presents an alternative vision to the Morrison government’s gas-fired recovery plan, arguing the shift to a clean electricity grid is inevitable and there are opportunities in accelerating it...

It recommends Australia aims to build 90 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity and 20GW of batteries over five years, a project it estimates would create 22,000 ongoing and 124,000 construction jobs. It describes the goal as ambitious, but “an evolution, not a revolution” given 11GW was installed in 2018 and 2019. It cites a report by consultants Rystad Energy that found 133GW of large-scale solar, wind and battery projects are in development. About a quarter have planning approval...

Energy firms urged to mothball coal plants as cost of solar tumbles (Guardian)

Companies could save billions, says report, as well as curbing carbon emissions...

Building new solar power projects would generate cheaper electricity than running most of the world’s existing coal power plants, according to a global renewable energy report.

New figures have revealed that more than half of the world’s coal plants could be undercut by the falling cost of new large-scale solar projects, which are now more than 80% cheaper to build than in 2010.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has found that up to 1,200 gigawatts of the world’s existing coal capacity could cost more to run than the cost of new utility-scale solar plants...

Solar, Wind, Storage Link Arms in Push for ‘Majority Renewables’ by 2030 (greentechmedia)

The U.S. solar, wind, energy storage and hydropower industries announced a new era of cooperation between their sectors, with the goal of bringing renewables to constitute a majority of electricity generation sources by 2030. While the American solar and wind industries have long fought for many of the same policies on the national stage, the two markets are largely supported by different mechanisms at the federal level, and a policy victory for one industry has not always meant a victory for the other. But the two industries have grown increasingly blended...

Britain goes coal free as renewables edge out fossil fuels (BBC)

Britain is about to pass a significant landmark - at midnight on Wednesday it will have gone two full months without burning coal to generate power. A decade ago about 40% of the country's electricity came from coal; coronavirus is part of the story, but far from all.

When Britain went into lockdown, electricity demand plummeted; the National Grid responded by taking power plants off the network. The four remaining coal-fired plants were among the first to be shut down. The last coal generator came off the system at midnight on 9 April. No coal has been burnt for electricity since.

The current coal-free period smashes the previous record of 18 days, 6 hours and 10 minutes which was set in June last year...

Vatican Asks Catholics to Ditch Fossil Fuel Investments (Eco Watch)

The Vatican urged Catholics to closely consider where they invest their money and to take a close look at the environmental impact of the companies they may be shareholders in...

Pope Francis has frequently criticized wanton greed that has led to environmental degradation and a climate crisis that is uprooting the lives of the world's most vulnerable and impoverished people. On Earth Day, the Pope gave a speech in which he said that humans have sinned against the earth, as EcoWatch reported at the time.

To follow up on the pontiff's works, the Vatican released a 225-page manual for church leaders and workers that included the guidance to end investments in weapons manufacturing and defense systems, fossil fuels, and to closely monitor companies in the energy sector to see if their actions are causing environmental harm...

Vatican urges Catholics to drop investments in fossil fuels, arms (Reuters)

The Vatican urged Catholics on Thursday to disinvest from the armaments and fossil fuel industries and to closely monitor companies in sectors such as mining to check if they are damaging the environment...

Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts (Guardian)

A giant flywheel in north-east Scotland could soon help to prevent blackouts across Britain by mimicking the effect of a power station but without using fossil fuels.

The trailblazing project near Keith in Moray, thought to cost about £25m, will not generate electricity or produce carbon emissions – but it could help keep the lights on by stabilising the energy grid’s electrical frequency...

By simulating the spinning metal mass of a power station turbine without producing emissions, Statkraft should be able to help ESO rely less on fossil fuels and use renewable energy more...

Africa can become a renewable energy superpower – if climate deniers are kept at bay (Guardian)

The power of climate science denial in the UK, thankfully, has been in retreat over the past decade. Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) may still boast a prime Westminster address, but its influence has waned. In fact, its decline aptly mirrors the fortunes of the coal industry, including US titans such as Peabody Energy, which saw its share price plunge 99% between 2008 and 2016 before filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

With countries rightly phasing coal out of their energy mix, the GWPF has turned its sights on Africa to peddle its misinformation about the merits of burning fossil fuels. It has published a new report, derisively titled Heart of Darkness: Why Electricity for Africa is a Security Issue, and launched a glossy website for “energy justice”, which uses the language of climate justice campaigners to try to undermine renewable energy.

As an African from a pastoralist community in northern Kenya, I have seen the suffering that coal-fuelled climate breakdown has wrought on my people. The anti-climate policies that the GWPF has pushed for years have contributed to the droughts, storms and surging temperatures that have killed people and destroyed livelihoods. Yet now they pretend to be Africa’s saviours, seeking out new markets for the ever more desperate coal industry. And coal barons are not alone: European-produced petrol, so dirty and polluting that it can’t be sold there, is being dumped on to the Nigerian market.

The GWPF report was written by Geoff Hill, a Zimbabwean journalist who spent much of his early career working for Rupert Murdoch’s the Australian, a newspaper known to spread misinformation about the climate crisis. Hill does not seem to have an academic background in climate science or energy policy. The report cites three academics who appear to have a vested interest in the solutions proposed: Dr Rosemary Falcon, Dr Samson Bada and Dr Jacob Masiala are all connected to the Clean Coal Technology Research group at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

African prosperity will not come by it being shackled to the outdated dirty energy infrastructure of the past. Rather than trudging behind in the 50-year-old footsteps of European countries, Africa needs to leapfrog to the clean, cheap and renewable technologies of the future. This is how Africa will catch up with its global neighbours. Africa is blessed with more sun, wind and geothermal energy than anywhere else on the planet, but that fact does not help the GWPF or the coal industry.

Not only are wind and solar increasingly becoming the cheapest forms of new electricity across the globe, but they are also inherently more agile and versatile than grid-reliant fossil fuels. Pastoralists in remote parts of Africa in need of electricity will not be served waiting for hulking great power grids to be built, cutting a swathe across Africa’s precious natural landscape. They would be better off with solar mini-grids and wind turbines supplying energy exactly where it is needed most.

No continent suffers more from global heating than Africa, yet nowhere has done less to cause it. But despite being victims of a climate crisis they did not create, Africans are smart enough to know that putting more coal on the fire is not the solution...

What’s Holding Geothermal Energy Back? (Oilprice.com)

It’s abundant, and it’s emissions-free: the heat from the earth’s mantle that reaches well into the crust and gives deep drillers a headache occasionally is the new star on the renewables block. Nevertheless, oil and gas companies have been somewhat reluctant to embrace it. Let’s first clarify: geothermal energy is only “new” in terms of the media attention it has been getting. Researchers - including people from the oil and gas industry - have been working for decades on technologies to extract the heat from the earth and either use it directly or turn it into electricity. It is only gaining prominence now as these technologies advance and the world’s attention becomes increasingly focused on alternatives to fossil fuels...

Geothermal is quite big in Kenya, where I live.

On a global level, what is holding back renewable forms of energy is what I call pushback. The good news that one or more doctoral dissertations have begun to document the variety of lobbying efforts, etc., around the world by fossil fuel advocates, in order to maintain business and government demand for fossil fuel.

For instance, my family and I plan to replace our gas-powered cooking technology with magnetic induction stoves. Induction cooking was recommended by climatologist Heidi Cullen in her early 2000s book for the general public on global weather long-term trends. And yet, over the last five years my family and I have noticed a vast number of TV and magazine ads for gas stoves.

Our family's plans to move to a different home have been put on hold, so I will take advantage of that hiatus to put together a new Zeitgeist list of recommended titles.

More coal power generation closed than opened around the world this year, research finds (Guardian)

The size of the global coal power fleet fell for the first time on record over the first six months of the year, with more generation capacity shutting than starting operation...

While China continues to build coal, construction has ground to a near halt in India, which shut more capacity than it opened...

>82 MaureenRoy: magnetic induction stoves

Sounds interesting. I've just googled and it looks as if the induction units would use upwards of 1,200 watts, which is more electricity than our current solar system could handle comfortably. We can't use electric stoves, kettles, irons or anything that involves heating. I'm hoping that in the long run we can instal a small biogas unit for cooking. We don't have enough domestic waste at the moment (it either goes for composting or to feed our pack of dogs) but when we eventually get some livestock and fowl we might find ourselves with more organic waste at our disposal.

>84 John5918: Induction uses less because less waste, e.g., stovetop next to pot is cool enough to touch. Heats up really quickly, which is great for stir-fries. Less air pollution in house than with gas. In addition to range, we have a couple of portables that we use at summer place, on the deck for grilling, basement for beer-making, and garage for maple syrup--I love induction!

I can only think of two downsides, which are easily overcome (except for your situation, sounds like):
1. Our induction range requires a 50 amp circuit, to fire up oven and all five hobbs for a Thanksgiving dinner without tripping breaker. (As opposed to 40 for most electric ranges?)
2. Pots must be able to take a magnet, e.g., carbon steel, cast iron, stainless steel that takes a magnet (All Clad, Hexclad).

>85 margd: Our induction range requires a 50 amp circuit

Thanks, yes, for me that would be the problem. Our solar system wouldn't handle that.

>86 John5918: How about inexpensive induction portable one-hobb cooktop like Max Burton (below)? We bought an earlier model to give induction a try before investing in a range--and still use it! (You no doubt have a better selection in Europe, Asia, and your part of the world.)

Max Burton #6450 Digital LCD 1800 Watt Induction Cooktop Counter Top Burner (portable, $89 on amazon)
One touch simmer and boil buttons
LCD display and touchpad controls
120V, 15 amps of electricity – standard household outlet
Up to 1800 watts with Heat Mode – 10 Heat Settings
Temp Mode – 15 Temperature settings from 100° to 450° in 25° increments
180-minute programmable timer
Lock to prevent setting changes

China poised to power huge growth in global offshore wind energy (Guardian)

The world’s offshore windfarm capacity could grow eightfold by the end of the decade powered by a clean energy surge led by China, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).

A new industry report has revealed stronger than expected growth for the offshore wind industry, which could reach 234GW by 2030, from a global tally of just over 29GW at the end of last year...

Can Renewables Fully Sustain Our Current Way Of Life? (oilprice.com)

“The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could”... Why? Because people just are not willing to give up all the perks of modern life... Climate change and the pivot toward energy transition are real. But the idea of having the world function as we know it powered solely by renewable energy is unrealistic today...

Consumers with ‘first-world problems’ want constant stable internet connection and cheap electricity. Many people in some parts of the world do not have any access to electricity...

This article in an oil industry magazine is predictable, but it does raise the real issue that we need not only a transition to renewable energy but also a lifestyle change. The former appears to be the easier part of the equation. It's "the idea of having the world function as we know it" which needs to change. There has to be a better way for the world to function.

Is this the end for ‘king coal’ in Britain? (Guardian)

Britain achieved an unlikely status as a power provider last year. Its annual consumption of coal plunged to the lowest level in 250 years. According to figures released last week, a mere 8 million tonnes were incinerated in UK factories and power plants. That is roughly the same amount that was burned nationally in 1769, when James Watt was patenting his modified steam engine.

That invention helped to spark the Industrial Revolution and triggered a massive rise in annual coal use in Britain, which soared to well over 200 million tonnes by the mid-20th century. Now levels have plummeted back to their original pre-revolution state. King coal – once the undisputed ruler of British industry – has finally been dethroned...

It provided Britain with enormous power but at an exorbitant cost in terms of pollution and the diseases – asthma, cancer, and heart and lung ailments – that emerged in its wake. Other countries – Germany, Poland, China among them – still burn coal in significant quantities. But the nation that first took advantage of it, and which built an empire using the industrial might it conferred, has now emphatically turned its back on coal...

“We should look at last year as marking the beginning of the end for fossil fuels as sources of energy for electricity generation, and not before time.”

Mind you, at the same time Mongolia is developing a new railway line to "transport coking coal from Tavan-Tolgoi in southern Mongolia, one of the world’s largest untapped coal deposits... When completed the railway will have capacity to transport for up to 15 million tonnes per year..." (First 50km of 414km Mongolian freight line completed (International Railway Journal)).

Plummeting Renewable Energy, Battery Prices Mean China Could Hit 62% Clean Power And Cut Costs 11% By 2030 (Forbes)

China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, and is building the most power plants of any country in the world, making its decarbonization paramount to preventing dangerous climate change. But the costs of wind, solar, and energy storage have fallen so fast that building clean power is now cheaper than building fossil fuels – a lot cheaper.

New research shows plummeting clean energy prices mean China could reliably run its grids on at least 62% non-fossil electricity generation by 2030, while cutting costs 11% compared to a business-as-usual approach. Once again, it’s cheaper to save the climate than destroy it...

Boris Johnson poised to stop UK funding overseas fossil fuel projects (Guardian)

Boris Johnson is poised to sign off new rules barring the UK government’s chief foreign lender from offering financial support to foreign fossil fuel projects.

The new policy, which could come as soon as this week, will rule out future loans and financial guarantees for polluting projects overseas through the UK’s export credit agency, UK Export Finance, just weeks after it agreed to a £1bn financial package to support work on a gas project in Mozambique.

Under the new rules no support may be offered to fossil fuel extraction or oil refining projects from 2021, apart from limited funding for gas-fired power plants “in exceptional circumstances”...

Why Do Solar Farms Kill Birds? Call in the AI Bird Watcher (Wired)

Solar facilities kill tens of thousands of birds every year, and no one is quite sure why. An artificial-intelligence-powered birder is on the case...

In 2016, a first-of-its-kind study estimated that the hundreds of utility-scale solar farms around the US may kill nearly 140,000 birds annually. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of the estimated number of birds killed by fossil-fuel power plants (through collisions, electrocution, and poisoning), but the researchers expected that number to nearly triple as planned solar farms come online. The link between solar facilities and bird deaths is still unclear...

Earlier this year, the Department of Energy awarded a team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois a $1.3 million contract to develop an artificial intelligence platform dedicated to studying avian behavior at large-scale solar facilities around the US...

UK firm's solar power breakthrough could make world's most efficient panels by 2021 (Guardian)

Oxford PV says tech based on perovskite crystal can generate almost a third more electricity...

>93 John5918: Hope your wind farm not yet up: much cheaper to paint a blade on the ground!

Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades
The study ran for nine years at Norway's Smøla wind farm.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 8/25/2020, 1:43 PM

... Previous laboratory studies have suggested that birds may not be very good at seeing obstructions while they're flying, and adding visual cues like different colored fan blades can increase birds' chances of spotting a rapidly rotating fan.

At the Smøla wind farm, regular checks of four particular wind turbines—each 70m tall with three 40m-long blades—found six white-tailed eagle carcasses between 2006 and 2013. In total, the four turbines killed 18 birds that flew into the blades over those six years, along with five willow ptarmigans that are known to collide with the turbine towers rather than the blades. (Another four turbines selected as a control group were responsible for seven bird deaths, excluding willow ptarmigans, over the same timeframe.)

And so, in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.

Digging into the data a little more showed some variation on bird deaths depending upon the season. During spring and autumn, fewer bird deaths were recorded at the painted turbines. But in summer, bird deaths actually increased at the painted turbines, and the authors note that the small number of turbines in the study and its relatively short duration both merit longer-term replication studies, both at Smøla and elsewhere.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/black-paint-on-wind-turbines-helps-preve...
_____________________________________________________

Roel May et al. 2020. Paint it black: Efficacy of increased wind turbine rotor blade visibility to reduce avian fatalities. Ecology and Evolution (26 July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6592 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6592

OPEN ACCESS

Abstract

As wind energy deployment increases and larger wind‐power plants are considered, bird fatalities through collision with moving turbine rotor blades are expected to increase. However, few (cost‐) effective deterrent or mitigation measures have so far been developed to reduce the risk of collision. Provision of “passive” visual cues may enhance the visibility of the rotor blades enabling birds to take evasive action in due time. Laboratory experiments have indicated that painting one of three rotor blades black minimizes motion smear (Hodos 2003, Minimization of motion smear: Reducing avian collisions with wind turbines). We tested the hypothesis that painting would increase the visibility of the blades, and that this would reduce fatality rates in situ, at the Smøla wind‐power plant in Norway, using a Before–After–Control–Impact approach employing fatality searches. The annual fatality rate was significantly reduced at the turbines with a painted blade by over 70%, relative to the neighboring control (i.e., unpainted) turbines. The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white‐tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds. Painting the rotor blades at operational turbines was, however, resource demanding given that they had to be painted while in‐place. However, if implemented before construction, this cost will be minimized. It is recommended to repeat this experiment at other sites to ensure that the outcomes are generic at various settings.

The Best Electricity Plan: Overbuild Solar & Wind Power Plants (Clean Technica)

More than 8 years ago, researchers from the University of Delaware (UD) and Delaware Technical College (DTCC) put forward a rather “radical” idea — to deal with wind and solar power’s intermittency while also acknowledging wind and solar power’s falling costs, why not just overbuild wind and solar power plants in the future?...

March of renewable energy unstoppable (Star (Kenya))

Unlike fossil fuels, most countries can attain energy security because renewable energy sources – wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower and tidal energy – are ubiquitous...

China pledges to become carbon neutral before 2060 (Guardian)

Unexpectedly forthright pledge will boost UN efforts to galvanise action on climate crisis...

Ugandan lawmakers reject plan for Murchison Falls hydropower dam (Guardian)

Conservationists in Uganda have hailed a bipartisan decision to reject the government’s plan to construct a hydro-power dam at the country’s biggest tourist attraction...

“Whereas the benefits of hydroelectricity are numerous, the country needs to pursue means of sustainably utilising its natural resources, a feat that requires a delicate balance of trade-offs,” said the report, presented by Keefa Kiwanuka, the committee’s chair.

“The Uhuru project, while promising to add to the generation capacity of the country, poses irreversible impacts on the already constrained Murchison Falls national park and other sectors of the economy,” it said.

“In the light of these, the committee recommends that other ongoing generation projects be advanced and the power project at Murchison Falls or its tributary, Uhuru Falls be abandoned”...

The park, Uganda’s largest and most visited, is home to two famous waterfalls – Murchison Falls, one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world, and Uhuru Falls, whose name means freedom in Swahili and which was created by floods in 1962, the year of Uganda’s independence from British colonial rule. The area is on Unesco’s list of wetlands of international importance...

A good decision. Murchison Falls really is one of the great wonders of the world. The entire water of the Nile, the world's longest river, forces its way through a gap in the rocks only about 7 m wide.

Future looks bright for geothermal to bridge power gap in East Africa (The EastAfrican)

The renewable energy sector in East Africa is now aspiring to increase the installed capacity of geothermal on the continent by over 2,500MW of electricity by 2030...

Windfarms in Great Britain break record for clean power generation (Guardian)

Forty per cent of Friday’s electricity was generated in windfarms thanks to blustery winter weather...

A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
G.E.’s giant machine, which can light up a small town, is stoking a renewable-energy arms race.
Stanley Reed | Jan. 1, 2021

...Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam’s harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe.

Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today.

G.E. has yet to install one of these machines in ocean water...
But already the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry....

...A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes...capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to G.E., will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture breezes that are stronger and more reliable.

...A larger turbine produces more electricity and, thus, more revenue than a smaller machine. Size also helps reduce the costs of building and maintaining a wind farm because fewer turbines are required to produce a given amount of power.

These qualities create a powerful incentive for developers to go for the largest machine available to aid their efforts to win the auctions for offshore power supply deals that many countries have adopted. These auctions vary in format, but developers compete to provide power over a number of years for the lowest price.

...“We will also reach a plateau (in size of turbine) ; we just don’t know where it is yet,” said Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen, chief technology officer of the offshore wind unit of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, the leading maker of offshore turbines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/business/GE-wind-turbine.html

How Kenya is harnessing the immense heat from the Earth (BBC)

In the volcanic region of East Africa's Great Rift Valley, tectonic shifts are tearing the continent apart – and releasing unimaginable quantities of clean energy.

Drive along the dusty dirt road that winds through Kenya's Hell's Gate National park, past the zebra, gazelles and giraffes, and you'll see a plume of steam shooting skyward in the distance. Vehicles must sometimes swerve to avoid running over warthogs as they enter a vast valley dotted with dozens of steam vents – a factory of clouds. Blasts of steam billow loudly, releasing heat from deep within the Earth. But even more powerful is the steam you don't see: that which twists through miles of tubes to push past turbines, generating a type of clean energy that won't run out for millions of years...

Climate change: 'Default effect' sees massive green energy switch (BBC)

When Swiss energy companies made green electricity the default choice, huge numbers of consumers were happy to stick with it - even though it cost them more. Four years after the switch, researchers found that around 80% of customers were still on green tariffs. This "default effect" happened partly because people didn't want the hassle of switching back to fossil fuels...

Before the switch, the numbers choosing to have green power were at around 3%. Afterwards, this rose to 80-90% of customers. Residential consumers had to pay at least 3-8% more for their energy on the green tariff, while businesses saw their costs increase by up to 14% for energy used at night. Remarkably, these extra costs weren't enough to push consumers to change their tariffs back to ones with fossil fuels in the mix...

China leads the world in wind – and coal (electrek)

The good green energy news out of China: China built more new wind farms in 2020 than the whole world combined built in 2019. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that China was responsible for 58 gigawatts out of the world’s total of nearly 100 gigawatts worth of wind farms built in 2020...

The bad fossil-fuel news out of China: Global Energy Monitor reported that China led in building coal power plants, too... In the first half of 2020, China hosted almost 90% of all coal plants under construction and is home to half the world’s operating coal-fired electricity capacity...

Good vibrations: bladeless turbines could bring wind power to your home (Guardian)

The bladeless turbines stand at 3 metres high, a curve-topped cylinder fixed vertically with an elastic rod. To the untrained eye it appears to waggle back and forth, not unlike a car dashboard toy. In reality, it is designed to oscillate within the wind range and generate electricity from the vibration...

Switching off rooftop solar will become an important feature of a renewables grid (Renew Economy)

Australia’s biggest grid problems have traditionally been framed as one of matching supply and demand, with the focus on ensuring enough supply to meet the demand at any one point in time. But that network challenge is about to be turned on its head: the biggest problem in the future will be ensuring there is enough demand, because most consumers have their own supply in the form of rooftop solar...

The gas generators were back on line, but relatively low power consumption and sunny conditions – and the still inhibited cross-border trade – meant there was too much supply, and not enough “grid demand”, because most demand was being provided by rooftop solar systems... It needs a certain number of controllable assets to keep the grid stable. So at around 3pm local time, the rooftop solar systems of more than 10,000 Adelaide households, along with some larger ground-mounted systems, were quietly turned off. By around 5.15pm they were all back on line, but it is likely that few of the solar households affected even noticed the intervention, and certainly not their place in Australia’s grid history – for this was the first time that AEMO had intervened in such a way...

China dominates global wind industry after record installations (FT)

Record wind power installations in 2020 have secured China’s position at the top of the global industry despite waning subsidies from Beijing. The 52 gigawatts of new wind power added last year doubled the capacity China installed in 2019...

Doubling of wind power generation blowing gas out of the mix in Victoria (Renew Economy)

A doubling of wind energy capacity on the Victorian grid since 2017 has “significantly displaced” fossil fuel power in the state, a new report has found, and created a unique generation profile that fits particularly well alongside solar – and has been particularly tough on gas...

Offshore Installation Starts at Ørsted’s 900 MW Wind Farm in Taiwan (Offshore Wind)

Ørsted will begin export and array cable laying, installation of the offshore substations and foundations in 2021, and proceed with the wind turbine installation next year. Located 35-60 kilometres from the coastline of Changhua County, the first large-scale and far shore offshore wind farms in Taiwan are scheduled to be finalized by 2022...

>102 John5918:

Geothermal power firm gets Sh500m grant for Baringo wells (Business Daily)

Geothermal Development Company (GDC) has received a Sh500 million ($5 million) grant from the Geothermal Risk Mitigation Facility (GRMF) to drill two wells in Baringo County. The grant will be used to fund 40 per cent of the costs for drilling and testing at the Paka Geothermal Project, one of three geothermal prospects in the area. The others are Silali and Korosi...

128 MW Karoo hybrid project to blend wind, sun and batteries to provide dispatchable power (Engineering News)

the project is pioneering globally in the way it will use co-located wind turbines, solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, lithium-ion batteries and a hybrid controller that orchestrates all three technologies to provide dispatchable renewable energy to the grid as and when needed...

Offshore Wind Could Meet Nearly All of US 2050 Electricity Demand – Report (Offshore Wind)

Offshore wind has the potential to deliver 90 per cent of America’s projected 2050 electricity demand, according to a report released by Environment America Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group...

Biden administration announces plan to expand wind power (Al Jazeera)

The White House has announced plans to expand offshore wind energy in the coming decade by opening new areas to development, speeding environmental permitting, and boosting public financing for projects. The plan is part of President Joe Biden’s broader effort to rapidly transition the US economy to net zero greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change...

The plan sets a target to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030, which the administration said would be enough to power 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year while creating jobs in construction, development, and steel-making...

Dead Power Grid Revived with Solar and Wind, Not Diesel (Scientific American)

An unexpected outage in Colorado allowed engineers to test whether renewable energy and batteries can quickly restart an electric grid...

May gales help Britain set record for wind power generation (Guardian)

In early hours of Friday, windfarm turbines provided nearly two-thirds of Britain’s electricity...

Ultra-Small Water Power Generator
Designer Masaya Sumino

http://www.unido.or.jp/en/technology_db/5276/

I want one!!!

Here’s a promising wind generated street light:

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/05/18/papilio-street-light-tobias-trubenbacher-desig...

The country powering up on cocoa (BBC)

The world's largest producer of cocoa, Ivory Coast, has found a new use for the cocoa plant that could power millions of homes...

Worldwide, the volume of cocoa waste is steadily growing. This waste is now set to become a significant part of Ivory Coast's transition to renewable energy. After successful pilot projects, Ivory Coast has begun work on a biomass plant which will run on cocoa waste. The facility will be located in Divo, a town that produces a large share of the country's cocoa. In the biomass plant, cocoa plant matter left over after cocoa production will be burned to turn a turbine and generate electricity, much like a conventional fossil-fuel power plant. "This plant alone will be able to meet the electricity needs of 1.7 million people"...

‘Global fossil fuel demand for power has peaked’ (Energy Live News)

Global fossil fuel demand for electricity has reached its peak as more and more emerging countries are injecting more renewables into their grid.

That’s one of the findings of a new report by the financial think tank Carbon Tracker and India’s Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), which further estimates fossil fuel demand for electricity has already peaked or plateaued in nearly 63% of emerging markets. These include Chile, Nicaragua, Kenya and Thailand among others.

The authors of the report suggest the demand for fossil fuels for electricity generation in developed markets has also dropped by 20% since 2007. They also note all developed countries except Israel and Latvia have seen a peak in fossil fuel demand for electricity. In addition, the analysis highlights the huge financial loss that can come as a result of an economy that is heavily reliant on fossil fuels...

Tidal turbine in Orkney starts generating power (BBC)

What's being described as the most powerful tidal turbine device in the world has connected to the grid in Orkney. Orbital Marine Power's O2 tidal turbine is anchored in the Fall of Warness where a subsea cable connects the two-megawatt offshore unit to the local onshore electricity network...

Women will be the Driving Force of Africa's Energy Future, and African Energy Week in Cape Town will Emphasize this (africa news)

Despite making up 50% of the population, women continue to represent a minimal role in the African energy industry, accounting for merely 21% of the overall workforce in energy utilities. Continued gender disparity, inequality, and barriers to entry not only directly prevent women from participating in the energy industry, but dramatically constrain economic and sector growth. As the continent moves to make a significant energy sector transformation – on the back of new discoveries, a shift to renewable solutions, and evolving technology -, women have a fundamental role to play in driving Africa’s energy future, and African Energy Week (AEW) taking place in Cape Town on the 9th-12th of November aims to emphasize it. AEW 2021 considers women to be the key drivers of Africa’s energy revolution and should, therefore, comprise notable participants in the workforce...

Kenya Aims to Export Geothermal Know-How (Bloomberg)

When Kenya opened the Olkaria power plant four decades ago, it was considered more research project than commercial venture. Now, the technology is on track to become the backbone of the country’s electricity grid...

Olkaria geothermal power plants in Kenya to be upgraded (Construction Review)

The Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) intends to undertake upgrading of two Olkaria geothermal power plants particularly the Olkaria IV and Olkaria IAU 140MW in a bid to increase the power output and improve steam efficiency...

Giant Energy Storage Project Hoovers Up Excess Wind & Solar (Clean Technica)

Located in Moss Landing near Monterey, California, the facility got under way in 2020 and it just completed an expansion, bringing its capacity to 400 megawatts or 1,600 megawatt-hours, depending on who’s counting and why... So far, work on the first two phases has progressed ahead of schedule, and Vistra is looking forward to another expansion that will bring the plant up to 1,500 megawatts, which translates into 6,000 megawatt-hours...

World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale (New Atlas)

China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life. The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields. Every year, each one is expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity...

KenGen receives two million carbon credits for Olkaria geothermal projects (Star)

The Kenya Electricity Generating Company has received more than two million carbon credits from its Olkaria I, Units four and five Geothermal Power plant. The additional 2,040,515 Carbon Emission Reductions were issued by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, bringing total carbon credits to 2,591,496 tonnes. KenGen managing director Rebecca Miano said the UNFCCC’s issuance of the carbon credits is an affirmation of company’s commitment to addressing climate change...

KenGen shifted its focus to production of green energy and currently more than 86 per cent of the energy produced by the company is from clean sources; wind, hydro and geothermal...

Wonder if military research might not produce nuclear component with solar and wind for local power "in remote and austere environments". (Such as Texas, after winter cold and summer hurricanes take down the grid!) In Afghanistan, DOD cooled tents with solar panels... Lots of universities have small nuclear reactors for research.

US military eyes prototype mobile nuclear reactor in Idaho
KEITH RIDLER | September 24, 2021

The U.S. Department of Defense...began a 45-day comment period on Friday with the release of a draft environmental impact study evaluating alternatives for building and operating the microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power. The department’s energy needs are expected to increase, it said.

“A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that would not add to the DoD’s fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments,” the Defense Department said.

The (314-page) draft environmental impact statement cites President Joe Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order prioritizing climate change considerations in national security as another reason for pursuing microreactors. The draft document said alternative energy sources such as wind and solar were problematic because they are limited by location, weather and available land area, and would require redundant power supplies....

The department in the draft environmental impact statement said it wants to reduce reliance on local electric grids, which are highly vulnerable to prolonged outages from natural disasters, cyberattacks, domestic terrorism and failure from lack of maintenance.

The department also said new technologies such as drones and radar systems increase energy demands.

But critics say such microreactors could become targets themselves, including during transportation...

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-science-technology-business-us-department-o...
-----------------------------------------------------

Notice of Availability of Draft Construction and Demonstration of a Prototype Mobile Microreactor Environmental Impact Statement
A Notice by the Defense Department on 09/24/2021
This document has a comment period that ends in 40 days. (11/08/2021)
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/24/2021-20546/notice-of-availa...

Local news

Berea College builds a hydroelectric generating plant on the Kentucky River, using unused navigational locks.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/2021-09-22/berea-unvei...

Will generate half the annual electric use of the college. Selling to Jackson Energy Cooperative, also local.

Stanford University has gone solar; and will generate 100% of their electricity with solar installation by next year.

https://www.stanforddaily.com/2021/08/18/stanfords-commitment-to-sustainability/

>125 2wonderY: BTW, the town of Berea owns and operates its electric grid. They buy wholesale from bigger suppliers, but they also built two solar arrays. That was financed by residents who bought panels and now get credits on their utility bills.

Given Fox News' reputation for climate crisis denial, I found it interesting that they have published this story about the effects of, er, the climate crisis.

Record-breaking heat, droughts shrink Hoover Dam's ability to generate power (Fox)

The nation’s most extensive reservoir is experiencing historically low levels, prompting federal authorities to declare a water shortage for drought-stricken southwestern areas. The issue at Lake Mead is cutting water supplies to Arizona by nearly 20% and by 7% for Nevada... The Colorado River Basin is in the 22nd year of drought... "We were at about 95% of capacity at Lake Powell and Lake Mead in 2000 when the drought began... We are at 35% capacity at Lake Mead today"... Standing on top of the Hoover Dam, one can see the effects of the drought, where water lines indicate how high the water once was. "We are now in territory at Lake Mead that we have not seen these elevations since the lake was initially filled in the early 1930s"... If water levels continue to drop, there won’t be enough water at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam or Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam to generate non-polluting hydroelectricity for roughly 1 million homes across Nevada and California.

>128 John5918: Probably so they can imply that this federal tax dollar-funded, publically-owned facility isn't even doing it's job. Just imagine how much better it would be if it was run by the private sector, owned by, say, Fox's friends. (/daily hate)

Renewable energy is fuelling a forgotten conflict in Africa’s last colony (The Conversation)

Morocco has positioned itself as a global leader in the fight against climate change, with one of the highest-rated national action plans. But though the north African country intends to generate half its electricity from renewables by 2030, its plans show that much of this energy will come from wind and solar farms in occupied land in neighbouring Western Sahara. Indeed, in my research I have looked at how Morocco has exploited renewable energy developments to entrench the occupation.

Western Sahara, a sparsely-populated desert territory bordering the Atlantic Ocean, is Africa’s last colony. In 1975, its coloniser Spain sold it to Morocco and Mauritania in exchange for continued access to Western Sahara’s rich fisheries and a share of the profits from a lucrative phosphates mine.

According to Morocco, Western Sahara formed part of the Moroccan sultanate before Spanish colonisation in the 1880s. However, that year the International Court of Justice disagreed, and urged a self-determination referendum on independence for the indigenous Saharawis. Nevertheless, Morocco invaded and used napalm against fleeing Saharawi refugees...

Wind power risks becoming too cheap, says top turbine maker (Reuters)

The head of Siemens Gamesa (SGREN.MC) warned on Wednesday that a decade-long race to bring down the cost of generating wind power could not continue, as it would reduce the financial muscle of turbine producers to continue investing in new technologies...

Scotland marks end to coal power as Longannet chimney is blown up (Guardian)

Scotland has marked the end of its coal-powered history by demolishing the huge chimney at its last remaining coal plant at Longannet in Fife. The chimney, which was Scotland’s largest freestanding structure, dominated the skyline for more than half a century before it was destroyed on Thursday morning with 700kg of explosives. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who pushed the ignition button on the controlled implosion, described the demolition as “a symbolic reminder that we have ended coal-fired power generation in Scotland, as we work in a fair and just way towards becoming a net zero nation by 2045”...

Inside Clean Energy: US Battery Storage Soared in 2021, Including These Three Monster Projects
Storage industry continues rapid growth despite rising costs. California leads the way.
Dan Gearino | March 31, 2022

...In 2021, the market added 3,508 megawatts of battery storage capacity, an amount more than double from the prior year, according to a report issued last week by the research firm Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, a trade group. The total includes grid-scale storage and smaller storage systems at homes and businesses...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31032022/inside-clean-energy-battery-storage/

NowThis @nowthisnews | 8:33 PM · Jun 4, 2022:
This man created a hydroelectric power turbine out of spare parts and recycled material⚡️

0:31 ( https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1533245467055689730 )
Man Creates Hydroelectric Generator From Recycled Material
This man created a hydroelectric power turbine out of spare parts and recycled material⚡️

The mountain that helps power Britain (BBC)

Hewn from a near-mythic Scottish mountain, colossal Cruachan Power Station in Argyll is a model for renewable and low-carbon energy production and a pioneer in sustainable tourism... Using four reversible turbines, the pumped storage hydro plant drives the loch water upwards, over millennia of strata, to fill the mountain reservoir when demand for electricity is low. This procedure recasts the power station as an immense battery, with the water stored for when it is needed. When demand surges, the stockpiled water is released and flushed through underground rotors to create power at rapid speed. When the network needs it, electricity can be triggered in as little as 28 seconds. By comparison, a traditional coal plant can take hours to spark to life...

>134 John5918: Hopefully Britain designed its facility to minimize entrainment and impingement of fish. A 1970s pump storage station on Lake Michigan killed milions every year, and still does, though nets help a bit. Today, wind turbines are being sited near the Ludington Pump Storage Station in order to store energy produced at night, so the sushi machine grinds on... (Toronto is entertaining another idea to store energy produced overnight--use it to submerge huge "balloons", releasing them during the day when energy needed. Some aquatic habitat sacrificed but at least fish aren't actively vacuumed up...)

https://www.glft.org/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant

From April 2022:

For the first time, wind power eclipsed both coal and nuclear in the U.S.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/14/1092806582/wind-power-energy-source

"On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says.

In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country."

November:

Onshore wind power is likely to provide at least 10% of the nation's electricity in 2022. Renewable energy hasn't hit that mark since the 1980s. (hydropower)
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/us-wind-power-milestone-10-percent-power-mix

This Massive ‘Sand Battery’ Can Store Excess Solar and Wind Energy for Months

first commercial sized application

The sand doesn’t store electricity, but stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat from storage, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used for a variety of tasks, including converting water into process steam or heating water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, if the application includes turbine technology.

Ville Kivioja, lead scientist at Polar Night Energy, tells the BBC that the Finnish battery stores 8 megawatt hours of thermal energy when full, and discharges about 200 kilowatts of power through the pipes, enough for 100 homes and the public pool. “There’s no wear and tear involved with the heat exchange pipes and the sand,” he says. “The fan is the only moving part and it’s easy to replace, if necessary.”

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a41869336/sand-battery/

Tides are amazingly powerful and extreme in ever-narrowing Bay of Fundy. Article contains short (2:59) video on capturing tidal energy, on a movable (not fixed) platform in the Bay of Fundy:

Nova Scotia’s ambitious climate plan aims to phase out coal
Nathan Coleman | Dec. 9, 2022, 2:37 PM
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/climate/solutions/climate-nova-scotias...

UK and western Europe in middle of a wind drought - and a 'global stilling' is coming

https://news.sky.com/story/future-of-renewable-energy-in-balance-as-uk-suffers-w...

Even if the world reaches net zero soon after 2050, limiting the rise in temperature, winds will weaken significantly in the northern hemisphere.

It's called global stilling. And it's caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic, which is narrowing the temperature difference with the tropics, a gap that drives wind.

In the UK, the average wind speed is expected to drop by 2% to 3% by 2050, and 10% by the end of the century.

That matters because the UK is taking a big bet on wind.

UK sets new record for wind power generation (Guardian)

Britain has set a new record for wind generation as power from onshore and offshore turbines helped boost clean energy supplies late last year. National Grid’s electricity system operator (ESO), which handles Great Britain’s grid, said that a new record for wind generation was set on 30 December, when 20.91 gigawatts (GW) were produced by turbines. This represented the third time Britain’s fleet of wind turbines set new generation records in 2022. In May, National Grid had to ask some turbines in the west of Scotland to shut down, as the network was unable to store such a large amount of electricity when a then record 19.9GW of power was produced – enough to boil 3.5m kettles. The ESO said a new record was also set for the share of electricity on the grid coming from zero-carbon sources – renewables and nuclear – which supplied 87.2% of total power. These sources have accounted for about 55% to 59% of power over the past couple of years...

Tiny water turbines

https://www.ctc-n.org/products/renewable-energy-micro-hydraulic-power-unit-spira...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9nkQES3QdZY

Electrified cement could turn houses and roads into nearly limitless batteries
Energy storing building materials could make on-demand power from renewables affordable worldwide
Robert F. Service | 31 Jul 2023

Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind.

...carbon black cement ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/electrified-cement-could-turn-houses-and...

Supercapacitors! Didn’t Doc Brown harness that back in the 80s?

Sounds promising. A couple concerns I would have to research.
Living within the electromagnetic radiation of a huge battery.
The fact that concrete production is itself a large contributor to climate change - each pound of concrete releases 0.93 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Ibis PowerNest combines solar and wind components on top of tall buildings, each enhancing the other’s performance.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuE3ycWpkE8/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==

So. Good question. Wind turbine blades and components have a relatively short lifespan. What’s the solution to the waste created?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwsZ4ykuvg2/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Regulators say (U.S.) power grid may collapse

Winter blackouts

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/dangerous-winter-blackouts-could-affect-mo...

Edited to add a better reportage of the story:

Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/portugal-just-ran-on-100-renew...
…..

Portugal sets 'important' new renewable energy record as production outstrips demand

Over six consecutive days, 1102 GWh of electricity was generated compared to the 840 GWh the country consumed during the same period. Production surpassed the energy needs of households and industry by 262 GWh.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/11/09/portugal-sets-important-new-renewable-...

https://www.instagram.com/p/CztfiL1OrHX/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

This happened in February this year.

New Law: 50%+ Solar Power Over Parking Lots In France

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/09/new-law-50-solar-power-over-parking-lots-in...

One analysis reportedly found that the requirement would add up to 8% of France’s current power capacity to the grid. That would be the equivalent of 10 nuclear power plants.

TIME wrote about the idea coming to America:

https://time.com/6239651/solar-parking-lots-france-us/

U.S. Solar Electricity Generation to Exceed Hydroelectricity in 2024, EIA Predicts

https://www.ecowatch.com/solar-electricity-generation-hydroelectricity-us-foreca...

EIA attributes this prediction to continuing growth around the U.S. in both utility-scale and small-scale solar facilities. Earlier this year, EIA said it expected about 54% of electricity-generating capacity to come from solar energy in 2023 as developers had plans to add a total of 54.5 gigawatts of utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the U.S. power grid.

According to the administration, installed solar capacity has had a growth rate of 44% per year on average from 2009 to 2022, while installed hydropower electric capacity’s growth rate averaged less than 1% per year in the same time frame. In another report, EIA found that the U.S. has had a higher amount of solar-generated electricity than hydroelectricity per month. As such, the trend is expected to continue, allowing solar electricity generation to exceed hydroelectricity in 2024 for the first time.

This is not the first time hydroelectricity generation has been passed up by other clean energy sources. Annual wind energy generation exceeded hydropower generation for the first time in 2019, EIA reported.

“Some scientists think we could get our energy from tidal power. They argue that ocean tides are more reliable than wind or sunlight. Oh really?! I for one do not want to count on something that gets high twice a day.”

- there. I can discard that scrap of notepaper.

Native Americans are building their own solar farms (BBC)

For decades, Native Americans were reliant on the US government to bring them power. Now, that may be changing...

MEET THE ‘WAVELINE MAGNET’ BY SWEL

https://www.designboom.com/technology/sea-wave-energy-limited-waveline-magnet-fl...

With its lightweight and simple design, the ‘Waveline Magnet’ cuts high costs on manufacturing and transportation. It’s also easy to repair and maintain, as it can be built using manageable (recyclable) materials like reinforced plastics.

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (Guardian)

Fossil fuel plants contributed about a third of electricity supplies in 2023 and renewables a record 42%... Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas...

A wall of rotary wind turbines to power your house:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4gntwbtip1/?igsh=MXYxODc0b2VhNTg3MA==

A new generation of sodium batteries?

https://interestingengineering.com/science/sodium-battery-charged-in-seconds

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a high-power hybrid sodium-ion battery that can be charged in seconds.
…
According to researchers, the SIHES can achieve an energy density of 247 Wh/kg and a power density of 34,748 W/kg. Professor Kang said that the research represents a breakthrough in overcoming the current limitations of energy storage systems. He anticipates broader applications across various electronic devices, including electric vehicles.