Energy Articles | Popular Science

Welcome aboard the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell superyacht

Andrew Paul — Tue, 07 May 2024 15:13:18 +0000

'Project 821' took five years to build, and is currently for sale. Credit: Feadship

Superyachts are notoriously dirty luxury toys, with a single billionaire’s boat emitting as much as 7,020 tons of CO2 per year. And while it’s unlikely uber-wealthy shoppers are going to forgo from their statement vessels anytime soon, at the very least there’s now a chance to make superyachts greener. That’s the idea behind the new Project 821, billed as the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell superyacht.

Announced over the weekend by Danish shipyard cooperative Feadship, Project 821 arrives following five years of design and construction. Measuring a massive 260-feet-long, the zero-diesel boat reportedly sails shorter distances than standard superyachts on the market, but still operates its hotel load and amenities using completely emissionless green hydrogen power.

The superyacht’s liquid hydrogen must remain in cryogenic tanks cooled to -423.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Credit: Feadshipt

Hydrogen cells generate power by turning extremely lightweight liquid hydrogen into electricity stored in lithium-ion batteries. But unlike fossil fuel engines’ noxious smoke and other pollutants, hydrogen cells only emit harmless water vapor. The technology remained cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging for years, but recent advancements have allowed designers to start integrating the green alternative into cars, planes, and boats.

There are still hurdles, however. Although lightweight, liquid hydrogen must be housed in massive, double-walled -423.4 degrees Fahrenheit cryogenic storage tanks within a dedicated section of the vessel. According to Feadship, liquid hydrogen requires 8-10 times more storage space for the same amount of energy created by diesel fuel. That—along with 16 fuel cells, a switchboard connection for the DC electrical grid, and water vapor emission vent stacks—necessitated adding an extra 13-feet to the vessel’s original specifications. But these size requirements ironically makes superyachts such as Project 821 arguably ideal for hydrogen fuel cell integration.

Although emissionless, ‘Project 821’ is still not capable of standard-length voyages. Credit: Feadship

And it certainly sounds like Project 821 fulfills the “superyacht” prerequisites, with five decks above the waterline and two below it. The 14 balconies and seven fold-out platforms also house a pool, Jacuzzi, steam room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, gym, pantry, fireplace-equipped offices, living room, library, and a full walkaround deck.

Such luxuries, however, will need to remain relatively close-to-harbor for the time being. Project 821 still isn’t capable of generating and storing enough power to embark on lengthy crossings, but it can handle an “entire week’s worth of silent operation at anchor or [briefly] navigating emission-free at 10 knots while leaving harbors or cruising in protected marine zones,” according to Feadship.

“We have now shown that cryogenic storage of liquified hydrogen in the interior of a superyacht is a viable solution,” Feadship Director and Royal Van Lent Shipyard CEO Jan-Bart Verkuyl said in the recent announcement, adding that “additional fuel cell innovations… are on the near horizon.”

Of course, the greenest solution remains completely divesting from ostentatious, multimillion-dollar vanity flotillas before rising sea levels (and angry orcas) overwhelm even the wealthiest billionaires’ harbors. But it’s at least somewhat nice to see a new eco-friendly advancement on the market—even if it still looks like a Bond villain’s getaway vehicle.

The post Welcome aboard the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell superyacht appeared first on Popular Science.

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Testing the waters: Scotland surges ahead on ocean Power

Dan Falk / Undark — Mon, 06 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

A tidal stream energy generator called the O2, made by Orbital Marine Power Ltd, extracts energy from the tides off the coast of Scotland and feeds it into the electric grid. Orbital Marine Power via Undark

This article was originally featured on Undark.

By quirk of geography, the Orkney islands, located off the northern tip of Scotland, are unusually well positioned to bear witness to the ocean’s might. On the archipelago’s western shores, waves crash relentlessly against the rocks. And within its numerous channels, the tides push an enormous volume of water from the North Atlantic to the North Sea and back again, twice every day, squeezing between and around the islands of Rousay, Westray, Eday, and a myriad of other ones.

No wonder the European Marine Energy Center, one of the world’s leading agencies for developing and testing wave and tidal power technologies, chose to set up shop here; the nonprofit agency hosts both wave and tidal power testing facilities on Orkney.

EMEC’s wave-energy testing site is at Billia Croo, located on the western shore of Orkney’s largest island. On a relatively calm day last spring, Lisa MacKenzie, EMEC’s marketing and communications manager, surveyed the gray waters from the Billia Croo site. “We get an average of 2-to-3-meter wave height,” she said, or roughly 6.5 to 10 feet. “But we’ve had waves of over 20 meters”—more than 65 feet—during “really extreme conditions over the winter.”

The surrounding landscape is windswept and nearly treeless. Were one to sail directly west from this spot, “the first bit of land that you would hit is Canada,” MacKenzie said.

EMEC was founded in 2003 following a recommendation by the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (now known as the Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee). To date it has received about $53 million in public investment; its funders include the European Union, the U.K. government, the Scottish government, and the Orkney Islands Council. More than 20 corporate clients have used EMEC’s facilities, and more ocean energy converters have been tested at the center than at any other site in the world.

The Billia Croo facility opened in 2004 on land rented from a local farmer. An array of transformers, housed in green bins each the size of a compact car, lines the perimeter of the site’s small parking lot. A modest stone-wall hut, which blends into the landscape, houses the facility’s control center and is filled electronic switching equipment. The testing berths are offshore, where EMEC’s clients can test all manner of wave-energy conversion devices, with cables running along the seabed to the control hut. Any electricity produced can also be fed directly into the U.K. national grid.

A wave energy device called the Oyster 800, made by Aquamarine Power, in operation at EMEC’s Billia Croo site. Numerous devices from more than 20 clients have been tested at EMEC’s facilities. Visual: Aquamarine Power via Undark

Waves, like the wind that produces them, are not a constant; both are inherently variable. And they are linked: Wind imparts energy to the ocean, which then dissipates as waves over a longer time scale. As MacKenzie puts it, waves are the aftermath of wind.

Harnessing the energy of waves is one way to draw power from the oceans; another is to exploit the energy of the tides. Of the two energy sources, tidal is more constant, given the tides’ regular-as-clockwork response to the push and pull of the moon and sun.

EMEC runs a grid-connected tidal energy test facility located off the southern tip of Eday. “We get a peak tidal flow over 4 meters per second, which is about 8 knots,” MacKenzie said. “So about half a billion tons of water passes through there, every hour, at peak tide.”

As MacKenzie puts it, waves are the aftermath of wind.

And that flow is comparatively predictable—far more so than, say, wind or solar, which are stymied by calm or cloudy conditions. “We can predict the tides 200 years into the future,” MacKenzie said. “Which means that we can predict how much power can be derived from the tides, 200 years into the future.”

There is no question that the planet’s oceans contain enormous amounts of energy. According to a 2021 study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, tidal stream energy alone could provide the equivalent of 11 percent of the U.K.’s annual electricity needs. Power from the oceans is “the largest untapped resource of renewable energy on the planet right now,” said Rémi Gruet, CEO of Ocean Energy Europe, the world’s largest network of ocean energy professionals.

The question is, can that energy be harnessed economically—or is the idea of pulling watts from the water doomed to be a mere sideshow in the quest for green energy? After decades of testing at tidal energy facilities like EMEC and other smaller-scale facilities around the globe, only a handful of commercial wave and tidal power facilities are online, and they contribute a miniscule amount to the world’s energy production. Even in Orkney, a leader in the quest to extract energy from the ocean, wave and tidal power account for just a fraction of the islands’ energy consumption.

“We can predict how much power can be derived from the tides, 200 years into the future.”

Notably, wave and tidal lag behind other forms of renewable energy. “It’s fair to say that we’re nowhere near a wind or solar industry at this point,” says Carrie Schmaus, a marine energy technology manager at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office.

Still, for the technology’s supporters, the ocean is seen as a virtually limitless source of energy waiting to be tapped, if only governments step up with the public investment needed to kick the industry into high gear. “There’s an energy resource there,” says Andrew Scott, CEO of Edinburgh-based Orbital Marine Power Ltd. “The question is, what are you prepared to pay to extract that energy?”

On paper, the power of the world’s oceans is indisputable: Tidal stream energy is estimated to represent a global resource of some 1,200 terawatt-hours (a terawatt is one trillion watts) per year, while wave power is even more abundant, adding up to almost 30,000 terawatt-hours per year—enough, in theory, to meet all of humanity’s energy needs 10 times over.

As promising as tidal and wave energy may seem, the list of obstacles to widespread adoption is significant: the formidable cost of scaling up the technology; bureaucratic hurdles; environmental concerns, including possible effects on fish and sea mammals; and, in the case of tidal power, geographical restrictions. There are also fears that rising sea levels could substantially alter ocean movements in a way that could impact current or planned tidal power facilities. In a 2022 paper published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Danial Khojasteh and his co-authors noted that “long-term management decisions associated with harnessing the potential of tidal energy schemes within estuaries should be made with caution.”

The question of cost is paramount. Even though the cost of tidal and wave energy may be dropping, the cost of wind and solar are dropping even faster, said Brian Polagye, a University of Washington mechanical engineer who studies marine renewable energy. That means tidal and wave energy can be seen as succeeding and failing at the same time.

“Until your price comes down to the point where you’re competitive with other forms of generation—either because you’re directly competitive, or you’re being subsidized until you get to that point—the technologies really can’t take off,” Polagye said. Nonetheless, he added, “I do feel these are technologies that have a long-term role to play in our energy systems.”

Schmaus, at the Water Power Technologies Office, describes wave and tidal power as a nascent industry (as did others interviewed for this story). By way of comparison, she pointed out that in the early days of the wind power industry, all manner of turbine designs were tested. “And then at some point that technology converged,” she said. “Now we have the three-bladed turbine we all know and love. Marine energy is still in that ideation kind of area. We have not had technology convergence yet.”

For the technology’s supporters, the ocean is seen as a virtually limitless source of energy waiting to be tapped.

One of her department’s goals, she says, is to learn from small-scale demonstration projects, scale up designs, and bring down costs. This scaling-up is just what Scott’s Orbital Marine is trying to achieve in Orkney. They’re the company behind the O2 tidal stream energy generator—the world’s most powerful such device—located in the Fall of Warness, south of Eday, and connected to the grid via EMEC’s tidal energy test site. (MacKenzie described the project as “one of our biggest success stories.”) The O2 is a 240-foot-long structure shaped like a submarine (though it stays on the surface), with two submerged arms, each supporting a twin-bladed turbine. In an interview in a cavernous exhibition hall at the annual All-Energy conference in Glasgow last spring, and later by email, Scott spoke of his vision for the company, and the potential of tidal stream power. He said that Orbital Marine hopes to add another six turbines to the Fall of Warness site over the next few years, and, in time, perhaps another dozen.

Scott acknowledges the forbidding technical challenges—especially the difficulty of designing machinery that can withstand seawater’s salt and grime for months or years on end. And he has seen his share of unrealistic proposals over the years. At times “it was a bit of a joke,” he recalled. People saw how much traction wind energy was getting, he says, and figured wind’s success could be readily duplicated beneath the waves.

“People would say, ‘Just go and ‘marinize’ it, and it will be equally successful in the tidal application,” he continued. “It was as naïve as that.”

Orbital Marine’s O2 tidal stream energy generator operating at EMEC’s Fall of Warness grid-connected test site. The O2 is 240 feet long with two submerged twin-bladed turbines. One of EMEC’s biggest success stories, it currently provides about 10 percent of Orkney’s electricity—enough to power about 2,000 homes. Visual: Orbital Marine Power via Undark

But many of those early challenges have been overcome, Scott said. He noted that O2 is currently providing about 10 percent of Orkney’s electricity, enough to power about 2,000 homes. Because the islands are sparsely populated, and rich in wind energy, Orkney actually produces more energy than is needed locally, which means the islands are already a net contributor to the U.K. grid—and some of that energy comes from O2. Scott said he foresees Orbital Marine generating about $17.5 million from electricity sales per year, over the turbine array’s projected 20-year life. “We’re effectively at that critical stage where we start to grow commercial revenues and profits,” Scott said.

Of course, most parts of the world are not blessed with Orkney’s extreme tidal flows. “It is niche,” Scott acknowledged. “But where it does exist, it represents a phenomenally dense form of renewable energy. Because water is 800 times the density of air.”

While some regions have more powerful tides than others, waves can be found pretty much everywhere that ocean meets land. During a visit to the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility on the campus of the University of Edinburgh, a crew from a company called Mocean Energy tested a floating wave-energy converter in a massive circular water tank, some 80 feet across. Paddles along the perimeter of the tank create waves that strive to mimic the conditions of the open seas.

So far, there’s no one preferred way to extract energy from waves—just as there’s no one preferred way to build a tidal stream turbine—so various designs are being tested. The one Mocean was testing uses a simple electrical generator to convert the kinetic energy of the waves into electricity. As Mocean’s converter bobbed in response to the waves, Chris Retzler, the company’s technical director and co-founder, spoke of the path to commercialization, saying he hoped to have a product on the market in 12 to 18 months, and “a much larger-scale, grid-connected machine” in three to four years.

“People would say, ‘Just go and ‘marinize’ it, and it will be equally successful in the tidal application. It was as naïve as that.”

For now, both wave energy and tidal energy lag behind wind in terms of investment and commercialization, but the gap may be closing, Retzler said. “The wind industry, of course, has been phenomenally successful—but it started in much the same way, with small-scale experimentation, gradually building up,” he says. “And we’re following a similar pattern here. We learn by doing.”

Retzler also noted that there is a natural symbiosis between wave energy, with its long-term dependability, and wind and solar, which have much greater hour-to-hour and day-to day fluctuations. “The ocean is storing wind energy over time,” he said. “Waves take a while to build up, and then a long while to decay. That smooths out the production of energy. So wave energy can provide a more stable contribution, and therefore can fill in the gaps that are left by wind and solar.”

The United States has not traditionally been a big player in ocean power technologies, though that may be changing. An established testing facility known as PacWave North, located off the coast of Oregon, will soon be joined by PacWave South, a larger facility now under construction in deeper waters south of Newport. PacWave, funded by the Department of Energy, the State of Oregon, and other public and private entities, bills itself as the first pre-permitted, utility-scale, grid-connected, open-water test facility in the U.S.

Burke Hales, an oceanographer at Oregon State University and PacWave’s chief scientist, describes PacWave as conceptually similar to Scotland’s EMEC, which was one of PacWave’s design partners. “PacWave will be bigger, [with] more total power capability, more berths, more individual devices,” he says. Hales cites figures from the Department of Energy that suggest wave power could meet 15 percent of the nation’s electricity demand.

While the Oregon coast is synonymous with pounding waves, other locations may be better suited to small-scale projects that take advantage of the local geography. For example, in the village of Igiugig, in southwestern Alaska, there’s a demonstration project that draws energy from the estuary of the Kvichak River, via underwater turbines. That’s seen as a vast improvement on the current situation, in which the community trucks in diesel fuel at great cost.

And other U.S. projects may be on the horizon. In 2022, the Department of Energy pledged $35 million in funding “to advance tidal and river current energy systems” in a move that represents the largest such investment in the nation.

Back in Orkney, a company called SAE Renewables announced last winter that they’d hit the milestone of producing 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity with their tidal stream array in the Pentland Firth, the strait that separates Orkney from the Scottish mainland. Further north, in Shetland, Nova Innovation added a sixth turbine to its tidal array last year, which has been powering homes and businesses in the area since 2016.

Across Europe, some 2.2 megawatts of tidal stream capacity were added in 2021, up from just 260 kilowatts the year before. By comparison, Europe installed more than 17 gigawatts of wind power capacity in 2021 (87 percent of them on-shore). By 2022, wind accounted for well over a third of Europe’s energy consumption.

Tidal stream and wave power are not the only ways to extract energy from the oceans. In estuaries or bays with high tides, tidal barrages are another option, a practice dating back as far as 619 A.D. The idea is simple: Find an inlet with significant tides, and build a barrier with sluices that can open and close (similar to a traditional hydroelectric dam). Open the valves as the tide comes in, then direct the water through turbines as the tide goes out. So far, tidal barrages have historically seen more commercial use than tidal stream projects, notably in France (the world’s first commercial tidal power project, on the estuary of the Rance River, dates from 1966), and in South Korea.

As with tidal stream power, tidal barrages could be a natural fit in specific environments. For example, as low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Belgium look to build dikes and barriers to protect against rising ocean levels, tidal barrage generators may be a natural addition to already-planned projects. There is concern, however that tidal barrages can impact salinity and sediment levels and disrupt coastal ecology.

Interestingly, the spot with the world’s highest tides—the Bay of Fundy, which separates the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—has also seen the most disappointment. The volume of water that whooshes through the bay twice each day could, on paper, generate up to 2,500 megawatts of power—roughly equivalent to two large nuclear reactors, enough to meet Nova Scotia’s electricity needs.

But efforts to harness those tides have been fraught. A tidal barrage power station opened on the bay in 1984, but ceased operations in 2019 following technical problems and concern over harm to fish in the bay. Tidal stream projects have been attempted in the bay as well, but have likewise struggled. Last year, a company called Sustainable Marine Energy Canada pulled the plug on its floating tidal turbine platform in the bay after five years of testing and $45 million in investment, citing bureaucratic barriers put in its way by the Canadian government. The company declared voluntary bankruptcy last spring, and in November one of its floating turbine platforms broke free from its mooring and ran aground on the bay’s south shore.

One thing industry insiders agree on is that, for all forms of wave and tidal energy, the path to commercialization requires significant public investment. A 2019 study pegged the cost of tidal energy for one commercial-scale project at $130 to $280 per megawatt-hour, compared to $20 to around $40 per megawatt-hour for wind. But according to Scott at Orbital Marine, it’s misleading to speak of tidal power as being expensive and wind and solar as being cheaper, because so much more investment has been pumped into the latter compared to the former. The green energy sector “has all this legacy background in terms of state intervention and subsidy,” he said. “And the whole thing is structured around taxation and subsidy.”

The path to commercialization for ocean energy projects can seem like a paradox, said Polagye. “Economies of scale occur because you’re building a lot of things,” and “you tend to build a lot of things because they’re the most cost-effective thing to build,” he said. “So it’s a chicken and egg problem, right?”

“It took the wind industry 20 years to get commercial and 40 years to get cheap, between the 1980s and today, so we are still well ahead of the curve.”

Gruet similarly sees the supposed lagging-behind of wave and tidal power as the result of a lack of public investment. “The industry has not received any subsidies in any shape or form in a similar way that the wind or solar industry have received in the early stage of their development,” he said. “And that has slowed down our development tremendously.”

He added that the cost of tidally generated power is already on par with that for floating offshore wind platforms. “So tidal and wave are not lagging behind,” he said. “It took the wind industry 20 years to get commercial and 40 years to get cheap, between the 1980s and today, so we are still well ahead of the curve.”

A wave energy device, the Blue X made by Mocean Energy, being tested at EMEC’s Scapa Flow test site in 2021. Though the path to commercialization for ocean energy projects includes many challenges—like significant public investment—proponents of the technology continue to forge ahead. Visual: Colin Keldie/EMEC via Undark

For EMEC’s MacKenzie, the latent energy of the world’s oceans represents a chance for her own country to make up for past mistakes in the race for renewables. She recalled an incident in 1987, when the U.K. secretary of state for energy, Cecil Parkinson, spoke in the House of Commons about the potential of wind power. Sure, it was a good idea in principle, he said, but he “cannot see the day when we shall be generating large quantities of electricity from wind.”

The U.K. hesitated—and Denmark jumped in. “Denmark absolutely won that race,” MacKenzie says. “And this is what we’re really keen to make sure doesn’t happen with wave and tidal.” (Today, wind power provides about one third of the U.K.’s electricity production. About 40 percent comes from coal, oil, and natural gas, while nuclear power and bioenergy provide about 15 percent and 11 percent respectively.)

For Scott, the power latent in the world’s oceans is an important resource in the fight against catastrophic climate change, even if its total contribution remains small compared to that of other renewables. “Inaction is not an option,” he says.

The post Testing the waters: Scotland surges ahead on ocean Power appeared first on Popular Science.

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Battery prices are plummeting. That’s good news for the planet.

Mack DeGeurin — Wed, 01 May 2024 17:51:43 +0000

Cheaper battery prices are increasing the reliability of solar power and helping drive its adoption. DepositPhotos

Climate scientists, for years, have urged governments around the world to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Wind and solar plants have increased in popularity in recent years but they both have a fundamental problem. Lapses in sunlight and wind caused by weather events can make it difficult to reliably capture and store all that energy, especially when attempting to supply power to large cities. The solution to the reliability issue are batteries, and lots of them.

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently argued these hordes of batteries will play a critical role in determining whether or not ambitious climate goals established by international experts are ever met. Recent innovations in lithium-ion battery tech have significantly lowered their costs which in turn is helping make switches to renewable energy power sources more viable for communities around the world. Battery prices by 2030, the report notes, could fall by 40%.

At the same time, increased demand for battery powered electric vehicles and energy produced from renewable sources means battery tech will need to get even cheaper in only a few short years in order to meet rising demands. All of this, according to IEA estimates, will require a six-fold increase in energy storage capacity by 2030. Cheap batteries will need to get even cheaper.

“Reducing emissions and getting on track to meet international energy and climate targets will hinge on whether the world can scale up batteries fast enough,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol wrote. “Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.”

Lithium-ion battery costs have fallen more than any other energy technology

Though lithium-ion batteries are typically associated with gadgets and other consumer electronic gizmos, that’s increasingly no longer their main use case. In 2023, according to the IEA, the energy sector accounted for 90% of all battery demand. The total lithium-ion battery market has increased nearly ten times the size it was just eight years ago. Costs associated with those batteries have plummeted by 90% in just the past 15 years, according to the report. Overall, the report notes, batteries have seen the sharpest price drops of any energy technology to date. Those falling battery prices have led to more affordable electricity vehicles and solar energy offered at price points comparable to fossil fuels.

“The combination of solar PV (photovoltaic) and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India,” Birol said in a statement. “And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States.”

As impressive as all those figures may sound, the IEA notes it still might not be nearly enough to support rising energy demands. In order to meet the United Nations’ goals of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, the IEA estimates global battery storage will need to increase by six times its current size. To do that, battery storage deployment will need to increase by an average of at least 25% every year. Batteries will need to have steep price drops while simultaneously maintaining or improving performance. The IEA estimates new innovations in battery chemistry and manufacturing could reduce lithium-ion costs globally by 40% between now and 2030. Battery manufacturing capacity is also currently limited to a select few countries, something the IEA says will need to change moving forward.

“A shortfall in deploying enough batteries would risk stalling clean energy transitions in the power sector,” the report reads.

What cheaper batteries mean for consumers

Increased adoption of electric vehicles and renewables power sources are playing a meaningful role in efforts to cut back on emissions. While EV adoption in the US has slightly slowed compared to previous years, the trend globally is up. EV deployment increased by 40% in 2023, a figure which translated to 14 million EVs hitting roads. The IEA estimates the continually growing fleet of electric vehicles could displace the need for 8 million barrels of oil every day by the end of the decade. In practical terms, lower costs associated with batteries will translate to cheaper electric vehicles in the near future. US drivers repeatedly cite pricing as one of the primary factors preventing them from switching to an EV. More affordable models driven partly by falling battery prices could encourage more drivers to make a switch and could even help make a dent in the Biden Administration’s goal of having 50 percent of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

On the infrastructure side of the equation, cheaper energy storage prices means developing countries looking to create new power plants can choose more renewable options at prices comparable to non-renewable alternatives. Falling battery prices are also making it possible to deploy renewable microgrids in areas that are currently underserved by traditional energy grids.

In places like the US, a more reliable energy sector buttressed by batteries would further improve the country’s energy independence and cut down on the need to purchase fossil fuels from other countries. Renewable energy sources accounted for just 19% of the US energy grid in 2020 but affordable, more reliable storage could alter that dynamic. Researchers from Stanford provided some evidence of that scenario by recently running a simulation showing the possibility of the US maintaining a 100% renewable energy grid by 2050.

Batteries have a critical mineral problem

Cheaper batteries, at least how they are currently manufactured, aren’t a silver bullet. Today, the global battery market is largely dependent on critical minerals sourced from a concentrated handful of countries. China alone accounts for more than half of material processing for lithium and cobalt. Extracting these minerals from the Earth is dangerous work and can create its own source of damaging pollution. Massive mines can also radically alter the environment of entire communities.

New types of batteries could offer some solutions to the mineral problem. Lithium ion phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are increasingly being used in new electric vehicles, rely on a different chemistry method which does not contain nickel or cobalt. Though more mineral intensive lithium-ion batteries still make up the vast majority of battery storage, (LFP) batteries accounted for 80% of new batteries made last year. Efforts to more effectively recycle aluminum, copper, and other resources found in mounding e-waste could also potentially help build out future batteries with less intensive mining. Less than 1% of rare earth metals found in e-waste are currently recycled.

The post Battery prices are plummeting. That’s good news for the planet. appeared first on Popular Science.

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In the rush to decarbonize, the shipping industry is exploring alternative fuels

Chris Baraniuk / Hakai Magazine — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Internationally, commercial ships are responsible for about two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. DepositPhotos

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

For decades, the world’s commercial ships have depended on a fossil fuel so sticky and thick that it needs to be heated to around 150 °C just to get it to flow through a vessel’s innards. Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) is one of the dirtiest fuels out there. “It’s the last step of the [oil] refining process,” says Morten Bo Christiansen, head of the energy transition team at Danish shipping giant Maersk. “You could say, the bottom of the barrel.”

Yet now, as the International Maritime Organization (IMO)—the United Nations branch tasked with managing global shipping—implements new regulations intended to force the shipping industry to cut its sulfur and carbon emissions, HFO is on the chopping block. The new rules have decision-makers like Christiansen racing to figure out which of the myriad potential fuels of the future will ultimately replace it.

Part of Christiansen’s job, alongside dozens of colleagues, is to buy the fuel that powers Maersk’s hundreds of ships. HFO and other fossil fuels, he says, are already beginning to give way to cleaner alternatives.

In mid-2023, for example, a new container ship, the US $160-million Laura Maersk, began operating in the Baltic Sea. “It looks like any other container ship,” says Christiansen. But the Laura Maersk has never run on oil. Instead, it’s powered by methanol. There are lots of different ways of producing methanol, and not all are environmentally friendly. However, when sustainably sourced, such as by capturing gas produced at landfill sites or through various processes powered by renewable energy, methanol can be significantly less polluting than fossil fuels. The Laura Maersk is already plying the waters off northern Europe, and more than 200 other ships capable of running on methanol are currently on the order books of shipyards around the world.

To meet the IMO’s newest regulations—which it designed to put the shipping industry on a path to net zero by 2050—commercial vessels will have to cut their carbon emissions by at least 30 percent in just six years, says Simon Bullock, a shipping and climate change researcher at the University of Manchester in England. Should the industry take any longer than that, he adds, it will be next to impossible for shipping companies to reduce emissions aggressively enough to meet the most ambitious regulatory targets. In a paper published in 2023, Bullock and his colleagues showed how, if things don’t move fast enough, the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement would be in jeopardy.

To reach net zero, getting rid of HFO is a must. And, to have the greatest effect on carbon emissions, alternative fossil fuels currently being used by some ships, such as liquefied natural gas, ultimately need to go. But reengineering existing ships to use significantly cleaner fuels is not easy, and building new vessels is neither fast nor cheap. There’s also the issue of supply. For methanol, the global availability of this fuel is currently nowhere near enough to meet the shipping industry’s colossal demand.

The challenge for Christiansen and others like him, then, is to figure out how to transition vessels to alternative fuels without any major technological or logistical hiccups—and to do so in an incredibly short time.

For now, the only way forward is to diversify fuel inputs. Besides methanol, the shipping industry is exploring other non–fossil fuel options, such as hydrogen, ammonia, electricity, and nuclear power. Given how controversial the latter is—nuclear struggled to take off as a commercial-ship fuel and is used almost exclusively for military vessels—nuclear is unlikely to have any impact on shipping during the next few crucial years. Powering a large number of huge cargo ships with electricity using suites of on-board batteries is also unlikely because batteries can’t pump out enough power to compensate for their size and high price.

Ammonia, though, is a real contender. The big benefit of ammonia is that it’s an important commodity in many other industries—notably agriculture, in which millions of tonnes of it are used every year as a fertilizer. Ammonia has a solid supply chain, and the chemical is already stored at many of the world’s ports.

However, like methanol, ammonia is imperfect. For starters, it’s incredibly toxic, so accidents and spills could be ecologically disastrous. At present, no ports will allow ammonia-powered vessels to dock—a stance that forced the Green Pioneer, a proof of concept ship retrofitted to run on both ammonia and diesel, to use fossil fuels to power its visit to the COP28 conference in the United Arab Emirates last year.

And ammonia is also harder to burn than some of the alternatives. Designing more reliable, more efficient ammonia-burning engines is a huge challenge currently being tackled by companies like the Germany-based MAN Energy Solutions, which also built the methanol-burning engine on the Laura Maersk.

Lars Tingbjerg Danielsen, the promotion manager at MAN Energy Solutions, explains that ammonia has a high ignition temperature—it needs to be above 650 °C before it lights—and so must be burned alongside a secondary pilot fuel. Its flame is fickle, too. Compared with methanol, ammonia’s flame speed (how fast the flame expands as the fuel combusts) is six times slower. If the engine spins too quickly, combustion will falter, allowing ammonia to slip out of the engine. Given its toxicity, this would be a significant contamination risk.

Luckily, giant two-stroke ship engines turn relatively slowly compared with smaller engines, says Danielsen, so it’s easier to get ammonia to sustain combustion within them. His firm is currently using high-speed cameras to study the ignition of the fuel.

Danielsen adds that determining the most effective fuel depends, in part, on how a given ship is used. Methanol supply facilities are expensive to build, so methanol-fueled ships might be best suited to repetitive routes with fixed ports of call. According to research by the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, ammonia is and will likely remain cheaper than methanol, he says, so it may make sense to use it for the biggest ships, which require the most energy.

Maersk, for its part, is interested in burning ammonia. “We certainly expect it to be in the fuel mix in the future,” says Christiansen. However, neither Maersk nor any other major shipping company currently has ammonia-burning ships, and Christiansen declined to confirm whether Maersk has plans to announce any such orders this year. The Yara Eyde, the world’s first ammonia-powered cargo ship, is expected to be launched in 2026, and about a dozen ammonia-burning vessels are on order globally.

At present, the shipping industry is not overly keen on Stephen Turnock’s favorite alternative fuel: hydrogen. But Turnock, a maritime engineer at the University of Southampton in England, likes hydrogen because, as with ammonia, it can be created with renewable energy, yet burning it produces nothing but steam. (Ammonia combustion creates a mix of nitrogen gas and water—not too bad—while burning methanol yields carbon dioxide and water.)

Yet the industry is wary of working with something so hard to handle. Hydrogen evaporates at -235 °C—colder than the surface of the moon at night—so chilling it into a liquid to put into a ship’s fuel tank requires a lot of energy. And because hydrogen molecules are so incredibly tiny (even by nanoscopic chemical standards), hydrogen tends to leak through the smallest of cracks.

Maersk conducted a pilot study with hydrogen, says Christiansen, and found that using it would be more expensive than methanol and ammonia. And that’s saying something because methanol is itself three times more expensive than conventional ship fuels, he says.

Because ammonia actually contains hydrogen—ammonia is one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms—there’s also the opportunity for a hybrid approach: pump a ship’s fuel tanks full of ammonia and then chemically convert it into hydrogen on board. It’s a conversion in which 60 percent of the available energy in the ammonia is lost, but this process would, ultimately, allow for propulsion with zero carbon emissions. Amogy, a start-up headquartered in New York, is working toward testing a tugboat powered by this hybrid approach later this year.

Yet in the rush to find cleaner fuels, Bullock, the shipping and climate researcher, cautions against overlooking all the other ways the industry can slash its emissions. “The sector has to put a greater focus on the other things it can do,” he says. For instance, so-called wind-assisted technology (a truly ancient ship propulsion method) can reduce the effort required from a ship’s main engine no matter what it’s burning.

Stricter regulations could also play a role in driving down shipping’s carbon emissions, Bullock argues. Ports could refuse entry to ships that don’t have a high enough energy-efficiency rating based on a scale introduced by the IMO last year, for example. Christiansen at Maersk says he backs proposals from some within the shipping industry for a Green Balance Mechanism that would raise the cost of polluting fuels to subsidize greener alternatives.

But there is hardly any time left for shipping companies to make big changes. The industry only has a few years to cut its carbon emissions by nearly one-third—largely because it has kept its “head in the sand” for too long, says Turnock.

Christiansen remains optimistic. If shipping can transform itself, it will be harder for other industries, such as aviation, to delay their own green transition. “Hey, if these shipping guys can get this done,” he says, “what’s your excuse?”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Geothermal power heats up

Katarina Zimmer / Knowable Magazine — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station. Geothermal power has long been popular in volcanic countries like Iceland, where hot water bubbles from the ground. GRETAR ÍVARSSON / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

Glistening in the dry expanses of the Nevada desert is an unusual kind of power plant that harnesses energy not from the sun or wind, but from the Earth itself.

The site, known as Project Red, pumps water thousands of feet into the ground, down where rocks are hot enough to roast a turkey. Around the clock, the structure sucks the heated water back up; it is then used to power generators. Since last November, this carbon-free, Earth-borne power has been flowing onto a local grid in Nevada.

Geothermal energy, though it’s continuously radiating from Earth’s super-hot core, has long been a relatively niche source of electricity, largely limited to volcanic regions like Iceland where hot springs bubble from the ground. But geothermal enthusiasts have dreamed of sourcing Earth power in places without such specific geological conditions—like Project Red’s Nevada site, developed by energy startup Fervo Energy.

Such next-generation geothermal systems have been in the works for decades, but they’ve proved expensive and technologically difficult, and have sometimes even triggered earthquakes. Some experts hope that newer efforts like Project Red may now, finally, signal a turning point, by leveraging techniques that were honed in oil and gas extraction to improve reliability and cost-efficiency.

The advances have garnered hopes that with enough time and money, geothermal power—which currently generates less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, and 0.4 percent of electricity in the United States—could become a mainstream energy source. Some posit that geothermal could be a valuable tool in transitioning the energy system off of fossil fuels, because it can provide a continuous backup to intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. “It’s been, to me, the most promising energy source for a long time,” says energy engineer Roland Horne of Stanford University. “But now that we’re moving towards a carbon-free grid, geothermal is very important.”

A rocky start

Geothermal energy works best with two things: heat, plus rock that is permeable enough to carry water. In places where molten rock sizzles close to the surface, water will seep through porous volcanic rock, warm up and bubble upward as hot water, steam or both.

If the water or steam is hot enough—ideally at least around 300 degrees Fahrenheit—it can be extracted from the ground and used to power generators for electricity. In Kenya, nearly 50 percent of electricity generated comes from geothermal. Iceland gets 25 percent of its electricity from this source, while New Zealand gets about 18 percent and the state of California, 6 percent.

Some natural geothermal resources are still untapped, such as in the western United States, says geologist Ann Robertson-Tait, president of GeothermEx, a geothermal energy consulting division at the oilfield services company SLB. But by and large, we’re running out of natural, high-quality geothermal resources, pushing experts to consider ways of extracting geothermal energy from areas where the energy is much harder to access. “There’s so much heat in the Earth,” Robertson-Tait says. But, she adds, “much of it is locked inside rock that isn’t permeable.”

Tapping that heat requires deep drilling and creating cracks in these non-volcanic, dense rocks to allow water to flow through them. Since 1970, engineers have been developing “enhanced geothermal systems” (EGS) that do just that, applying methods similar to the hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—used to suck oil and gas out of deep rocks. Water is pumped at high pressure into wells, up to several miles deep, to blast cracks into the rocks. The cracked rock and water create an underground radiator where water heats before rising to the surface through a second well. Dozens of such EGS installations have been built in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan—most of them experimental and government-funded—with mixed success.

Famously, one EGS plant in South Korea was abruptly shuttered in 2017 after having probably caused a 5.5 magnitude earthquake; fracking of any kind can add pressure to nearby tectonic faults. Other issues were technological—some plants didn’t create enough fractures for good heat exchange, or fractures traveled in the wrong direction and failed to connect the two wells.

Some efforts, however, turned into viable power plants, including several German and French systems built between 1987 and 2012 in the Rhine Valley. There, engineers made use of existing fractures in the rock.

But overall, there just hasn’t been enough interest to develop EGS into a more reliable and lucrative technology, says geophysicist Dimitra Teza of the energy research institute Fraunhofer IEG in Karlsruhe, Germany, who helped develop some of the Rhine Valley EGS systems. “It has been quite tough for the industry.”

Geothermal electricity has long been limited to volcanic regions where underground heat is easily accessible. But new kinds of power plants are making it possible to derive geothermal heat elsewhere in the world. Credit: Knowable Magazine

New momentum

Solutions exist for both safety and technological problems. There are, in fact, robust protocols for avoiding earthquakes, such as by not drilling near active faults. Long-term monitoring of the operating EGS plants in France and Germany has documented only minor tremors, building confidence in the safety of the technology. Importantly, drilling and fracking methodology has improved by leaps and bounds, thanks to the boom in oil and gas extraction from shale rocks that began in the 2010s. “Since then, we’ve seen a renewed interest in EGS as a concept, because the techniques that are central to EGS were perfected and brought down significantly in cost during that time,” says Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.

In 2015, for instance, the US Department of Energy launched a research site in Utah dedicated to advancing EGS technologies. Several new North American startups, including Sage Geosystems and E2E Energy Solutions, are developing new EGS systems in Texas and Canada, respectively. The most advanced is Fervo Energy, which has applied several techniques from the shale industry at its Nevada site; the electricity now supplies a local grid that includes energy-sucking data storage centers owned by Google. (Google partnered with Fervo to develop the plant.)

Engineers drilled almost 8,000 feet downward into the Nevada rock, reaching temperatures of nearly 380 degrees Fahrenheit, and then, at the bottom, drilled another 3,250-foot horizontal well to expand the area of hot rock that the system touches—a technique used in oil and gas extraction in order to maximize yield. The company also fractured the surrounding rock at several sites along the horizontal well to create a more extensive web of cracks for water to trickle through. Technologically speaking, compared to earlier EGS efforts, “they are, in fact, a big step forward,” says Horne, who is on Fervo’s scientific advisory board.

It remains to be seen how these new EGS systems perform in the long term. One advantage of systems like Fervo’s is that they can be made more profitable by taking advantage of energy price fluctuations, according to recent research by Ricks, a Princeton colleague and several experts at Fervo Energy. Operators could plug the exit wells, causing water to accumulate inside the system, building up pressure and heat. Then the energy could be extracted during times when it is most valuable—such as during cloudy or windless periods when solar or wind aren’t working.

Still, such systems would have to be significantly scaled up to be commercially viable, Ricks says. Although Project Red provided enough steam to generate 3.5 megawatts more any other EGS plant, it’s still relatively small; a nuclear or coal plant can easily have an output of 1,000 megawatts, while large solar or traditional geothermal plants often produce several hundred megawatts.

What the EGS field needs right now, Ricks says, is the funding to build and test more such systems to inspire investor confidence. “This all needs to be very well proven, out to the point where the perceived risk is low,” he says.

A turning point for geothermal?

To that end, the US Department of Energy recently awarded $60 million in funding to three demonstration projects for EGS and related technologies as part of a broader initiative to speed up EGS development. One 2019 report from the agency estimated that, with advances in EGS, geothermal power could represent around 60 gigawatts (60,000 megawatts) of installed capacity in the United States by 2050, generating 8.5 percent of the country’s electricity—a more-than-20-fold increase from today.

Even an increase of a few percent could aid in a global energy transition that’s aiming to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. “If in fifteen, twenty years, EGS is viable, I think it could play a huge part,” says Nils Angliviel de La Beaumelle, who recently coauthored an article on the global outlook for renewable energy in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Other geothermal technologies may also help. Some companies are exploring the feasibility of “super hot rock” geothermal—essentially, a young, extreme variant of EGS that involves drilling down even deeper into Earth’s crust, to a depth where water reaches a “supercritical” vapor-like state that allows it to carry much more energy than either steam or liquid. In southern Germany, the energy company Eavor is building the world’s first “closed-loop” geothermal system: Once pipes funnel water into the deep rock, the system fans out into a network of parallel boreholes, without water ever penetrating the rock. That’s a more predictable—albeit less efficient—way of warming water, as it doesn’t involve uncertainties around fracturing the rock in the right way, Teza says. “I’m really excited to see that there’s investment into these technologies,” she says. “I think it can only help.”

On the whole, it’s an important moment for geothermal energy—and not just for providing carbon-free electricity, Robertson-Tait says. Geothermal brines hauled out of the Earth are rich in lithium and other critical minerals that can be used to build green technologies like solar panels and EV batteries. There’s a growing push to use direct geothermal heat to warm buildings, either through shallow heat pumps for residential buildings or larger systems designed for entire districts—like Paris and Munich already have.

Some oil and gas companies, recognizing that a change is coming, are increasingly interested in building geothermal systems of various kinds, says Robertson-Tait. “Our Earth is geothermal,” she says, “and so I think we owe it to ourselves to do everything we can to use it.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 22, 2024, to correct a mischaracterization of Project Red as a power plant. In fact, Project Red includes only the EGS infrastructure. The electricity itself is generated by a power plant under ownership of another company. A caption was also updated to correct the spelling of Larderello in Italy.

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Stellarator fusion reactor gets new life thanks to a creative magnet workaround

Andrew Paul — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:20:55 +0000

A photo of MUSE, the first stellarator built at PPPL in 50 years and the first ever to use permanent magnets. Michael Livingston / PPPL Communications Department

The quest to harness the holy grail of clean energy is potentially moving a step in the right direction thanks to the same principles behind refrigerator magnets. Earlier this week, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) revealed their new stellarator–a unique fusion reactor that uses off-the-shelf and 3D-printed materials to contain its superheated plasma.

First conceptualized over 70 years ago by PPPL’s founder, Lyman Spitzer, a traditional stellarator works by employing electromagnets precisely arranged in complex shapes to generate magnetic fields using electricity. Unlike tokamak reactors, stellarators do not need to run electric current specifically through their plasma to create magnetic forces—a process that can interfere with fusion reactions. That said, tokamaks still effectively confine their plasma so well that they have been the preferred reactor choice for researchers, especially when factoring in a stellarator’s comparative costs and difficulties. Because of all this, Spitzer’s design has remained largely unused for decades.

Engineers behind the new stellarator known as MUSE, however, say their workaround could solve these barriers. Instead of electromagnets, the device uses permanent magnets—albeit much more powerful and finely tuned than ones found in everyday novelty and souvenir collectibles. MUSE requires permanent magnets made using rare-earth metals that can exceed 1.2 teslas, the unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. In comparison, standard ferrite or ceramic permanent magnets usually exhibit between 0.5-to-1 teslas.

“I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur, and that’s the property that makes this technique work,” Michael Zarnstorff, a PPPL senior research physicist and MUSE principle investigator, said in a statement.

Left: Some of the permanent magnets that make MUSE’s innovative concept possible. Right: A close-up of MUSE’s 3D-printed shell. Credit: Xu Chu / PPPL and Michael Livingston / PPPL Communications Department

Building a stellarator with permanent magnets is a “completely new” approach, PPPL graduate student Tony Qian added. Qian also explained that the stellarator alteration will allow engineers to both test plasma confinement ideas and build new devices far more easily than before.

Atop the promising design alterations, MUSE reportedly manages what’s known as “quasisymmetry” better than any previous stellarator—more specifically, a subtype called “quasiaxisymmetry.”

In extremely simplified terms, quasisymmetry is when a magnetic field’s shape inside a stellarator isn’t the same as the field around the stellarator’s physical shape. Nevertheless, the overall magnetic field strength remains uniform, thus effectively confining plasma and increasing the chances for fusion reactions. According to Zarnstorff, MUSE pulls off its quasisymmetry “at least 100 times better than any existing stellarator.”

From here, the researchers intend to further investigate the nature of MUSE’s quasisymmetry, while also precisely mapping its magnetic fields—all factors influence the odds of achieving stable, net positive fusion reactions.

Whether or not scientists will discover the breakthroughs necessary to make green fusion energy a reality anytime soon remains to be seen. But thanks to some creative problem-solving using what are ostensibly very heavy duty fridge magnets, the long-overlooked stellarator could prove a valuable tool.

The post Stellarator fusion reactor gets new life thanks to a creative magnet workaround appeared first on Popular Science.

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Why aren’t there solar-powered cars on our roads?

Chen Liu / The Conversation — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

On June 9, 2022, the world's first long-range solar car Lightyear 0 was unveiled in an online global premiere. CESAR MANSO/AFP via Getty Images

This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Solar cars exist. The best place to see them is the World Solar Challenge, a race that’s held every two years in Australia. Competitors have to drive about 1,870 miles (3,000 kilometers), from Darwin on the country’s north coast to Adelaide on its south coast, using only energy from the Sun.

Many cars that compete in this race look more like amusement park rides or science fiction vehicles than the cars you see on the road. That tells you something about why solar cars aren’t an option for everyday travel, at least not yet.

Collecting enough sunlight

While a lot of sunlight falls on Earth during the day, the light becomes scattered as it travels through the atmosphere, so the amount that hits any given surface is fairly low. Averaged out over a full year to remove the effects of different seasons, it’s about 342 watts per square meter, an area equivalent to about 10 square feet. That’s approximately enough power to run a standard refrigerator.

Car sizes vary a lot, but a full-size car in the U.S. is about 18 feet long and 6 feet wide, so it has about 100 to 110 square feet (9 to 10 square meters) of horizontal surface. That would collect roughly 3,420 watts–enough to run a refrigerator, a dishwasher and a microwave oven.

Large solar farms that send electricity to cities and towns compensate for the fact that sunlight is spread across such a large area by putting up millions of solar panels across thousands of acres. Some, mainly in desert areas, use fields of mirrors to concentrate the Sun’s energy. But a standard car doesn’t have enough surface area to collect a lot of solar energy.

Turning sunlight to energy

Another issue is that today’s solar panels aren’t very efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. Typically, their efficiency is around 20%, which means they convert about one-fifth of the solar energy that reaches them into electric current.

This means that 3,420 watts of solar power falling on an average car covered with solar panels would yield only about 684 watts that the car could use. In comparison, it takes about 20,000 watts for an electric vehicle to drive at 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour).

Vehicles that compete in the World Solar Challenge tend to be large and have designs that maximize their horizontal surface area. This helps them collect as much sunlight as possible. As a concept vehicle, that’s fine, but most models don’t have many windows, or space for anything except a driver.

Highlights from the 2023 World Solar Challenge show that solar cars are designed very differently from conventional models.

When the Sun doesn’t shine

Yet another challenge is that geographic locations, daylight hours and weather conditions all affect how much solar energy can be generated.

The Earth is tilted on its axis, so not all areas receive equal amounts of sunlight at any given time. When the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the Sun, the upper part of the globe gets more Sun exposure and observes spring and summer, while the Southern Hemisphere is colder and darker. When the southern half of the planet tilts toward the Sun, areas on Earth’s southern half get more Sun and the upper half gets less.

Areas near the equator get consistent sunlight year-round, so zones closer to it–such as Southern California or the Sahara desert–have more intense solar power than places closer to Earth’s poles, such as Alaska.

Solar cars would also struggle to collect enough sunlight on overcast or rainy days. Even big utilities with huge solar farms have to plan for times when the Sun doesn’t shine.

And drivers need their cars to operate at night. In order for a solar car to run after dark, it would need to use extra energy that it collected during the day and stored in a battery. Solar panels and batteries increase the weight of the car, and heavier cars need more power to run.

Researchers are working to design solar cars that are more suitable for everyday use. For this to happen, designers will need to make solar panels more efficient at converting sunlight to energy and design solar panels that are more suitable for cars. It also will be critical to make solar systems for cars cheaper, so average buyers can afford them.

For now, the closest option to a solar car is an electric vehicle that’s charged at home or at a charging station. Depending on how that electricity is generated, some of the energy that flows into these cars is likely from solar panels, wind turbines, hydropower dams or other renewable sources. And that share will rise as states work to switch to clean energy over the next several decades. If you’re driving or riding in an electric car, you might be traveling on solar power right now.

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The best solar generators for 2024, tested and reviewed

Nick Hilden and Stan Horaczek — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 18:00:00 +0000

Stan Horaczek

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Best overall	Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus	SEE IT	This is a solid all-around mix of features and affordability.
Best for camping	Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core	SEE IT	This powerful pack is easy to transport to a site.
Best for homes	EcoFlow Delta Pro	SEE IT	This is the pick if you need lots of scalable capacity.

You don’t want to wait until you need a solar generator to buy one. Whether you’re trying to live the van life, prepare for emergencies, or just bring some creature comforts with you when you go camping. Whatever the case, few things are as useful in today’s tech-driven world as a source of reliable, renewable power. The best solar generators can reliably and sustainably meet various energy needs, and we have tested and compared the best models to find which one fits your needs.

Best overall: Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus
Still great: Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro
Best high-capacity: Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro
Best for frequent use: Anker 767 Portable Power Station Solar Generator
Best for camping: Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core
Best for off-grid living: Bluetti AC200 Max
Fastest charging: EcoFlow Delta 2 Max
Best for homes: EcoFlow Delta Pro
Best budget: Jackery Explorer 300

How we chose the best solar generators

As an avid outdoorsman, I’ve had the opportunity to test an extremely wide range of outdoor gear, including mobile and off-grid electrification equipment like solar-powered generators, as well as inverter and dual-fuel generators. These became particularly essential when the pandemic forced my travels to become domestic rather than international, which prompted me to outfit a van for long-term road-tripping.

To bring my work along for the ride, I needed a constant power source to charge my laptop, a portable fridge, lighting, and a myriad of devices and tools … even the best electric bikes. As a result, I’ve tried all the leading portable power stations (and plenty that aren’t leading, too), so I know precisely what separates the best from the blah. I’ve written all about it (and other outdoor tech) for publications, including the Daily Beast, Thrillist, the Manual, and more. There were cases when my own opinion resulted in a tie, and I, therefore, looked to reviews from actual customers to determine which solar generators delivered the most satisfaction to the most users.

The best solar generators: Reviews & Recommendations

The solar generators on this list span a wide range of budgets, from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. They span several use cases, from camping to a backup for your home. Only you know all the factors that make one of these the best solar generator for you, but we think that one of these will get the job done.

Best overall: Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus

Stan Horaczek

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: It offers just about everything from our previous best overall pick with the added benefits of LiFePO4 battery power.

Specs

Storage capacity: 2,042.8Wh (expandable up to 24,000Wh)
Output capacity: 6,000w
Dimensions: 18.6 x 14.7 x 14.1 inches
Weight: 61 pounds
Price: $2,199

Pros

Charges quickly
Very high output that can run power-hungry devices
Built-in wheels and handle
Clear display
Four AC outlets
Expandable with extra batteries
Long life batteries

Cons

Heavy
Slightly less capacity than our previous pick

As new solar generators hit the market, many come toting new lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries instead of the familiar lithium-ion batteries that came before. LiFePO4 offers a few advantages, including a much longer lifespan as you charge and discharge them. They’re also safer and often faster to charge. They do typically add some weight, however. Just about all of those modifiers apply here in the form of the Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus.

The Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus can power current-hungry devices at up to 6000w, so even if you want to power a welder, you can. The battery will only last you about a half hour doing this (we tried it), but it does work, and that’s more than many other models can say. I also got to test the Explorer 2000 Plus during a real power outage. It kept our router running for several hours to maintain connectivity.

This model has 2kWh of storage built-in, but you can expand that capacity with extra external daisy-chained batteries. It gives a total max storage of up to 24kWh—enough for a serious off-grid job. The optional solar panels charge the battery quickly and efficiently. Jackery claims roughly two hours of charging time via the optional solar panels, and I found it took more like 2.5 hours, but that includes battling some passing clouds. With two straight hours of direct sun, it could likely get the job done.

The Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus handle and integrated wheels make it considerably easier to move around. Stan Horaczek

At 61 pounds, this is considerably heavier than the Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro, which weighs nearly 20 pounds less. But, the integrated wheels, handle, and chunky grips to either side of the box make it very easy to lug around. Everyone in my family could easily set it in the back of my wife’s Honda Civic.

The switch to LiFePo4 also means that this unit will last a long time before the battery degrades beyond its usable range. The company claims it will take 4,000 cycles before the battery life degrades to 70 percent. We obviously haven’t had time to test that yet, but that is the nature of LiFePo4, so it will almost certainly last longer than a lithium-ion model at least.

Still great: Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro

Nick Hilden

SEE IT

Buy it used or refurbished: eBay

Why it made the cut: This Jackery solar generator delivers the best blend of capacity, input/output capability, portability, and durability.

Specs

Storage capacity: 2,160Wh
Input capacity: 1,200W
Output capacity: 2,200W (4,400W surge)
Dimensions: 15.1 x 10.5 x 12.1 inches
Weight: 43 lbs
Price: $2,498

Pros

Fast charging and outstanding capacity
Durable and easy to use
Plenty of ports
Can connect to six 200W solar panels

Cons

Heavy for its size

The biggest portable power station from Jackery, a leading solar generator manufacturer, the Explorer 2000 Pro offers a tremendous 2,160 watt-hours of power, making it capable of charging a full camping setup for a few days. When plugged into six 200W solar panels, an upgrade over the four-panel setup available on the Jackery Explorer 1500, you can fully charge this portable power station in just 2-2.5 hours. That’s less than half the time of the smaller model.

On top of all that, it’s extremely user-friendly. Numerous output ports ensure that you can plug in a wide range of devices and electrical equipment. Its functions are highly intuitive, and the digital display is easy to understand. Like other Jackery generators, it’s incredibly durable, too. The one potential downside is its weight: At 43 pounds, it’s a bit heavy for its size. Even so, for all the power you can store, and the rapid-charging time, the Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro will keep the lights on wherever you need power.

For more on the Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro, check out our full review.

Best high-capacity: Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro

Nick Hilden

SEE IT

Specs

Storage capacity: 3,024Wh
Output capacity: 3,000W
Dimensions: 18.6 x 14.1 x 14.7 inches
Weight: 63.9 pounds
Price: $2,799

Pros

Ample power storage for long trips or outages
Sturdy handles and wheels make it easy to move
Smooth design makes it easy to load and unload
High peak output for power-intensive tasks
Lots of ports for connectivity

Cons

200W solar panels can be klunky
Relatively pricey

This is the big sibling to our best overall pick. Inside the Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro, you’ll find 3,024Wh of power storage, which is enough to power even large devices for extended periods of time. It can charge a high-end smartphone more than 100 times on a single charge. It can also power full-on appliances in an RV or emergency situation.

Despite its large capacity, we learned firsthand that the Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro is relatively easy to move around. Sturdy handles molded into its case make it easy to pick up, while an extending handle and wheels make it easy to roll around at the campsite or any other location.

It can charge in less than three hours from a standard outlet or, under optimal conditions with the 200W solar panels, it can fill up as quickly as eight hours. That full solar array can get large and unwieldy, but a smaller setup can still provide ample charging if you don’t need to max out the capacity daily.

This portable power station offers the best of everything we loved about the Explorer 2000 Pro, there’s just more of it. When you’re living the van life, powering an RV, or trying to ride out a power outage, more is definitely better if you can justify the extra cost.

Best for frequent use: Anker 767 Portable Power Station Solar Generator

Stan Horaczek

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Why it made the cut: High capacity and fast charging make this long-lasting battery a solid everyday driver.

Specs

Storage capacity: 2,048Wh
Output capacity: 2,400W
Dimensions: 20.67 x 9.84 x 15.55 inches
Weight: 67.3 pounds
Price: $1,999

Pros

Charges up to 80% in less than two hours
Solid output and storage capacity
Optional battery pack doubles capacity
LiFePO4 batteries survive more charge cycles than traditional models
Plenty of ports
Built-in handle and wheels for transport

Cons

Heavy for its capacity
No USB-C in for charging

Anker has equipped its massive portable power station with LiFePO4 batteries, which stand up much better to repeat charging and discharging over the long term than common lithium-ion cells. Anker claims it can charge and discharge up to 3,000 times before it reaches 80% battery health compared to 500 in a similar lithium-ion setup. While I haven’t had the chance to run it through 3,000 cycles, LiFePO4 batteries have a well-earned reputation for longevity.

Regarding overall performance, the Anker 767 does everything you’d want a unit with these specs to do. The bad weather has given me [Executive Gear Editor Stan Horaczek] ample chances, unfortunately, to test it in real-world situations.

The built-in battery offers a 2048Wh capacity and pumps out up to 2,400W. It does so through four standard AC outlets, an RV outlet, two 120W car outlets, two 12W USB-A ports, and three 100W USB-C ports.

I used it during a blackout to keep our Wi-Fi running while charging my family’s devices. Filling a phone from zero barely makes a dent in the power station’s capacity, and it ran the router for several hours with plenty of juice left.

In another instance, it powered our small meat freezer for four hours before the power came back on with some juice still left in the tank. It does what it promises.

There are a few nice extra touches as well. Built-in wheels and an extendable handle allow it to roll like carry-on luggage. Unfortunately, those are necessary inclusions because it weighs a hefty 67.3 pounds. It’s manageable but definitely heavy compared to its competition.

The Anker 767 is compatible with the company’s 200W solar panels, which fold up for easy transportation. I mostly charged the unit through my home’s AC power, a surprisingly quick process. The 767 Portable Power Station can go from flat to more than 80% charge in less than a half hour with sufficient power. It takes about two hours to get it fully juiced.

Anker also offers a mobile app that connects to the power station via Bluetooth if you want to control it without actually going over and touching it.

Best for camping: Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core

Nick Hilden

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Buy it used or refurbished: eBay

Why it made the cut: Thanks to its outstanding portability, high storage capacity, and Yeti’s famous durability, the Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core is great for packing along for camping or van-living.

Specs

Storage capacity: 983Wh
Input capacity: 600W
Output capacity: 1,200W (2,400W surge)
Dimensions: 9.86 x 15.25 x 10.23 inches
Weight: 31.68 lbs
Price: $1,198.95

Pros

Highly portable
Incredible durability
Rapid recharge rate
Plenty of plugs

Cons

Expensive for its size/capacity

Yeti is long-renowned for making some of the best outdoor gear money can buy, so when the company launched its Goal Zero line of solar generators, it was no surprise that they turned out to be awesome. While the whole line is great, the 1000 Core model’s balance between capacity and portability makes it perfect for taking on the road and going camping.

While the 1000 Core has a third less capacity than our top pick, it charges up faster, making it a great option for rapid solar replenishment. That said, its capacity is no slouch, offering 82 phone charges, 20 for a laptop, or upwards of 15 hours for a portable fridge (depending on wattage). Suffice to say, it’s more than capable of powering your basic camping gear.

Beyond its charging capabilities, the Goal Zero 1000 Core excels at camping thanks to its hearty build quality. Built super tough—like pretty much everything Yeti makes—its exterior shell provides solid protection.

The biggest issue it presents is the cost. Like pretty much everything Yeti produces, its price tag isn’t small. While there are other 1000-level solar generators for less, this one offers a great balance of power storage and portability.

For more on the Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core, check out our full review.

Best for off-grid living: Bluetti AC200 Max

Bluetti

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Buy it used or refurbished: eBay

Why it made the cut: Thanks to its high solo capacity and ability to daisy-chain with additional batteries, the Bluetti AC200 Max is perfect for bringing power off the grid.

Specs

Storage capacity: 2,048Wh standalone, expandable up to 8,192Wh
Input capacity: 1,400W
Output capacity: 2,200W (4,800W surge)
Dimensions: 16.5 x 11 x 15.2 inches
Weight: 61.9 lbs
Price: $1,999

Pros

Massive capacity
Daisy-chain capability
Lightning-fast input capacity
30A RV plug and two wireless charging pads
Surprisingly affordable for what it offers

Cons

Pretty heavy
Fan can get loud, especially in hot weather

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a solar generator better suited for living off the grid for an extended period than the Bluetti AC200 Max. It boasts a substantial 2,048Wh capacity, allowing you to power your whole life off it longer than most portable generators. Even better, you can daisy-chain multiple Bluetti batteries, expanding its capacity to a massive 8.192Wh. That’s flat-out enormous and translates into the ability to power a full-sized fridge for over a day or several hours of air conditioning. For the more modest needs of people who are used to living off a generator, it will last for a very long time.

At the same time, the AC200 Max has an outstanding input capacity of 1,400W. That means you can plug in a pretty hefty array of solar panels to replenish its stores quickly. This allows you to keep your off-grid setup going with little to no interruption. It also features some specialty charging options, including a 30A plug, which lets you plug it directly into an RV, and multiple wireless charging pads for smaller devices.

Fastest charging: EcoFlow Delta 2 Max

Stan Horaczek

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Why it made the cut: Whether it’s solar or AC power, you can get 80% of a charge in an hour or less.

Specs

Storage capacity: 2048Wh (expandable to 6,000Wh)
Output capacity: 3,400W
Dimensions: 19.8 x 9.5 x 12.01
Weight: 50.71 lbs
Price: $2,000

Pros

Very fast charging over solar or mains
Relatively compact
Not as heavy as we might have expected
Long-lasting batteries
Scalable by connecting two extra batteries
Advanced temperature management for safety

Cons

Solar panels are pricy
Still heavier than non-LiFePo4 models

Plug this 2048Wh battery pack into up to 1,000 watts of solar panels, and you can get an 80 percent charge in just 43 minutes. That’s blisteringly fast compared to other models. Plug the unit into the wall and you’ll go from zero to 80 percent in just 1.1 hours, which is still fairly speedy when it comes to soaking up electricity. That extra time can make a huge difference if you only have limited opportunities to top off your solar generator. We managed to get above 80 percent in just under an hour without perfect sun conditions here in Upstate New York.

In addition to its quick charging skills, the EcoFlow Delta 2 Max offers an impressive array of connectivity, including six AC outlets, which is more than many larger models offer. That’s good if you want to run many devices or chargers simultaneously. If you need more capacity, you can add two extra external batteries to give it a total storage of 6Wh.

At 51 pounds, this isn’t the lightest solar generator in its category, but like the other EcoFlow generators, it has chunky handles on top that make it easy to lug around. Everyone in my family could easily get it in and out of the back of our Honda CR-V without issue. Though, it doesn’t have wheels, so you will have to actually carry it around or put it on a cart.

Ultimately, this feels like a very high-end device. The fast charging is wonderful. The display is clear and relatively bright (though it could be brighter). And it offers a wide array of connectivity.

Best for homes: EcoFlow Delta Pro

Nick Hilden

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Buy it used or refurbished: eBay

Why it made the cut: The EcoFlow Delta Pro delivers the standalone and expandable power capacity necessary to power your entire home.

Specs

Storage capacity: 3,600Wh standalone, expandable up to 25,000Wh
Input capacity: 6,500W
Output capacity: 3,600W (7,200W surge)
Dimensions: 25 x 11.2 x 16.4 inches
Weight: 99 lbs
Price: $3,699

Pros

Enormous capacity
Daisy-chain capability
30A RV plug
Lightning-fast input capacity
Wi-Fi and Smartphone connectivity

Cons

Very heavy
Expensive

If you’re looking for the best solar generator for home backup in the event of a power outage, the EcoFlow Delta Pro stands apart from the pack, thanks to an unrivaled power and output capacity. The Delta Pro alone packs a 3,600Wh wallop, and you can expand that to 25,000Wh by chaining it to extra EcoFlow batteries and generators. That’s a ton of power and it has the substantial output capacity necessary to power an entire house worth of electronics when you need it to.

The Delta Pro also offers a companion app for iOS and Android that allows you to monitor energy usage, customize its operation, and monitor and manage a number of other elements.

While it’s not overly large for what it does, the Delta Pro is a heavy piece of equipment. It has wheels, so it is technically portable, but this is meant to be put down in a home or other semi-permanent site. Given its size and power, it’s also a much more expensive device, especially if you’re springing for the add-ons. As the best solar power generator to provide backup power for your entire home, however, it’s worth every penny.

Best budget: Jackery Explorer 300

Stan Horaczek

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Buy it used or refurbished: Amazon

Why it made the cut: With its reasonable capacity, compact size, and solid build quality at a low price, the Jackery Explorer 300 is a great budget pick.

Specs

Storage capacity: 293Wh
Input capacity: 90W
Output capacity: 300W (500W surge)
Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.2 x 7.8 in
Weight: 7.1 lbs
Price: $250

Pros

Affordable
Durable
Portable
Reasonable capacity

Cons

No flashlight
Slower input capacity

Though it isn’t quite as impressive as our top picks for best overall and best high-capacity, Jackery’s smaller Explorer 300 solar generator is super compact and lightweight with a decent power capacity for its price. Less a mobile power station than an upscale power bank, the 7-pound Jackery Explorer 300 provides plenty of portable recharges for your devices when you’re camping, on a job site, driving, or just need some power and don’t have convenient access to an outlet. Its modest 293Wh capacity isn’t huge, but it’s enough to provide 31 phone charges, 15 for a camera, 6 for the average drone, 2.5 for a laptop, or a few hours of operation for a minifridge or TV. A built-in flashlight would have upped its camping game somewhat, but at $300 (and often considerably less if you catch it discounted), this highly portable little power station does a lot for a little.

We tested this portable power station for several months, and it came in handy numerous times, especially during the winter when power outages abound. At one point, we had it powering two phones, a MacBook, and a small light.

The built-in handle makes it very easy to lug around. It feels like carrying a lunch box. The screen is easy to read, and the whole package seems fairly durable. Our review unit hasn’t taken any dramatic tumbles yet, but it has gotten banged around in car trunks, duffle bags, and other less-than-luxurious accommodations with no issues. If you catch one of these on sale, get it and stick it in a cabinet. You’ll be extremely glad to have it around when the need arises.

What to consider before buying the best solar generators

Over the past few years, solar generators have exploded onto the market. There are now dozens of different brands that largely look more or less the same at a glance. The fact is there are only a few standouts amidst a sea of knockoffs. Here’s what to look for to ensure you’re getting a great one:

How much power can it store?

A portable solar generator comes in an extremely wide range of sizes, but a generator’s size doesn’t automatically make it capable of storing a lot of power. In fact, most are disappointingly limited and unable to store much more juice than a portable charger.

To properly check a generator’s storage, you must look at its capacity, measured in watt-hours (Wh). One watt-hour is the equivalent of 1 watt flowing over the course of an hour. The best solar generators offer capacities of several hundred and sometimes several thousand watt-hours. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will provide power for several hundred or several thousand hours. Any generator will ultimately last a different amount of time, depending on what’s plugged into it.

It’s easy to predict how long a generator will last when you use it to power one thing. For example, if you were to power a 100-watt bulb using a power station with a capacity of 500 watt-hours, it would stay lit for five continuous hours. Add a portable fridge that requires 50 watts per hour, your phone which uses 18, a mini-fan that uses three … you get the picture. The more capacity, the better.

Charging capability

No solar generator will hold a charge forever, so you want one capable of charging as quickly and easily as possible. This is where we put the “renewable” into “renewable energy.”

All of the power stations included in this roundup can be charged by connecting them to solar panels (hence the designation “solar generators”). Still, you also want to look for the ability to charge via other sources like wall outlets and your vehicle’s 12-volt plug. This ensures that you can charge up whether you’re off-grid in the sun, plugged in while preparing at home, or using your dash socket on the go.

You must also monitor a model’s charging input capacity, measured in watts (W). For example, a solar-powered generator with a max input of 100W can take in a continuous flow of up to 100 watts, which is about the minimum that you’ll reasonably want to look for. Most of the generators below have input capacities of at least a few hundred watts when charging via solar, so a few 50- to 200-watt solar panels will max them out.

Output capability

Solar generators need to keep the power coming in and going out. The best solar generators can simultaneously charge all your intended devices via whatever plugs are necessary.

Any portable power station worth your money will have a high output capacity so you can charge many devices, even if they require a lot of juice. A generator’s maximum output should be much higher than its max input. While a particular model might only be capable of taking in a few hundred watts at any given moment, it will usually put out exponentially more. At a minimum, you’ll want a generator that can put out 300 watts at a time, though you’ll want at least 500 for larger tasks.

The best solar generators should also offer a variety of output plugs, including AC outlets, USB-A, USB-C, and even 12-volt DC outlets like the one in your vehicle dash. This ensures you can charge several devices simultaneously regardless of their plug. The number of ports you’ll need will vary depending on how many devices you need to power, but it should have at least a couple of AC outlets and a few USB-A ports.

Portability

While portable battery sources have been around for a while now, over the past several decades, they’ve been pretty heavy, unwieldy things. One of the most exciting aspects of the latest generation of solar generators is that they’ve become much more physically compact.

Suppose you plan on taking a generator camping or working it into a van conversion where every square inch matters; well, size and weight become major considerations. All of the products we’ve recommended are about the size of one or two shoeboxes—three at the most. The lightest is about the weight of a 24-pack of soda, while the heaviest is 100 pounds. Most fall somewhere between 30-60 pounds.

If you’re using your generator as a more or less stationary source of backup power at home, portability isn’t a huge issue. Still, we generally recommend keeping weight and size in mind; You never know when you’ll need it for something other than a backup. (Plus, who wants to lug around something heavy and awkward if they don’t have to?)

Another consideration regarding portability involves the necessity for accessories, which can impact how easy it is to move and use your generator. Some generators, for example, require a lot of removable battery packs, which can be a hassle when you’re on the go or packing a vehicle. All of the inclusions on our list require some accessories—you can’t get solar power without connecting cables and solar panels—but they work well with minimal add-ons.

Durability

As with any product you expect to last, durability and all-around quality craftsmanship are essential. This is especially true if you plan on lugging your generator around on camping and road trips. Many subpar power stations are made from cheap components and flimsy plastic that doesn’t feel like it will hold up under the rigors of the road.

Durability isn’t something you can determine by reading a spec sheet off the internet. You’ve actually got to take the generator out, use it a bunch, and see how it holds up. I’ve verified the durability of these recommendations via a combination of my own actual field tests and reviews culled from countless real product owners.

Related: Best electric generators

FAQs

Q: What size solar generator should I get?

It’s easy to underestimate how much capacity you need. A 1,000 watt-hours might sound like a lot, but if you’re going to power a converted van with a portable fridge, lights, and occasional phone and laptop top-off, that 1,000 watt-hours will go faster than you expect. I used a setup like this and know from personal experience that you should always overestimate how much power you’ll need.

A generator with a capacity under 1,000Wh can keep electronics charged. A larger one with 1000-1500Wh should be the minimum for road trips where you’ll need it to last multiple days between full charges. For a house or worksite where you expect to use some serious energy—like a full-sized refrigerator or power tools—you’re going to want to start looking at the biggest possible power stations that can be daisy-chained to external batteries.

If you want to get precise, there is an equation:

1. Estimate how many hours you’ll need to power various devices. For example, if you want to power two light bulbs for 2 hours: you need 4 hours of operation.

2. Add up the total wattage necessary: the two bulbs are 60 watts each, so you need 120 watts.

3. Multiply these together to find the total watt-hours needed: 4 x 120 = 480. So, in this case, you’d need at least a 500Wh solar generator.

That might sound like a lot for two lightbulbs, but remember that, in most situations, you won’t really be powering 60-watt light bulbs for hours on end. You’ll be charging phones and laptops for an hour here or there, cooling a fridge that kicks on and off every once in a while, using power tools in short bursts, and whatnot.

Q: How many years will a solar generator last?

Most modern generators are rated to last upwards of 25 years. The best-designed power stations are pretty sturdy, with few to no moving parts, so they should likely keep kicking for a long time, provided that you care for them properly. I’ve been pretty rough with a few of mine, and they show no signs of stopping.

Q: Can I run my house on solar power only?

Yes and no. While it’s absolutely possible to power your house with solar power, you’re unlikely to do so with a portable solar generator unless you use several at once while limiting your power usage. The largest of our recommendations—the EcoFlow Delta Pro—will come fairly close when bolstered with extra batteries. If the power goes out, you’ll be able to keep your fridge cold and use basic electronics for a couple of days without recharging. With quality solar panels, good sunlight, and smart energy usage, your power should theoretically go uninterrupted.

Final thoughts on the best solar generators

Best overall: Jackery Explorer 2000 Plus
Still great: Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro
Best high-capacity: Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro
Best for frequent use: Anker 767 Portable Power Station Solar Generator
Best for camping: Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core
Best for off-grid living: Bluetti AC200 Max
Fastest charging: EcoFlow Delta 2 Max
Best for homes: EcoFlow Delta Pro
Best budget: Jackery Explorer 300

We’re living in a “golden age” for portable solar generators. When I was a kid, and my family was playing around with solar gear while camping in the ‘90s, the technology couldn’t charge many devices, so it wasn’t all that practical.

By contrast, the solar generators we’ve recommended here are incredibly useful. I’ve relied on them to power my work and day-to-day needs while road-tripping nationwide. They’re also great when the power goes out. When a windstorm cut the power at my house for a couple of days, I was still working, watching my stories, and keeping the lights on.

We haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of the potential offered by portable, reliable, renewable, relatively affordable power. What we can do now is already incredible. The potential for what may come next, though, is truly mind-blowing.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best solar generators for 2024, tested and reviewed appeared first on Popular Science.

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Debate and innovation define nuclear energy’s present and future

Nicola Jones / Knowable Magazine — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Nuclear power can provide electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. The question is whether new reactor designs are safe enough — and cheap enough—to play a role in the globe’s energy future. DepositPhotos

This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

In an online video from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a cartoon simulation shows a tsunami wiping out one of their future nuclear power stations and cutting off power. What happens next? Not much: The reactor quietly shuts itself down. “It cools off just by sitting there, no moving parts or fluids, no operator actions,” says the reassuring video. “We’ve designed a reactor that is inherently safe no matter the events.”

The Seattle-based Ultra Safe and dozens of other companies like it are at the forefront of a global nuclear energy revival. As the world urgently needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get the planet’s temperature under control, policymakers, companies and researchers are reexamining nuclear energy as a green alternative that can help bolster the power produced by renewables like wind and solar. Today the industry is emerging from a period of stagnation, with a promise to double or triple its capacity by 2050.

That revival is undergirded by two hot technology trends. Companies like Ultra Safe are aiming to build small modular reactors (SMRs) designed to be just a fraction of the size of former plants, to reduce both building costs and the scope of possible disasters. And many are aiming to utilize new technologies designed to make meltdown accidents impossible and to create less long-lived waste.

But the surge in interest is not without controversy. As with everything in the nuclear landscape, debate rages about whether society actually needs nuclear to tackle climate change, and whether the new systems are as shiny as they seem—with reasonable arguments for and against every promise and risk. Some say the new technologies could offer a fantastic solution to our energy woes; others say nuclear is beset with so many environmental, social and economic problems that it is best abandoned in favor of other ways to meet the globe’s energy demands.

The next few years will decide what course nuclear power takes in the world’s energy future. “This is a moment of truth,” says Francesca Giovannini, a nuclear policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School. Over the next few decades, nuclear power is “either going to make it, or that industry is fundamentally done for. … It’s 50/50 how this goes.”

Ups and downs in nuclear power output

Nuclear power poses some obvious risks—meltdown accidents, nuclear fuel being diverted to weapons programs, environmental issues posed by mining for uranium, the problems of storing nuclear waste. Against a backdrop of such concerns, alongside shifting economics of energy production, nuclear power production started to level off in the early 2000s and even dipped briefly after the Fukushima power plant accident of 2011. Some nations, most notably Germany, decided to shutter their nuclear programs entirely. But global nuclear power production is now starting to inch upward again.

Today, nuclear plants produce about 10 percent of global electricity, making nuclear the second largest source of non-fossil-fuel energy after hydropower. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in operation globally; another 60 or so are now being built, and around 100 are on order or planned.

Nuclear power generation grew rapidly through the last few decades of the 20th century, then leveled off. It may be poised for another big increase.

Most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for keeping the world below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming include some kind of increase in nuclear power capacity. In the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) pathway to net zero, global nuclear power production doubles over 2022 levels by 2050. A key reason for this is that nuclear is seen as a good way to provide consistent baseload power to prop up more variable renewable sources of energy like wind or solar. Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear.

Nuclear has plenty of advantages: It produces no carbon emissions (and, counterintuitively, releases less radioactive uranium and other elements into the environment than burning coal does). It takes up a lot less land than renewables, a not insignificant consideration. If the goal is to decarbonize quickly and with as little social pain as possible, “nuclear is essential,” says Kai Vetter, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the UN’s Convention on Climate Change meeting in Dubai in December 2023, more than 20 nations signed a declaration to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. And cash is flowing into this effort. In 2020, the US Department of Energy (DOE) notably gave $160 million for two demonstration plants to get up and running by 2027. And in 2022, the European Union declared that some nuclear projects could call themselves “green” in the same way as renewables, opening the door to environmental financing mechanisms.

But as with almost every issue relating to nuclear power, the arguments in favor of nuclear have their detractors. Public policy expert M.V. Ramana at the University of British Columbia is one of many, for example, who say that baseload power is an outdated concept. A smart, diverse and flexible electric grid, they argue, can assure a reliable power supply by shunting power among sources and storage facilities.

And with the cost of renewables falling fast, today’s economic estimates about the relative costs of power sources may not mean much in the future.

Most scenarios for global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 include a role for nuclear power. Here, projections from the International Energy Agency forecast that the total amount of power from nuclear will need to grow by 2050 to meet needs (left). But because the world’s total energy demand is expected to rise significantly, nuclear’s share of all power generation may actually fall (right).

Then there’s the question of safety. The grand total of lives lost from all nuclear power generation to date, while hard to quantify, is certainly far lower than the number of people killed by air pollution related to the burning of fossil fuels; a recent paper by NASA scientists concluded that nuclear power saved roughly 1.8 million lives from 1971 to 2009 thanks to avoided air pollution. By some accounts nuclear power has also proved less deadly than wind power, which has been linked to drownings at offshore wind farm sites and helicopter collisions with turbines.

But fatality is arguably a blunt way to measure the impacts of the nuclear industry, which also include the risk of accidents contaminating large tracts of land, plus numerous other effects related to such things as mining and waste storage. Ramana has documented how the burden of these last issues falls disproportionately on Indigenous and disempowered communities, working against the goals of social justice. Nuclear power, he writes, “does not fit with any idea of a responsible and cleaner energy system.”

Small and shiny: New nuclear technologies

If we are to pursue nuclear power at the scale called for by the IEA, it will take a herculean effort. The IEA’s pathway requires the world to ramp up from building five big nuclear plants per year to 20 per year over the next decade. Big plants typically cost billions of dollars and come with big financial risks. Westinghouse Electric Company, for example, recently filed for bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars of cost overruns during the construction of four nuclear plants in the United States.

One plan for reducing those epic and prohibitive costs is to build small modular reactors, ranging from reactors that can be shipped on a truck and produce a couple of hundred megawatts, to tiny single-megawatt sizes that are more akin to hefty diesel generators. The modules could be pre-built in a factory and shipped to a site for installation. All this should make these reactors less frightening prospects for investors (though the end price per unit of electricity might wind up higher than that from a larger nuclear power plant).

A handful of SMRs are already in operation in Russia, China and India. Dozens more are in development. Canada has a national SMR action plan, and as of 2021 there were 10 SMR proposals under review (including one from Ultra Safe).

But so far, the promise of enticingly low costs for SMR builds hasn’t materialized, says Granger Morgan, a physicist and codirector of the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon. Morgan has crunched the numbers for nuclear in the US and was disappointed. “I thought SMRs were going to hold much more promise, but we can’t make the numbers wash,” he says.

That message was hammered home in November 2023 when the company NuScale scrapped its high-profile advanced plans to build an underground SMR in Idaho in the face of cost hikes. “Would it be nice to have nuclear? Yes absolutely,” says Morgan. “Will it be affordable? That’s very much an open question.”

Others argue that small isn’t always beautiful. While smaller plants present a smaller risk from smaller potential accidents, this strategy also means more plants overall, which means more facilities to protect against theft and terrorism. “You have way more fissile material dispersed; you will have to secure way more infrastructure,” says Giovannini. “I mean, that becomes a mess.”

Next generation nuclear

While some are focusing on making nuclear plants smaller, there’s a parallel movement to make them safer and more efficient. The next generation of reactor designs—Generation IV, in the industry’s lingo—includes a suite of six major reactor families, all very different from today’s standard, each with many possible variants under development. Much of the attention (particularly in the US) has been focused on three of these: high-temperature gas-cooled, molten salt and sodium-cooled.

The ideas behind these technologies, and even some early-stage power plants, have been around for decades. But the new variants of these old ideas combine novel fuels and designs, promising to be safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly. “They’re doing all kinds of whizz-bang, high-tech stuff,” says Morgan, who has no doubt that newer reactors can be made safer than old ones.

Most existing reactors are water-cooled uranium systems, which were chosen as the dominant technology largely as a quirk of history. Like all reactor types, they have their pros and cons. They need high pressures to stop their coolant waters from boiling off at typical operating temperatures around 300 degrees Celsius. And they are designed to work with relatively slow-moving neutrons—the subatomic particles that collide with nuclear fuel to initiate nuclear fission. Slow-moving neutrons are more likely to interact with fuel particles, but systems that use them are also limited in the kinds of fuels they can use. Catastrophe can strike if the fission reaction runs amok or the reactor gets too hot and the core “melts down,” as happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, spewing radiation into the environment.

The latest models of water-cooled reactors (sometimes called Gen III Plus, including many SMRs) use new design tricks to reduce the number of safety systems that require human intervention, aiming to stop accidents in their tracks automatically. Gen IV reactors, though, use entirely different coolant materials, are usually designed to operate at higher, more efficient temperatures, and often use faster-speed neutrons that can convert the most prevalent natural isotopes of uranium into usable fuel, or even feed on nuclear waste.

High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, for example, run at temperatures up to 950°C, making them 20 to 33 percent more thermally efficient than water-cooled reactors. Since the core materials used in these reactors are typically stable up to 1,600°C, which is hotter than lava, there’s a large margin of safety. The reactor in Ultra Safe’s video is an SMR that falls into this category; its small size helps, too, with passive cooling. Ultra Safe also makes their own fuel pellets, encased in a bespoke material that they say retains radioactive materials even in extreme conditions. They’re hoping to build their first commercial micro-reactor in Canada.

In molten salt reactors, both fuel and coolant are already liquid. So meltdowns, in the traditional sense, are impossible. And liquid-sodium-cooled reactors have a built-in safety feature: If they heat up, the liquid sodium expands and allows more neutrons to escape through the gaps between atoms, so the reaction (which is driven by neutrons) naturally winds down. The US Department of Energy has funded the US company TerraPower (which has Bill Gates as a major investor) to build a demonstration plant of its sodium-cooled Natrium reactor in Wyoming by 2030.

Nuclear waste not, want not

Waste is one area where the new designs really see some significant improvements, says Giovannini. “None of the reactors have entirely solved the problem of nuclear waste, but they do provide some significant solutions in terms of quantity,” she says. The spent fuel from traditional light water reactors needs to be buried in special repositories for hundreds of thousands of years, because of the production of long-lived radioactive byproducts. Some Gen IV reactors, on the other hand, can transform spent fuel into more fissile isotopes and use it for further fission reactions. This can improve efficiency and produce waste that need only be stored for hundreds of years.

Not everyone, though, thinks all these systems are as shiny as they seem. In 2021, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report entitled “‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better,” in which they highlighted issues with safety, sustainability and nuclear proliferation. They concluded that nearly all the Gen IV reactor types “fail to provide significant enough improvements over [light water reactors] to justify their considerable risks.”

The report was criticized by some for being ideologically antinuclear, says Giovannini. But, she says, “it was very fair” to point out that new tech comes with new worries. Liquid salt, the report pointed out, is corrosive; liquid sodium metal can burst into flame when in contact with water or air. High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, the report concluded, while tolerant of high temperatures, are “far from meltdown-proof, as some claim.”

Hot idea

Many of these Gen IV systems offer another key benefit: Their higher temperatures can provide not just electricity but also useful heat. This could be used in many industrial processes, such as the production of steel, cement and fertilizer, which currently burn a lot of fossil fuels in their furnaces.

“That heat is pretty much for free,” says Vetter, who sees a particular utility for nuclear heat in desalination, getting clean drinking water out of saltwater as is done at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. Indeed, X-energy, a leading US Gen IV nuclear company funded by the DOE, has partnered with Dow chemical company to build its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at a Dow chemical production site by 2030. Morgan, though, thinks that most industries will balk at the set-up costs.

Even if Gen IV reactors turn out to be technically superior, though, it may be decades before they can be thoroughly tested, passed by regulators and built at commercial scale. With little time to spare in the fight against climate change, the world might be better off simply ramping up old reactor designs that are already proven, says Esam Hussein, a retired nuclear engineer from the University of Regina, Canada. “We have the operating experience, we have the regulatory framework,” he says. “If the goal is to fight climate change, why don’t you go with the devil you know?”

In response to why we need a devil at all, many are quick to point out that no energy solution is problem-free, including renewables. Giovannini says she agrees with the nuclear industry’s criticism that we have “jumped on renewables in a very uncritical way.” Wind and solar require electronics and battery banks to store their energy; these in turn need elements like lithium and cobalt that can come with environmental and social justice issues from mining. “Nothing is 100 percent safe,” says Vetter.

It is hard for many to swallow data, assurances and statistics about nuclear, given its history and the huge amounts of money at stake. “I think the nuclear industry is selling a bunch of bullshit most of the time,” says Giovannini, who has been critical of how the industry deals with public concerns. But her own main worry about nuclear is “they’re moving too slow.” If companies like Ultra Safe, X-Energy, TerraPower and others are going to help fight climate change with Gen IV technologies and fleets of small reactors, she and others say, they’re going to have to ramp up fast.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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AI companies eye fossil fuels to meet booming energy demand

Mack DeGeurin — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Energy-intensive data centers were responsible for an estimated 4% of the US’ overall energy use in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. DepositPhotos

It takes massive amounts of energy to power the data center brains of popular artificial intelligence models. That demand is only growing. In 2024, many of Silicon Valley’s largest tech giants and hoards of budding, well-funded startups have (very publically) aligned themselves with climate action–awash with PR about their sustainability goals, their carbon neutral pledges, and their promises to prioritize recycled materials. But as AI’s intensive energy demands become more apparent, it seems like many of those supposed green priorities could be jeopardized.

A March International Energy Agency forecast estimates input-hungry AI models and cryptocurrency mining combined could cause data centers worldwide to double their energy use in just two years. Recent reports suggest tech leaders interested in staying relevant in the booming AI race may consider turning to old-fashioned, carbon-emitting energy sources to help meet that demand.

AI models need more energy to power data centers

Though precise figures measuring AI’s energy consumption remain a matter of debate, it’s increasingly clear complex data centers required to train and power those systems are energy-intensive. A recently released peer reviewed data analysis, energy demands from AI servers in 2027 could be on par with those of Argentina, the Netherlands, or Sweden combined. Production of new data centers isn’t slowing down either. Just last week, Washington Square Journal reports, Amazon Web Service Vice President of Engineering Bill Vass told an audience at an energy industry event in Texas he believes a new data center is being built every three days. Other energy industry leaders speaking at the event, like Former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, argued renewable energy production may fall short of what is needed to power this projected data center growth.

“We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” Moniz said. The Obama-era energy secretary went on to say unmet energy demands brought on by AI, primarily via electricity, would require tapping into more natural gas and coal power plants. When it comes to meeting energy demands with renewables, he said, “you’re kind of stuck.”

Others, like Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue say the increased energy demand has led them to build out a new gas power plant while also trying to meet a 2050 net-zero goal. Other natural gas company executives speaking with the Journal, meanwhile claim tech firms building out data setters have expressed interest in using a natural gas energy source.

Tech companies already have a checkered record on sustainability promises

A sudden reinterest in non-renewable energy sources to fuel an AI boom could contradict net zero carbon timelines and sustainability pledges made by major tech companies in recent years. Microsoft and Google, who are locked in a battle over quickly evolving generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, have both outlined plans to have net negative emissions in coming years. Apple, which reportedly shuttered its long-running car unit in order to devote resources towards AI, aims to become carbon neutral across its global supply chains by 2030. The Biden administration meanwhile has ambitiously pledged the US to have a carbon pollution free electricity sector by 2035.

Critics argue some of these climate pledges, particularly those heralded by large tech firms, may seem impressive on paper but have already fallen short in key areas. Multiple independent monitors in recent years have criticized large tech companies for allegedly failing to properly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. Others have dinged tech firms for heavily basing their sustainability strategies around carbon offsets as opposed to potentially more effective solutions like reducing energy consumption. The alluring race for AI dominance risks stretching those already strained goals even further.

AI boom has led to new data centers popping up around the US

Appetites for electricity are rising around the country. In Georgia, according to a recent Washington Post report, expected energy production within the state in the next ten years is 17 times larger than what it was recently. Northern Virginia, according to the same report, could require the energy equivalent of several nuclear power plants to meet the increased demand from planned data centers currently under construction. New data centers have popped up in both of those states in recent years. Lobbyists representing traditional coal and gas energy providers, the Post claims, are simultaneously urging government offices to delay retiring some fossil fuel plants in order to meet increasing energy demands. Data centers in the US alone were responsible for 4% of the county’s overall energy use in 2022 according to the IEA. That figure will only grow as more and more AI-focused facilities come online.

At the same time, some of the AI industry’s-starkest proponents have argued these very same energy intensive models may prove instrumental in helping scale-up renewable energy sources and develop technologies to counteract the most destructive aspects of climate change. Previous reports argue powerful AI models could improve the efficiency of oils and gas facilities by improving underground mapping. AI simulation modes, similarly could help engineers develop optimal designs for wind or solar plants that could bring down their cost and increase their desirability as an energy source. Microsoft, who partners with OpenAI, is reportedly already using generative AI tools to try and streamline the regulatory approval process for nuclear reactors. Those future reactors, in theory, would then be used to generate the electricity needed to quench its AI models’ energy thirst.

Fossil-fuel powered AI prioritizes long-term optimism over current day climate realities

The problem with those more optimistic outlooks is that they remain, for the time being at least, mostly hypothetical and severely lacking in real-word data. AI models may increase the efficiency and affordability of renewable resources long term, but they risk doing so by pushing down on the accelerator of non-renewable resources right now. And with energy demands surging in other industries outside of tech at the same time, these optimistic longer-term outlooks could serve to justify splurging on natural gas and goal in the short term. Underpinning all of this is a worsening climate outlook that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and international organizations agree demands radical action to reduce emissions as soon as possible. Renewable energy sources are on the rise in the US but tech firms looking for easier available sources of electricity to power their next AI projects risk setting back that progress.

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Drones offer a glimpse inside Fukushima nuclear reactor 13 years after disaster

Andrew Paul — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 18:00:00 +0000

In this satellite view, the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power plant after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 14, 2011 in Futaba, Japan. DigitalGlobe via Getty Images via Getty Images

A team of miniature drones recently entered the radioactive ruins of one of Fukushima’s nuclear reactors in an attempt to help Japanese officials continue planning their decades’ long cleanup effort. But if the images released earlier this week didn’t fully underscore just how much work is still needed, new footage from the tiny robots’ excursion certainly highlights the many challenges ahead.

On Thursday, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), the Japanese utility organization that oversees the Fukushima Daiichi plant reclamation project, revealed three-minutes of video recorded by a bread slice-sized flying drone alongside a snake-like bot that provided its light. Obtained during TEPCO’s two-day probe, the new clip offers viewers some of the best looks yet at what remains of portions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility—specifically, the main structural support in its No. 1 reactor’s primary containment vessel.

🎥 Fukushima: Vídeo de drone mostra interior do reator da usina nuclear danificado em 2011 pic.twitter.com/xs6HIGBLyV
— UOL Notícias (@UOLNoticias) March 22, 2024

The Fukushima plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown on March 11, 2011, after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the Japanese coast produced a 130-foot-tall tsunami that subsequently bore down on the region. Of the three reactors damaged during the disaster, No. 1 is considered the most severely impacted. A total of 880 tons of molten radioactive fuel debris is believed to remain within those reactors, with No.1 believed to contain the largest amount. An estimated 160,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding areas, with only limited returns allowed the following year. Around 20,000 people are believed to have been killed during the tsunami itself.

Last week’s drone-gathered images and video show the remains of the No. 1 reactor’s control-rod drive mechanism, alongside other equipment attached to the core, which indicate the parts were dislodged during the meltdown. According to NHK World, “agglomerated or icicle-shaped objects” seen in certain areas could be nuclear fuel debris composed of “a mixture of molten nuclear fuel and surrounding devices.”

Experts say only a fraction of the damage could be accessed by the drones due to logistical difficulties, and that the robots couldn’t reach the core bottom because of poor visibility. Similarly, radiation levels could not be ascertained during this mission, since the drones did not include instruments such as dosimeters so as to remain light enough to maneuver through the plant.

TEPCO now plans to analyze the drone data to better establish a plan of action to collect and remove the radioactive debris within Fukushima. In August 2023, officials began a multiphase project to release treated radioactive wastewater from the plant into the Pacific Ocean. While deemed safe by multiple agencies and watchdogs, the ongoing endeavor has received strong pushback from neighboring countries, including China.

The Japanese government and TEPCO have previously estimated cleanup will take 30-40 years, although critics believe the timeline to be extremely optimistic.

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EPA says over half of all new cars must be EVs or hybrids by 2032

Andrew Paul — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:30:00 +0000

Transportation pollution is the single largest greenhouse gas contributor in the US. Deposit Photos

The Biden administration has announced some of the biggest pollution regulations in US history. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency revealeded the finalization of new, enforceable standards meant to ensure electric and hybrid vehicles make up at least 56 percent of all passenger car and light truck sales by 2032.

To meet this goal, automotive manufacturers will face increasing tailpipe pollution limits over the next few years. This gradual shift essentially means over half of all car companies’ sales will need to be zero-emission models to meet the new federal benchmarks.

According to the EPA, this unprecedented industry transition could cut an estimated 7 billion tons of emissions over the next three decades. Regulators believe this will also offer a nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits for the nation, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits from improved air quality alongside $62 billion in reduced annual fuel, maintenance, and repair costs for everyday drivers.

Transportation annually generates 29 percent of all US carbon emissions, making it the country’s largest single climate change contributor. Aggressively pursuing a nationwide shift towards EV adoption was a cornerstone of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign platform. While in office, Donald Trump rolled back the Obama administration’s previous automotive pollution standards applicable to vehicles manufactured through 2025. He has promised to enact similar orders if re-elected during this year’s presidential election.

The EPA’s new standards is actually a slightly relaxed version of a previous proposal put forth last year. To address concerns of both manufacturers and the industry’s largest union, United Auto Workers, the Biden administration agreed to slow the rise of tailpipe standards over the next few years. By 2030, however, limits will increase substantially to make up for the lost time. The EPA claims today’s finalized policy will still reduce emissions by the same amount over the next three decades.

The new rules are by no means an “EPA car ban” on gas-powered vehicles, as lobbyists with the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers continue to falsely claim. The guidelines go into effect in 2027, and only pertain to new cars and light trucks over the coming years. The stipulations also cover companies’ entire product lines, so it’s up to manufacturers to determine how their fleets as a whole meet the EPA benchmarks.

Still, fossil fuel companies and Republican authorities are extremely likely to file legal challenges over today’s announcement—challenges that could easily arrive in front of the Supreme Court in the coming years. Earlier today, the vice president of federal policy for the League of Conservation Voters said during a press call that they already discussed such possibilities with the Biden administration, and “they are crystal clear about the importance of getting rules out to make sure that they withstand both legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry and any congressional attacks should Republicans take over the Senate and the White House.”

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A cargo ship’s ‘WindWing’ sails saved it up to 12 tons of fuel per day

Andrew Paul — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Pyxis Ocean sailing through the English Channel from Spain to Amsterdam, March 2024. Business Wire / Cargill

A shipping vessel left China for Brazil while sporting some new improvements last August—a pair of 123-feet-tall, solid “wings” retrofitted atop its deck to harness wind power for propulsion assistance. But after its six-week maiden voyage testing the green energy tech, the Pyxis Ocean MC Shipping Kamsarmax vessel apparently had many more trips ahead of it. Six months later, its owners at the shipping company, Cargill, shared the results of those journeys this week—and it sounds like the vertical WindWing sails could offer a promising way to reduce existing vessels’ emissions.

Using the wind force captured by its two giant, controllable sails to boost its speed, Pyxis Ocean reportedly saved an average of 3.3 tons of fuel each day. And in optimal weather conditions, its trips through portions of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans reduced fuel consumption by over 12 tons a day. According to Cargill’s math, that’s an average of 14 percent less greenhouse gas emissions from the ship. On its best days, Pyxis Ocean could cut that down by 37 percent. In all, the WindWing’s average performance fell within 10 percent ts designers’ computational fluid dynamics simulation predictions.

In total, an equally sized ship outfitted with two WindWings could annually save the same amount of emissions as removing 480 cars from roads—but that could even be a relatively conservative estimate, according to WindWing’s makers at BAR Technologies.

“[W]hile the Pyxis Ocean has two WindWings, we anticipate the majority of Kamsarmax vessels will carry three wings, further increasing the fuel savings and emissions reductions by a factor of 1.5,” BAR Technologies CEO John Cooper said in a statement on Tuesday.

The individual success of Pyxis Ocean is encouraging news, but that’s just one of the 110,000-or-so merchant ships in the world. On top of that, ports are currently designed to accommodate shipping vessels’ traditional proportions—that 125-feet of height added by WindWings could potentially complicate docking in many locations. According to Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill’s Ocean Transportation business, they’re already working to address such issues.

“Cargill is creating ways for all [wind assisted propulsion] vessels—not just the Pyxis Ocean—to operate on global trade routes,” they said in this week’s announcement, adding that the company has begun talking to over 250 ports to figure out the logistics needed to accommodate such ships.

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Huge 60-foot-tall buoy uses ocean waves to create clean energy

Andrew Paul — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:20:00 +0000

The buoy shifts into a passive 'transparent' mode when the waters get too choppy. CorPower

Giant buoys over 60-feet tall may one day generate clean energy to feed into local power grids—but making it a reality isn’t as simple as going with the ocean’s flow. To successfully keep the idea afloat, it’s all about timing.

Swedish company CorPower recently announced the completion of its first commercial scale buoy generator demonstration program off the coast of northern Portugal. Over the course of a six-month test run, CorPower’s three-story C4 Wave Energy Converter (WEC) endured four major Atlantic storms and adapted to constantly shifting wave heights. Although final analysis is still ongoing, CorPower believes the technology offers a promising new way to transition towards a sustainable future.

As New Atlas explains, the basic theory behind CorPower’s C4 is relatively straightforward. As its air-filled chassis bobs along the rolling waves, an internal system converts the up-and-down movement into rotational power for energy generation. At the same time, however, a tensioned, internal pneumatic cylinder reacts in real-time to wave phases—slightly delaying its movements behind the waves amplifies the buoy’s bobbing, thus creating even more energy production. According to CorPower, using this system can boost power generation as much as 300-percent.

But what about when the sea inevitably gets choppier, as was the case during storms that produced waves nearly as high as the C4 itself? When this happens, the pneumatic cylinder switches off its active control to allow the machine to enter “transparent” mode, during which time it simply rides out the adverse ocean conditions until it’s time to spring back into action. CorPower compares this “tuning and detuning” feature to similar systems in wind turbines, which adjust the pitch of their blades in response to surrounding weather conditions.

CorPower says its team recorded as much as 600kW of peak power production during the C4 trial, although they believe it’s possible for the buoy’s current version to ramp that up to around 850kW. While that by itself isn’t much compared to a single offshore wind turbine’s multi-megawatt range, CorPower’s plan is to eventually deploy thousands of more efficient WEC machines to create a much more powerful generator network. If it can scale a farm up to produce 20 gigawatts of energy, it estimates the buoys could offer something between $33-$44 per megawatt-hour. That’s pretty attractive to investors, especially given C4’s aquatic power source operates virtually 24/7, unlike wind or solar generators.

Right now, however, 20 gigawatts would require over 20,000 buoys, so a more economical and efficient buoy system is definitely needed before anyone starts seeing fleets of these canary yellow contraptions floating out there on the open oceans. CorPower seems confident it can get there, and is next planning a new trial phase that will see multiple C4 buoys in action.

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Can EVs drive in National Radio Quiet Zone?

Cameron Aubernon — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:02:00 +0000

Green Bank Observatory

The United States National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) is a 13,000 square-mile rectangle covering the southernmost tip of Maryland’s western panhandle, the Allegheny Mountains in Eastern West Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Mountains in Central Virginia. The area exists to protect key government installations deep in the heart of the NRQZ from radio interference, including the Green Bank Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The most severe restrictions exist within a 20-mile radius of the observatory and involve limitations on Wi-Fi and cellular service, and the prohibition of all but diesel-powered vehicles when approaching the observatory itself.

The world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, operates at Green Bank and requires radio silence for its work. The telescope has found everything from a trio of millisecond pulsars from Messier 62 to the most massive neutron star yet discovered, PSR J0740+6620. Such findings are only possible due to the extreme sensitivity this and the other three radio telescopes at the observatory possess. But the drawbacks of these highly sensitive instruments are their ability to detect any radio transmission–from digital cameras, smartphones, or even the spark plugs of gasoline-powered vehicles. Thus, the restrictions imposed.

EVs in the NRQZ

Enter electric vehicles and the infrastructure needed to keep them going. For most parts of the NRQZ–which U.S. Interstates 81, 79 and 64 pass through–EV owners might not even realize they’re within this special part of the U.S. Would such vehicles face similar issues as gas-powered cars deep in the heart of this unique zone due to their electric motors emitting radio frequencies that would interfere with the work performed at the Green Bank Observatory?

“Electric vehicles are on campus,” said Jill Malusky, the news and information manager for the observatory. “Some of our staff have them. We have two charging stations on campus that the public can access. There are also some charging stations in the area. We have a bigger ski resort up here called the Snowshoe Ski Resort about a 45-minute drive [from Green Bank], and they have electric vehicle charging stations up there.”

Malusky adds that Green Bank isn’t as isolated as some reports would suggest; some 50,000 visitors visit the observatory each year to learn more about radio astronomy and the NRQZ. She says all vehicles are welcome onto the public areas of Green Bank Observatory, including EVs. But just like fully gas-powered vehicles, EVs, plug-in hybrids, and regular hybrids cannot approach the 1.5-mile radius surrounding the radio telescopes. The reason is that diesels do not emit as much radio interference as spark plugs and electric motors. Instead, visitors can hike or cycle one of the trails leading into the quietest part of the NRQZ, or board a diesel-powered bus.

However, there is one potential concern still on the ground: the day diesels are potentially phased out of production. As more and more manufacturers push to go fully electric, it may not be too long afterwards until the parts needed to keep the diesels at Green Bank going are harder to track down. What happens then?

“When we are doing maintenance, we tend to turn our biggest telescope off,” said Mulasky. “We already most of the time turn everything off, anyways; we can’t observe while maintenance is happening. So, we would just do it like that. We would just shift the way that we do maintenance, turn everything off, plan accordingly, and then get those electric vehicles out of the way when they’re done, turn everything back on.”

Who lives in the Quiet Zone?

Then, there’s Green Bank itself, a small census-designated community of 200–including many employees with the Green Bank Observatory–with a public library, a fire department and an elementary school. Mulasky says that many of the stories about the community and its relationship with modern technology is a complex tale.

“Hundreds of thousands of people live in the Quiet Zone and don’t realize it,” said Malusky, “because of the way the Quiet Zone works in those parts only really impacts industry. There’s cell phone service. There’s Wi-Fi. There’s every modern amenity you can think of. The only way we monitor the Quiet Zone is when a new cell phone tower or some sort of technology that’s being put up that’s really ‘loud’ or really powerful, we have engineers that work with them to make sure that it points away from our telescopes.

“There are still some local misunderstandings about what causes us to be so quiet or so cut-off,” said Mulasky. “It’s a mix of both, ‘We have this scientific facility that uses the National Radio Quiet Zone,’ and also that [Green Bank is] a very small, remote, rural, Appalachian town; we don’t have a lot of access to resources. We don’t have a lot of business or industry that would’ve come into the area to give us more.”

Mulasky says that most things on the ground don’t affect the observatory. Instead, it’s objects in the sky, like radio communications from satellites and airplanes, currently delivering the most impact upon the Green Bank Observatory. Thus, with help from the National Science Foundation, the observatory created the National Radio Dynamic Zone around two years ago to work with engineers of such skyborne communications to mitigate any complications that could come up between the telescopes and the overhead radio wavelengths, mainly by having the satellites and aircraft passing over briefly turn off their radios.

Mulasky adds that living in a world where everything is transmitting radio signals all of the time means innovating wherever possible, including software. The observatory’s software engineers are working on filters and programs that can see the interference caused by things like smartphones and smartwatches to filter it out.

“Radio astronomy not only involves what you think of as traditional scientists or even traditional technicians to do the physical work,” said Mulasky. “There’s also tons of software and programming that goes into it. For the past few years, our software teams have been trying to think of different sorts of ‘filters,’ or software programs they can use that can see the interference that’s caused by anything we’re talking about, and just filter it out. We don’t have that technology yet, but we know that it’s important. We’re working on it now, and I would say in 20 years, we’ll surely have that by then. A problem like [filtering radio interference] can’t take 20 years to solve.”

Perhaps by then, the NRQZ will be a quieter place with EVs traversing the roadways, the sound of wind and, now and again, the clatter of diesel engines breaking the silence.

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Washers and dryers are about to get a whole lot more efficient

Tik Root/Grist — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

This is the first time that washer and dryer standards have been updated in more than a decade. DepositPhotos

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Doing laundry accounts for about 8 percent of a home’s annual electricity use, a figure that does not include the energy needed to heat the water swirling through the washing machine. Beyond that financial cost, the appliances contribute mightily to the nation’s carbon footprint. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced new washer and dryer efficiency standards that could ease those burdens.

The updated standards — first reported by Grist — will result in top-loading clothes washers that are 11 percent more energy efficient than similar current machines while using 28 percent less water. Dryers will see up to a 40 percent reduction in energy use, depending on the model. The requirements are in line with current Energy Star efficiency benchmarks, and will apply to equipment produced after March 1, 2028.

“These rules represent an opportunity for more efficient appliances that provide the same level of performance but have reduced operating expenses,” a Department of Energy official told Grist, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The government estimates that the measures will shave $2.2 billion a year from Americans’ utility bills and, over 30 years, eliminate 71 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million homes.

The updates are drawn from a deal manufacturers struck with environmental and consumer advocacy organizations last fall that outlined efficiency standards and implementation timelines for six appliance categories. The government has already adopted the group’s recommendations for stoves and refrigerators and freezers. New criteria for other refrigeration products (such as wine coolers), as well dishwashers, are expected in the coming months. If a consumer were to swap the least efficient model available today to the most common models available under the new efficiency standards, they would save around $120 per year, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit that helped negotiate the new standards.

“We are pleased that the [Department of Energy] accepted this joint recommendation that saves some energy,” Jill Notini, vice president of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, or AHAM, said in an email. “[It] also allows manufacturers to provide consumers with the products and features they love and rely upon.”

The updates come amid a conservative backlash. Fox News has dubbed the changes a “war on appliances,” that would leave clothes “dirtier and stinkier.” But Joanna Mauer, deputy director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, points out that Energy Star models tend to score higher than more conventional appliances in Consumer Reports testing.

“These new standards will help ensure that dryers aren’t over-drying clothes,” she said. “Over-drying clothes doesn’t just waste energy, but can also shrink or otherwise damage them.”

AHAM was among the organizations that pushed back on the government’s initial appliance proposals, which were released in 2022 and 2023, and succeeded in weakening several of them through the joint recommendations. The most notable change involved gas stoves — a debate that proved particularly contentious. The standards for some washer models were also slightly lower than those the Biden administration first put forward. But, Mauer said, they still “achieve the bulk of the potential consumer savings.”

This is the first time that washer and dryer standards have been updated in more than a decade, a step Mauer said is long overdue. By law, the government is supposed to review appliance standards every six years, a procedure that AHAM has criticized as “resulting in a never-ending regulatory churn regardless of who is in the White House.” But the Trump administration stalled the process, pushing revisions well past their deadlines. In 2022, the Department of Energy reached a legal settlement with environment, consumer and housing nonprofits that laid out the current schedule.

While he would have welcomed quicker change, Joe Vukovich, an attorney for the National Resources Defense Council who participated in joint recommendation negotiations, said the end result proves that progress is possible.

“It’s not a sector where manufacturers are just uniformly hostile to regulation,” he said. “Stakeholders can come together and get something that we view as a win-win.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/washers-and-dryers-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-more-efficient/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

A concern for climate and health

Residential gas use is also controversial today because it slows the ongoing shift toward renewable energy, at a time when the impacts of climate change are becoming alarmingly clear. Some cities have already moved or are considering steps to ban gas stoves in new construction and shift toward electrifying buildings.

As communities wrestle with these questions, regulators, politicians and consumers need accurate information about the risks of gas stoves and other products in homes. There is room for vigorous debate that considers a range of evidence, but I believe that everyone has a right to know where that evidence comes from.

The commercial interests of many industries, including alcohol, tobacco and fossil fuels, aren’t always compatible with the public interest or human health. In my view, exposing the tactics that vested interests use to manipulate the public can make consumers and regulators savvier and help deter other industries from using their playbook.

Jonathan Levy is Professor and Chair at the Department of Environmental Health, Boston University. Disclosure: Jonathan Levy has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Health Effects Institute for studies on the contribution of outdoor and indoor sources to air pollution levels in homes.

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A Danish company just scrapped its ambitious plan for a New Jersey offshore wind farm

Andrew Paul — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:45:00 +0000

An offshore turbine similar to Ocean Wind's plans during construction off Scotland's coast. Deposit Photos

The wind energy company Ørsted has officially shuttered plans for two New Jersey offshore wind farms, citing rising inflation, interest rates, and supply chain problems. The blow to US green energy infrastructure arrives less than two weeks after the Danish wind industry giant promised to pay the Garden State a $100 million penalty if its Ocean Wind I turbines weren’t online by the end of 2025. But although the company’s plans off the coast of Atlantic City are canceled, similar projects are still underway across the US as the country transitions towards a sustainable energy infrastructure.

“We are extremely disappointed to have to take this decision, particularly because New Jersey is poised to be a US and global hub for offshore wind energy,” David Hardy, Ørsted Group EVP and CEO Americas, said in an October 31 statement. “I want to thank Governor Murphy and NJ state and local leaders who helped support these projects and continue to lead the region in developing American renewable energy and jobs.”

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

According to the Associated Press on Tuesday, however, NJ Gov. Phil Murphy had strong words for the company, citing Ørsted’s recent statements “regarding the viability and progress of the Ocean Wind I project.”

“Today’s decision by Ørsted to abandon its commitments to New Jersey is outrageous and calls into question the company’s credibility and competence,” added Gov. Murphy per the AP. He also hinted at impending plans to pursue an additional $200 million Ørsted reportedly pledged for the state’s offshore wind industry. In the meantime, Gov. Murphy reiterated New Jersey’s commitment to offshore wind infrastructure, and said the state will solicit a new round of project proposals in the near future.

Both Ocean Wind endeavors had faced intense scrutiny and pushback from both Republican state legislators and locals, who criticized the farms’ alleged ecological impacts, ocean horizon views, as well as the millions of dollars in subsidies granted to Ørsted. Earlier this month, Ørsted received a lawsuit filed on behalf of an environmental group called Clean Ocean Action alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations. In May 2023, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which deemed it responsibly designed and safe for the region’s ecological health.

If completed, Ocean Wind I would have included nearly 100 giant turbines roughly 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Once online, the farm would have annually generated 1.1 gigawatts of energy—enough to power over 500,000 homes. Ocean Wind II was slated for construction next to its sibling wind farm, and would have offered similar energy outputs.

[Related: Watch a heavy-lifting drone land a perfect delivery on an offshore wind turbine.]

While the Danish company’s plans in New Jersey are dashed, America’s wind farm buildup is still progressing elsewhere—and Ørsted remains a part of that trajectory. The same day as its Ocean Wind announcement, the company confirmed it is moving forward with a $4 billion project, Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island. If completed, the offshore wind farm will supply clean energy for residents in both Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Meanwhile, a utility company called Dominion Energy received crucial federal approval on Tuesday for plans to construct 176 turbines over 20 miles off the coast of Virginia. Dominion claims the project is the largest offshore project in the US, and will generate enough energy for nearly 660,000 homes upon its estimated late-2026 completion date. According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of US electricity by 2050.

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Watch a heavy-lifting drone land a perfect delivery on an offshore wind turbine

Andrew Paul — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:30:00 +0000

The drone weighs in at nearly 130 pounds, and is as wide as an albatross' wingspan. Ørsted

An autonomous drone with the wingspan of an albatross is now trialing cargo restocks for a giant offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Overseen by the Danish wind power company Ørsted, the 128-pound unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—roughly the weight of “a large baby giraffe”—is meant to cut down on time and costs, while also improving overall operational safety, and is billed as the first of its kind in the world.

“Drones mean less work disturbance as turbines don’t have to be shut down when cargo is delivered,” Ørsted’s October 30 announcement states. “They avoid risk, making it safer for personnel working on the wind farm and minimize the need for multiple journeys by ship, reducing carbon emissions and climate change impacts.”

In a video posted to the social media platform, X, the hefty drone is shown launching from a cargo ship’s deck while towing a large orange bag suspended by a cable beneath the UAV. From there, the transport soars over a few hundred feet of North Sea waters to hover above one of Hornsea 1’s 7-megawatt wind turbines. Once in place, the drone carefully lands its cargo on the platform before releasing its tether to return to its crew transfer vessel, where human pilots have overseen the entire process.

While Ørsted didn’t name its drone partner in the project announcement, additional promotional materials provided by the company confirm it is a Skylift, a UK-based business focusing on offshore wind farm deliveries.

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

“[W]e want to use our industry leading position to help push forward innovations that reduce costs and maximize efficiency and safety in the offshore wind sector,” Mikkel Haugaard Windolf, head of Ørsted’s offshore logistics project, said via the company’s October 30 reveal, adding that, “Drone cargo delivery is an important step in that direction.”

Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm consists of 174 turbines installed across over 157-square-miles in the North Sea. Generating roughly 1.7Gw of power, the farm’s electricity is enough to sustainably power over 1 million homes in the UK.

Despite the company’s multiple Hornsea wind farm successes, Ørsted has encountered significant setbacks during attempts to expand into the US market. Earlier this month, local officials in Cape May County, NJ, filed a lawsuit attempting to block construction of a 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines off the coast of Atlantic City, citing regulatory sidesteps and environmental concerns. In an email to PopSci at the time, the American Clean Power Association’s Director of Eastern Region State Affairs described the lawsuit as “meritless,” and reiterated that offshore wind energy production remains “one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation.”

According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of the country’s sustainable electricity by 2050.

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Chicken feather fibers could help make less toxic hydrogen fuel cells

Andrew Paul — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 14:10:00 +0000

Chicken feathers are a major pollution byproduct in the poultry industry. DepositPhotos

Chicken feathers, much like human hair and fingernails, are composed mostly of a tough protein called keratin. And like with your own hair and nails, the birds produce a lot of feathers over the course of their lives. Generally speaking, this isn’t a big issue—but it’s another matter for the food industry. Each year, approximately 40 million metric tons of chicken feathers are incinerated during the poultry production process, releasing harmful fumes like carbon and sulfur dioxide.

Finding a new use for all those feathers could dramatically cut down on food waste and pollution, and a team of researchers may have figured out what to do with them: turn feathers into a vital component of green hydrogen fuel cells.

[Related: Why you should build a swing for your chickens.]

As detailed in a new paper published via ACS Applied Materials & Sciences, scientists from ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) have developed a method to extract feathers’ keratin and spin it into thin fibers called amyloid fibrils. From there, these fibrils can be installed as a hydrogen fuel cell’s vital semipermeable membrane. Traditionally composed of highly poisonous “forever chemicals,” these membranes allow protons to pass through while excluding electrons. The blocked electrons are then forced to travel via an external circuit from negative anodes to positive cathode, thus creating electricity.

“Our latest development closes a cycle: [we took] a substance that releases CO2 and toxic gasses when burned, and used it in a different setting,” Raffaele Mezzenga, a professor of food and soft materials at ETH Zurich, said in a recent university profile. “With our new technology, it not only replaces toxic substances, but also prevents the release of CO2, decreasing the overall carbon footprint cycle.”

According to researchers, the keratin-derived membranes are already cheaper to produce in a lab setting than existing synthetic hydrogen fuel cell membranes, and hope similar savings will translate to mass production. The team has applied for a joint patent, and is now looking for partners and investors to make the product publicly available. Still, a number of hurdles remain for the fuel cells to become truly viable renewable energy sources. While hydrogen cells’ only emissions are heat and water, the power that actually helps generate their electricity still largely stems from natural gas sources like methane. Such a reliance arguably undercuts hydrogen fuel cells’ promise of green energy.

But even there, chicken feathers could once again come to the rescue. The keratin membranes reportedly also show promise in the electrolysis portion of hydrogen energy production, when direct current travels through water to split the molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

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Aging US energy grid will get a largest-ever $3.5 billion boost

Joseph Winters / Grist — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Many of the projects have a specific focus on improving grid reliability for rural or low-income households. DepositPhotos

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it would funnel $3.46 billion toward upgrading the country’s aging electric grid—marking its largest-ever investment in that part of the United States’ energy network.

The funding, which comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021, is intended to prepare the grid for more renewable energy capacity as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels, and to prevent blackouts caused by increasingly severe climate disasters.

Between 2011 and 2021, the country experienced a 78 percent increase in weather-related power outages compared to the previous decade. Twenty percent of these outages were caused by hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires.

“Extreme weather events fueled by climate change will continue to strain the nation’s aging transmission systems,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. She added that the new funding would “harden systems” and “improve energy reliability and affordability.”

The new funding targets 58 projects across 44 states that, cumulatively, are expected to leverage $8 billion in federal and private investments in grid expansion and resiliency. Many of these projects involve building new microgrids, groups of dispersed but interconnected energy-generating units that can provide electricity even when the larger grid is down. For example, a solar microgrid involves lots of rooftop solar panels all feeding into a common pool of electricity—usually stored in a battery that serves as a source of backup power during an outage.

The funding will also support the development of several large-scale transmission lines, including five new lines across seven Midwestern states. These lines help carry electricity from place to place, allowing clean energy to be generated in rural areas, where land tends to be more plentiful, and delivered to population centers.

Other projects involve more general upgrades to accommodate greater loads of electricity or improve emergency monitoring systems. Altogether, the DOE says the projects will help bring 35 gigawatts of renewable energy online, equivalent to roughly half of the U.S.’s utility-scale solar capacity in 2022. This will contribute to President Biden’s goal of moving the country’s electricity generation away from fossil fuels by 2035. As of 2021, the power sector accounted for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The Energy Department highlighted the selected projects’ commitments under Justice40, a Biden administration initiative that promises to direct at least 40 percent of the benefits of federal investment in infrastructure, clean energy, and other climate-related projects to disadvantaged communities, often defined as those that are low-income or that have been disproportionately exposed to pollution. According to the Energy Department, 86 percent of the projects contain labor union contracts or will involve collective bargaining agreements, and the agency says they will help “maintain and create good-paying union jobs.”

Many of the projects also have a specific focus on improving grid reliability for rural or low-income households. For example, one project in Oregon aims to upgrade transmission capacity and bring carbon-free solar power to remote customers on the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation. Another project in Louisiana will create a backup battery system that could reduce energy bills for disadvantaged communities.

Wednesday’s announcement allocates just some of the funds included in the Energy Department’s broader, $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program, which is expected to fund more grid resiliency projects in the future.

Meanwhile, experts say funding to upgrade power grids needs to double globally by 2030 in order to facilitate the transition from fossil fuels to technologies powered by electricity—electric vehicles instead of gas cars, for example, or heat pumps instead of furnaces. Otherwise, a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency warns that aging electric grids could become a “bottleneck for efforts to accelerate clean energy transitions and secure electricity security.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/the-us-electric-grid-is-getting-a-3-5-billion-upgrade/

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains

Andrew Paul — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:30:00 +0000

New Jersey's offshore wind farm could look like Ørsted's Walney, UK project—if it ever begins construction. Ørsted

Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

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Small planes are still spewing toxic lead across the US, EPA says

Andrew Paul — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 21:00:00 +0000

Piston-engine small aircraft are the only planes to still use leaded fuel in the US. Deposit Photos

Airborne lead levels in the US have declined an impressive 99 percent since 1980 thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but leaded gas isn’t gone completely. While large jet aircraft do not use leaded fuel, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 220,000 smaller, piston-engine aircraft capable of carrying between two and 10 people still run on leaded aviation gasoline, or “avgas.”

Today, the EPA took its first step towards attempting to finally phase out air transportation’s lingering lead holdouts with a new endangerment finding announcement highlighting the adverse effects of even minuscule levels of airborne lead. With the new findings, the EPA argues that leaded avgas endangers public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act—and because of this, the US could finally see its first-ever avgas lead limitations.

“The science is clear: Exposure to lead can cause irreversible and life-long health effects in children,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan via the agency’s October 18 announcement. “Aircraft that use leaded fuel are the dominant source of lead emissions in our air.”

[Related: The US can’t get away from lead’s toxic legacy.]

The federal level determination earned support from legislators including House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). “[The] EPA’s conclusion confirms what constituents in my district and Americans across the country know all too well—emissions from leaded aviation fuel contribute to dangerous lead air pollution,” Lofgren said via the announcement. She also cited the disproportionate exposure to leaded avgas in many poorer and minority communities near general aviation airports.

Lead’s neurotoxic effects have long been understood, especially its dangers to younger children, as it negatively affects cognitive abilities and slows physical growth. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control announced a redefinition of “lead poisoning,” lowering the threshold for toxic exposure from 5 micrograms per deciliter of a child’s blood down to just 3.5 mgs per deciliter. Even with the added stringency, however, the EPA reiterated in its October 18 announcement that there is no evidence of any threshold to fully reduce lead exposure’s harmful effects.

[Related: Leaded gas may have lowered the IQ of 170 million US adults.]

The new avgas endangerment finding does not carry any regulatory or legal weight itself. Instead, it opens the door to a future phaseout of avgas for small aircraft. Last year, the FAA and industry leaders announced their “Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions” (EAGLE) program aiming to “achieve a lead-free aviation system” by 2030. The FAA has already approved usage of a 100 octane unleaded fuel capable of being used by piston-engine aircraft, although the EPA notes it is not yet commercially available. A lower octane fuel is also available at an estimated 35 US airports, with plans to “expand and streamline the process for eligible aircraft to use this fuel.”

As The Washington Post notes, however, the EPA’s and FAA’s attempts to phase out avgas come as Congress considers a long-term reauthorization of the FAA that would all but require smaller airports to continue offering leaded avgas.

“While today’s announcement is a step forward, we cannot be complacent,” Lofgren added on Wednesday. “We must finish the job and protect our nation’s children from all sources of lead.”

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This off-roading, solar-powered vehicle just sped across the Sahara

Andrew Paul — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

The Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a sunny day. STE / Bart van Overbeeke

Despite decades of innovation, solar powered cars remain comparatively expensive and difficult to mass produce—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to pack a serious punch. At least one prototype reportedly handled an off-road sojourn across the world’s largest non-polar desert at speeds as fast as 90 mph.

Designed by a team of 21-to-25-year-old college students at the Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology, their Stella Terra recently completed a 620 mile (1,000 km) test drive that began in Morocco before speeding through portions of Tangier and the Sahara. While miles ahead of what is currently available to consumers, the army green two-seater could be a preview of rides to come.

[Related: Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels.]

As highlighted by The Guardian on Monday, the aerodynamic, comparatively lightweight (1,200 kg) Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a clear, sunny day without recharging. This is thanks to the car’s solar converter designed in-house by the students, which turns 97 percent of its absorbed sunlight into an electrical charge. For cloudier situations, however, the vehicle also includes a lithium-ion battery capable of powering shorter excursions. For comparison, the most efficient panels available today only sustain roughly 45 percent efficiency, while the vast majority measure somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. According to The Guardian’s rundown, Stella Terra’s panels actually proved a third more efficient than designers expected.

In a September project update, Wisse Bos, Solar Team Eindhoven’s team manager, estimated Stella Terra’s designs are between 5 and 10 years ahead of anything available on the current market. But Bos also stressed their ride is meant to inspire similar experimentation and creativity within the automotive industry.

[Related: Swiss students just slashed the world record for EV acceleration.]

“With Stella Terra, we want to demonstrate that the transition to a sustainable future offers reasons for optimism and encourages individuals and companies to accelerate the energy transition,” Bos said at the time.

While the innovative, army green off-roadster is unlikely to hit American highways anytime soon, the students believe larger auto manufacturers’ could look to Stella Terra to help guide their own plans for more sustainable transportation options. Speaking with CNN on Monday, the team’s event manager, Thieme Bosman, hopes companies such as Ford and Chrysler will take notice of such a vehicle’s feasibility. “It’s up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles,” Bosman said.

And if off-roading isn’t your thing, don’t worry: Solar Team Eindhoven’s previous teams have also designed luxury vehicles, self-driving cars, and even mobile tiny homes powered by the sun.

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US will build seven regional ‘hydrogen hubs’ to spark clean energy transition

Laura Baisas — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 17:10:00 +0000

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm speaks before US President Joe Biden at Tioga Marine Terminal on October 13, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden discussed how his Bidenomics agenda is creating good-paying union jobs, investing in infrastructure, accelerating the transition to a clean energy future, and combating the climate crisis. Mark Makela/Getty Images

On October 13, President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced plans to develop seven regional clean hydrogen hubs across the US. The hubs will receive $7 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen.

These new hubs aim to produce more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually. They are estimated to help eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the combined annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars.

According to the White House, advancing clean hydrogen is essential to achieving President Biden’s “vision of a strong clean energy economy that strengthens energy security, bolsters domestic manufacturing, creates healthier communities, and delivers new jobs and economic opportunities across the nation.”

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element on Earth. However, it rarely exists on its own in nature and instead is usually found in compound form like in water (H₂0). Elemental hydrogen is also an energy carrier, meaning it can transport energy in a usable form from one place to another. However, hydrogen must be produced from another substance in order to do this.

Hydrogen fuel is made by separating water molecules, sometimes using a device called an electrolyzer. Fuel from hydrogen can also be produced from natural gas during a process called steam methane reforming that combines methane with steam.

While a clean fuel itself, the current processes used to make it is anything but clean. Large quantities of fossil fuels are used, which emit greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Energy companies are working to advance cleaner versions of making emission-free hydrogen fuel and California, Texas, and Colorado are already working to become clean hydrogen centers.

[Related: This liquid hydrogen-powered plane successfully completed its first test flights.]

These newly announced hubs will be focused on the goal of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen production. This huge undertaking will require large amounts of renewable energy to power the manufacturing process. It could also require additional nuclear power and a large network of carbon storage facilities that will grab and bury emissions in the regions where natural gas is still used to make hydrogen.

Cleanly manufacturing hydrogen could help decarbonize multiple industries in the US, as hydrogen is used to make fertilizer and is important in the chemical and petrochemical industry.

“This has potential to be transformative,” Oleksiy Tatarenko, who focuses on hydrogen at RMI, a clean energy advocacy group, told The Washington Post. “But we need to get it right from day one. We need to ensure this hydrogen can demonstrate climate benefits.”

How long will this take?

Granholm tells PopSci that the initiative provides the US with the opportunity for, “creating an entirely new economy around hydrogen and putting thousands and thousands of people to work, particularly people who have powered our nation for the last century.”

The hubs will be an asset in bringing hydrogen production up to scale, to reduce the currently high costs of hydrogen production. It also incorporates multiple industries from construction to operations to design.

“For the seven hydrogen hubs, it’s about a one-to six-investment, meaning for every dollar the federal government puts in, six dollars come from the private sector, so it’s government enabled, but private sector led,” says Granholm. “These projects are not just one year projects, these are projects that last several years to be able to plan and design, build, and operate.”

Where will the ‘hydrogen hubs’ be located?

The seven new hydrogen hubs will stretch across 16 states and are organized by geographic region.

“These states that were selected are not awardees yet. There’s a negotiation period that will occur between selection and award. So there is a period of time there for states to make sure that they’ve got an environment that will make these hubs of success, “ explains Granholm.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

The Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey will repurpose old oil infrastructure and use renewable and nuclear electricity from both established and innovative electrolyzer technologies.

The Appalachian hub will be located across West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. This hub is slated to be among the largest in terms of production and will use the region’s methane gas to derive hydrogen.

The California hub will span the entire Golden State and encompass the busy ports Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland to produce hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass.

A Gulf Coast hub will be based in Houston, Texas, and could potentially expand into Louisiana. Houston is the traditional energy capital of the US and the plans for this hub include large-scale hydrogen production through both natural gas with carbon capture and renewables-powered electrolysis.

The Heartland Hydrogen hub spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota will use wind energy to derive hydrogen in an effort to decarbonize the region’s critical agricultural sector.

The Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan will further decarbonize industrial sectors by using hydrogen in steel and glass production, power generation, refining, heavy-duty transportation, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The Pacific Northwest hub in parts of Eastern Washington State, Oregon, and parts of Montana plans to produce clean hydrogen exclusively from renewable sources.

“The hub design in itself is important because it creates clusters of supply and demand that are close to one another, minimizing the need to tackle challenges that would come with moving hydrogen long distances,” Adria Wilson, the hydrogen policy lead at Breakthrough Energy, told CNBC.

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China says it discovered potentially vast amounts of a rare superconducting material

Andrew Paul — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Workers at a rare earth mine in Inner Mongolia in 2010. Deposit Photos

Niobium can be found in steel, particle accelerators, MRI machines, and rockets, but sourcing it is largely limited to a handful of countries including Brazil and Canada. Earlier this month, however, Chinese news outlets announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of ore deposit in Inner Mongolia containing potentially vast amounts of the superconductive rare earth element. According to Antonio Castro Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore speaking with the South China Morning Post, the new resource trove could even be so large that it would make China self-sufficient in its own niobium needs.

The ore found in Inner Mongolia—dubbed niobobaotite—also contains large quantities of barium, titanium, iron, and chlorine, according to a statement from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) earlier this month.

Discovered in 1801, niobium is named after Tantalus’ daughter Niobe in Greek mythology due to its chemical relationship to tantalum. Almost 85-to-90 percent of all mined niobium in the world goes towards iron and steel processing production. Adding just 0.03-0.05 percent to steel, for example, can boost its strength by as much as 30 percent while adding virtually no extra weight. That prized performance enhancement is comparatively difficult to obtain, however. The element only occurs within the Earth’s crust at a proportion of roughly 20-parts-per-million.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

In addition to its many current uses, niobium is of particular interest to researchers hoping to further the development of niobium-graphene and niobium-lithium batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widespread rechargeable power sources, but remain restricted in terms of charge times and lifespans, as well as safety concerns. Earlier this year, researchers working on improving niobium-graphene batteries estimated future iterations of the alternative could fully charge in less than 10 minutes alongside a 30 year lifespan—approximately 10 times longer than current lithium-ion options.

As promising as the discovery may be for China, labor concerns will almost undoubtedly be an issue for outside observers. The nation has a long and troubling history of exploitation within the mining industry. Rare earth mineral mining also generates a wide array of pollution issues.

Brazil is by far the world’s largest exporter of niobium, with Canada trailing far behind in second place. China currently needs to import about 95 percent of its niobium supplies, but the newfound deposits could dramatically shift their sourcing to almost complete independence. Meanwhile, the US is currently working towards opening the Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in southern Nebraska, which when opened will be the country’s first niobium mining and processing facility.

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AI could consume as much energy as Argentina annually by 2027

Andrew Paul — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 17:00:00 +0000

AI programs like ChatGPT could annually require as much as 134 TWh by 2027. Deposit Photos

Artificial intelligence programs’ impressive (albeit often problematic) abilities come at a cost—all that computing power requires, well, power. And as the world races to adopt sustainable energy practices, the rapid rise of AI integration into everyday lives could complicate matters. New expert analysis now offers estimates of just how energy hungry the AI industry could become in the near future, and the numbers are potentially concerning.

According to a commentary published October 10 in Joule, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Business and Economics PhD candidate Alex de Vries argues that global AI-related electricity consumption could top 134 TWh annually by 2027. That’s roughly comparable to the annual consumption of nations like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomenon.]

Although de Vries notes data center electricity usage between 2010-2018 (excluding resource-guzzling cryptocurrency mining) has only increased by roughly 6 percent, “[t]here is increasing apprehension that the computation resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.” Given countless industries’ embrace of AI over the last year, it’s not hard to imagine such a hypothetical surge becoming reality. For example, if Google—already a major AI adopter—integrated technology akin to ChatGPT into its 9 billion-per-day Google searches, the company could annually burn through 29.2 TWh of power, or as much electricity as all of Ireland.

de Vries, who also founded the digital trend watchdog research company Digiconomist, believes such an extreme scenario is somewhat unlikely, mainly due to AI server costs alongside supply chain bottlenecks. But the AI industry’s energy needs will undoubtedly continue to grow as the technologies become more prevalent, and that alone necessitates a careful review of where and when to use such products.

This year, for example, NVIDIA is expected to deliver 100,000 AI servers to customers. Operating at full capacity, the servers’ combined power demand would measure between 650 and 1,020 MW, annually amounting to 5.7-8.9 TWh of electricity consumption. Compared to annual consumption rates of data centers, this is “almost negligible.”

By 2027, however, NVIDIA could be (and currently is) on track to ship 1.5 million AI servers per year. Estimates using similar electricity consumption rates put their combined demand between 85-134 TWh annually. “At this stage, these servers could represent a significant contribution to worldwide data center electricity consumption,” writes de Vries.

As de Vries’ own site argues, AI is not a “miracle cure for everything,” still must deal with privacy concerns, discriminatory biases, and hallucinations. “Environmental sustainability now represents another addition to this list of concerns.”

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This nuclear byproduct is fueling debate over Fukushima’s seafood

Rahul Rao — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Fishery workers sort out seafood caught in Japan's Fukushima prefecture about a week after the country began discharging treated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images

On October 5, operators of Japan’s derelict Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resumed pumping out wastewater held in the facility for the past 12 years. Over the following two-and-a-half weeks, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plans to release around 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

This is TEPCO’s second round of discharging nuclear plant wastewater, following an initial release in September. Plans call for the process, which was approved by and is being overseen by the Japanese government, to go on intermittently for some 30 years. But the approach has been controversial: Polls suggest that around 40 percent of the Japanese public opposes it, and it has sparked backlash from ecological activists, local fishermen, South Korean citizens, and the Chinese government, who fear that radiation will harm Pacific ecosystems and contaminate seafood.

Globally, some scientists argue there is no cause for concern. “The doses [or radiation] really are incredibly low,” says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “It’s less than a dental X-ray, even if you’re consuming seafood from that area.”

Smith vouches for the water release’s safety in an opinion article published on October 5 in the journal Science. The International Atomic Energy Agency has endorsed TEPCO’s process and also vouched for its safety. But experts in other fields have strong reservations about continuing with the pumping.

“There are hundreds of clear examples showing that, where radioactivity levels are high, there are deleterious consequences,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

[Related: Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants]

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, TEPCO started frantically shunting water into the six reactors to stop them from overheating and causing an even greater catastrophe. They stored the resulting 1.25 million tons of radioactive wastewater in tanks on-site. TEPCO and the Japanese government say that if Fukushima Daiichi is ever to be decommissioned, that water will have to go elsewhere.

In the past decade, TEPCO says it’s been able to treat the wastewater with a series of chemical reactions and cleanse most of the contaminant radioisotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. But much of the current controversy swirls around one isotope the treatment couldn’t remove: tritium.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that has two extra neutrons. A byproduct of nuclear fission, it is radioactive with a half-life of around 12 years. Because tritium shares many properties with hydrogen, its atoms can infiltrate water molecules and create a radioactive liquid that looks and behaves almost identically to what we drink.

This makes separating it from nuclear wastewater challenging—in fact, no existing technology can treat tritium in the sheer volume of water contained at Fukushima. Some of the plan’s opponents argue that authorities should postpone any releases until scientists develop a system that could cleanse tritium from large amounts of water.

But TEPCO argues they’re running out of room to keep the wastewater. As a result, they have chosen to heavily dilute it—100 parts “clean” water for every 1 part of tritium water—and pipe it into the Pacific.

“There is no option for Fukushima or TEPCO but to release the water,” says Awadhesh Jha, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK. “This is an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t store it—they have to deal with it.”

Smith believes the same properties that allow tritium to hide in water molecules means it doesn’t build up in marine life, citing environmental research by him and his colleagues. For decades, they’ve been studying fish and insects in lakes, pools, and ponds downstream from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. “We haven’t really found significant impacts of radiation on the ecosystem,” Smith says.

[Related: Ultra-powerful X-rays are helping physicists understand Chernobyl]

What’s more, Japanese officials testing seawater during the initial release did not find recordable levels of tritium, which Smith attributes to the wastewater’s dilution.

But the first release barely scratches the surface of Fukushima’s wastewater, and Jha warns that the scientific evidence regarding tritium’s effect in the sea is mixed. There are still a lot of questions about how potent tritium effects are on different biological systems and different parts of the food chain. Some results do suggest that the isotope can damage fish chromosomes as effectively as higher-energy X-rays or gamma rays, leading to negative health outcomes later in life.

Additionally, experts have found tritium can bind to organic matter in various ecosystems and persist there for decades. “These things have not been addressed adequately,” Jha says.

Smith argues that there’s less tritium in this release than in natural sources, like cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and create tritium rain from above. Furthermore, he says that damage to fish DNA does not necessarily correlate to adverse effects for wildlife or people. “We know that radiation, even at low doses, can damage DNA, but that’s not sufficient to damage how the organism reproduces, how it lives, and how it develops,” he says.

“We don’t know that the effects of the water release will be negligible, because we don’t really know for sure how much radioactive material actually will be released in the future,” Mousseau counters. He adds that independent oversight of the process could quell some of the environmental and health concerns.

Smith and other proponents of TEPCO’s plan point out that it’s actually common practice in the nuclear industry. Power plants use water to naturally cool their reactors, leaving them with tons of tritium-laced waste to dispose. Because tritium is, again, close to impossible to remove from large quantities of H₂0 with current technology, power plants (including ones in China) dump it back into bodies of water at concentrations that exceed those in the Fukushima releases.

“That doesn’t justify that we should keep discharging,” Jha says. “We need to do more work on what it does.”

If tritium levels stay as low as TEPCO and Smith assure they will, then the seafood from the region may very well be safe to eat. But plenty of experts like Mousseau and Jha don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to say that with certainty.

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The world’s most powerful computer could soon help the US build better nuclear reactors

Charlotte Hu — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is getting a new supercomputer, Aurora, which its scientists will use to study optimal nuclear reactor designs. As of now, the lab is using a system called Polaris, a 44-petaflops machine that can perform about 44 quadrillion calculations per second.

Aurora, which is currently being installed, will have more than 2 exaflops of computing power, giving it the capacity to do 2 quintillion calculations per second—almost 50 times as many as the old system. Once the unprecedented machine comes online, it’s expected to lead the TOP500 list that ranks the most powerful computers in the world. It was expected to start running earlier, but has had delays due to manufacturing issues.

A more powerful supercomputer means that nuclear scientists can simulate the fundamental physics underlying the reactions with as much detail as possible, which will allow them to make better assessments of overall safety and efficiency of new reactor designs. Reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Here, a process called fission happens, leading to a series of nuclear chain reactions that produce incredible levels of heat, which is used to turn water into steam to spin a turbine that then creates electricity.

“Anyone out there that’s actively designing a reactor is going to use what we call ‘faster running tools’ that will look at things on a system-level scale and make approximations for the reactor core itself,” Dillon Shaver, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, tells Popsci. “[At Argonne] we are doing as close to the fundamental physical calculations as possible, which requires a huge amount of resolution and a huge amount of unknowns. It translates into a huge amount of computation power.”

Shaver’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the math that prevents reactors from melting down. That involves a deep understanding of how different types of coolant liquids behave, how fluid flows around the different reactor components, and what kind of heat transfer occurs.

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

According to the Department of Energy, “all commercial nuclear reactors in the US are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.” And most active light-water reactors have a fuel pin geometry design, where large arrays of fuel pins (large tubes that contain the fuel, usually uranium, needed for fission reactions) are arranged in a rectangular lattice.

The next generation of reactor designs that Shaver and his team are investigating include wire-wrapped liquid metal fast reactors. The reactors are placed in a triangular lattice instead of a rectangular one, and are also layered with a thin wire that forms a kind of helix around the fuel pin. “This leads to some really complicated flow behavior because the [liquid metals like sodium] has to move around that wire and usually causes a spiral pattern to develop. That has some interesting implications on heat transfer,” Shaver explains. “A lot of time it enhances it, which is a very desirable thing” because it’s able to get more power out of a limited amount of fuel.

However, with the advanced designs like the wire wrap, “it’s a little bit more complicated to pump the fluid around these wires compared to just an open model,” he adds, which means that it could take more input energy too.

An illustration of the inside of a pebble bed reactor. Argonne National Laboratory

Another popular option is called a pebble bed reactor, which involves a series of graphite pebbles about the size of a tennis ball being embedded with the nuclear fuel. “You just randomly pat them into an open container and let fluid flow around them,” Shaver says. “That is a very different scenario compared to what we’re used to with light-water reactors because now all of the fluid can move through these random spaces between the pebbles.” Such a system has many benefits for low-energy cooling.

With the newly proposed designs, the goal is to ultimately generate more power while putting less in. “You’re trying to enhance the heat transfer you get from it, and the price you pay is how much energy it takes to pump it,” says Shaver. “There’s an interesting cost-benefit there.” Some of the tradeoffs can be significant, and these supercomputer simulations promise to give more accurate numbers than ever, allowing upcoming nuclear power plants to work with reactors that are as efficient and safe as possible.

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The EPA wants to tighten up their ‘zero-emission’ building definition

Andrew Paul — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 19:00:00 +0000

The US is a hodgepodge of green building regulations, but the EPA hopes to simply the situation. Deposit Photos

The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

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Microsoft wants small nuclear reactors to power its AI and cloud computing services

Andrew Paul — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 21:00:00 +0000

The NuScale VOYGR™ SMR power plant. The first NRC certified U.S. small modular reactor design. It hopes to be operational by 2029. NuScale VOYGR™ via Office of Nuclear Energy

Bill Gates is a staunch advocate for nuclear energy, and although he no longer oversees day-to-day operations at Microsoft, its business strategy still mirrors the sentiment. According to a new job listing first spotted on Tuesday by The Verge, the tech company is currently seeking a “principal program manager” for nuclear technology tasked with “maturing and implementing a global Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and microreactor energy strategy.” Once established, the nuclear energy infrastructure overseen by the new hire will help power Microsoft’s expansive plans for both cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Among the many, many, (many) concerns behind AI technology’s rapid proliferation is the amount of energy required to power such costly endeavors—a worry exacerbated by ongoing fears pertaining to climate collapse. Microsoft believes nuclear power is key to curtailing the massive amounts of greenhouse emissions generated by fossil fuel industries, and has made that belief extremely known in recent months.

[Related: Microsoft thinks this startup can deliver on nuclear fusion by 2028.]

Unlike traditional nuclear reactor designs, an SMR is meant to be far more cost-effective, easier to construct, and smaller, all the while still capable of generating massive amounts of energy. Earlier this year, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a first-of-its-kind SMR; judging from Microsoft’s job listing, it anticipates many more are to come. Among the position’s many responsibilities is the expectation that the principal program manager will “[l]aise with engineering and design teams to ensure technical feasibility and optimal integration of SMR and microreactor systems.”

But as The Verge explains, making those nuclear ambitions a reality faces a host of challenges. First off, SMRs demand HALEU, a more highly enriched uranium than traditional reactors need. For years, the world’s largest HALEU supplier has been Russia, whose ongoing invasion of Ukraine is straining the supply chain. Meanwhile, nuclear waste storage is a perpetual concern for the industry, as well as the specter of disastrous, unintended consequences.

Microsoft is obviously well aware of such issues—which could factor into why it is also investing in moonshot energy solutions such as nuclear fusion. Not to be confused with current reactors’ fission capabilities, nuclear fusion involves forcing atoms together at extremely high temperatures, thus producing a new, smaller atom alongside massive amounts of energy. Back in May, Microsoft announced an energy purchasing partnership with the nuclear fusion startup called Helion, which touts an extremely ambitious goal of bringing its first generator online in 2028.

Fission or fusion, Microsoft’s nuclear aims require at least one new job position—one with a starting salary of $133,600.

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This Belgian factory’s massive mirror array turns sunlight into thermal energy

Andrew Paul — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Over 2,400 parabolic mirrors reflect sunlight into containers of heat absorbing oil. Avery Dennison

A massive industrial plant in Belgium using 2,240 parabolic mirrors to harvest sunlight to create green heat is officially open. At 5,540 square meters (roughly 18,175 square feet), the site’s Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) platform and six-module thermal storage unit is the largest of its kind in Europe, according to manufacturing company Avery Dennison.

In basic terms, the facility takes sunlight, reflects it into heat-absorbing oil, and then utilizes the oil to help supply the plant’s thermal energy needs.

Over half of the entire world’s energy consumption stems directly from manufacturing industries—meaning that these companies must adopt sustainable infrastructures to avert climate change’s worst outcomes. The European Union, in an attempt to spur such reforms, passed legislation in 2021 which set net-zero emissions targets across all its industries by 2050. As such, Avery Dennison’s new attempt at progressing towards that goal leverages direct sunlight as a substitute for fossil fuel heating systems.

The installation generates the same thermal power that can be achieved using 2.3 GWh of gas consumption, but is expected to reduce the facility’s overall emissions by an estimated 9 percent annually. During the warmer summer months when less heat is needed, however, the new system is expected to offer 100 percent of any necessary demand.

[Related: Could aquifers store renewable thermal energy?]

To convert solar rays into heating fuel, the CST platform’s curved mirrors first reflect light towards a collector tube filled with an absorption liquid such as thermal oil. This heated oil is then stored within a specialized installation similar to a giant thermos, whose heat is distributed as needed and on demand like a battery. Scaling up to six “battery” modules totalling 5 MWh of thermal power storage ensures the system can emit high temperature heat whenever required.

Among other products, Avery Dennison manufactures adhesive tapes and labels for uses across the automotive, medical device, personal care, and construction industries. According to the company, most of the vast array’s generated heat will be directed into drying ovens used during the coating process of pressure-sensitive adhesive products.

“We have big ambitions to tackle climate change and achieve net zero by 2050,” Mariana Rodriguez, general manager of Avery Dennison Performance Tapes Europe, said via the company’s announcement. “To meet these goals we will look across our industrial processes and identify opportunities to implement new technologies that decarbonize and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.”

Thermal power storage is showing increasing promise as a cheap, sustainable way to meet industries’ heating needs. In recent years, new research indicates methods such as utilizing silica sand and even underwater aquifer water could offer effective means for housing thermal energy.

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A remote Air Force base in Alaska is getting its own nuclear reactor

Kelsey D. Atherton — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 22:13:54 +0000

F-35 fighter jets at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska in March, 2022. Jose Miguel T. Tamondong / US Air Force

On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning.

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions.

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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Heat pumps still get the job done in extreme cold

Andrew Paul — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Even in extremely cold climates, heat pumps outperformed three times better than traditional gas and oil installations. Deposit Photos

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, heat pumps are still considered by some to be inferior to traditional gas and fossil fuel installations. A new study published on September 11 in Joule, however, offers even more credence to adopting the eco-friendly alternative, while also debunking some of the more persistent myths surrounding heat pumps. Even in extreme cold environments, heat pumps perform as much as three times better than fossil fuel options, the latest study found.

To understand how heat pumps work, imagine the opposite of a refrigerator—instead of a fridge sucking up its ambient interior heat and pumping that outside the container via its compressor, a home’s heat pump sucks in warmth for later use. Heat pumps’ sources generally either come from ambient outside air, or underground, such as via geothermal heat. The principle is largely the same as AC units, which operate on the same principles but in reverse. Either way, a team of Oxford University researchers working alongside the independent think tank, Regulatory Assistance Project, have ample evidence that pumps are much more preferable to pollutant-heavy standards.

[Related: Energy-efficient heat pumps will be required for all new homes in Washington.]

As The Guardian explains, the study aggregated data from seven field studies across the US, Canada, China, Germany, Switzerland, the UK. After analyzing the numbers, the team found that heat pumps operated two-to-three times more efficiently than gas and oil heaters at below zero temperatures. According to the findings, this makes heat pumps perfectly suited—if not superior—for homes across the globe, including in Europe and the UK.

Speaking with Canary Media, Duncan Gibb, study co-author and a senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, argued that the study supports their belief that “there are very few—if any—technical conditions where a heat pump is not suitable based on the climate,” at least in Europe.

That’s not to say that consumers wouldn’t benefit from switching to heat pumps in the US—far from it, actually. According to the team’s field studies, even some of the nation’s coldest regions in Alaska and Maine still offered more efficient heat pump performance than fossil fuel counterparts. Extrapolate that to the country’s generally warmer areas, and heat pumps generate even more bang for their buck.

The new information presents a stark counter to recent dismissals of the technology, which are often financed by those with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. “Even though heat pump efficiency declines during the extreme cold and back-up heating may be required, air-source heat pumps can still provide significant energy system efficiency benefits on an instantaneous and annual basis compared with alternatives,” the study’s authors argue in the paper’s introduction. And from their new data, they have the numbers to prove it.

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This alternative to lithium-based batteries could help store renewable energy

Andrew Paul — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Zinc-bromine batteries could one day store the nation's renewable energy reserves. Deposit Photos

The Department of Energy is providing a nearly $400 million loan to a startup aimed at scaling the manufacturing and deployment of a zinc-based alternative to rechargeable lithium batteries. If realized, Eos Energy’s utility- and industrial-scale zinc-bromine battery energy storage system (BESS) could provide cheaper, vastly more sustainable options for the country’s burgeoning renewable power infrastructure.

According to the DOE’s recent announcement, Eos Energy’s project could annually produce as much as 8 gigawatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity by 2026—enough to instantly power over 300,000 US homes, or meet around 130,000 homes’ annual electricity requirements.

Because renewable sources like wind and solar produce power intermittently, storage solutions are necessary to house the energy for later use. For years, lithium battery systems’ prices have decreased as their efficiencies increased, but the metal’s comparative rarity presents a challenging hurdle for scaling green energy infrastructure.

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid]

Unlike lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries, alternatives such as the Eos Z3 design rely on zinc-based cathodes alongside a water-based electrolyte, notes MIT Technology Review. This important distinction both increases their stability, as well as makes it incredibly difficult for them to support combustion. Zinc-bromine batteries meanwhile also boast lifespans as long as 20 years, while existing lithium options only manage between 10 and 15 years. What’s more, zinc is considered the world’s fourth most produced metal.

Per MIT, Eos’s semi-autonomous facility in Pennsylvania currently produces around 540 megawatt-hours annually, although it doesn’t operate at full capacity. The DOE’s conditional commitment loan—disbursed only after certain financial, technical, and other operating stipulations are met—could boost the Eos’ factory towards full-power.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

“Today’s energy storage market is nascent but rapidly growing and is dominated by lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate battery technologies, which typically serve short-term duration applications (approximately 4 hours),” the DOE explained in its announcement. “… Eos’s technology is also specifically designed for long-duration grid-scale stationary battery storage that can assist in meeting the energy grids’ growing demand with increasing amounts of renewable energy penetration.”

The DOE also notes that “over time,” Eos expects to source almost all of its materials within the US, thus better insulating its product against the market volatility and supply chain issues. While the DOE previously issued similar loans to battery recycling and geothermal energy projects, last week’s announcement marks the first funding offered to a manufacturer of lithium-battery alternatives.

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Traveling through the world’s most traffic-heavy city just got a lot quicker—and greener

Andrew Paul — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Lagos' Blue Line could shrink a 3 hour commute down to under 30 minutes. PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP via Getty Images

Travelers within Lagos, Nigeria, can finally board a light-rail line connecting two busy regions of the world’s worst metropolis for traffic. Although construction on Lagos’ Blue Line Rail began in 2009, years of funding issues delayed officials’ intended 2011 launch date by over a decade. Now, however, an estimated 150,000 commuters each day will be able to travel the 8-mile route in under 25 minutes—a stark improvement from the sometimes three hour long journey the same distance takes on Lagos roadways.

With over 24 million residents, Lagos has long suffered from notorious traffic issues. The Nigerian city’s infrastructure problems, greenhouse emissions, and overall dissatisfaction with roadways repeatedly earned it the moniker of the world’s worst region to travel—even when compared to similarly congested cities such as Los Angeles and Delhi.

[Related: A high-speed rail line in California is chugging along towards 2030 debut.]

According to Quartz, aspirations for a light rail line within Lagos date as far back as 1983, but decades of funding and civic issues prevented the project from moving forward. Meanwhile, the Lagos-based Danne Institute of Research estimates traffic congestion annually results in a loss of over $5.2 billion due to lost work hours from commuters spending a cumulative 14.1 million hours on the road per day. The World Bank estimates Lagos residents spend more of their household budgets on transportation costs than any other major African city.

Construction for the $132 million endeavor finally completed earlier this year, with official service starting on August 4. For the first two weeks, the Blue Line Rail will run 12 trips per day before upping the daily total to 76. A separate phase of the line will extend the total track line to roughly 17 miles, while Lagos intends to complete a Red Line Rail connecting eastern and western sections of the city by the year’s end. According to Lagos Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu speaking via Bloomberg, the second line is already 95 percent ready.

“A mega city cannot function without an effective metro line,” said Adetilewa Adebajo, chief executive of Lagos-based CFG Advisory, told Bloomberg on August 5. “However, Lagos needs not just the metro line. It has to develop waterways too, being a coastal city. It needs an integrated transport system. Those are what will be able to relieve the congestions in the city.”

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Poppyseed-sized nuclear fuel cells might power a NASA moon base

Andrew Paul — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:00:00 +0000

Trisofuel could help power a lunar base via a car-sized nuclear generator. NASA

Nuclear fuel cells the size of poppy seeds could power NASA’s Artemis lunar base once it begins operations around 2030. Designed by researchers at Bangor University’s Nuclear Futures Institute in the UK, the miniscule power source—dubbed “Trisofuel”—is intended to run on a micro nuclear generator roughly the size of a small car created by Rolls Royce. According to a report in the BBC, engineers intend to begin fully testing their new fuel within the next few months. If successful, Trisofuel’s uses could even extend far beyond the moon’s surface.

Momentum is quickly building towards establishing a permanent human presence on the moon, likely near its south pole where scientists hope to find water-based ice to help support habitation. NASA’s ongoing Artemis project is making progress towards its proposed end-of-decade base construction, most recently with its first successful mission in November 2022. Last month, India made history as the fourth nation to land a probe on the moon via its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, as well as the first to do so at the lunar south pole.

[Related: India’s successful moon landing makes lunar history.]

Given its size and relative power, a resource like Trisofuel could be vital to lunar bases’ success. With its portability, however, the new nuclear fuel cell could easily be adapted to a range of other scenarios, both here on Earth and beyond. Phylis Makurunje, a researcher involved Trisofuel testing, explained to the BBC that the tiny fuel pellets could be used to power rockets that one day take humans to Mars. “It is very powerful—it gives very high thrust, the push it gives to the rocket. This is very important because it enables rockets to reach the farthest planets,” Makurunje explained.

Trisofuel may be so strong, in fact, that it could nearly halve the time it takes to reach the Red Planet—from an estimated nine months down to between four-to-six months. “Nuclear power is the only way we currently have to provide the power for that length of space travel,” Bangor University professor Simon Middleburgh said in a release. “The fuel must be extremely robust and survive the forces of launch and then be dependable for many years.”

At a much more localized level, researchers believe that micro generators running Trisofuel could also be deployed to disaster zones with compromised electrical grids.

Having a reliable, powerful fuel source is one thing—having structures to house such systems is another hurdle altogether. Of course, researchers are currently hard at work optimizing construction options for proposed lunar base designs. Potential building materials could even be drawn from the moon itself, using lunar regolith to reinforce 3D-printed bricks to compose base structures.

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Scientists are using AI to track coal train dust

Emma Foehringer Merchant / Undark — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 23:00:00 +0000

In the US, around 70 percent of coal travels by rail. DepositPhotos

This article was originally published on Undark.

In a sloping backyard in Vallejo, California, Nicholas Spada adjusted a piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a tripod, a briefcase, and a weather vane. The sleek machine, now positioned near a weathered gazebo and a clawfoot bathtub filled with sun-bleached wood, is meant for inconspicuous sites like this, where it can gather long-term information about local air quality.

Spada, an aerosol scientist and engineer at the University of California, Davis, originally designed the machine for a project based about 16 miles south, in Richmond. For six months, researchers pointed the equipment—which includes a camera, an air sensor, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—at railroad tracks transporting coal through the city, and trained an AI model to recognize trains and record how they affected air quality. Now Spada is scouting potential locations for the sensors in Vallejo, where he collaborates with residents concerned about what’s in their air.

The project in Richmond was Spada’s first using AI. The corresponding paper, which published in March 2023, arrived amid proliferating interest—and concern—about AI. Technology leaders have expressed concern about AI’s potential to displace human intelligence; critics have questioned the technology’s potential bias and harvest of public data; and numerous studies and articles have pointed to the significant energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with processing data for its algorithms.

But as concern has sharpened, so has scientific interest in AI’s potential uses—including in environmental monitoring. From 2017 to 2021, the number of studies published each year on AI and air pollution jumped from 50 to 505, which an analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health attributed, in part, to an uptick of AI in more scientific fields. And according to researchers like Spada, applying AI tools could empower locals who have long experienced pollution, but had little data to explicitly prove its direct source.

In Richmond, deep learning technology—a type of machine learning—allowed scientists to identify and record trains remotely and around the clock, rather than relying on the traditional method of in-person observations. The team’s data showed that, as they passed, trains full of coal traveling through the city significantly increased ambient PM2.5, a type of particulate matter that has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, along with early death. Even short-term exposure to PM2.5 can harm health.

The paper’s authors were initially unsure how well the technology would suit their work. “I’m not an AI fan,” said Bart Ostro, an environmental epidemiologist at UC Davis and the lead author of the paper. “But this thing worked amazingly well, and we couldn’t have done it without it.”

In Vallejo, California, aerosol scientist and engineer Nicholas Spada (front left), retired engineer Ken Szutu (back left), and undergraduate student Zixuan Roxanne Liang (right) demonstrate equipment used to measure and record long-term information about local air quality. Visual: Emma Foehringer Merchant for Undark

Ostro said the team’s results could help answer a question few researchers have examined: How do coal facilities, and the trains that travel between them, impact air in urban areas?

That question is particularly relevant in nearby Oakland, which has debated a proposed coal export terminal for nearly a decade. After Oakland passed a resolution to stop the project in 2016, a judge ruled that the city hadn’t adequately proved that shipping coal would significantly endanger public health. Ostro and Spada designed their research in part to provide data relevant to the development.

“Now we have a study that provides us with new evidence,” said Lora Jo Foo, a longtime Bay Area activist and a member of No Coal in Oakland, a grassroots volunteer group organized to oppose the terminal project.

The research techniques could also prove useful far beyond the Bay Area. The AI-based methodology, Foo said, can be adapted by other communities looking to better understand local pollution.

“That’s pretty earth shattering,” she said.

Across the United States, around 70 percent of coal travels by rail, transiting from dozens of mines to power plants and shipping terminals. Last year, the U.S.—which holds the world’s largest supplies of coal—used about 513 million tons of coal and exported about another 85 million tons to countries including India and the Netherlands.

Before coal is burned in the U.S. or shipped overseas, it travels in open-top trains, which can release billowing dust in high winds and as the trains speed along the tracks. In the past, when scientists have researched how much dust these coal trains release, their research has relied on humans to identify train passings, before matching it with data collected by air sensors. About a decade ago, as domestically-produced natural gas put pressure on U.S. coal facilities, fossil fuel and shipping companies proposed a handful of export terminals in Oregon and Washington to ship coal mined in Wyoming and Montana to other countries. Community opposition was swift. Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, set out to determine the implications for air quality.

In two published studies, Jaffe recorded trains in Seattle and the rural Columbia River Gorge with motion sensing cameras, identified coal trains, and matched them with air data. The research suggested that coal dust released from trains increased particulate matter exposure in the gorge, an area that hugs the boundary of Oregon and Washington. The dust, combined with diesel pollution, also affected air quality in urban Seattle. (Ultimately, none of the planned terminals were built. Jaffe said he’d like to think his research played at least some role in those decisions.)

Studies at other export locations, notably in Australia and Canada, also used visual identification and showed increases in particulate matter related to coal trains.

Wherever there are coal facilities, there will be communities nearby organizing to express their concern about the associated pollution, according to James Whelan, a former strategist at Climate Action Network Australia who contributed to research there. “Generally, what follows is some degree of scientific investigation, some mitigation measures,” he said. “But it seems it’s very rarely adequate.”

Some experts say that the AI revolution has the potential to make scientific results significantly more robust. Scientists have long used algorithms and advanced computation for research. But advancements in data processing and computer vision have made AI tools more accessible.

With AI, “all knowledge management becomes immensely more powerful and efficient and effective,” said Luciano Floridi, a philosopher who directs the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

The technique used in Richmond could also help monitor other sources of pollution that have historically been difficult to track. Vallejo, a waterfront city about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, has five oil refineries and a shipyard within a 20 mile radius, making it hard to discern a pollutant’s origin. Some residents hope more data may help attract regulatory attention where their own concerns have not.

“We have to have data first, before we can do anything,” said Ken Szutu, a retired computer engineer and a founding member of the Vallejo Citizen Air Monitoring Network, sitting next to Spada at a downtown cafe. “Environmental justice—from my point of view, monitoring is the foundation.”

Air scientists like Spada have relied on residents to assist with that monitoring—opening up backyards for their equipment, suggesting sites that may be effective locations, and, in Richmond, even calling in tips when coal cars sat at the nearby train holding yard.

Spada and Ostro didn’t originally envision using AI in Richmond. They planned their study around ordinary, motion-detecting security cameras with humans—some community volunteers—manually identifying whether recordings showed a train and what cargo they carried, a process that likely would have taken as much time as data collection, Spada said. But the camera system wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up all the trains, and the data they did gather was too voluminous and overloaded their server. After a couple of months, the researchers pivoted. Spada had noticed the AI hype and decided to try it out.

The team planted new cameras and programmed them to take a photo each minute. After months of collecting enough images of the tracks, UC Davis students categorized them into groups—train or no train, day or night—using Playstation controllers. The team created software designed to play like a video game, which sped up the process, Spada said, by allowing the students to filter through more images than if they simply used a mouse or trackpad to click through pictures on a computer. The team used those photos and open-source image classifier files from Google to train the model and the custom camera system to sense and record trains passing. Then the team identified the type of trains in the captured recordings (a task that would have required more complex and expensive computing power if done with AI) and matched the information with live air and weather measurements.

The process was a departure from traditional environmental monitoring. “When I was a student, I would sit on a street corner and count how many trucks went by,” said Spada.

Employing AI was a “game changer” Spada added. The previous three studies on North American coal trains combined gathered data on less than 1,000 trains. The Davis researchers were able to collect data from more than 2,800.

In early July 2023, lawyers for the city of Oakland and the proposed developer of the city’s coal terminal presented opening arguments in a trial regarding the project’s future. Oakland has alleged that the project’s developer missed deadlines, violating the terms of the lease agreement. The developer has said any delays are due to the city throwing up obstructions.

If Oakland prevails, it will have finally defeated the terminal. But if the city loses, it can still pursue other routes to stop the project, including demonstrating that it represents a substantial public health risk. The city cited that risk—particularly related to air pollution—when it passed a 2016 resolution to keep the development from proceeding. But in 2018, a judge said the city hadn’t shown enough evidence to support its conclusion. The ruling said Jaffe’s research didn’t apply to the city because the results were specific to the study location and the composition of the coal being shipped there was unlikely to be the same because Oakland is slated to receive coal from Utah. The judge also said the city ignored the terminal developer’s plans to require companies to use rail car covers to reduce coal dust. (Such covers are rare in the U.S., where companies instead coat coal in a sticky liquid meant to tamp down dust.)

Nicholas Spada holds a piece of graphite tape used to collect dust samples in the field. Spada and his colleague Bart Ostro didn’t originally envision using AI in their coal train study in Richmond. But, Spada said, using the technology was a “game changer.” Visual: Emma Foehringer Merchant for Undark

Hanna Best, former student of Spada’s, classifies train images with with the help of a Playstation controller. Best classified hundreds of thousands of images as a part of a team of UC Davis students who helped train the AI model. Visual: Courtesy of Nicholas Spada/UC Davis

Dhawal Majithia, a former student of Spada’s, helped develop code that runs the equipment used to capture and recognize images of trains while monitoring air quality. The equipment—which includes a camera, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—was tested on a model train set before being deployed in the field. Visual: Courtesy of Bart Ostro/UC Davis

Environmental groups point to research from scientists like Spada and Ostro as evidence that more regulation is needed, and some believe AI techniques could help buttress lawmaking efforts.

Despite its potential for research, AI may also cause its own environmental damage. A 2018 analysis from OpenAI, the company behind the buzzy bot ChatGPT, showed that computations used for deep learning were doubling every 3.4 months, growing by more than 300,000 times since 2012. Processing large quantities of data requires significant energy. In 2019, based on new research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, headlines warned that training one AI language processing model releases emissions equivalent to the manufacture and use of five gas-powered cars over their entire lifetime.

Researchers are only beginning to weigh an algorithm’s potential benefits with its environmental impacts. Floridi at Yale, who said AI is underutilized, was quick to note that the “amazing technology” can also be overused. “It is a great tool, but it comes with a cost,” he said. “The question becomes, is the tradeoff good enough?”

A team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and La Trobe University in Australia has devised a way to quantify that tradeoff. Their Green Algorithms project allows researchers to plug in an algorithm’s properties, like run time and location. Loïc Lannelongue, a computational biologist who helped build the tool, told Undark that scientists are trained to avoid wasting limited financial resources in their research, and believes environmental costs could be considered similarly. He proposed requiring environmental disclosures in research papers much like those required for ethics.

In response to a query from Undark, Spada said he did not consider potential environmental downsides to using AI in Richmond, but he thinks the project’s small scale would mean the energy used to run the model, and its associated emissions, would be relatively insignificant.

For residents experiencing pollution, though, the outcome of the work could be consequential. Some activists in the Bay Area are hopeful that the study will serve as a model for the many communities where coal trains travel.

Other communities are already weighing the potential of AI. In Baltimore, Christopher Heaney, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, has collaborated with residents in the waterfront neighborhood of Curtis Bay, which is home to numerous industrial facilities including a coal terminal. Heaney worked with residents to install air monitors after a 2021 explosion at a coal silo, and is considering using AI for “high dimensional data reduction and processing” that could help the community attribute pollutants to specific sources.

Szutu’s citizen air monitoring group also began installing air sensors after an acute event; in 2016 an oil spill at a nearby refinery sent fumes wafting towards Vallejo, prompting a shelter-in-place order and sending more than 100 people to the hospital. Szutu said he tried to work with local air regulators to set up monitors, but after the procedures proved slow, decided to reach out to the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis, where Spada works. The two have been working together since.

On Spada’s recent visit to Vallejo, he and an undergraduate student met Szutu to scout potential monitoring locations. In the backyard, after Spada demonstrated how the equipment worked by aiming it at an adjacent shipyard, the team deconstructed the setup and lugged it back to Spada’s Prius. As Spada opened the trunk, a neighbor, leaning against a car in his driveway, recognized the group.

“How’s the air?” he called out.

Emma Foehringer Merchant is a journalist who covers climate change, energy, and the environment. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Inside Climate News, Greentech Media, Grist, and other outlets.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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What’s the most sustainable way to mine the largest known lithium deposit in the world?

Rahul Rao — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:30:00 +0000

The clay mixture from which lithium would be extracted if a mine were to be permitted in Nevada's Thacker Pass. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

At first glance, the McDermitt Caldera might feel like the edge of the Earth. This oblong maze of rocky vales straddles the arid Nevada-Oregon borderlands, in one of the least densely populated parts of North America.

But the future of the modern world depends on the future of places like the McDermitt Caldera, which has the potential to be the largest known source of lithium on the planet. Where today’s world runs on hydrocarbons, tomorrow’s may very well rely on the element for an expanding offering of lithium-ion batteries. The flaky silver metal is a necessity for these batteries that we already use, and which we’ll likely use in far greater numbers to support mobile phones, electric cars, and large electric grids.

Which is why it matters a ton where we get our lithium from. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances today, suggests that McDermitt Caldera contains even more lithium than previously thought and outlines how the yet-to-be-discovered stores could be extracted. But these results are unlikely to ease the criticisms about the environmental costs of mining the substance.

[Related: Why solid state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

By 2030, the world may require more than a megaton of lithium every year. If previous geological surveys are correct, then the McDermitt Caldera—the remnants of a 16-million-old volcanic supereruption—could contain as many as 100 megatons of the metal.

“It’s a huge, massive feature that has a lot of lithium in it,” Tom Benson, one of the authors of the new paper and a volcanologist at Columbia University and the Lithium Americas Corporation.

One high-profile project, partly run by Lithium Americas Corporation, proposes a 17,933-acre mine in the Thacker Pass, on the Nevada side of the border at the caldera’s southern edge. The project is contentious: Thacker Pass (or Peehee Mu’huh in Northern Paiute) sits on land that many local Indigenous groups consider sacred. Native American activists are continuing to fight a plan to expand the mine-exploration area in court.

But not all of the lithium under McDermitt’s rocky sands ranks the same. Most of the desired metal there comes in the form of a mineral called smectite; under certain conditions, smectite can transform into a different mineral called illite that can sometimes also be processed for lithium. Benson and his colleagues studied samples of both smectite and illite drilled from the ground throughout the caldera. “There’s lithium everywhere you drill,” he says.

Previously, geologists assumed that you could find both smectite and illite in a wide distribution across the caldera, but the authors only found the latter in high concentrations in the caldera’s south, around Thacker Pass. “It’s constrained to this area,” explains Benson.

Benson et al. (2023)

That’s important. Benson and colleagues think that the caldera’s illite formed when lithium-rich fluid, heated by the underlying volcano, washed over smectite. In the process, the mineral absorbed much of the lithium. Consequently, they project the illite in Thacker Pass holds more than twice as much lithium than the neighboring smectite.

“That’s really helpful to change exploration strategy,” Benson says. “Now we know we have to stick in the Thacker Pass area if we want to find and mine that illite.”

Some of Thacker Pass’s proponents believe that would result in fewer costs and less damage from mining. Anyone who deals with lithium is, on some level, aware of the environmental costs. The recovery process produces pollutants like heavy metals, sucks up water, and emits tons of greenhouse gases. By one estimate, fitting a new electric vehicle with its lithium battery can result in upwards of 70 percent more carbon emissions than building an equivalent petrol-powered car (although the average electric car will more than make up the difference with day-to-day use).

That said, not all extraction is the same. There are two main types of lithium sources: brine recovery and hard-rock mining. Some of the lithium we use comes from super salty pools. Over millions of years, rainwater percolates through lithium-containing rocks, dissolves the metal, and carries it to underground aquifers. Today, humans pump brine to the surface, evaporate the water, add a slurry of hydrated lime to keep out unwanted metals, and extract the lithium that’s left behind. Much of the world’s brine lithium today comes from the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—one of the world’s driest regions.

Alternatively, we can directly mine lithium ores from the earth and process them as we would with most other metals. Separating lithium from ore typically involves crushing the rock and heating it up to temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Getting to those high temperatures often requires fossil fuels in the first place. This method is less laborious and costly than brine extraction, but also far more carbon-intensive.

[Related: Inside the high-powered process that could recycle rare earth metals]

McDermitt Caldera’s smectite and illite belong to what some lithium watchers see as a new third category of extraction: volcanic sedimentary lithium. When volcanic minerals containing lithium flow into nearby valleys and react with the loose dirt, they leave behind lithium-rich sediments that require little energy and processing to separate.

With the new alternative, mining proponents claim they can drastically reduce the environmental impact of their current and future activities at Thacker Pass. And the research by Benson’s team seems to suggest that, if lithium companies probe in the right places, they might get rewarded more for their efforts.

But this is likely little comfort to lithium-mining opponents in Oregon and Nevada, whose criticisms will be considered as the Bureau of Land Management maps out drilling in the deposit. Their case parallels those of Indigenous Chileans who oppose lithium extraction near their homes in the Atacama and locals fighting a lithium mining project near Portugal’s northern border. Together, they’re fighting a world that’s growing hungrier for lithium, along with new ways and places to exploit it.

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A high-speed rail line in California is chugging along towards 2030 debut

Andrew Paul — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000

The proposed railway would travel over 200 mph. California High-Speed Rail Authority

California authorities will begin accepting electric train manufacturers’ Request for Qualifications proposals (RFQs) by the end of the year, the latest stage of the state’s long-gestating, high-speed rail line. Although voters approved initial funding back in 2008, the decades’ long project has since encountered repeated setbacks and financial issues. Construction sites finally began making headway in 2015, and nearly 422 miles between the Los Angeles Basin and the Bay Area have since been “environmentally cleared for the project,” the Los Angeles Times recently reported.

Once selected and constructed, the high-speed trains would be tested at maximum speed of 242 mph while traversing a 171-mile starter segment connecting Central Valley’s Bakersfield and Merced. Rail authorities will select the final manufacturer during the first quarter of 2024, with an eye to debut a pair of functioning prototypes by 2028 for trials. According to the High-Speed Rail Authority’s announcement, whoever is chosen to provide the train cars will also agree to oversee train set maintenance for 30 years.

[Related: Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas.]

In a statement, Board Chair Tom Richards described the latest phase “allows us to deliver on our commitment to meet our federal grant timelines to start testing,” adding that, “This is an important milestone for us to deliver high-speed rail service in the Central Valley and eventually into Northern and Southern California.”

California’s high speed rail project is one of several in development across the US, each facing their own logistical and funding issues. Earlier this month, Amtrak announced a partnership with Texas Central to begin seeking grants for a bullet train line that could travel between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. Similar high-speed train routes are underway to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco and LA. Both of those projects have also encountered significant delays. Such projects could greatly help transition the US towards greener public transport methods—Amtrak’s proposed Texas project, for example, could save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel per year, cut greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually, and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region’s I-45 corridor.

Over 30 construction sites along Central Valley’s high-speed railway are currently active. Although backers hope the project will begin public service by the end of the decade, a recent progress report notes delays could push completion as far as 2033.

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Seafarers are unknowingly working with oil smugglers

Nathaniel Peutherer/Hakai Magazine — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 01:00:00 +0000

The MT Pablo exploded off Malaysia in May. Though most of the crew was rescued, three people remain lost. Photo by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Satyam Tripathi, a 27-year-old seafarer from Uttar Pradesh, India, leans against the railing of the MT Pablo, the oil tanker that has been his home for the past several months. Though the days at sea often blur together, today stands out as vividly as the South China Sea below. Today is his birthday.

Moments later, his mother calls on WhatsApp. How are you? she asks, forgetting her birthday wishes for her usual motherly enquires: are you as happy at sea as I know you to be on land? Tripathi had acclimatized quickly to life in the merchant navy. The oil tanker is a surprisingly social place, and his head is filled with romantic ideas of a life on the ocean. He reassures her: yes, mother, I’m still happy.

That afternoon, on May 1, 2023, the Pablo exploded off the Malaysian coast.

The crew were thrown by the blast. Adrift in the ocean, clinging to charred metal, most of the ship’s 28 crew waited anxiously for nearby ships to scramble to their rescue.

Twenty-five seafarers were saved in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency spent days searching for the rest. But three remain unaccounted for, Tripathi among them.

On May 1, 2023, Satyam Tripathi posted a photo to Facebook to mark his birthday. Photo courtesy of Shubham Tripathi

Footage of the incident spread quickly across the messaging service Telegram, where fellow seafarers prayed for the missing crew. But within hours, rumors began to swirl of what kind of ship the Pablo really was.

As staff at the ship-tracking service Tanker Trackers noted, the Pablo had spent years smuggling Iranian oil. The vessel also featured on a list of ships under investigation for sanctions-busting by the organization United Against Nuclear Iran. It quickly became clear that for as long as Tripathi had been working on the ship, the vessel he’d called home had been smuggling oil for the Iranian regime.

The ship was a member of the so-called shadow fleet, which emerged in 2018 shortly after the United States reimposed a flood of sanctions against Iran. The sanctions had been waived in 2015 as part of an international effort to end Iran’s nuclear program. But in May 2018, then-president Donald Trump reversed course. In response, Iran enlisted a fleet of vintage tankers to secretly transport its oil without US oversight.

These ships are in poor shape. Many, says Samir Madani, cofounder of Tanker Trackers, were on their way to the scrapyard. “But buyers would show up with a slightly better offer, and then keep them operating for a few more years,” he says.

So, too, with the Pablo. Before it was rechristened, the vessel was variously known as the Olympic Spirit II, the Mockingbird, the Helios, the Adisa, and a handful of other names. Already past its prime, the ship was sold to an undisclosed buyer for demolition. But a few days later, the deal quietly fell through, and the vessel began operating in the shadows.

Tripathi’s family only learned he was missing a few days after the explosion. By then, the search for survivors had been called off.

Shubham Tripathi, one of Satyam’s two brothers, received a single phone call from Satyam’s employer: “We were told there had been a disaster, that he was missing, but that no one was looking for him.”

Desperate, Shubham took to Google. “That is when I saw everyone talking about the smuggling.” It was his first time hearing about the shadow fleet, and he was shocked by what he read. But of one thing he was certain: “Satyam did not know.”

His assumption is not simply brotherly protectiveness. Michelle Bockmann, a senior analyst at Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping industry intelligence and analytics firm, says that “to suggest that any of the crew on board a ship like Pablo are somehow aware of the smuggling is a really unfair assumption to make.”

As far as Satyam was aware, he was undertaking a nine-month contract as a deck fitter on board a legal vessel. He’d found the job through SeaSpeed Marine, a certified crew management agency in Mumbai, India. It appeared to be an entirely legitimate and respectable job, and he was praised by his friends back home.

Yet the same clandestine operations that keep the illegal oil flowing also make it all but impossible for the Tripathi family to find closure. The ship’s registered owner, Pablo Union Shipping, is a shell company that cannot be traced. The vessel’s insurance is listed as “withdrawn” on most shipping websites. “We have complained, but what else can we do?” Shubham says. “They do not care for us.”

With no one to claim responsibility for the wreckage, the Pablo now sits abandoned—a hazard to ships off the Malaysian coast.

Working on a decrepit ship is dangerous. But those who did know the Pablo’s true purpose routinely put the crew’s lives in jeopardy.

Before the explosion, Satyam’s Facebook activity showed multiple check-ins in Malaysia, where the shadow fleet conducts risky ship-to-ship transfer operations—passing oil from one tanker to another to disguise its origin. These outlaw tankers conduct their transfers far out at sea, often with their mandatory automatic identification system location trackers disabled. They also overlook standard safety procedures. “These operations happen without tugboats and a boom line to assist,” says Madani.

Against that backdrop, the Pablo’s fate is likely a preview of what’s to come says Sam Chambers, a shipping expert and editor at Splash, a shipping industry trade magazine.

In late 2022, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union and G7 countries slapped sanctions on seaborne Russian oil. Like Iran, Russia is turning to the shadow fleet, often recruiting the very same tankers—staffed with crews sourced through the same crew management companies—that have experience smuggling Iranian oil.

Chambers says that with Russia joining Iran in seeking out the shadow fleet, there is a growing risk of substandard vessels running into trouble.

Right now, many more people like Satyam are unknowingly engaging in oil smuggling, having their lives put at risk to circumvent international sanctions. It’s likely that many more will suffer for it.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Japan begins releasing treated Fukushima waste water into the Pacific Ocean

Andrew Paul — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Storage tanks used for storing treated water at TEPCO's crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture on August 24, 2023. (JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT (Photo by STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images

Treated radioactive water reserves near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are now slowly dispersing into the Pacific Ocean. The initial release is the first part of a decades’ long plan to handle the hundreds of millions of gallons accumulated since the 2011 meltdown disaster. Although numerous scientific organizations and experts deem the project extremely safe—the treated waters actually contain tritium isotope levels far below global contamination standards—residents near the nuclear plant have continuously voiced concerns about potential reputational damage to the local fishing industries.

These worries are not unfounded. On Thursday, China announced a wholesale ban on the import of all “aquatic products” from Japan, effective immediately. According to the Associated Press on Friday, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) president Tomoaki Kobayakwa stated the utility provider is preparing to compensate business owners affected by the ban.

[Related: Japan’s plan to release treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant is actually pretty safe.]

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated his plea for China to reconsider its import ban, urging them to consider the treatment plan’s numerous safety assessments. “We will keep strongly requesting that the Chinese government firmly carry out a scientific discussion,” Kishida added earlier this week, per the AP.

Final preparations for the controlled release project started on August 22, when one ton of treated water was transferred to a dilution tank containing 1,200 tons of seawater. Experts repeatedly tested the combined waters over the next two days to ensure safety. Then, experts ran 460 tons of the mixture into a mixing pool for discharge. From there, the decontaminated waters traveled an estimated 30 minutes through a 1-kilometer-long undersea tunnel, exiting into the Pacific Ocean.

In a news conference on Thursday, a Tepco spokesperson confirmed that the released water’s Becquerels per liter measurement was just 1,500 bq/L. The Becquerel is a standard unit for measuring radioactivity, and references one atomic nucleus decaying per second. Japan’s national safety standard is 60,000 bq/L.

As the AP reports, Tepco intends to release 31,200 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean by March 2024, barely 10 of the roughly 1,000 tanks awaiting treatment. Despite the seemingly large amount, that number is a literal and figurative drop in the bucket compared to how much irradiated water is stored near the Fukushima plant—currently filled to 98-percent of their 1.37-million-ton total capacity. The entirety of those storage containers must be cleaned and emptied in order to make way for the facilities necessary to decommission the larger power plant. The treated wastewater is expected to finish dispersing around 2035.

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We can’t ignore that offshore wind farms are part of marine ecosystems

Becki Robins / Undark — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can know the true effect of thousands of offshore wind turbines, as well as how and where they should be built. DepositPhotos

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Last year, the Biden administration announced an ambitious goal: enough offshore wind to power 10 million homes by 2030. The move would reduce carbon emissions, create jobs, and strengthen energy security. It would also help the United States—which was responsible for just 0.1 percent of the world’s offshore wind capacity last year—catch up with renewable energy leaders like China and Europe.

The plan is already well underway: Massive turbines are rising off the coast of Massachusetts, and more projects are planned up and down the U.S. coastlines. Advocates say these turbines, and other offshore projects around the world, are a crucial tool in minimizing the effects of climate change: The technology is touted as clean, renewable, and plentiful. And, since offshore wind farms aren’t located in anyone’s backyard, they are, at least in theory, less prone to the political pushback onshore wind power has faced.

It will take a lot of turbines to meet Biden’s 2030 goal, and while wind turbines don’t use fossil fuels or generate carbon emissions, they are enormous structures, with some reaching heights of more than 850 feet above the water’s surface. (The Statue of Liberty, in comparison, stands a little over 300 feet.) As such, they will likely have some effect on the ocean environment.

Scientists already know some of the local impacts of wind farms. For example, they can, somewhat counterintuitively, reduce local wind speed. They also create their own local climates, and cause disturbances in the water in the form of a downwind wake. But what those changes might mean for marine life or for industries that depend on ocean resources is something that scientists are still trying to figure out.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., offshore wind has become the subject of bitter political disagreement and fear, fueling lobbying and lawsuits aimed at halting projects before they even begin. As researchers work to model potential outcomes, they stress that they don’t want to derail offshore wind, but rather seek to better understand it so that any negative effects can be minimized, and positive effects maximized.

Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can know the true effect of thousands of offshore wind turbines, as well as how and where they should be built. There may even be questions they haven’t thought to ask yet, said Ute Daewel, a scientist who studies marine ecosystems at The Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Germany.

“It’s so complex,” she said, “that I sometimes think we probably also miss a lot of things that might happen.”

Advocates of offshore wind turbines can point to a range of benefits—starting with their proximity to the places most in need of clean energy. Around 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the ocean. Energy demand in densely populated coastal regions tends to be high, so offshore wind farms will be located close to where they are most needed.

Evidence suggests offshore wind power could lower energy costs, especially during extreme events like cold snaps when energy demands are high and wholesale prices peak. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy says that, in addition to reducing carbon emissions, the technology would improve human health by cutting air pollution from fossil fuels.

But wind farms have also come under intense criticism from a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including conservation nonprofits worried about the impact on marine ecosystems, fishing industry groups concerned about access to traditional fishing grounds, coastal homeowners keen to maintain their views, and groups that appear to be funded by large oil companies hoping to stifle competition.

Some of those criticisms focus on the impact on animals. Like onshore wind, the turbines can kill birds, though some researchers studying large-bodied waterbirds like sea ducks and geese have found they tend to avoid the turbines, which may mean less bird mortality offshore. Recent criticism from Republican lawmakers also suggests that the noise from offshore wind turbines might kill whales, although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s no evidence to back up this concern.

Meanwhile, some research suggests wind farms might even help fish and other marine life. “A lot of people say, hey, this is going to be a habitat improvement because there’s going to be rocks on the bottom, which make artificial reefs,” said Daphne Munroe, a shellfish ecologist at Rutgers University. “And that’s absolutely true. But it’s a shift away from what was there.”

Munroe studies pressures on marine ecosystems, including the effects of climate, pollution, and resource exploitation. She’s also the lead author of a 2022 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management study on the impacts of offshore wind on surfclams—a type of clam commonly used to make chowders, soups, and stews. (The BOEM study was funded by the federal agency; Munroe has received funding from wind farm developers to conduct other projects.)

The fishing industry fears wind farms will affect their ability to yield a profitable catch — especially since the windy, shallow waters that support a rich diversity of sea life also tend to be ideal locations for turbines. Some scientists say these fears have been overblown—a 2022 study, for example, concluded that the Block Island Wind Farm located off the coast of Rhode Island does not appear to negatively impact bottom-dwelling fish. (Coastal regulators in the state of Rhode Island mandated the study be conducted and paid for by wind farm developers.) Others, like Munroe, say specific fisheries such as Atlantic surfclams will be significantly affected.

Surfclam fishing in wind farm areas, said Munroe, is logistically difficult, if not impossible, since vessels use dredges that drag though the sand to collect the clams. The presence of power cables on the ocean floor, she said, would make it too dangerous to use this kind of equipment around wind farms.

Installed boulders surrounding turbine foundations will also create obstacles, according to Munroe. “Each of the foundations is going to have what’s called scour protection,” she said. “So basically, big boulder fields that are going to be placed around the base of the turbine foundation in order to prevent the sand from scouring away.”

Currently, there are no legal restrictions on fishing in windfarm areas, Munroe said, just physical ones. “They could still get out there, but in order to fish efficiently and be able to get the catch they need and get back to the dock in a reasonable amount of time, it just wouldn’t be feasible,” she said. In her 2022 study, Munroe and her co-authors concluded that the presence of large offshore wind farms could cause fleet revenues to decline by up to 14 percent in some areas.

The industry has also been vocal about other consequences, such as habitat destruction and the possibility that the turbines’ sound might affect fish populations. In Maine, lobstermen worry that heavy mooring lines will drive their catch away. In Massachusetts, groups that represent fishing interests have filed lawsuits against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on the grounds that the agency failed to consider the fishing industry when it approved the 62-turbine Vineyard Wind project.

“The Bureau made limited efforts to review commercial fishing impacts,” wrote the plaintiffs in one of the Vineyard Wind lawsuits. “The limited effort that was made focused almost solely on impacts to the State of Massachusetts and on the scallop fishery, despite other fisheries being more active in the lease areas.”

Physical changes to the ecosystem, such as the placement of turbine foundations and scour protection, are some of the more obvious impacts of offshore wind turbines. But wind farms might elicit more subtle changes in local weather, affecting wind patterns and water currents, which models predict could reverberate through the food chain.

A 2023 study led by oceanographer Kaustubha Raghukumar, for example, found that turbine-driven alterations in wind speed could produce changes in ocean upwelling—a natural process where cold water from the deeper parts of the ocean rises to the surface—“outside the bounds of natural variability.” Those cold waters contain nutrients that support phytoplankton, the single-celled plants and other tiny organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain. Shifts in upwelling could have an impact on phytoplankton—although those impacts are still in question, particularly as climate change alters the equation.

Raghukumar and his colleagues at Integral, an environmental consulting company, based their predictions off historical data. But such an approach might not create an accurate picture of what will happen in the future as some scientists predict warmer global temperatures will produce stronger winds and increased upwelling, while others foresee localized decreases in upwelling. In their 2023 paper, which was funded by the California Energy Commission and the Ocean Protection Council, the authors noted that wind farms might reinforce—or even counteract—some of these climate change-driven changes in upwelling, but that all remains uncertain.

While Raghukumar’s study didn’t model how changes in upwelling might affect marine life, other scientists are closely studying possible changes to the ecosystem, though these are also likely to be complex and difficult to predict. A 2022 paper modeled the effect that planned wind farms might have in the North Sea, off the coasts of the U.K. and Norway, and concluded that they could influence phytoplankton, which could alter the food web.

Daewel, the study’s lead author, stopped short of drawing conclusions about what these changes might mean for the ecosystem as a whole. “We cannot say if that’s really a bad thing or a good thing because the ecosystem is very dynamic, especially in the North Sea,” she said.

Changes to ocean processes could impact fish survival, but, again, no one is really sure how. “Young fish need to be in a specific area at a specific time to find the right types of prey,” said Daewel. “So this redistribution of ecosystem parameters, that could mean that there might be a mismatch, or a better match also, for fishery life stages. But this is purely hypothetical.”

With or without wind farms, climate change is already altering the timing of critical ecosystem processes, said Robert Dorrell, lead author of a 2022 paper that investigated the effects of offshore wind on seasonally stratified shelf seas—coastal regions where water separates during the spring into different layers, with warm water at the top and colder water at the bottom. Shelf seas only represent about 8 percent of the ocean, but the phytoplankton that bloom there generate an estimated 15 to 30 percent of the organic matter that forms the basis of the food web.

In seasonally stratified shelf seas, phytoplankton grow in the upper layers, using up nutrients but also creating a food source for a myriad of marine animals. When the bloom is over, ocean mixing, a natural process driven by wind and waves, helps bring oxygen to the bottom layers and nutrients to the top, ensuring that creatures at every level can thrive. But climate change is expected to increase ocean stratification, which interferes with natural ocean mixing.

“When you have cold water underneath, which is of a higher density, that density difference makes it harder in general to mix water vertically, upwards or downwards,” said Dorrell.

Dorrell and his co-authors believe that wind farms could provide a partial solution to this problem by introducing artificial mixing of stratified shelf seas. This process, Dorrell said, is a little like stirring a cup of French coffee. “We have a nice coffee on the bottom and then you have foamy milk on the top. And if you would get a spoon and stir your French coffee you would mix the light milk up with the heavier coffee below.”

In much the same way, the downwind wake generated by an offshore turbine could help mix the warm and cold layers of water, which might help offset some of the effects of climate change.

Fortunately, scientists like Dorrell say, there is time to figure out the more subtle nuances of offshore wind and its larger effects on the marine ecosystem. “I think what we have to remember with offshore wind is that although there are plans underway at the moment, they are long-term plans,” he said. “In the U.K., for example, there are targets for 2030 certainly, but there are targets all the way through to 2050 and beyond. And there’s certainly time there for research to inform and support and maximize the best delivery of offshore wind for the benefit of everybody.”

Daewel added that papers like hers, which might suggest potential problems, aren’t an argument against wind farms. Instead, they are a call to closely monitor existing wind farms and those that will be built in the future. “I think that’s kind of the rule here, to be cautious and make sure that you understand what’s happening to your system while you’re building,” she said.

It’s possible that the way wind farms are built and where they are placed might help reduce potential negative impacts on the ocean ecosystem, though that research has yet to be done. “I think it will be a really interesting optimization kind of study, to kind of place the turbines in different locations and different densities,” said Raghukumar. The information gleaned from such a study, he said, could be used to balance the benefits of wind energy against any adverse consequences.

As research into the impacts of offshore wind energy continues, scientists say it’s important to maintain a sense of perspective, since fossil fuels also affect the ocean by driving changes to the climate.

“It’s not our intention to say this is a negative development. It’s also not our intention to say wind parks destroy the ecosystem. That’s not what our research shows,” Daewel said. “I just want to stress the research shows that we need to expect changes, and it’s better to learn that as soon as possible.”

Becki Robins is a freelance writer who lives with her family in rural Northern California. She writes about science, nature, history, and travel; her favorite stories include a little of all four. Her work has appeared in Science News, Comstock’s Magazine, Hakai Magazine, and others.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Ancient Egyptian ‘air conditioning’ could help cool modern buildings

Andrew Paul — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Researchers are looking for ways to optimize a millennia-old cooling technique for today's warming world. Washington State University

While the planet continues to endure scorching, unprecedented temperatures, a 60-square-foot shipping container is serving as a testing ground for passive, sustainable cooling solutions. As detailed in a new study published in the research journal Energies, an engineering team at Washington State University is utilizing the space to find and improve upon ancient cooling methods that don’t generate any forms of greenhouse gas—including water evaporation atop repurposed wind towers.

Buildings require roughly 60 percent of the entire world’s electricity, almost 20 percent of which is annually earmarked to keep those structures cool and comfortable. As society contends with climate change’s most ravaging effects, air conditioning systems’ requirements are only expected to rise in the coming years—potentially generating a feedback loop that could exacerbate carbon emission levels. Finding green ways to lower businesses’ and homes’ internal temperatures will therefore need solutions other than simply boosting wasteful AC units.

[Related: Moondust could chill out our overheated Earth, some scientists predict.]

This is especially vital as rising global populations require new construction, particularly within the developing world. According to Omar Al-Hassawi, lead author and assistant professor in WSU’s School of Design and Construction, this push will be a major issue if designers continue to rely on mechanical systems—such as traditional, electric AC units. “There’s going to be a lot more air conditioning that’s needed, especially with the population rise in the hotter regions of the world,” Al-Hassawi said in a statement.

“There might be [some] inclusion of mechanical systems, but how can we cool buildings to begin with—before relying on the mechanical systems?” he adds.

By retrofitting their shipping container test chamber with off-the-grid, solar powered battery storage, AL-Hassawi’s team can heat their chamber to upwards of 130 degrees Fahrenheit to test out their solutions while measuring factors such as air velocity, temperature, and humidity. The team is particularly focused on optimizing a passive cooling method involving large towers and evaporative cooling that dates as far back as 2,500 BCE in ancient Egypt. In these designs, moisture evaporates at the tower’s top, which turns into cool, heavier air that then sinks down to the habitable space below. In the team’s version, moisture could be generated via misting nozzles, shower heads, or simply water-soaked pads.

“It’s an older technology, but there’s been an attempt to innovate and use a mix of new and existing technologies to improve performance and the cooling capacity of these systems,” explained Al-Hassawi, who also envisions retrofitting smokestacks in older buildings to work as new cooling towers.

“That’s why research like this would really help,” he adds. “How can we address building design, revive some of these more ancient strategies, and include them in contemporary building construction? The test chamber becomes a platform to do this.”

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A cargo ship with 123-foot ‘WindWing’ sails has just departed on its maiden voyage

Andrew Paul — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 18:30:00 +0000

The giant sails could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 30 percent. Cargill

A massive cargo ship retrofitted with a pair of nearly 125-foot-tall “wing sails” has set out on its maiden voyage, potentially providing a new template for wind-powered ocean liners. Chartered by shipping firm Cargill, the Pyxis Ocean’s journey will take it from China to Brazil in a test of its two, rigid “WindWings” constructed from the same material as wind turbines. According to the BBC on Monday, the design harkening back to traditional boat propulsion methods could reduce the vessel’s lifetime emissions by as much as 30 percent.

Per an official announcement on August 21, Pyxis Ocean’s WindWings can save 1.5 tonnes of fuel per wing, per day. Combined with alternative fuel sources, that number could rise. During its estimated six week travels, the cargo ship’s sails will be closely monitored in the hopes of scaling the technology across both Cargill’s fleet, as well as the larger shipping industry. Speaking with BBC, one project collaborator estimated a ship using four such wings could save as much as 20 tonnes of CO2 every day.

[Related: These massive, wing-like ‘sails’ could add wind power to cargo ships.]

“Wind is a near marginal cost-free fuel and the opportunity for reducing emissions, alongside significant efficiency gains in vessel operating costs, is substantial,” explained John Cooper, CEO of project collaborator, BAR Technologies.

In addition to being a zero emission propulsion source, wind power is both a non-depleting resource as well as predictable. Such factors could prove extremely promising in an industry responsible for around 2-3 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions—around 837 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Less than 100 cargo ships currently utilize some form of wind-assisted technology, a fraction of the over 110,000 operational vessels throughout the world. Depending on Pyxis Ocean’s performance, the massive WindWings could help spur increased green tech retrofitting, as well as new builds already coming equipped with the proper systems.

Elsewhere, similar wind-based vessel projects are already underway. Earlier this year, the Swedish company Oceanbird began construction on a set of 40-meter high, 200 metric ton sails to be retrofitted on the 14-year-old car carrier, Wallenius Tirranna. According to the trade publication Offshore Energy, one of Oceanbird’s sails could cut down emissions by 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel per year.

“The maritime industry is on a journey to decarbonize—it’s not an easy one, but it is an exciting one,” said Jan Bieleman, president of Cargill’s ocean transportation business.

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The US is investing more than $1 billion in carbon capture, but big oil is still involved

Andrew Paul — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Occidental is one of 100 companies responsible for over 70 of all emissions. Deposit Photos

Investing in carbon capture technology will be necessary for a sustainable future, but environmental advocates frequently stress that this alone is not a cure-all for pollutants. The DOE, for example, estimates between 400 million and 1.8 billion tons of CO2 will need annual sequestration to meet the nation’s net-zero goal by 2050. Meanwhile, critics are concerned fossil fuel companies could use carbon capture projects as an excuse to continue with business-as-usual—and a recent announcement may do little to ease their worries.

Last week, the US Department of Energy announced up to $1.2 billion in funding for the nation’s first commercial-scale carbon capture facilities designed to pull harmful greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere for underground storage. The two locations near Corpus Christi, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, will be the largest direct air capture (DAC) plants ever constructed. The facilities are estimated to annually remove over 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere—roughly equivalent to taking 445,000 gas-guzzling cars off the road.

[Related: Carbon capture could keep global warming in check—here’s how it works.]

Unlike other carbon capture equipment that pulls CO2 directly from pollution-emitting machinery and facilities, DAC setups are specifically designed to offset gasses generated by vehicles and airplanes, as well as remove legacy emissions. As Ars Technica noted on Monday, legacy emissions are those already released into the atmosphere over the last century or so and still greatly contribute to the planet’s current eco crisis.

Carbon dioxide emissions that last anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years in the atmosphere often originate from the operations of corporations like Occidental, a hydrocarbon and petrochemical manufacturer long considered to be one of 100 companies responsible for an estimated 71 percent of global emissions. In 2020, Occidental (often referred to by its stock symbol abbreviation, Oxy) announced the formation of 1PointFive, a subsidiary tasked with developing carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies.

“1PointFive’s mission is to reduce atmospheric CO2 and help curb global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2050 in alignment with Paris Agreement targets,” reads Oxy’s fast facts sheet for the company.

And according to the Biden administration’s August 11 announcement, 1PointFive will help oversee the development and implementation of the new carbon capture facility in Kleberg County, Texas. When completed, the South Texas DAC Hub reportedly will remove upwards of 1 million metric tons of CO2 alongside an “associated saline geologic CO2 storage site.” While undoubtedly a positive development in carbon sequestration efforts, 1PointFive’s origins illustrate the complicated landscape governments and climate advocates must deal with in the face of such steep environmental stakes.

[Related: Judge sides with youth activists in groundbreaking climate change lawsuit.]

The DOE did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing. When asked to comment on Oxy’s role in the planet’s climate crisis, a spokesperson directed PopSci to two previous press releases—one from last week regarding the DOE announcement, and one from 2022 concerning 1PointFive’s early role in the project.

“We are one of the largest oil producers in the US,” reads Occidental’s description in each press release, adding that, “We are committed to using our global leadership in carbon management to advance a lower-carbon world.”

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Judge sides with youth activists in groundbreaking climate change lawsuit

Laura Baisas — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Lead claimant Rikki Held, 22, confers with members of Our Children's Trust legal team before the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. William Campbell/Getty Images

On August 14, a judge in Montana sided with youth climate activists who argued in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that state agencies permitting fossil fuel development without considering its effect on the climate were violating their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” The groundbreaking trial in the United States adds to a small, but growing, number of legal decisions surrounding a duty by the government to protect US citizens from the worst effects of climate change.

[Related: Young climate defenders bring hope in an unprecedented US lawsuit.]

The provision in question is part of the Montana Environmental Policy Act which states that agencies are not permitted to consider the effects of greenhouse gasses on climate change when permitting new fossil fuel projects. In Held v. Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found that the provision is unconstitutional. While the latest ruling won’t prevent burning fossil fuels or mining in the state, it will reverse this recently passed state law that prohibits state agencies from considering emissions when permitting for fossil fuel projects.

“Montana’s emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury” to the youth, Judge Seeley wrote in the ruling.

It is now up to the Montana State Legislature to determine how to bring this policy into compliance. Changes may take some time, as the state has numerous fossil fuel and mining interests and is dominated by Republicans in the statehouse.

Julia Olson, an attorney representing the youth and with Our Children’s Trust celebrated the ruling. “As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” Olson said in a statement. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”

During the two-week long trial in June, the state of Montana did not try to dispute the science of climate change, but they argued the state’s greenhouse gas emissions were small in comparison to global emissions. The Montana attorney general’s office will appeal the ruling to the Montana Supreme Court.

“This ruling is absurd, but not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiffs’ attorneys put on a weeklong taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial,” Emily Flower, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Austin Knudsen, said in a statement according to Associated Press. “Their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. The State will appeal.”

During the trial, Stockholm Environment Institute expert Peter Erickson testified on behalf of the plaintiffs, saying he found that Montana emits the sixth-highest volume of greenhouse gas emissions per capita among US states and more than more than the total amount from 100 countries. He said that the state also has the potential to extract and burn even more, as it contains the largest recoverable coal deposits in the US and 10 times more oil than the state’s 4,000 oil wells currently draw.

[Related: Some climate activists aren’t suing over the future—they are taking aim at the present.]

The case was brought to court by 16 young Montanans ranging in age from five to 22, and is the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate change lawsuit brought to trial. Some experts believe that this win could still energize the environmental movement and help reshape climate litigation across the United States. Climate cases around the world have more than doubled since 2018, but lawsuits led by youth haven’t fared as well as this caseAccording to a report published in July from the United Nations Environment Program and Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at least 14 of these cases have been dismissed.

The plaintiffs made claims about injuries they have suffered as a result of climate change, including 22-year-old plaintiff Rikki Held detailing how extreme weather has hurt her family’s ranch.

The state argued that Montana’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is small and that changing the law would not bring on a major impact, also contending that the legislature should weigh in on the law. This was a surprising pivot from the expected climate denial defense.

“People around the world are watching this case,” Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told The Washington Post. “Everyone expected them to put on a more vigorous defense. And they may have concluded that the underlying science of climate change was so strong that they didn’t want to contest it.”

The nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust represented the plaintiffs in this case and has taken legal action on behalf of youths in all 50 states. It currently has cases pending in four other states.

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How a US lab created energy with fusion—again

Rahul Rao — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

About eight months ago, scientists at a US-government-funded lab replicated the process that powers stars—nuclear fusion—and created more energy than they put in. Now, physicists and engineers at the same facility, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, appear to have successfully created an energy-gaining fusion experiment for the second time.

NIF’s latest achievement is a step closer—the second step down a very long road—to a dream of fusion providing the world with clean, abundant energy. There is a long way to go before a fusion power plant opens in your city. But scientists are optimistic.

“It indicates that the scientists at [NIF] and their collaborators understand what happened back in December well enough that they have been able to make it happen again,” says John Pasley, a fusion scientist at York University in the UK who wasn’t part of this experiment.

NIF declined to comment, noting that the facility’s scientists had not yet formally presented their results. Until that happens, there’s a lot we won’t know about the specifics of the experiment, which took place on July 30.

There are multiple ways of achieving fusion, and NIF works with one, called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In NIF’s setup, a high-powered laser beam splits into 192 smaller beams, showering a capsule that scientists call a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum’s walls, this barrage spawns X-rays that crash into the capsule’s filling: a pellet of deuterium and tritium, super-squeezing it at temperatures and pressures more intense than the sun’s, initiating fusion.

The goal of all this work is to pass the break-even point and create more energy than the laser puts in: an achievement that fusion scientists call gain. In December’s experiment, 2.05 megajoules of laser beams elicited 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy. We won’t know for sure until NIF releases its data, but unnamed sources told the Financial Times that this second success created even greater gain.

[Related: Cold fusion is making a scientific comeback]

In addition, the December experiment achieved self-heating: a state where the fusion reaction powered itself, like a fire that no longer needs stoking. Many scientists think self-heating is a prerequisite to generating power in ICF. Outside scientists speculate that NIF’s new experiment also achieved self-heating.

“An obvious part of the scientific process is that you get the same result,” says Dennis Whyte, a fusion scientist at MIT who also wasn’t involved in the NIF research. “Of course, that’s extremely heartening.”

This is no small feat. ICF experiments are notoriously delicate. Very subtle changes to the lasers’ angles, to the shapes of the hohlraum and the pellet, and to any one of dozens of other factors could drastically alter the output. NIF in December barely scratched the surface of fusion gain, and it’s clear that tiny changes were the difference between passing break-even and not.

“We also repeat things, not just to see if they repeat, but also to see the sensitivities,” Whyte says. “Seeing the variability and the differences of those from experiment to experiment is really exciting.”

Since the 1950s fusion scientists have tried to accomplish what the NIF team has done, twice, in the past year. But the long-term goal is to turn these experimental forays into clean, cheap, abundant energy for the world’s people. Converting that milestone into a power plant is another quest entirely, and it has only just begun. If creating gain in the lab is like learning to light a fire, then using it to generate electricity is like building a steam engine.

“I would like to see them gradually shift some of their focus from demonstration of ignition and gain toward investigation of target designs that are closer to those which might be employed in a fusion power reactor,” Pasley says.

[Related: Microsoft thinks this startup can deliver on nuclear fusion by 2028]

To build a viable power plant, NIF will need to show greater gain. The December experiment created about 1.5 times as much energy as the NIF scientists put in. Even if the July experiment created two or three times as much energy, NIF won’t have come close to the gain that fusion scientists think is necessary for a viable power plant: some 100 times.

Gain of that magnitude would also make fusion a viable addition to the larger electrical grid. It’s difficult to understate the importance of NIF’s achievement, but the facility didn’t actually generate more energy than it took from the outside world. To power the laser that created those 3.15 megajoules, the device needed 300 megajoules from California’s grid.

NIF isn’t really the optimal place to complete this quest, partly because it was built to maintain the US nuclear weapons stockpile and can’t focus on fusion all the time. But for now, NIF will likely keep trying, running more and more laser shots. And scientists can compare the results with simulations to understand what is happening under the surface.

“What we assume is going to happen now is we’re going to get dozens of [runs], and we’re going to really learn a lot,” Whyte says.

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Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas

Andrew Paul — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Japan's bullet trains could finally be coming to America. Deposit Photos

A new high-speed railway system inspired by Japanese bullet trains could someday carry commuters between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. Announced on Wednesday, the partnership between Amtrak and a company called Texas Central aims to connect the two cities by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph.

According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to “several federal grant programs” to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region’s I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year.

[Related: High-speed rail trains are stalled in the US—and that might not change for a while.]

The trains traveling Amtrak’s Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan’s updated N700S Series Shinkansen “bullet train,” a design that first debuted in 2020. Bullet trains have operated in Japan for over half a century, and are now completely electric, as well as lighter and quieter than traditional railcars. Additionally, the transportation method generates just one-sixth the amount of carbon-per-passenger mile than a standard commercial jet, according to Texas Central’s descriptions.

“This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US,” Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement.

[Related: A brief, buttery ride on Shanghai’s maglev train.]

American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation “in the right circumstances.” If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050. Similar high-speed projects are also in the works to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles (though no track has actually been installed yet), as well as another that hopes to connect LA and Las Vegas, although repeated setbacks have delayed such endeavors.

“The US is really a very auto-centric country,” Ian Rainey, a senior vice president at Northeast Maglev, told PopSci in 2022. “… If you can get that sweet spot of big populations that are 100 to 300 miles apart from each other, I think you’ve got a winner for high-speed rail.”

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Colorado is getting a state-of-the-art laser fusion facility

Andrew Paul — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 18:00:00 +0000

High density laser-created plasma physics could help build nuclear fusion technology. Colorado State University

The path to fusion power is getting a $150 million boost thanks to a partnership between Colorado State University and private laser energy company, Marvel Fusion. Announced on Monday, the new facility will be located on the CSU Foothills Campus, and is set to feature at least three, multi-petawatt laser systems designed to advance research in “clean fusion energy, microelectronics, optics and photonics, materials science, medical imaging, and high energy density science.”

According to Marvel Fusion’s August 7 statement, the development of laser fusion “is critical because of its ability to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of how energy is supplied globally.” Nuclear fusion has long been considered the Holy Grail of clean energy generation—the necessary resources are virtually unlimited, and produces vastly larger amounts of energy compared to other green alternatives. Unlike the nuclear fission reactions seen in traditional nuclear power plants, fusion involves forcing atoms together within extremely high temperatures to produce a new atom with a smaller mass.

[Related: In 5 seconds, this fusion reactor made enough energy to power a home for a day.]

“This is an exciting opportunity for laser-based science, a dream facility for discovery and advanced technology development with great potential for societal impact,” said Jorge Rocca, director of CSU’s Laboratory for Advanced Lasers and Extreme Photonics, in this week’s announcement.

Although the CSU-Marvel Fusion project aims to begin operations in 2026, it is likely still many more years before nuclear fusion energy can affordably be produced at scale; some experts estimate it could take multiple decades to reach the goal, if ever.

Rendering of CSU and Marvel Fusion’s new laser facility. Credit: Hord Coplan Macht

Still, researchers have significant gains towards sustainable nuclear fusion energy. In 2021, for example, a team in the UK generated a record-breaking 59 megajoules of energy in only five seconds via fusion technology—enough to power a home for an entire day. Earlier this year, the US government also doled out a number of grants earmarked to reignite research into cold fusion.

[Related: Cold fusion is making a scientific comeback.]

The overall prospects are tantalizing enough that major companies are investing heavily in fusion research. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a power purchasing agreement with Helion, a startup hoping to achieve sustainable fusion by 2028. As ambitious as that may sound, Helion’s aspirations have garnered the interest of other investors—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who contributed $375 million to the company in 2021.

Alongside the new partnership project, Marvel Fusion is working towards the construction of a prototype composed of hundreds of laser systems “capable of achieving fusion ignition and proving the technology at scale.”

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Solar power helps keep Europe’s grid reliable in historic heat

Andrew Paul — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Solar power is getting countries like Spain and Greece through the hottest months of the year. Deposit Photos

Solar power is getting its literal and figurative moment in the sun as much of the world is beset by unprecedented, deadly heat waves—thus requiring reliable energy sources to help keep things cool. According to Reuters on Monday, European countries in particular are experiencing the benefits of the robust, rapidly growing green energy infrastructure.

On July 24, for example, Sicily’s stifling temperatures topped 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The region’s solar grid, however, ensured the cooling demands could be met via providing over half of the excess demand totaling around 1.3 GW, per data from financial and infrastructure data provider, Refinitiv. This reliability was bolstered by the major increase year-to-year in the amount of solar energy comprising Spain’s entire electricity output—up from just 16 percent in 2022 to nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy production this year, reports Reuters.

“Without the additional solar, the system stability impact would have turned out much worse,” said power analyst Nathalie Gerl.

That same day, Greece’s solar photovoltaic infrastructure covered roughly a third of the nation’s 10.35 GW demand. Meanwhile, solar power has handled the entirety of Belgium’s additional energy demands during midday spikes—typically the time when temperatures are at their highest.

[Related: July’s extreme heat waves ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change.]

The US has yet to reach such a solar stride. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistics and analysis group, solar generation composed just three percent of all US electricity in 2020. At this pace, the EIA estimates one-fifth of US energy will come from solar infrastructure by midcentury.

The Biden administration has loftier goals. In 2021, the Department of Energy’s Solar Futures Study indicated that solar energy has the potential to support 40 percent of US electricity consumption while employing roughly 1.5 million people, all without raising consumers’ electricity costs. Such aims are vital as dire climatic events become the new norm for vast portions of the globe.

Regardless, solar grids and their accompanying wind energy arrays grew at their fastest rate in US history last year, for a combined total of 13 percent of all the country’s power, according to USA Today. “Ten years ago that would have been unfathomable. Six years ago, people would have been incredulous,” Dan Whitten, vice president for public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said at the time.

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The world’s first hydrogen-powered train has made its final stop

Andrew Paul — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Hydrogen fuel-cell trains were found to be 80 percent more expensive than battery-powered alternatives. Christophe Gateau/picture alliance via Getty Images

Germany’s state-owned, $85 million hydrogen fuel-cell powered train system is shuttering almost exactly one year after its first public debute in August 2022. This doesn’t mean that the railways are reverting back to pollutant-spewing diesel engines, however. According to the country’s Ministry for Economic Affairs, Transport, Building and Digitisation, the lines will transition to electric battery-driven systems that are simply “cheaper to operate.”

As Quartz noted on Monday, Germany’s LVNG railway company first started planning diesel train phaseways all the way back in 2012, and began testing hydrogen fuel-cell trains in 2018. For years, the transition process in the Lower Saxony region was plagued by delays and logistical issues, such as retrofitting existing trains with the proper hardware and software.

At the time of its official rollout in August 2022, Stephan Weil, Minister-President of Lower Saxony, declared the project to be a “role model worldwide [and] an excellent example of a successful transformation made in Lower Saxony.” Weil added that, “As a country of renewable energies, we are thus setting a milestone on the way to climate neutrality in the transport sector.” By the end of the year, however, a state-commissioned study determined that hydrogen trains could be as much as 80 percent more expensive than other electric options. Last week, LVNG finally pulled the plug on its hydrogen fuel-cell plans.

[Related: Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever.]

Germany is still moving aggressively to address these issues while also attempting to maintain its goal to phase out all diesel trains by 2037. By decade’s end, for example, Lower Saxony officials plan to introduce 102 battery-electric trains alongside another 27 lines powered by catenary systems—overhead electricity lines that allow for constant power.

It’s unclear if or how Germany’s shift in railway plans could affect the many other hydrogen fuel-cell train projects across the world. Last year, for example, California approved over two dozen hydrogen trains, while Italy earmarked €300 million ($330 million) to convert many of its diesel trains to hydrogen power.

Other travel industries are also still steadily pushing forward with their own hydrogen plans. Over the summer, two US-based startups have conducted successful test flights of prop airplanes retrofitted to partially run on hydrogen fuel-cells. According to a recent report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, such retrofitted planes could generate as much as one-third less CO2 over its lifetime compared to green alternatives such as “e-kerosene” composed of carbon dioxide, water, and electricity.

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Shared e-scooters can be sustainable—but there’s a catch

Carla Delgado — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Zero-emissions travel will still beat out low-emissions travel when it is possible. Deposit Photos

The use of shared light, low-occupancy vehicles like bicycles and electric scooters (or e-scooters) is growing steadily in the United States and has become an essential part of urban transportation networks. Only 321,000 trips were recorded in 2010, rising to 112 million in 2021. These “micromobility” vehicles are typically designed to travel distances that are too short for driving but too far to walk. Almost 60 percent of all car trips in 2017 were less than six miles, which demonstrates the need for such micromobility solutions.

The rental of dockless e-scooter systems, in particular, emerged that same year and was operating in 65 cities in less than 12 months. Ride-sharing companies like Bird, Lime, and Superpedestrian make fleets of e-scooter available for users to rent for short periods through their respective apps. Because e-scooters have no tailpipe emissions and can replace short car trips, they are often the more eco-friendly mode of transportation. However, e-scooters still have environmental impacts that must be considered.

The sustainability of e-scooters

Giovanni Circella, director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program at the University of California, Davis, says that the use of e-scooters in US cities “tend to have somewhat positive effects in terms of environmental sustainability” by replacing the use of more polluting modes of transportation such as private cars and ride-hailing vehicles like Uber and Lyft.

In 2018, the Portland Bureau of Transportation launched a four-month pilot program to assess how e-scooters can help the city’s transportation needs. Data revealed that 34 percent of Portland riders and 48 percent of visitors took an e-scooter instead of driving a personal vehicle or taking an Uber, Lyft, or a taxi.

[Related: Could swappable EV batteries replace charging stations?]

E-scooters can also promote a culture of active travel and “get the critical mass to justify investments in bike lanes and other infrastructure projects that support the use of active travel modes,” says Circella. However, shared e-scooters have mixed impacts, and they can also replace trips that would have otherwise been made by walking, bicycling, or taking public transportation, he adds.

Although the pilot program revealed that a number of users replaced motor vehicle travel with e-scooter sharing, “it also found that scooter-sharing replaced some lower emission active transportation trips,” says Susan Shaheen, co-director of Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Data shows that about 42 percent of Portlanders would have taken lower-emission trips if scooters weren’t an option: 37 percent said they would walk and 5 percent would’ve taken a bicycle. Moreover, the operations of the program—which involves the deployment and retrieval of e-scooters every day—likely added motor vehicle trips to the transportation system, but it is beyond the scope of the study.

It’s important to understand the overall impact of e-scooters beyond the trips they replace and consider other factors like manufacturing and longevity because results can vary based on the assumptions and scenarios modeled, says Shaheen.

A study presented at the 2020 IEEE European Technology and Engineering Management Summit analyzed the environmental impacts of e-scooters under different scenarios, changing different variables like the lifespan, kind of batteries, type of vehicle used to collect them, the average distance per lifetime, and more.

[Related: The pandemic could make cities more bike-friendly—for good.]

In the best case scenario, where e-scooters last 24 months and have a swappable battery that is replaced by riding in electric vans, e-scooter sharing has a lower environmental impact than private cars, electric mopeds, and public transport busses, but is still less sustainable than trams, bicycles, and electric bicycles. However, in the worst-case scenario where the lifespan of e-scooters is only six months, they would have the worst environmental impact out of all.

A 2019 study published in Environmental Research Letters also reported that ensuring e-scooters are used for two years decreases the average life cycle emissions significantly.

Overall, shared e-scooters are most sustainable when they are replacing personalized individual transport, but it’s possible that they are also catalyzing trips that would not otherwise take place, says Parth Vaishnav, assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Therefore, local governments should think carefully about encouraging e-scooter use, where to deploy them, and whether there are more effective ways of providing mobility, he adds.

How to make shared e-scooter systems more sustainable

E-scooters are a relatively sustainable mode of transportation, but they can become even greener. Shaheen says the public and private sectors can support e-scooter sharing systems by establishing solar docking stations where practical, using clean or renewable energy sources to charge e-scooters, and using electric vehicles to help with the distribution of scooters would be beneficial.

Switching to electric vehicles for the rebalancing and charging of e-scooters and opting for renewable energy has the potential to reduce the amount of fossil fuel involved in its lifecycle and operations. Most e-scooter companies have yet to explore these options. In 2019, Spin ran a 60-day pilot program and deployed dozens of solar-powered docking stations in Washington D.C. and Ann Arbor, but it’s unclear what the results were.

“The use of pricing and incentives to impact pick-up and drop-off behavior could also help reduce the need to rebalance the scooter network,” says Shaheen. This goes along with the recommendation of the aforementioned 2019 study to reduce collection and distribution distance to minimize the environmental impacts of e-scooters. It also suggests using more efficient vehicles, increasing scooter lifetimes, and charging less frequently.

[Related: General Motors wants to predict when battery fires might happen.]

Policies may also help reduce the environmental burdens of integrating e-scooters into the transportation system. For instance, allowing e-scooters to remain in public areas overnight can already minimize the trips required to pick up fully charged e-scooters. E-scooter misuse and mistreatment also reduce their lifespans, so implementing policies against these acts would be beneficial. Vaishnav recommends demanding suppliers to produce more durable scooters.

In general, shared dockless e-scooter systems do increase mobility in cities for a number of people and have the potential to reduce emissions in the transportation industry. Concrete steps like ensuring a longer lifespan, switching to renewable energy for charging, and using electric vehicles to pick up and drop off e-scooters would help make them even more sustainable.

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Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever

Andrew Paul — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Companies like Universal Hydrogen are retrofitting planes with hydrogen fuel cells.

Despite only recently taking to the skies, hydrogen-powered planes are already assuaging some skeptics about their role within a more sustainable airline industry. And while current prototypes won’t be making transoceanic flights anytime soon, their proofs-of-concept could guide better, more efficient, and larger craft in the years to come.

As Canary Media highlighted on August 2, two California-based startups’ have recently run multiple successful test flights for their experimental hydrogen gas fuel cell propeller planes. Both prototypes involve retrofitting existing turboprops to accommodate hydrogen fuel technology, albeit in slightly different ways to achieve different goals.

Universal Hydrogen’s 40-passenger Dash 8 prototype, for example, pairs an original jet fuel engine alongside a 1.2 megawatt fuel cell and 800-kilowatt electric motor. According to the company’s CTO Mark Cousin, the Dash 8 has successfully flown a total of nine times as high as 10,000 feet while at speeds upwards of 170 knots (195 mph). Meanwhile, ZeroAvia’s modified 19-seat Dornier 228 has flown 10 times at 5,000 feet while traveling at 150 knots without any issues. The company’s twin-engine turboprop includes one standard fuel setup, as well as a 600 kilowatt combination of hydrogen fuel cells and batteries.

[Related: This plane powered by hydrogen has made an electrifying first flight.]

Air travel has steadily rebounded following countries’ easing of COVID-19 lockdown precautions. While the numbers still aren’t pre-pandemic levels, they are expected to surpass them by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). All those additional planes in the sky come with carbon emissions—roughly 800 metric tonnes of it, as of last year. In order to ensure a sustainable future, the IEA estimates that nations need to keep those CO2 levels below 1000 metric tonnes through the decade’s end. Unfortunately, the organization currently deems the airline industry “not on track” to achieving the goal.

For years, industry experts largely agreed that hydrogen fuel airplanes simply weren’t economically or logistically viable, given issues such as hydrogen canisters’ space requirements and their overall power outputs. Over time, however, both Universal Hydrogen and ZeroAvia intend to transition to liquid hydrogen, which packs more of a punch while also taking up less canister space.

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test.]

Given the current technological landscape, flights that can completely run on hydrogen will still likely be restricted to shorter distance journeys, but that could still put a major dent in airline emissions. According to a new report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, even a retrofitted fuel-cell plane could generate one-third less CO2 over its entire lifetime compared to even “e-kerosene,” i.e. fuel made from water, carbon dioxide, and electricity.

“The question of how to create sustainable air travel has plagued the green movement for decades,” Dale Vince, an environmental entrepreneur planning to utilize ZeroAvia’s engine for passenger flights between England and Scotland, told the BBC in July. “The desire to travel is deeply etched into the human spirit, and flights free of C02 emissions, powered by renewable energy will allow us to explore our incredible world without harming it for the first time.”

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Outdated broadband equipment could find new life as EV chargers

Andrew Paul — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000

These green broadband hardware housing units are ubiquitous in the UK. Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A UK-based telecom giant is currently overseeing a massive logistical campaign to decommission its copper-based broadband and phone lines in favor of fiber connections. Doing so, however, will render its estimated 90,000 hefty streetside equipment cabinets obsolete. But instead of simply chucking the large housing units to the curb, the company hopes to upcycle the majority of them to help Britain’s ongoing transition to a greener future.

According to a recent announcement from BT Group, the telecom provider intends to retrofit as many as 60,000 of its ubiquitous, green broadband wiring containers into EV chargers in the coming years. Beginning next month, BT will conduct a slate of technical and commercial tests starting in Northern Ireland, with plans to expand to public trials by the end of the year.

[Related: 8.3 million places in the US still lack broadband internet access.]

“With the ban on sales of internal combustion engine vehicles coming in 2030, and with only around 45,000 public charge points today, the UK needs a massive upgrade to meet the needs of the EV revolution,” Tom Guy, managing director of BT’s innovation department, said in a statement. “The pilots are critical for the team to work through the assessment and establish effective technical, commercial and operational routes to market over the next two years.”

Although UK’s existing streetside EV chargers can be found across the country, the majority are concentrated in urban areas such as London and Birmingham. Last year, the government earmarked roughly £1.6 billion ($2.6 billion) to install at least 235,000 more strategically placed charge points by the decade’s end, although it is currently unclear if any of that funding will reach BT’s project. On BT’s end, there are still many factors to consider for such a sizable undertaking, including accessibility, cabinet locations, local engagement in planning, and funding options.

[Related: Volvo is the latest automaker to hop on the Tesla EV-charging bandwagon.]

As The Next Web notes, however, recent governmental analysis estimates the country is “10 years behind” its intended green energy infrastructure goals, with less than 40 percent of its emissions reductions supported by “proven policies and sufficient funding.” That said, it has made major strides in areas such as reducing reliance on coal—from 40 percent of all energy production in 2012 to just two percent in 2022.

BT’s announcement hopefully will be the first of many similar private company projects aimed at boosting the UK’s green energy transition. “Programs like BT Group’s are an incentive for other businesses and drivers to go electric,” Helen Clarkson, CEO at the non-profit Climate Group, told The Next Web at the time. “But we need the UK government to play its part.”

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Two ancient materials may help solve a modern energy dilemma

Andrew Paul — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:00:00 +0000

The conductive cement could one day find its way into homes and other buildings. FRANZ-JOSEF ULM, ADMIR MASIC, AND YANG-SHAO HORN

Storing clean energy is as vital as harvesting it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of rechargeable batteries currently rely on rare earth metals like lithium, the mining of which is fraught with environmental and ethical issues. According to researchers, however, a promising alternative can be found simply by combining two of civilization’s oldest and most commonplace materials: cement, and the charcoal-like mixture known as carbon black.

As detailed in a new study published on July 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, engineers working together from MIT and the Wyss Institute recently discovered that properly mixing the two ingredients in electrolyte-infused water creates a powerful, low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later usage. With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging.

[Related: This rechargeable battery is meant to be eaten.]

Much like batteries, supercapacitors store and direct large reserves of electrical power. To do this, designers soak two conductive plates in an electrolyte solution before inserting a membrane between them. Once charged, the barrier then prevents ions from traveling between the positive and negative plates, thus storing the potential power for later usage.

In the case of researchers’ new cement-based material, however, its relatively high internal surface area is key to its supercapacitor potential. After combining highly conductive carbon black, cement powder, and water, researchers wait for their resultant mixture to cure. During this time, the water naturally creates tiny openings which are subsequently filed by the carbon to ostensibly create an internal, fractal-like network of wiring. Position two plates of this material atop one another and separate them by an insulating layer, and you have a novel supercapacitor at your disposal.

Credit: Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn

According to researchers such as paper co-author Admir Masic, the new material is as promising as it is poignant—cement usage dates as far back as 6,500 BCE, while carbon black was the ink authors employed to pen the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that, when you combine them in a specific manner, you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting,” Masic said in a statement.

The team envisions projects such as stretches of roadways imbued with the concrete supercapacitator material wired to nearby solar panel arrays. Similar to experimental projects already underwayin Europe, the streets themselves could then be harnessed to wireless charge vehicles as they ride atop the surface. But before they get to such a potentially revolutionary civic engineering project, researchers have to start small.

[Related: Get ready for the world’s first permanent EV-charging road.]

To initially test their new material, Masic and their colleagues first created a trio of tiny, 1 volt supercapacitator prototypes, each roughly 1cm in diameter and 1mm-thick. When wired together, the three conductors easily powered a 3-volt LED. Going forward, the team hopes to scale up their prototypes to a 12-volt example comparable to an EV battery, then a 45-cubic-meter supercapacitator capable of hypothetically powering an entire home.

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Cold War-era atomic weapons facilities in the US could become clean energy powerhouses

Andrew Paul — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Locations like New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could get green energy facility makeovers courtesy of the DOE. Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Government-owned land, previously home to Cold War-era atomic weapons manufacturing facilities, could soon receive new, green leases on life. According to an announcement on July 28, the US Department of Energy’s “Cleanup to Clean Energy” initiative has identified five sites across the US, totalling roughly 70,000 acres, to be potentially utilized for massive solar, wind, and nuclear energy projects.

As Reuters notes, some of these locations—such as Richland, Washington’s now-decommissioned Hartford Site—were first built in the 1940s to produce plutonium and uranium for the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs. Other locations such as New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), however, are much more recent projects. Established in 1999, the WIPP is the country’s only deep geologic nuclear waste repository, and includes over 185,000 containers filled with transuranic-contaminated “clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and other items” roughly 2,000 feet underground, according to its official website. Additional sites that will potentially receive green renovations include the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

[Related: What ‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t tell you about atomic bombs.]

“We are going to transform the lands we have used over decades for nuclear security and environmental remediation by working closely with tribes and local communities together with partners in the private sector to build some of the largest clean energy projects in the world,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in an official statement.

The DOE’s Cleanup to Clean Energy is part of federal agencies’ ongoing response to President Biden’s December 2021 executive order directing them to use 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2030. To help meet the goal, Executive Order 14057 directed officials to authorize the use of property assets including land “through leases, grants, permits, or other mechanisms.”

As the federal government ramps up such projects, private industry is also looking to renovate similarly outdated and retired sites on their own. Earlier this year, the company charged with demolishing the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan’s Van Buren county announced revamped intentions to restart the 800 megawatt facility. If successful, it will mark the first time a US nuclear reactor restarted after losing its fuel and operating licenses.

Although there are currently no detailed plans or construction timelines currently available, based on the executive order’s directives, it’s safe to say these DOE green renovation projects should be up-and-running by the end of the decade.

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7 automakers team up to cover the US and Canada with fast EV chargers

Sara Kiley Watson — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Each fast-charging machine costs somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000. DepositPhotos

For some drivers, electric vehicles sound pretty awesome—until it comes down to charging. Range anxiety is a real thing, and while there are around 32,000 fast chargers across the US that can refill your EV’s battery in half an hour or so, that’s still quite small compared to the more than 100,000 gas stations across the US as of 2017. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that there needs to be around 182,000 fast chargers across the country by 2030 to support the 30-42 million predicted EVs on the road.

When it comes to EVs and charging them, Tesla normally makes the biggest headlines, but this time other automakers are stepping up in an Avengers-style move. This week, a coalition of seven automotive companies—BMW Group, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group, and Stellantis NV—made a commitment to bring 30,000 fast chargers to North America. The first of these should come online by summer 2024, according to their announcement.

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source.]

“To accelerate the shift to electric vehicles, we’re in favor of anything that makes life easier for our customers,” Mercedes-Benz Group CEO Ola Källenius said in the statement. “Charging is an inseparable part of the EV-experience, and this network will be another step to make it as convenient as possible.”

According to Reuters, each fast-charging machine costs somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000, making this endeavor one that could cost billions of dollars. Currently, Tesla has the largest network of fast chargers with 45,000 supercharging locations globally.

Some of the companies involved with this new undertaking include companies such as GM and Mercedes that have already signed on to start using Tesla’s charging technology, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), starting in 2025. The others still have product plans using the Combined Charging System (CCS). The new stations, according to the announcement, will offer charging connectors for both systems.

The announcement stated that the network “intends” to solely run on renewable energy, but a plan for this has not yet been disclosed. The chargers will be concentrated in urban areas and on highways.

“We think this is an important step forward,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told Reuters. President Joe Biden has previously stated goals to bring 500,000 EV chargers online by 2030.

[Related: EV adoption doesn’t lighten energy costs for all American families.]

Currently, the vast majority of EV chargers in the US are “level 2” chargers, which can take anywhere from four to 10 hours to completely charge a vehicle, according to the Washington Post. Owners of EVs frequently have those level-2 chargers installed at their homes. System malfunctions also currently run amok—a recent survey found that one in five EV owners have rolled up to a charger and were then unable to charge due to issues like system malfunctions.

“We believe that a charging network at scale is vital to protecting freedom of mobility for all, especially as we work to achieve our ambitious carbon neutrality plan,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in the statement. “A strong charging network should be available for all.”

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An Israeli wind project draws scrutiny on turbines and people’s health

Zayna Syed — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:07:20 +0000

Wind turbines operate in a wind farm in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights on the the border with Syria. A new wind project has spurred protests among native farmers in the area. Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images

Scientists agree that harnessing energy from renewable sources to power our lights, ACs, phones, stoves, and cars will be necessary to slow global warming. But wind farms across the world have increasingly been subject to protest by communities whose land they’ve encroached on. People in small towns across the US have raised concerns at zoning meetings about health issues and depressed property values. An Indigenous group in Norway says a wind farm will affect their ability to herd reindeer, a concern supported by climate activist Greta Thunberg.

One of the most common concerns raised by protestors worldwide is how these turbines will affect their health. People say wind projects near their homes, different from the off-shore wind farms at sea, have caused a range of harmful effects on their bodies, including migraines, chronic pain, increased blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping.

When wind turbines are properly regulated, these problems don’t quite reach the point of a public health concern, says Chris Ollson, an environmental health consultant in Canada who has worked for on minimizing fallout from wind projects for more than a decade. He points to more than a hundred studies that measure the impacts of wind turbines on sleep and other biological responses.

When wind turbines are properly regulated, problems don’t quite reach the point of a public health concern.
Chris Ollson, environmental health consultant

But regulations don’t always consider important local context. Take the Golan Heights for example, where one of the world’s more contentious wind projects led thousands of Druze farmers to protest in the streets in June. The Golan has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and was annexed in 1981, although international law and every country except the US recognizes it as Syrian land. The state’s relations with the Druze community, most of whom consider themselves Syrian, have been tense—Israeli police responded to the recent demonstrations with force, using teargas, water cannons, and rubber-coated metal bullets.

The chief concern of the protestors is how the wind farm, proposed by the multinational company Energix, would further entrench Israeli occupation over the Golan. But another main concern is how the turbines will affect their health. In the region, regulations must consider context and the circumstances in which the new site would be built, Druze leaders say.

Noise pollution and shadow flicker

The two primary health concerns with wind farms include the level of noise they emit and the flickering lights they create, called “shadow flicker,” Ollson says. Disruptions are created when the three-pronged turbines spin, emulating a slow, giant fan. Typically, governments don’t allow wind farms to send more than 50 decibels of sound to nearby houses, which is about as loud as the hum from a household refrigerator.

The noise pollution could prevent those living nearby from sleeping properly. When people can’t rest well for a prolonged period of time, it can reduce their quality of life. They might feel both tired and sick, which could lead to trouble eating and exercising, among other problems, Ollson explains. However, research shows that turbines that hum at less than 45 to 50 decibels don’t have any statistical effect on sleep quality, he adds.

Ollson points to one 2016 study from Canada that he says is considered the gold standard around the world. The government studied the sleep quality of 720 people who lived between 820 feet to about 7 miles away from a wind farm emitting a range of 20 to 46 decibels of noise. The researchers used actimeters, which are similar to fitbits, to track participants’ sleep quality. The study found no statistical difference between those living near the wind farm and those living a few miles away. “There’s some indication when we go over 55 or 60 decibels that it’s probably too close. But ultimately, we aren’t seeing that in jurisdictions that are [regulated] properly,” Ollson says.

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms]

It’s unclear exactly how many decibels of sound the Energix wind project would wreak on Majd Al Shams, one of the few remaining Druze towns in the Golan. The farm is expected to be about 3,280 feet away from the neighborhoods, meaning the residents should be safe from noise. But farmers who work near the project would still be exposed—and there are more than 1,800 cottages that people visit regularly on the farming properties a few hundred feet away from the designated site, Wael Tarabieh, a project manager for Al Marsad, says.

Other major health concerns from living or working around turbines are epileptic seizures, headaches, nausea, and general disturbance from shadow flicker, which occurs when the sun shines through the turbine’s spinning prongs, causing a shadowing effect that can sometimes be seen in homes and buildings. People can simulate shadow flicker by pointing a flashlight at a ceiling or desk fan: The dark shapes created on the wall are similar to what people living near a wind farm might experience, though at a significantly lower rate, given that the fan blades move much faster than a turbine’s does. A near universal standard across the world is limiting shadow flicker to 30 hours per year, Ollson says. This can be done by using computer programs to model conditions and choosing spots for turbines accordingly.

“We can’t find a correlation in these larger epidemiological studies” between shadow flicker and headaches or nausea, Ollson notes. And the turbines move too slowly to cause epileptic seizures, he adds. “What the majority of my colleagues in the field would say, is that shadow flicker isn’t a health concern, but it is an annoyance or nuisance. Imagine you’re sitting in your place tonight, and if I was standing at the wall and turning your lights on and off, in a slow fashion, for 20 minutes at a time. You would not enjoy that.”

An Israeli Centurion tank abandoned during 1973 Kipur war, sits on a older wind farm in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights. Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images

But in the Golan, some residents could experience up to one hour of shadow flicker per day during certain times of the year. This is because of the wind farm’s location and use of larger turbine blades, Israeli doctor Ofer Megged told Al Marsad for their 2018 report on the wind farm. The project has been modified several times since then—it’s unclear how many hours of shadow flicker the latest plan would produce.

All forms of energy have their drawbacks, Ollson adds. Oil refineries and coal plants, the main way the world has generated power for the past century, churn out air pollution, which has been linked to a much wider range of health problems, including increased risk of asthma, cancers, and heart disease.

Winds of change in the Golan Heights

New construction needs to take native people, their history, and their current situation into context, explains Munir Fakher Eldin, an assistant professor and dean of the faculty of arts at Birzeit University in Palestine who writes about land rights. He calls the new wind farm in the Golan, where he is from, a form of greenwashing.

The Golan is known for its wealth of natural resources, such as water, wind, and potentially petroleum. The area is attractive for renewables because of an estimated wind speed almost double that of Israel’s coastal plane, vast open areas, and low population density, according to the Syria Report. Wind energy is a major component of Israel’s net zero goal, and the country plans for nearly half of it to come from the Golan.

[Related: What companies really mean when they say they’re ‘net-zero’]

The Golan is already home to two wind farms, which are both near Israeli settlements. (Some settlers have also opposed the turbines, according to Tarabieh.) Israel also has plans to build a dozen more wind projects in the Golan to serve locals, both native and non-native. But the Energix project, first proposed in 2018, has received scrutiny from the Druze and become the subject of both protests and lawsuits for the past five years.

After Israel began to occupy the Golan in 1967, they expelled around 131,000 Syrians, which was about 95 percent of the population in the area, according to Al Marsad. Since then, the 1,800 cottages near the wind farm have served as a place for many to escape. “Our agricultural lands are not simply a place to cultivate the land. Actually, they are a kind of extension to our everyday life,” Tarabieh says. “Most of the people escape from [overcrowding in Majd Al-Shams] to the agricultural lands to spend the time with their family. People sleep in these cottages all the time … That’s why in our case, it’s really very dangerous. It’s not that people are afraid of or imagining something. It’s real, and we are all close to it.”

The new project would also subsume a quarter of agricultural land left to farmers, who were already stripped of most of their land more than 50 years ago. Settlements, military facilities, and national park acquisition put 95 percent of the Golan under Israeli control, according to Tarabieh. The wind farm would also limit how much Majd Al-Shams could grow. Mountains in the north, a ceasefire line in the east, and settlements in the west mean that the agricultural land to the south, where the farm is planned, is the only place the town could expand. A new residential zoning code also allows houses to be built much closer to the turbines, which could increase health risks from the wind farm, Tarabieh says.

In our case, it’s really very dangerous. It’s real, and we are all close to it.
Wael Tarabieh, a project manager for Al Marsad

Fakher Eldin and Tarabieh also think the development would affect residents’ psychological health. In a complaint echoed by those living near wind farms around the world, the turbines, which stand at about 680 feet tall, would ruin their land’s pastoral beauty. What’s different in the Golan though, they say, is the wind farm could serve as yet another reminder of how little control the native Syrian communities have over their home. “The land is part of people’s identity and sense of security, belonging, and communal safety,” says Fakher Eldin. “Basically we’re defending our right for reasonable existence on our land … The wind farm will feel like a suffocating presence.”

Update (July 28, 2023): The headline of this story has been changed from “Are wind farms low-key harming people’s health.” The article focuses on health concerns in some communities living around turbines, mainly in the Israel-annexed region the Golan Heights. Scientific reports and experts stress that most of the issues, which are far less severe than health effects stemming from oil refineries and coal plants, can be managed through proper siting and safety regulations. The political context in the Golan Heights, however, makes new wind farms more fraught for native residents.

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Artificial nests could give endangered birds a home near new offshore wind farm

Andrew Paul — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Three offshore artificial nest towers can each house around 500 birds. Red7Marine

A major offshore wind farm provider has just completed the construction of three massive artificial nesting structures (ANS) along England’s East Coast. The trio of massive bird houses is part of an agreement to protect a local, endangered seabird—the black-legged kittiwake gull. According to an announcement from UK-based marine contractor Red7Marine, each structure can house 500 nests for the gulls. The contractor hopes they will provide researchers with the means to monitor the bird population’s health over the course of the farm’s entire lifespan.

One of wind farms’ central drawbacks are their impacts on local bird populations, particularly the effects of off-shore turbines on vulnerable seabirds. And while climate change undoubtedly remains these species’ biggest existential threat, mitigating these unintended byproducts of green infrastructure expansion is key to ensuring a responsible transition towards a sustainable future.

[Related: When wind turbines kill bats and birds, these scientists want the carcasses.]

That outlook was central to the approval of the UK’s Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm, which is the country’s first turbine project to require “ecological compensation,” according to sustainable technology site Electrek on Friday. Once completed in 2025, Hornsea 3 will provide roughly 2.85-gigawatts of power to the country—enough to power over 3 million homes. Before that can happen, however, the Danish wind farm company Ørsted partnered with Red7Marine and others to design and erect the new kittiwake apartment complexes.

The three ANS are located less than a mile off the coast of England, and required a pair of “jack-up” barges alongside a host of other tools to build. According to Red7Marine, a team of architects, engineers, and ecologists collaborated to design the artificial eight-sided nesting walls, which feature narrow ledges to replicate kittiwakes’ natural cliffside habitats. The main structure is also intentionally painted off-white to blend in with both the ocean and sky, while the interior is furnished with tables, chairs, and whiteboards for researchers visiting the locales. Each nest nook also includes sliding Perspex paneling to allow for unobtrusive monitoring of the kittiwakes.

“Kittiwake are listed as at risk from extinction and with climate change as a key driver to their decline, a move towards a green energy system could help considerably in the long-term conservation of the species,” Ørsted’s environmental manager Eleni Antoniou said in a statement provided to Electrek. “In the meantime, the provision of these structures will provide a safe, nesting space to enable future generations to raise young away from predators and out of town centers.”

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US climate efforts look promising, but there’s more to do

Sara Kiley Watson — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 14:00:00 +0000

By 2035, an estimated 63 to 87 percent of all US power generation could come from zero or low emitting plants. Deposit Photos

On August 16, 2022, President Joe Biden signed what many have called the most important climate legislation in the history of the US—the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). After years of slow progress and resistance against policies that support the growth of clean energy and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the IRA finally looked like it could get the US back on track to Paris Climate Agreement goals. While the estimated decrease in emissions is notable, however, we’re still not on track to reach these lofty goals with the IRA alone.

Eleven months after the enactment of the IRA, the Rhodium Group, an independent research group, published their annual Taking Stock report, this time including projecting the greenhouse gas reductions of the policy for the coming decades. What they’ve found is that the current policies, as of June 2023, put the US on track to decrease emissions 32 to 51 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. By 2030, the US is expected to achieve 29 to 49 percent reductions, which is a “meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations,” the authors write, but still not enough to hit Paris goals.

[Related: ‘Humanity on thin ice’ says UN, but there is still time to act on climate change.]

The IRA largely takes aim at slashing emissions in the power and transportation sectors, and Rhodium’s analysis shows that these sectors are off to a good start. The report shows that in 2035 an estimated 63 to 87 percent of all US power generation could come from zero or low emitting plants, up from 40 percent in 2022. This, combined with the rapid growth of the electric vehicle industry, is poised to reduce household energy bills by $2,200-$2,400 per year in 2035 from 2022 levels, according to the report.

However, a challenge still lies in the industry sector of emissions reductions, where the law has a negligible impact on fossil fuel use from things like petroleum refining and steel production. “A bunch of these emissions are coming from burning stuff to heat stuff up,” Ben King, an associate director with Rhodium and lead author of the report, told the Washington Post. “We think there’s an opportunity to electrify those processes, but we’re still trying to crack the nut on those solutions.”

On top of that, continuing progress in power reductions would require an addition of 32-92 gigawatts of wind and solar power every year between now and 2035. According to the report, 32 GW of renewables is “roughly equivalent to the best year of renewable installations on record.”

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

The report goes to show that federal policies can only take the country so far—reaching Paris Agreement goals is possible with supporting policies at the state level. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, DC and 24 states (such as California, New York, and Oregon) have all adopted specific emissions reduction targets, but some states (like Texas, Georgia, and Ohio) still lag behind.

“The IRA is the most substantial federal action the US has ever taken to combat climate change, but it was not intended to solve every decarbonization challenge in one bill,” the authors write. “A sustained stream of federal and state actions is the only way to close the US emissions gap.”

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This art installation will tell time and produce solar energy

Sara Kiley Watson — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Rendering of Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time). The installation will act as an hourly art show, shady spot to cool down, and renewable energy generator. LAGI

The oldest known sundial was made in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, for telling the time as the sun passed through the day’s sky. Since then, we’ve upgraded our time-telling technology significantly—but the fascination with tracking the sun remains.

Today, the sun’s power is often discussed as a means to create clean, renewable energy through solar photovoltaic and thermal cells. A recently announced permanent artwork in the city of Houston, Texas makes a way to celebrate sun-centered technology over the eons. Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano plans to build the world’s largest free-standing sundial which will simultaneously generate clean energy. The 100-foot-tall arch is expected to produce around 400,000 kilowatt-hours of solar electricity each year, equivalent to the demand of around 40 Texas homes.

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano originally entered the idea, called the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time), in a Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) design competition for Abu Dhabi in 2019. The arch has found its new home, however, acting as an entrance to Houston’s Second Ward community. The sculpture acts as a giant clock, as different beams of light create geometric shapes corresponding with the seasons of the year and the hours of the day on the ground and surfaces of the arch. At night, the arch will be used as a stage for concerts and other community events.

Rendering of the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time) at night. Credit: LAGI.

“The apparent movement of the sun in the sky activates the space with light and colors and engages viewers who participate in the creation of the work by their presence,” Mariano said in a release. “It is a practical example to illustrate the movement of the earth around the sun in a playful way.”

The south-facing exterior of the giant arch will be linked with solar modules, which will allow the artwork itself to offset the power demand of the nearby community arts center Talento Bilingue de Houston. Over its lifetime, LAGI states that the artwork will be able to generate over 12 million kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to “pay back” the footprint required to create the artwork and it’s materials.

[Related: Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite.]

This isn’t the first, or likely the last, exploration of renewable energy as art. While some opponents to clean energy projects note the less-than-attractive appearance of solar panels or wind turbines lining the landscape, innovative projects can turn energy-generating projects into gorgeous murals to funky sculptures that double as charging stations.

Robert Ferry, one of the Land Art Generator Initiative co-founders, hopes the Arco del Tiempo can hopefully act as “an antidote to climate despair” in one of the most climate change-impacted regions in the US. The installation is set to be completed in 2024.

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An American start-up claims it just set a geothermal energy record

Andrew Paul — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:05:00 +0000

Fervo Energy's Project Red site can generate 3.5 megawatts of geothermal power 24/7. Fervo Energy

Harnessing the Earth’s geothermal energy at a commercial scale could be an integral part of society’s transition to greener infrastructure, and a Houston-based startup just claimed a major milestone in making that goal a reality. On Tuesday, Fervo Energy confirmed it has successfully completed a 30-day trial run of its Project Red commercial pilot site in northern Nevada. The results could help open the industry at a crucial moment for climate sustainability.

According to the energy company’s July 18 announcement, the Project Red site was able to produce 3.5 megawatts of sustained power—enough to fuel approximately 2,600 homes—over the industry standard, month-long energy test. Fervo also contends their proof-of-concept sets new records for flow and power outputs.

Geothermal power is an incredibly attractive green energy source, as it is completely carbon-free and can operate 24/7, unlike solar and wind farms. The US Department of Energy estimates the country sits atop enough geothermal energy to hypothetically power the entire world, but only about 0.4 percent of the nation’s energy came from such sources in 2022.

[Related: How heat pumps can help fight global warming.]

That said, geological limitations—such as the right amounts of heat, water, and underground permeability—have largely restricted harvesting to shallow hydrothermal sources in areas such as Nevada’s Great Basin region. Meanwhile, mining operations can destabilize an underground area enough to trigger earthquakes.

An enhanced geothermal system (EGS), however, leverages oil and gas tech to drill much deeper into the Earth to reach energy reservoirs. As Bloomberg notes, engineers and researchers have attempted to make commercial EGS a viable avenue for energy production since the 1970s, and Fervo’s recent demonstration is the first to be done at such a scale.

Fervo’s EGS works by vertically drilling deep into geothermal reserves, thus allowing for multiple wells at a single location. Project Red’s setup, for example, uses a pair of 7,700 feet deep wells connected by roughly 3,250 feet long horizontal pipes. As Canary Media explains, fluid is then pumped into the reservoir, where it is heated to as much as 376 degrees Fahrenheit and fed into turbines to generate electricity. Meanwhile, fiber optic cables installed within the wells provide real-time monitoring of temperature, flow, and performance to best optimize its performance.

A number of roadblocks remain before EGS sites like Fervo’s can expand their scope—most importantly, reducing costs and meeting regulatory approvals. In 2022, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced the Enhanced Geothermal Shot, which aims to reduce EGS costs by 90 percent to roughly $45 per megawatt hour by 2035. Regardless of future costs, however, a previously announced partnership with Google will soon begin using Project Red’s energy generation to fuel a portion of its data centers near Las Vegas.

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A cap on ‘luxury’ emissions could make a clean energy transition fairer

Andrew Paul — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 22:00:00 +0000

A new study confirms the wealthiest must do their part to help stave off climate collapse. Deposit Photos

There are a myriad of things everyday consumers can do to reduce their carbon footprints: basic water conservation, recycling, and transitioning to electric vehicles. While it’s true that everyone can benefit from striving to live their greenest lives, a new study reaffirms a less popularized fact—the world’s wealthiest are disproportionately responsible for producing dangerous carbon emissions.

According to a new study, reducing “luxury” demands from the top 20 percent of Europeans using the most energy would save seven times the amount of emissions generated from meeting energy needs for the continent’s bottom 20 percent. In doing so, the hypothetical cutbacks would more than make up for the necessary emissions that stem from lifting the most vulnerable out of what some call energy poverty.

[Related: ‘Slow water’ could transform the Southwest, one little rock wall at a time.]

As detailed in a paper published on Monday in Nature Energy, researchers working together from the Universities of Leeds and Manchester modeled narrowing European households’ energy uses across an array of instances, including personal transportation, home insulation, and holiday travel. To do so, researchers created a fictional country composed of 100 citizens drawn from 27 European countries—all of the EU minus Austria, alongside the UK. In this scenario, the first citizen uses the least energy, with each subsequent resident using more. Researchers then lowered the demands of residents 81-to-100 down to the level of the 80th citizen, while simultaneously raising the energy demand of residents 1-19 to the level of resident 20.

The team determined that such luxury usage caps cut household energy emissions by over 11 percent, alongside transportation emissions by nearly 17 percent. Meanwhile, meeting needs for impoverished Europeans only raised emissions by barely 1 percent for home energy, and just under 1 percent for transportation costs.

[Related: Recycling plants spew a staggering amount of microplastics.]

In an interview with The Guardian on Monday, University of Leeds professor of sustainable welfare and study lead author Milena Buchs explained, “We have to start tackling luxury energy use to stay within an equitable carbon budget for the globe, but also to actually have the energy resources to enable people in fuel poverty to slightly increase their energy use and meet their needs.”

Such energy use reductions are incredibly feasible for middle- and upper-class residents, as they frequently have more agency and financial leeway to make the necessary adjustments with little-to-no impact on their quality of living. While technological innovations must still lead the way to a sustainable, healthy future for the planet, reducing the wealthiest individuals’ footprint is also a major component in ensuring critical climate goals are met.

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This giant solar power station could beam energy to lunar bases

Andrew Paul — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:35:00 +0000

An orbiting solar power station above the moon could one day be feasible. European Space Agency

Harvesting solar power here on Earth is limited to a location’s daylight hours—a restriction that doesn’t exist while in space. Knowing this, researchers have long theorized and experimented on ways to construct solar farming satellites capable of beaming virtually unlimited clean energy back to Earth via microwave transmissions. But as progress inches closer to making the science fiction concept a reality, a new project taking shape aims to amass solar power beyond Earth’s surface—in this case, from the moon.

According to a recent European Space Agency (ESA) bulletin, engineers at the Swiss company Astrostrom unveiled the first details for their Greater Earth Lunar Power Station, or GE⊕-LPS, in a study published earlier this year. Taking a cue from butterfly wing physiology, the GE⊕-LPS includes V-shaped solar panels positioned in a helix configuration over one-square-kilometer in length. Such a size could hypothetically allow the satellite station to beam as much as 23 megawatts of sustained energy to a lunar base. For reference, a single megawatt of power can supply as many as 200 houses in Texas with energy during times of peak demand.

[Related: A potentially revolutionary solar harvester just left the planet.]

Per the team’s study, both the GE⊕-LPS and even its solar panels could largely be constructed using lunar surface materials such as iron-pyrite. Iron-pyrite, also known as “Fool’s Gold,” can be found on Earth, but its components also occur in lunar regolith. Combining these could allow for synthetic manufacturing. With each light-absorbing crystal measuring around just 400th of a millimeter in size, iron-pyrite could function as a reliable reflective external layer for the solar panels.

The station itself is designed for sustained human habitation, and would be located at an Earth-moon Lagrange point roughly 61,350 km above the moon. Lagrange points are locations between two celestial bodies in which their respective gravitational and centrifugal forces balance out, thus creating an equilibrium requiring minimal orbital correction.

[Related: Are solar panels headed for space?]

Although such a project may initially seem financially and logistically prohibitive, researchers believe constructing and launching such satellites from the lunar surface could actually be easier and more cost-effective than doing so from Earth. In fact, Astrostrom engineers estimate lunar solar power launches would require five times less velocity change to place them in geostationary orbit compared to satellite launches on Earth. What’s more, the study determined that the deployment of GE⊕-LPS “could be achieved without requiring any technological breakthroughs.”

“Launching large numbers of gigawatt-scale solar power satellites into orbit from the surface of the Earth would run into the problem of a lack of launch capacity as well as potentially significant atmospheric pollution,” Sanjay Vijendran, head of the ESA’s SOLARIS space-based solar power research project, said in a statement. “But once a concept like GE⊕-LPS has proven the component manufacturing processes and assembly concept of a solar power satellite in lunar orbit, it can then be scaled up to produce further solar power satellites from lunar resources to serve Earth.”

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Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite

Sara Kiley Watson — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:30:00 +0000

Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Charles Chee Surya holding his version of a tandem solar cell in 2016. Photo by K. Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post via Getty Images

Solar PV capacity is growing rapidly across the United States (and elsewhere). In the last decade alone the market for solar has grown by 24 percent each year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). Across the US, there’s already 149 gigawatts of solar capacity installed, which could theoretically power 26 million homes. The future seems bright too, as SEIA and Wood Mackenzie predict that the solar market will triple in size in five years, bringing capacity up to 378 gigawatts in 2028. Solar power made up 1.2 trillion watts of electricity produced worldwide in 2022.

[Related: Floating solar panels could be the next big thing in clean energy.]

Solar energy development and investment is crucial to building a cleaner, more sustainable future, as the technology allows for a great deal of energy to be produced while emitting no planet-harming greenhouse gasses. The technology has come a long way in recent years (and leaps and bounds from its first stages in the 19th century), but efficiency of the average solar panel still stands at about 15-20 percent on average. That means around 80-85 percent of the raw energy beaming down from our favorite star is lost. Not to mention that silicon solar cells, which are the most common deployed photovoltaic tech, have a theoretical limit of around 29 percent efficiency.

Scientists have been trying to solve this problem for years. One team from NREL made a panel with 47 percent efficiency, but unfortunately, the model is a bit too expensive for mainstream use. However, described in two separate papers published in Science on July 6, two different teams of researchers found a way to give silicon solar panels a much needed boost—perovskite.

Perovskite is a mineral that has the same crystal structure as calcium titanium oxide, but can be made up of several different elements for different purposes, according to the University of Washington. They also make for a pretty solid semiconductor for solar panels with a laboratory record efficiency at 25.2 percent.

The two teams paired up perovskite with silicon to make a tandem solar cell. These technologies aren’t necessarily new—the first one was developed in 2009, and a team from Hong Kong was able to bring efficiency up to around 25 percent in 2016. But, now scientists are reaching even higher.

In one study, Xin Yu Chin of Switzerlands’ Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and team used a perovskite top cell and silicon bottom cell, adding phosphonic acid additives during the processing of the cells. Their cell reached efficiencies of 31 percent.

The other team, led by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie’s Silvia Mariotti, used an ionic liquid called piperazinium iodide to enhance their tandem solar cell, achieving an efficiency rate of up to 32.5 percent.

“Overcoming this threshold provides confidence that high-performance, low-cost PVs can be brought to the market,” material science researchers Stefaan de Wolf and Erkan Aydin, who were not involved in the research, wrote in a related perspective article published in Science.

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

The competition is heating up outside of Europe as well—de Wolf, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, claims his team has achieved 33.7 percent efficiency in a yet unpublished tandem cell test run earlier this year. LONGi, a Chinese company that produces a majority of the world’s solar panels, announced their development of a tandem solar panel with an efficiency of 33.5 last month.

As exciting as this all is, it’s still just the very beginning. We need a lot more clean energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the planet liveable.

“Overcoming the 30 percent threshold provides confidence that high performance, low-cost PVs can be brought to the market,” De Wolf told the Guardian. “Yet to avert the catastrophic scenarios associated with global warming, the total capacity needs to increase to about 75TW by 2050.”

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This tiny hydrogen-fueled car just broke a world record for going the distance

Sara Kiley Watson — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 16:00:00 +0000

The small but mighty Eco-Runner XIII. ECO-RUNNER TEAM DELFT

While plug-in electric vehicles are the center of much hype, they aren’t the only type of newfangled, potentially sustainable vehicle that the world’s brightest minds have set their sights on. Fuel cell electric vehicles also use electricity, but instead of using a battery, they produce electricity internally using a hydrogen fuel cell. While these kinds of vehicles have been around for a while, the technology has faced plenty of challenges and hurdles—namely inefficiency and range anxiety.

However, a team of students at the Netherland’s Delft University of Technology recently took a big step for hydrogen cars—and, simultaneously, broke the Guinness World Record for the greatest distance driven on full tanks of hydrogen fuel. On Sunday, June 25, the student team drove their hydrogen-fueled Eco-Runner XIII for 2,488.4 kilometers (1,546.2 miles) over the course of three days on just one kilogram of hydrogen fuel—that’s about the distance between Boston and Miami. The student crew drove the 71.5 hours in rotating shifts of two hours, only stopping to switch out drivers.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow’.]

The previous record of 2,056 kilometers (1,277 miles) was set only last May by ARM Engineering’s electric Renault Zoe, which operates using a methanol fuel cell.

The impressive feat took place at Germany’s Immendigen track. The record-breaking vehicle is the thirteenth iteration of the Eco-Runner, the first of which was revealed in 2005. The scientists first exhibited the final design of the Eco-Runner XIII in May, touting the development as possibly the most efficient hydrogen car yet. The three-wheeled, cloud-shaped vehicle utilizes carbon fiber instead of steel for parts such as push rods in the steering system, the hull of the vehicle, and suspension beams. Additionally, the team took extra care to factor in energy efficiency in terms of energy losses—especially during the conversion of hydrogen to electricity, and then electricity to kinetic energy. To do so, the team used a “brand-new” fuel cell.

All in all, the 72 kilogram (158 pound) car can drive around 45 kilometers per hour (27 miles per hour). While this one-person, funky-shaped, car might not be road-trip ready, the team hopes their developments can keep pushing the clean technology closer to the mainstream. Around 56,000 hydrogen cars were sold worldwide in 2022 according to one report, and the market for such vehicles is slated to hit $17.88 billion by 2029.

[Related: This plane powered by hydrogen has made an electrifying first flight.]

For those who are intrigued by hydrogen vehicles and live in the Netherlands, you’re in luck—the first hydrogen energy refueling hub was just unveiled outside of Amsterdam.

“Electric cars are also part of the solution for sustainable mobility, but the electricity grid is already filling up,” Eline Schwietert, the Delft team’s press contact, said in a recent statement. “Electrifying the whole world is not an option. Hydrogen and electric cars go hand in hand. There is not one big winner.”

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Cold fusion is making a scientific comeback

Rahul Rao — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 18:00:00 +0000

The ringed building is the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, where LENR researchers are studying palladium nanoparticles. ESRF/P. Jayet

Earlier this year, ARPA-E, a US government agency dedicated to funding advanced energy research, announced a handful of grants for a field it calls “low-energy nuclear reactions,” or LENR. Most scientists likely didn’t take notice of the news. But, for a small group of them, the announcement marked vindication for their specialty: cold fusion.

Cold fusion, better known by its practitioners as LENR, is the science—or, perhaps, the art—of making atomic nuclei merge and, ideally, harnessing the resultant energy. All of this happens without the incredible temperatures, on the scale of millions of degrees, that you need for “traditional” fusion. In a dream world, successful cold fusion could provide us with a boundless supply of clean, easily attainable energy.

Tantalizing as it sounds, for the past 30 years, cold fusion has largely been a forgotten specter of one of science’s most notorious controversies, when a pair of chemists in 1989 claimed to achieve the feat—which no one else could replicate. There is still no generally accepted theory that supports cold fusion; many still doubt that it’s possible at all. But those physicists and engineers who work on LENR believe the new grants are a sign that their field is being taken seriously after decades in the wilderness.

“It got a bad start and a bad reputation,” believes David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University, “and then, over the intervening years, the evidence has piled up.”

[Related: Physicists want to create energy like stars do. These two ways are their best shot.]

Igniting fusion involves pressing the hearts of atoms together, creating larger nuclei and a fountain of energy. This isn’t easy. The protons inside a nucleus give it a positive charge, and like-charged nuclei electrically repel each other. Physicists must force the atoms to crash together anyway.

Normally, breaking this limit needs an immense amount of energy, which is why stars, where fusion happens naturally, and Earthbound experiments reach extreme heat. But what if there were another, lower-temperature way?

Scientists had been theorizing such methods since the early 20th century, and they’d found a few tedious, extremely inefficient ways. But in the 1980s, two chemists thought they’d made one method work to great success.

The duo, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, had placed the precious metal palladium in a bath of heavy water: a form of H₂O whose hydrogen atoms have an extra neutron, a form known as deuterium, commonly used in nuclear science. When Fleischmann and Pons switched on an electrical current through their apparatus and left it running, they began to see abrupt heat spikes, or so they claimed, and particles like neutrons.

Those heat spikes and particles, according to them, could not be explained by any chemical process. What could explain them were the heavy water’s deuterium nuclei fusing, just as they would in a star.

If Fleischmann and Pons were right, fusion could be achievable at room temperature in a relatively basic chemistry lab. If you think that sounds too good to be true, you’re far from alone. When the pair announced their results in 1989, what followed was one of the most spectacular firestorms in the history of modern science. Scientist after scientist tried to recreate their experiment, and no one could reliably replicate their results.

[Related: Nuclear power’s biggest problem could have a small solution]

Pons and Fleischmann are remembered as fraudsters. It likely didn’t help that they were chemists trying to make a mark on a field dominated by physicists. Whatever they had seen, “cold fusion” found itself at respectable science’s margins.

Still, in the shadows, LENR experiments continued. (Some researchers tried variations on Fleischmann and Pons’ themes. Others, especially in Japan, sought LENR as a means of cleaning up nuclear waste by transforming radioactive isotopes into less dangerous ones.) A few experiments showed oddities such as excess heat or alpha particles—anomalies that might best be explained if atomic nuclei were reacting behind the scenes.

“The LENR field has somehow, miraculously, due to the convictions of all these people involved, has stayed alive and has been chugging along for 30 years,” says Jonah Messinger, an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute think tank and a graduate student at MIT.

Fleischmann and Pons’ fatal flaw—that their results could not be replicated—continues to cast a pall over the field. Even some later experiments that seemed to show success could not be replicated. But this does not deter LENR’s current proponents. “Science has a reproducibility problem all the time,” says Florian Metzler, a nuclear scientist at MIT.

In the absence of a large official push, the private sector had provided much of LENR’s backing. In the late 2010s, for instance, Google poured several million dollars into cold fusion research to limited success. But government funding agencies are now starting to pay attention. The ARPA-E program joins European Union projects, HERMES and CleanHME, which both kicked off in 2020. (Messinger and Metzler are members of an MIT team that will receive ARPA-E grant funds.)

By the standards of other energy research funding, none of the grants are particularly eye-watering. The European Union programs and ARPA-E total up to around $10 million each: a pittance compared to the more than $1 billion the US government plans to spend in 2023 on mainstream fusion.

But that money will be used in important ways, its proponents say. The field has two pressing priorities. One is to attract attention with a high-quality research paper that clearly demonstrates an anomaly, ideally published in a reputable journal like Nature or Science. “Then, I think, there will be a big influx of resources and people,” says Metzler.

A second, longer-term goal is to explain how cold fusion might work. The laws of physics, as scientists understand them today, do not have a consensus answer for why cold fusion could happen at all.

Metzler doesn’t see that open question as a problem. “Sometimes people have made these arguments: ‘Oh, cold fusion contradicts established physics,’ or something like that,” he says. But he believes there are many unanswered questions in nuclear physics, especially with larger atoms. “We have an enormous amount of ignorance when it comes to nuclear systems,” he says.

Yet answers would have major benefits, other experts argue. “As long as it’s not understood, a lot of people in the scientific community are put off,” says Nagel. “They’re not willing to pay any attention to it.”

It is, of course, entirely possible that cold fusion is an illusion. If that’s the case, then ARPA-E’s grants may give researchers more proof that nothing is there. But it’s also possible that something is at work behind the scenes.

And, LENR proponents say, the Fleischmann and Pons saga is now fading as younger researchers enter the field with no memory of 1989. Perhaps that will finally be what lets LENR emerge from the pair’s shadow.“If there is a nuclear anomaly that occurs,” says Messinger, “my hope is that the wider physics community is ready to listen.”

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How can we decarbonize copper and nickel mining?

Carla Delgado — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 16:00:00 +0000

By 2050, the annual supply of copper and nickel will have to increase by about 150 to 200 percent. DepositPhotos

We are at the beginning of a green technological revolution, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The transition to a low-carbon economy to mitigate climate change would not be possible without green technologies like electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage systems. However, these technologies rely on over 10 different minerals and metals—including copper, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum—whose production must increase significantly to meet demand.

By 2050, the annual supply of copper and nickel, in particular, will have to increase by about 150 to 200 percent relative to 2020 production levels to meet the needs of green technology deployments. If production grows rapidly, the associated environmental impacts and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are expected to rise as well. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the GHG emissions of copper and nickel may increase by 125 and 90 percent, respectively, by 2050. Therefore, decarbonizing the mining industry is an essential part of meeting global climate targets.

How mining affects the environment

Mining is an environmentally invasive process. Its impacts manifest in land use change, disturbance to local ecosystems, and GHG emissions, says Paolo Natali, a principal with RMI’s climate intelligence program who leads the Supply Chain Emissions Initiative. The nature of mining is to disturb large areas of land to retrieve resources deep below the surface, that’s why it can drive deforestation and increase the erosion rate greatly. Waste rock and tailings from mining may also contaminate the soil and water, which, combined with the clearing of forests, contributes to habitat loss and ecosystem damage.

[Related on PopSci+: The summer issue of PopSci is extremely metal.]

Mining is also a significant source of GHG emissions due to the use of diesel-powered equipment, which releases carbon dioxide, as well as through the release of trapped gasses like methane, says Natali. The supply chain is also energy-intensive because activities like drilling and blasting, material handling or the process of moving the mined material out of the mine via conveyor belts or trucks, grinding, metal smelting, and transporting all require a lot of energy.

Natali says copper and nickel extraction, in particular, are experiencing declining ore grades. Ore grades refer to the concentration of the mineral or metal content in an ore-bearing rock. Declining grades means that it’s taking more effort to gather the same amount of mineral, and therefore using up more energy and resulting emissions, he adds. As the ore grade decreases, the energy, diesel, and electricity used all increase. The finite nature of these resources—which makes it necessary to go deeper and into more remote areas to keep finding them—and the economies of scale that the mining industry has developed have enabled lower grades to be processed profitably, says Natali.

Increasing the production of copper and nickel to address the growing need for green technologies would increase the impacts of mining and harm the environment even further. Perrine Toledano, the director of research and policy at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, says meeting the rising mineral demand will put pressure on freshwater resources in copper mining regions and present a significant biodiversity risk in locations with nickel reserves. Chile, the world’s top copper producer, is already water-scarce and will face increasing water risks due to the impacts of climate change.

Overall, decarbonizing mining is necessary to successfully transition to a low-carbon economy.

Decarbonizing copper and nickel mining

To cut emissions associated with carbon-intensive energy production, the industry should replace fossil fuels and its generated electricity with renewable energy, sustainable biofuels, and green hydrogen, says Toledano. For instance, eliminating diesel use in mining equipment may remove up to 40 percent of a mine site’s emissions.

Aside from using clean electricity, Natali says adopting higher precision mining techniques to improve ore grades and electrifying the energy input, like by using conveyors or electric trucks during material handling, are crucial. Latest developments in battery electric large-haul trucks, such as fast charging or hydrogen fuel-cell range extenders, will have to be coupled with the increasing use of renewable energy and new technologies downstream to eliminate emissions from high temperature and chemical processes like smelting and refining, he adds.

[Related: For years, Chile exploited its environment to grow. Now it’s trying to save it.]

Circular economy interventions like increasing metal recovery and reusing mineral and non-mineral waste may also support emission reductions across the mining value chains. Both copper and nickel can be recycled repeatedly without losing their properties or quality. Moreover, recycled copper uses about 85 percent less energy than primary production.

Policymakers can support a just transition to net zero mining by establishing stricter and clearer regulation of mining activities and subsidizing green energy, says Natali. He also recommends requiring that imported minerals face similar environmental and social standards with domestically produced minerals.

Fossil fuel subsidies in place create an artificial cost disadvantage for renewables, says Toledano. Such subsidies reduce the cost of fossil-fuel-powered electricity generation, which makes renewable energy less competitive. They can also reinforce the reliance on fossil fuels and make it more favorable. Therefore, policymakers must ensure the penetration of renewable energies, which could support the transition of the mining industry to clean energy.

Decarbonizing copper and nickel mining won’t happen in an instant. However, by switching to renewable energy, improving production efficiency, and establishing policies that include climate-related mitigation and adaptation obligations on mining operations, meeting increasing mineral demand with fewer emissions may become achievable.

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What an electric vehicle’s MPGe rating really means

Rob Verger — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 19:15:19 +0000

Hyundai's 2023 Ioniq 6 boasts a MPGe of 140, making it exceptionally efficient. Hyundai

For decades, drivers in the United States have been able to think about the efficiency of their gas-powered vehicles with a simple criteria: miles per gallon. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency started publishing the mpg metric for vehicles in the 1970s, and it makes intuitive sense. Theoretically, how far could your car travel on a single gallon of gasoline? The mpg figure is the answer.

But with electric vehicles—as well as plug-in hybrids—the situation gets a tad more complex. A pure EV does not burn gasoline. It gets the energy for its batteries from the grid, and is better for the environment.

Enter the MPGe metric, which stands for mile per gallon of gasoline-equivalent and “allows [for] a reasonable comparison between vehicles using different fuels,” the EPA says.

What is MPGe?

New EPA vehicle labels debuted in 2012. For electric vehicles, it includes the EV’s “fuel economy” listed in MPGe, as well as other metrics, like its range. You can check out the EPA’s EV label on the agency’s site. For plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, that PHEV label shows both the car’s efficiency when running on just battery power (in MPGe), as well as its efficiency if it were just burning gasoline, in mpg. And of course, a traditional vehicle that burns only gasoline has a label with the regular mpg metric.

One commonality between the mpg metric and MPGe is that a larger number means better efficiency. “Miles per gallon is designed such that bigger numbers are better,” says David Gohlke, an energy and environmental analyst at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “Higher miles per gallon means you go farther—you get more goodness out of the gallon of gasoline that you’re burning.”

[Related: Volvo’s new electric EX30 is cheaper than a Tesla Model 3]

The bigger-is-better metric might sound obvious, but that’s not always the case with other measurement metrics for vehicle efficiency. For example, the gasoline vehicle sticker also features a gallons-per-100-miles figure, and in that case, a lower number represents better fuel efficiency—ideally, you want to burn as few gallons as possible when driving 100 miles. Ditto, on an EV’s sticker you’ll find the kilowatt-hours-per-100-miles metric, with lower being more efficient. And a PHEV vehicle’s sticker contains both of those lower-is-better metrics.

But with the proliferation of EVs, the main metric to keep in mind is MPGe. “The EPA said, ‘Okay, well we’re going to need some way of describing these electric vehicles to the average person,” Gohlke says. “The EPA has come up with a conversion factor that translates from a kilowatt-hour of energy into the equivalent amount of energy in terms of a gallon of gasoline.”

How is MPGe calculated?

The kilowatt hours (kWh) equivalent from gas comes from “the total heat content that exists in a gallon of gasoline,” Gohlke says. “They say, ‘Okay, if we took this gallon of gasoline, and set it on fire, effectively, how much heat energy can we get out of that?’”

The answer to that question is 33.7 kWh. An EPA spokesperson notes via email that this figure is “a standard number for the energy content in gasoline.”

[Related: How to use less gas when driving with Google Maps]

So now the question becomes: How far can an EV travel on 33.7 kWh, which is equal to the energy in 1 gallon of gas? And that’s where the MPGe figure comes from.

For context when it comes to understanding kWh, the average American home used about 886 kWh of electricity each month in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Considering a 30-day month, that means daily electric use is about 30 kWh. If you have a 1,000-watt (1 kilowatt) microwave and use it for an hour, you’ve used 1 kWh of electricity. So MPGe is saying: Here’s how many miles this EV can travel on an amount of electricity that is just a bit more than the average US household consumes each day.

How can you find an EV’s MPGe?

To see how the EPA rates an EV with this MPGe metric, you can look up the vehicle at fueleconomy.gov. For example, one variant of the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 gets 140 MPGe, when combining its city (153) and highway (127) ratings. That’s superb. A 2023 Tesla Model 3 gets 132 MPGe. What about the gargantuan GMC Hummer EV? It’s rated for 47 MPGe. The Hyundai and the Tesla are way more efficient than the Hummer.

Even if the MPGe measurement takes some getting used to, Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis at AutoPacific, argues that it plays an important role. That’s because an EV’s range, which is also listed on the sticker, isn’t the full story. “That doesn’t necessarily tell you how efficient the vehicle actually is,” he says. “You might have a really high range number, like [with the electric] Hummer for example, but if you look at the MPGe figure for that, it shows that it’s very inefficient.”

Ultimately, the MPGe metric isn’t perfect, but it’s good to have. “From a consumer perspective, I think there’s still quite a bit of confusion on what it actually means,” Waatti says. Still, he argues that it’s an important metric for giving people a sense of the car’s efficiency.

Bottom line: A higher MPGe means the EV is more efficient, and right now, a number at or close to 140 is ideal.

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How does electricity work? Let’s demystify the life-changing physics.

Rahul Rao — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

A Tesla coil gives off current electricity, where the negatively charged electrons continuously move, just like they would through an electrical wire. Depositphotos

To the uninitiated, electricity might seem like a sort of hidden magic. It plays by laws of physics we can’t necessarily perceive with our eyes.

But most of our lives run on electricity. Anyone who has ever lived through a power outage knows how inconvenient it is. On a broader level, it’s hard to understate just how vital the flow of electricity is to powering the functions of modern society.

“If I lose electricity, I lose telecommunications. I lose the financial sector. I lose water treatment. I can’t milk the cows. I can’t refrigerate food,” says Mark Petri, an electrical grid researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

[Related: How to save electricity this summer]

Which makes it all the more important to know how electricity works, where it comes from, and how it gets to our homes.

How does electricity work?

The universe as we know it is governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force (which holds subatomic particles together inside atoms), the weak nuclear force (which guides some types of radioactivity), gravity, and electromagnetism (which governs the intrinsically linked concepts of electricity and magnetism).

One of electromagnetism’s key tenets is that the subatomic particles that make up the cosmos can have either a positive or negative charge. To use them as a form of energy, we have to make them flow as electric current. The electricity we have on Earth is mostly from the movement of negatively charged electrons.

But it takes more than a charge to keep electrons flowing. The particles don’t travel far before they run into an obstacle, such as a neighboring atom. That means electricity needs a material whose atoms have loose electrons, which can be knocked away to keep the current going. This type of material is known as a conductor. Most metals have conductive qualities, such as the copper that forms a lot of electrical wires.

Other materials, called insulators, have far more tightly bound electrons that aren’t easily pushed around. The plastic that coats most wires is an insulator, which is why you don’t get a nasty shock when you touch a cord or plug.

Some scientists and engineers think of electricity as a bit like water streaming through a pipe. The volume of water passing through a pipe section at a given time compares to the number of electrons flowing through a particular strand of wire, which scientists measure in amps. The water pressure that helps to push the fluid through is like the electrical voltage. When you multiply amps by volts, you compute the power or the amount of energy passing through the wire every second, which electricians measure in watts. The wattage of your microwave, then, is approximately the amount of electrical energy it uses per second.

How electrons carry voltage through wires

Based on the law of electromagnetism, if a wire is caught in a magnetic field and that magnetic field shifts, it induces an electric current in the wire. This is why most of the world’s electricity is born from generators, which are typically rotating magnetic apparatuses. As a generator spins, it sends electricity shooting through a wire coiled around it.

[Related: The best electric generators for your home]

Powering a whole city calls for a colossal generator, potentially the size of a building. But it takes energy to make energy from that generator. In most fossil fuel and nuclear plants, the fuel source boils water into steam, which causes turbines to spin their respective generators. Hydro and wind generators take advantage of nature’s own motion, redirecting water or gusts of wind to do the spinning. Solar panels, meanwhile, work differently because they don’t need moving magnets at all. When light strikes a solar cell, it excites the electrons within the atoms of the material, causing them to flow out in a current.

It’s easier to transfer energy with lots of volts and fewer amps. As such, long-distance power lines use thousands of volts to carry electricity away from power plants. That’s far too high for most buildings, so power grids rely on substations to lower the voltage for regular outlets and home electronics. North American buildings typically set their voltage to 120 volts; most of the rest of the world uses between 220 and 240 volts.

Current also doesn’t flow one way—instead, it constantly switches direction back and forth, which engineers call alternating current. This enables it to travel stretches of up to several thousands of miles. North American wires flip from one current direction to the other 60 times every second. In other parts of the globe, particularly in Europe and Africa, they alternate back and forth 50 times every second.

That brings the current to your building’s breaker box. But how does that power actually get to your electronic devices?

[Related: Why you need an uninterruptible power supply]

To keep a continuous flow of electricity, a system needs a complete circuit. Buildings everywhere are wired with incomplete circuits. A two-hole socket contains one “live” wire and one “neutral” wire. When you plug in a lamp, kitchen appliance, or phone charger, you’re completing that circuit, allowing electricity to flow from the live wire, through the device, and back through the neutral wire to deliver energy.

Put another way, if you stick a finger into a live socket, you’re temporarily completing the circuit with your body (somewhat painfully).

An electrician carries out maintenance work on electric wires of a high-voltage power line project on September 28, 2022, in Lianyungang, China. Geng Yuhe / VCG via Getty Images

The future of electricity

Not long ago, electricity was still a luxury. In the late 1990s, nearly one-third of the world’s population lived in homes without electrical access. We’ve since cut that proportion by more than half—but nearly a billion people, mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, still don’t have a current.

Historically, almost all electricity started at large power plants and ended at homes and businesses. But the transition to renewable energy is altering that process. On average, solar and wind farms are smaller than hulking coal plants and dams. On rainy and calm days, giant batteries can back them up with stored power.

“What we have been seeing, and what we can expect to see in the future, is a major evolution of the grid,” says Petri.

[Related: Why hasn’t Henry Ford’s power grid become a reality?]

The infrastructure we build around electricity makes a difference, both for the health of the planet and people. In 2020, only 39 percent of the world’s electricity came from clean sources like nuclear and hydro, compared to CO₂-emitting fossil fuels.

Fortunately, there is plenty of reason for optimism. By some accounts, solar power is now the cheapest energy source in human history, with wind power not far behind. Moreover, a growing number of utility users are installing rooftop solar panels, solar generators, heat pumps, and the like. “People’s homes are not just taking power from the grid,” says Petri. “They’re putting power back on the grid. It’s a much more complex system.”

The laws of electricity don’t change depending on where we choose to draw our current from. But the consequences of our decisions on how to use that power do matter.

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The hidden costs of Amazon returns

Simone Peinkofer/The Conversation — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 23:00:00 +0000

Retailers’ costs for managing returns are rising. Photo by Ronny Hartmann/picture alliance via Getty Images

This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

E-commerce may make shopping more convenient, but it has a dark side that most consumers never see.

Say you order an electric toothbrush for Father’s Day and two shirts for yourself from Amazon. You unpack your order and discover that the electric toothbrush won’t charge and only one shirt fits you. So, you decide to return the unwanted shirt and the electric toothbrush.

Returns like this might seem simple, and often they’re free for the consumer. But managing those returns can get costly for retailers, so much so that many returned items are simply thrown out.

In 2022, returns cost retailers about US$816 billion in lost sales. That’s nearly as much as the U.S. spent on public schools and almost twice the cost of returns in 2020. The return process, with transportation and packaging, also generated about 24 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions in 2022.

As a supply chain management researcher, I follow developments in retail logistics. Let’s take a closer look inside the black box of product returns.

Returns start with miles of transportation

So, you repackaged your unwanted shirt and the electric toothbrush and drove them to UPS, which has an agreement with Amazon for free returns. Now what?

UPS transports those items to the retailer’s warehouses dedicated to processing returns. This step of the process costs the retailer money – 66 percent of the cost of a $50 item by one estimate – and emits carbon dioxide as trucks and planes carry items hundreds of miles. The plastic, paper or cardboard from the return package becomes waste.

Processing a return takes two to three times longer than initially shipping the item – it has to be unpacked, inspected, repacked and rerouted. That adds more to the cost to the company, especially in a tight labor market. Workers have to manually unpack the items, inspect them and, based on the return reason, decide what will happen next.

Restocking and reselling means more miles

If a warehouse worker decides the shirt in our example can be resold, the shirt will be repackaged and sent to another warehouse.

Once another consumer orders the shirt, it will be ready to be packed and shipped.

In-store returns can significantly cut warehouse and transportation costs, but driving to a brick-and-mortar store might not be convenient for the consumer. Only about a quarter of online purchases are returned in person to the store.

Refurbishing, if repair costs less than the product

If the item is defective, like the electric toothbrush in our example, the warehouse worker might send it back to the manufacturer for fixing and refurbishing. It would be repackaged and loaded on a truck and possibly a plane to be sent to the manufacturer, leading to more carbon dioxide emissions.

If the electric toothbrush can be repaired, the refurbished product is ready to be sold into the consumer market again – often at a lower price.

Refurbishing returned products helps to achieve a closed-loop supply chain where products are reused rather than disposed of as waste, making the process more sustainable than buying a new item.

Sometimes, however, repairs cost more than the product can be resold for. When it is more expensive to restock or refurbish a product, it may be cheaper for the retailer to throw the item away.

Landfills are a common end for returns

If the company can’t resell the shirt or refurbish the electric toothbrush economically, the outlook for these items is grim. Some are sold in bulk to discount stores. Often, returned products simply end up in landfills, sometimes overseas.

In 2019, about 5 billion pounds of waste from returns were sent to landfills, according to an estimate by the return technology platform Optoro. By 2022, the estimated waste had nearly doubled to about 9.5 billion pounds.

Era of free returns might not last

In the past, customers who wanted to return items by mail were often expected to do so on their own dime. That changed after Amazon began offering free returns and providing easy-to-use drop-off locations at UPS or Kohl’s stores. Other retailers followed suit to compete, with many seeing free returns as a way to keep shoppers coming back.

But that pendulum may be starting to swing back. The percentage of retailers charging to ship returns increased from 33 percent to 41 percent in 2022.

Retailers are trying several other techniques to lower the return rate, waste and losses, which ultimately come back to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Some retailers have shortened the return window, limited frequented returns or stopped offering free returns. Other strategies include virtual dressing rooms and clearer fitting guides, which can help reduce clothing returns, as can high-quality photos and videos that reflect size and color accurately. If consumers use those tools and pay attention to sizing, they can help cut down on retail’s growing climate footprint.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Where will electric semi-trucks recharge? California has a big solution.

Andrew Paul — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Forum Mobility says they are building enough recharging depots to simultaneously handle a total of 600 trucks over the next 18 months. Forum Mobility

California’s massive, ongoing push to completely electrify its public and private transportation sectors by 2035 is getting a major boost.. According to recent reports, the electric truck and charging station manufacturer Forum Mobility is planning to soon begin construction on a 96-vehicle capacity recharging depot for drayage carriers. These are the massive transports used to move goods between ports, distribution centers, and rail yards.

The news comes barely a month after the California Air Resources Board announced that, beginning next year, any new trucks purchased by a shipping company in the state must be an electric model powered by either hydrogen fuel cells or batteries. According to clean energy news site Electrek on Wednesday, funding for the 4.4-acre site will derive in part from a $4.5 million East Bay Community Energy (EBCE). Earlier this year, Forum Mobility also received a major additional investment from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, a program aimed at helping the massive retailer achieve net zero carbon by 2040.

“Today we can provide a Class 8 electric truck, and all its charging needs, at a monthly price that’s competitive with diesel—without the emissions,” Matt LeDucq, CEO and co-founder of Forum Mobility, said at the time.

[Related: Electric vehicles are only one part of sustainable transit.]

Despite their comparatively small numbers compared to consumer vehicles, the EPA estimates that medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for around 23 percent of the nation’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling that segment of industry is key to transitioning towards a green, sustainable infrastructure for not just California, but the US overall.

According to Electrek, California’s in-state drayage fleet includes an estimated 33,000 trucks, which the California Energy Commission has stated will require approximately 157,000 medium- and heavy-duty chargers by the decade’s end to comply with all new vehicle regulations. When faced with those numbers, the addition of a 96-vehicle charging facility may only seem like a drop in the bucket. But it is all-but-certain Forum Mobility’s Greenville Community Charging Depot is just the first of many similar announcements to come for the state. According to Forum Mobility’s CEO, the company is in the process of building enough recharging depots to simultaneously handle a total of 600 trucks over the next 18 months.

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Community-owned solar will soon power this small mountain town in Puerto Rico

Katherine Rapin/Nexus Media — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Puerto Rico-based Máximo Solar hired local women to help install the 700 solar panels that power the microgrid. Casa Pueblo

This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and Next City as part of a series that looks at how cities are tackling inequality and the climate crisis. A Spanish-language version of this article, translated by Patricia Guadalupe and produced by palabra, is available here.

For two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Lucy’s Pizza was the only restaurant open in the central mountain town of Adjuntas. The town’s 18,000 residents, like those on the rest of the island, were entirely without electricity.

“No one has power, you can’t get gas, it’s difficult to make food, so everyone came here to eat,” said owner Gustavo Irizarry. “The line,” he gestured down the block along the town’s central plaza, “endless.”

Using a diesel generator, Lucy’s was running at about 75% capacity. The generator was loud, smelly and expensive to run — Irizarry spent $15,000 on diesel in the six months the grid was down. He was often up in the middle of the night to restart the generator because of the risk of losing power to the refrigerators. He didn’t want ingredients to spoil.

Now, nearly six years later, Irizarry is poised to generate his own energy from the sun. He’s one of 14 merchants in downtown Adjuntas who have invested in the island’s first community-owned solar microgrids — expected to go live before this summer.

“After Maria, we saw the vulnerability and the necessity to have an electric system that truly works,” Irizarry said. “To have better, alternative power, to be able to live.”

The microgrid project is the latest effort in a grassroots movement to build energy security in Puerto Rico in the form of solar power. Across the island, groups like Casa Pueblo, which first opened in Adjuntas more than 40 years ago, have relied on deep roots in the community to create local buy-in and make it an equitable transition.

In March 2023, thousands lined the streets of Adjuntas for Casa Pueblo’s second annual rally for solar energy. (Photo by Katherine Rapin)

“The microgrid is a major step in taking Puerto Rico from the vulnerability of the centralized fossil fuel system to the aspiration that I think we share in Puerto Rico,” said Arturo Massol Deyá, associate director of Casa Pueblo. “To use [renewable] fuels and generate power at the point of consumption, where it’s needed.”

Microgrids power small networks of buildings with energy that’s generated close to where it’s used, often wind or solar. The systems are typically connected to a central grid, but in the case of an outage they can run on “island mode,” relying solely on locally-generated power and battery storage capacity.

Hurricane Maria damaged 80% of Puerto Rico’s power grid, and the subsequent outages, which lasted for months, contributed to the storm’s death toll. Six years and $14 billion in federal commitments later, Puerto Rico’s central grid is still in disrepair.

Puerto Ricans suffer regular outages while spending, on average, 8% of their incomes on electricity, according to the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA). (The average American spends 2.4% on electricity.)

“It’s not an opportunity to move away from the centralized system,” said Massol Deyá. “In Puerto Rico, it’s a necessity.”

Puerto Rico’s energy problems predate Maria. The island’s utility, PREPA, had filed for bankruptcy in March 2017, nearly six months before Maria. In 2020, officials signed a 15-year contract giving Luma Energy, a consortium of Canadian and U.S. companies, control over the transmission and distribution of electricity. Since Luma took over, rates increased and blackouts have continued.

Renewable energy advocates, including the movement Queremos Sol (We Want Sun), say the solution is obvious. Rooftop solar alone could provide four times the island’s residential energy demand, Department of Energy studies have shown. In 2019, Puerto Rican lawmakers set a goal of transitioning to 40% renewable energy by 2025 and 100% by 2050. But despite those commitments, the island currently sources less than 4% from renewables. In recent years, PREPA has advanced methane gas projects and even proposed a fee on energy generated by rooftop solar to help pay its $9 million debt.

“It’s the worst thing that could happen to Puerto Rico,” said Massol Deyá of a potential solar tax. (PREPA did not respond to requests for comment.)

For Massol Deyá, the outages following Maria were a tragedy — but also a chance to extoll the benefits of solar power. In the wake of the disaster, Adjunteños gathered at Casa Pueblo, which had installed its first solar panels in 1999 and had gone off the electric grid entirely just months before Maria. Locals were able to charge phones, run dialysis machines, and store medications in the center’s refrigerators. One neighbor came daily to administer her son’s asthma treatment.

Members of Puerto Rico’s diaspora got in touch with Casa Pueblo to ask how they could help. “We told everyone, don’t send us money — send us solar lamps,” Massol Deyá said.

Over the next six months, the organization distributed 14,000 lamps. And in the last six years, it has helped fund and install more than 350 solar energy systems on buildings across town, including in an assisted living facility, a grocery store, the local fire station and many homes in the poorest neighborhoods of Adjuntas. Casa Pueblo even built a public solar park, where locals charge phones using outlets that source energy from solar arrays resembling trees.

In 2018, Salt Lake City-based Honnold Foundation, which supports solar projects around the world, took notice of what was happening in Adjuntas. Then-director Dory Trimble reached out. “She told us to think bigger,” said Massol Deyá. “[We thought] why not do downtown Adjuntas, around the main square, which is what gives communities in Puerto Rico a sense of identity?”

Lucy’s is in one of seven buildings around Adjuntas’ central plaza connected to two half-megawatt battery storage systems that link to the central grid; in the case of an outage, the systems can “island,” relying on their own generation and storage.

By creating a microgrid with other local businesses on the grid, including a bakery, hardware store and pharmacy, Adjuntas could gain energy security during emergencies, all while starving the fossil fuel industry by unplugging those with the highest energy demands.

But as the microgrid idea was taking shape, Casa Pueblo’s late co-founder Tinti Deyá Diaz (Massol Deyá’s mother) said she wanted to ensure that lower-income residents would continue to benefit from the solar transition — after all, households with solar power were paying about $40 less per month on their energy bills, according to Casa Pueblo.

That concern led Irizarry and the 13 other investors in the microgrid to form the Community Solar Energy Association of Adjuntas (ACESA), a non-profit independent utility that reinvests in community solar projects, prioritizing homes of the most vulnerable Adjunteños. “We each have a commitment to the community,” said Irizarry.

Their dedication paid off. When Hurricane Fiona hit in 2022, it caused widespread outages, but the town’s solar-powered buildings were spared. The local fire station became a regional response center, intercepting calls from a station in Ponce, 15 miles to the south, which had lost power.

“When you see the entire landscape, you know that we are still at risk — we are going to be confronting the same climate change challenges, hurricanes, earthquakes,” says Massol Deyá. “But we are in a better situation for normal days and we’re better positioned to confront difficult times as a community.”

Adjuntas’ transition has earned it nationwide recognition. In March, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited Casa Pueblo to discuss plans to disburse $1 billion in federal funds to improve Puerto Rico’s grid. (The Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, approved by Congress in December, will focus on the island’s “most vulnerable and disadvantaged households and communities.”) Following her visit, Granholm tweeted, “They’re leading by example, showing that 100% solar power is possible for Puerto Rico.”

Other communities on the island are interested in replicating Adjuntas’ model. The Monte Azul Foundation is working to develop a solar microgrid in Maricao, 30 miles west of Adjuntas. Last March, director Andrew Hermann visited Adjuntas with Maricao residents.

“Seeing [the microgrid] in person and talking to business owners that are super pro-microgrid — it’s really assuring the business owners here,” Hermann said. “That’s the type of energy that helps build these projects from the ground up.”

This article is co-published with Next City as part of a series that looks at how cities are tackling inequality and the climate crisis.Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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GM’s new partnership with Tesla could supercharge the EV landscape

Andrew Paul — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 17:00:00 +0000

GM's announcement follows a similar strategy from Ford last month. General Motors

Two weeks ago, Ford took a major step forward within the EV market via a new partnership with Tesla. The new plan will soon open up the latter’s charging stations to Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit owners. Following in their tire tracks, General Motors announced a similar alliance on Thursday—beginning early next year, GM owners will also be able to access over 12,000 Tesla Supercharger stations through a special adapter. And starting in 2025, all new electric GM models will come equipped to charge without the need for any external attachments.

“This collaboration is a key part of our strategy and an important next step in quickly expanding access to fast chargers for our customers,” GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. “Not only will it help make the transition to electric vehicles more seamless for our customers, but it could help move the industry toward a single North American charging standard.”

[Related: Ford EVs can soon be charged at Tesla stations.]

The move towards a single standard is a tacit concession to Tesla’s overall industry footprint, says CNBC. Although most EVs in America have long utilized what’s known as Combined Charging System (CCS) ports for fast recharging, Tesla vehicles rely on a proprietary setup known as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), alongside adapters owners could use at third-party stations. Beginning in late 2021, Tesla opened up some of its superchargers to other EVs thanks to a “Magic Dock” adapter, although anyone wishing to use it still needed to download Tesla’s app for access.

Like Ford, GM’s partnership will both simplify charging options for consumers as well as pave the way for more standardized infrastructure that supports the growing EV industry. Beginning in early 2024, owners of vehicles such as the Cadillac Lyriq and Chevy Bolt will be able to recharge at Tesla outlets using a specialized adapter, with new GM EVs featuring a NACS inlet sans adapter aiming to debut in 2025. Additionally, GM aims to integrate the Tesla Supercharger Network into its brands’ mobile apps to streamline location, payment, and charging sessions. GM also eventually intends to make CCS adapters for owners of NACS-enabled vehicles, although has not specified a timeframe for the rollout.

GM isn’t only looking to Tesla to help expand charging access for EVs—last year, the company partnered with Pilot Company and EVgo to add over 5,000 new DC chargers to the almost 13,000 stations already available across North America. An estimated one-fourth of all vehicle sales are estimated to be EVs by the end of 2030, with that number skyrocketing to over 70 percent by 2040.

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Kraken tests algorithm-based EV charging that won’t sink the grid

Cadence Bambenek / Hothouse — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 01:00:00 +0000

The charging algorithm takes advantage of the cycle of renewable energy. DepositPhotos

This story originally featured on Hothouse. Subscribe to the climate newsletter on Substack.

Renewable energies have long been criticized for their variability. From brewing your morning coffee or tea to binging Netflix at night, demands for residential power tax the grid most in the mornings and evenings. Meanwhile, renewable wind power peaks in the middle of the night, while solar peaks during the brightest hours of the day.

Powering the legacy grid with gas or oil is relatively straightforward — you get out what you put in. One gallon of gas in is one gallon of gasoline consumed. As we transition to a green grid, the energy industry finds itself in the position of having to solve for these discrete breakdowns and inherent mismatches between human behavior and renewable generation.

One promising solution is emerging in the U.K.

The London-based Octopus Energy is an energy company built around the insight that, by finding a way to shift more residential energy demands to those off-peak hours, we can simultaneously lighten the burden on the grid and reduce energy costs for consumers.

Take electric cars. If everyone driving electric vehicles plugged their cars in when they return from their 9-to-5, expecting an instantaneous charge, the surge in demand could overwhelm the grid, triggering a meltdown.

In the U.K., Octopus Energy runs an application called “Intelligent Octopus for EV”, which uses algorithms to both stagger the charging of electric vehicles overnight, ensuring the grid’s need never outstrips its supply, and to time the charging of each vehicle to when renewable energy is most abundant and cheap on the grid.

When an electric vehicle owner returns home, she simply inputs when she plans to take her car out the next day into the Intelligent Octopus app.

Following the sun’s cycle of heating and cooling the atmosphere, wind is most abundant at night. The charging algorithm takes advantage of this. In the early morning hours, the algorithm kicks in, and sweet renewable electrons surge into electric cars under the Intelligent Octopus app’s orchestration.

Today, Intelligent Octopus regulates power supply to 150,000 electric vehicles in the U.K. For now, only customers of utility providers licensing a software platform called Kraken Technologies have access to the application.

Kraken is on a mission to make every tentacle of the energy system as efficient as possible.

Through a mix of software automations, behavioral nudges, and optimized hardware, Kraken pushes people to use energy when renewable electrons are most abundant, and therefore cheapest, on the grid. By tackling this challenge from every angle, Kraken has built a business model out of bridging the gap inherent between the variabilities of renewable energies and human behavior.

A full tech stack for the energy industry

Initially, the Kraken software was conceived to disrupt the payments and billing side of utility companies. Coming from a background in consumer-oriented enterprise software, Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson says he and his cofounders saw energy as an antiquated industry where software could add value.

It’s not that traditional utilities don’t run software — they do. It’s that their software is often piecemeal, says Jackson. Utilities typically run numerous layers of disjointed software, with one operating billing, another payments, and a handful more managing communications and energy consumption data. A change to one software could necessitate a change to every other, which is exactly what it sounds like — a house of cards.

Kraken set out to bundle these services. Similar to the way Substack markets itself as a full tech stack for running an independent media business, Kraken imagined itself as a full tech stack for running an energy company.

The platform was designed to be a seamless user experience for consumers and utility providers alike. For the first time, a utility representative could actually access and control all aspects of a household’s account, from billing to payments to meter readings, in one place, making the passing of frustrated customers from one department to another a thing of the past.

It was this centralization of data and operations that would ultimately enable a platform even more powerful than the team originally anticipated.

Kraken has, in effect, introduced an operating system to the energy system.

In the same way that the iPhone’s iOS operating system laid the foundation for the development of endlessly proliferating smartphone applications, Kraken offers an operating system through which software developers, energy retailers, and consumers can collaborate to develop and deploy different applications to solve discrete energy constraints as they arise.

“When the iPhone was launched, it came with iOS, the operating system and 8 built-in apps. An email app, a text app, and a couple of others,” says Jackson. “At the time, it wasn’t obvious that that underlying operating system that enabled an initial few apps to work would develop to the point that you’d have this flourishing development of capability through new apps. Everything from the revolution of transport through Uber to the QR codes, and everything else, all enabled by the fact you’d moved to an operating system, and a few bits of tech on the phone itself, that were fundamentally different than we’d had before. That’s what we can do with energy.”

The Intelligent Octopus program coordinating the charging of electric vehicles is just one example of multiple applications running on top of Kraken optimizing energy efficiency so far.

Overcoming the old guard

Kraken’s software now operates in around 10 countries, and its codebase is updated and released 150 times a day. But the road to get here hasn’t been an easy one: marketing Kraken Technologies as a full stack tech platform for energy and utilities management turned out to be a harder sell than anticipated.

“We had the insight that you could build software platforms in the 21st century that brought this cheaper, greener power to life faster,” Jackson says. “But when we spoke to energy companies, they’re typically very conservative.”

Most energy companies are well over a century old. The result? Many still do business like it’s 1910. They’re risk averse. The idea of paying for such a comprehensive external software service was so foreign to many traditional utility companies, the creators of Kraken struggled to find a first customer.

So Kraken decided to build a first customer of its own: Octopus Energy.

The London-based Octopus Energy launched to the public in April 2016. In the early days, Kraken’s tech team sat with Octopus’s customer service team, listening in on calls to identify pain points in the internal workflow and the customer experience. Through this hands-on research, the Kraken team slowly unearthed inefficiencies that bits of new software or user interfaces could solve — the kinds of insights that could only be gleaned from the inside.

Kraken’s design improved incrementally, expanding in capacity and technical capability. In time, Kraken has morphed into a fully-fledged dynamic software platform capable of managing an energy system’s entire value chain.

By streamlining operations and optimizing energy consumption across the board, Octopus Energy is able to sell cheaper clean electricity than its traditional utility counterparts.

That demo client — Octopus Energy — has been so successful, it recently eclipsed all but one of the U.K.’s major energy providers to become the second-largest energy company in the country. Octopus Energy now directly services 18 percent of the U.K. retail energy market directly. If you count U.K. homes that get their energy from other utility companies running Kraken, the market share goes up to 40 percent.

An unprecedented rate of innovation

Since 2016, Octopus Energy has been ground zero for building and testing apps on top of the Kraken software platform. Once tested and proven, these apps can be used by all utility companies licensing the Kraken software, regardless of location.

“It’s the same platform, whether you’re in Australia, Tokyo, London, or Munich,” Jackson told The Telegraph. “What that means is, when you learn more about how to optimize charging a car battery in Houston, the same optimization is instantly available around the world.”

Kraken’s streamlined software grants energy companies an unprecedented agility: Programs can even be spun up in a pinch in response to a crisis. Such a short cycle of innovation is unheard of in the energy industry.

This last winter, for example, in just a matter of weeks, Kraken was able to design and launch a program in response to the energy supply crunch in the U.K. Forty percent of households serviced by Kraken in the U.K. opted into the program. Customers who volunteer to lighten the load on the energy grid through easy behavioral changes, like running the dishwasher later in the evening instead of immediately after dinner, are rewarded.

“In the U.K., when electricity is in quite short supply, the national grid will turn on the most expensive and filthy diesel generators to maintain supply,” says Jackson. “And instead of doing that, what we’ve pioneered is paying customers to move their consumption away from the period when the diesel would have been used. Instead of giving the money to the diesel polluters, we give it to the consumers.”

Jackson says this consumer choice of 600,000 participating households — 40 percent of Octopus’ U.K. retail customers — had the equivalent reduction in energy consumption as turning off all the lights in two of the U.K.’s largest cities.

Building out the customer-centricity of Kraken was critical in unlocking the capacity to promote these kinds of behavioral changes. Meanwhile, the element of Kraken as an “iOS” on top of the energy system is what enabled the rapid prototyping and testing of potential ideas to identify the messaging and incentives that would actually resonate with consumers to develop new energy consumption habits.

Instead of money, for instance, Octopus gave customers reward points, offering bonuses and multipliers for winning streaks. Prizes go to customers who score within the top five percent.

The tactics are not unlike that of Duolingo, an app that has perfected the behavioral nudge to get people hooked on language learning. Across the energy industry, perfecting and scaling these kinds of behavioral nudges will be key to addressing renewable energy’s variability systemwide.

“If you go to the supermarket, you’ll see hundreds of different ways of influencing our purchasing decisions,” says Jackson. “And yet, too often, I’ll read a really well-researched paper in energy that says we tried this program one way [and it didn’t work]. We need to move into the world where we can do so much more.”

Zero-bill homes

Another app spun up and deployed on Kraken in short order last year is Octopus Zero.

“In a lot of parts of the United States, consumers and, indeed, in lots of parts of Europe, consumers don’t get paid for excess solar electricity generated on their property when it goes on the grid,” says Jackson. “And that’s complete madness, because, essentially we’re asking people to make an investment that benefits the system, and yet they carry the cost and no benefit.”

With Octopus Zero, Kraken set out to flip that dynamic on its head, rewarding homeowners who adopt electric appliances with quite literal ‘zero-bill homes’ — zero utility bill, zero electricity bill.

Octopus Zero created an algorithmic model that spits out electric appliance recommendations perfectly suited to the size and dimension of a home by combing billions of historic data points of home electric appliances. The end result is home outfitted for optimal energy efficiency and consumption. From there, Kraken’s proprietary software optimizes each appliance’s energy consumption over time.

“If a house builder gives us the footprint, the design of a house, we can say how much solar paneling, what size heat pump, what size battery, what kind of hot water heater it needs. And then we’ll optimize all of that [through its connection to the grid], and we’re confident enough in the data that we’ve done, that we’ll underwrite it. And you’ll never get an energy bill for a decade.”

The ‘zero-bills home’ program began with just two houses last September. Now, Jackson, they have 100 additional homes signed up and thousands more in the pipeline.

In Octopus Energy’s dogged pursuit of end-to-end efficiency, the energy company has even started sticking its tentacles into optimizing electric hardware directly.

For instance, when Octopus couldn’t find heat pumps capable of talking to the Kraken software in the way they wanted, Octopus mocked up their own ‘intelligent’ heat pumps to maximize efficiency. Jackson says prototypes are currently in the market and a retail product is expected to go into production within the year.

“The best tech businesses in the world do this. If you look at Amazon, Amazon operates ships, right? I remember when Amazon was an online book store. It now operates ships, and planes. If you want to change the world quickly for the better, and you’ve got technology at the core, you often have to change everything around it, and that’s what we’ll do,” says Jackson. “The key thing here is understanding a bit like a Tesla wasn’t just a car with, you know, some batteries and motors. It was a rethink of the car.”

Not a clean slate, but the next best thing

While the energy transition presents discrete challenges to be solved, it presents discrete opportunities, too.

Jackson emphasizes that trying to make the renewable energy system behave like the fossil fuel system is not only impractical, it also shortchanges us the benefits of renewables not yet imagined.

“One of the lights that came on for me is that, when you worry about the periods when generation is low, you forget just how incredible the opportunities are [the] times [when] generation is high,” says Jackson.

Take urban agriculture. From powerful UV lights driving growth, to running intricate sprinkler systems and powerful air purifiers, over half of an indoor farm’s operating expenses can be attributed to energy consumption. Reduce energy costs and dramatically impact the bottom line.

“We’ve got 14 indoor farms on our customer books who have taught the crops to sleep when energy prices are high, and to grow with light and heat when energy prices are low,” says Jackson. “If we try to make renewables behave like fossil fuels, like by flattening out the curve with [battery] storage, those farms would all be paying more for electricity all the time and we’d be missing out on cheap, locally grown, super healthy food.”

Jackson says we should be identifying opportunities like this where we can capitalize on the fundamentals of renewables.

In an ideal world, Jackson says, we would reimagine and rebuild the energy system entirely from scratch. He points out that we know we didn’t get the energy system right the first time around with our dependence on fossil fuels.

“If we could all start with a clean sheet of paper, it would be easier,” says Jackson. “[But] stop thinking about what we’ve currently got, because it’s probably largely wrong, right? … Imagine we never had fossil fuels. What world would brilliant and genius humans have built? That’s the world we now need to get to.”

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Inside Blue Abyss’ plan to build super-deep pools for astronauts and military bots

Sarah Scoles — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Ard Su for Popular Science

In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

VLADIMIR PLETSER stands in front of an eclectic audience—a group of people attending the Analog Astronaut Conference in Arizona. Analog astronauts are folks who simulate the lives of spacefarers, for science, while remaining on Earth. For days or weeks or months, they inhabit and experiment in facilities that mimic cosmic conditions, living as quasi-astronauts. Sometimes those facilities are settlements in the Utah desert that look like the Red Planet, such as the Mars Desert Research Station, run by the nonprofit Mars Society; others are mocked-up astro-habitats inside NASA centers, like the Human Exploration Research Analog at Johnson Space Center.

But Pletser, on this Saturday in May, is here to discuss a new analog facility courtesy of Blue Abyss, a company where he serves as space operations training director. That’s an appropriate position, as he’s managed microgravity research for the European Space Agency, he’s worked in support of China’s space station, and he is an astronaut candidate for Belgium.

Blue Abyss, a company focused on enabling research, training, and testing in extreme environments, is planning to build the second-deepest pools in the world. (The deepest pool is in Dubai, built for recreation and filming.) The proposed bodies of water will be 160 feet deep and about 130 to 160 feet wide. They’ll be the largest pools in the world by volume. Giant bodies of water like these will be useful to astronauts who want to practice in an environment analogous to space—an oxygen-deprived place with neutral buoyancy. They’re also of interest to deep-sea divers and people in the offshore energy sector. Then there are operators in the defense industry who find themselves in the ocean for tasks like reconnaissance, search and rescue, and mine hunting. Blue Abyss aims to serve them all.

Diving in

The pools will be built in Cornwall, England, and Brook Park, Ohio, near Cleveland, if all goes according to plan. And they won’t just be super-size swimming holes. They will have multiple underwater levels for research and provide enough room for big instruments and vehicles to enter the buildings and the water.

“We envisage that the size and flexibility of our pools will enable some of the more complex planetary [extravehicular activity] that will be undertaken in the future on the moon and Mars to be practiced here on Earth, something that is still quite difficult to conduct in the neutral buoyancy pools that exist today, which weren’t developed with this in mind,” says John Vickers, Blue Abyss’ CEO. The facility will also be able to mimic the tides and currents of the real world and the varied lighting conditions people might find in the ocean or outer space. Specific chambers will simulate the pressure found at depths of up to thousands of meters.

While Blue Abyss’ plans for facilities are not limited to big pools, they will be the centerpieces. Pools like these are not a totally unique idea in the astronaut world; NASA has a similar aqueous facility, called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, in Houston—but it goes down only 40 feet. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, hosts its own Hydro Lab, of similar depth. China’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility in Beijing and the European Space Agency’s in Germany both dip down 33 feet. Blue Abyss’ pools will be bigger, and perhaps better able to accommodate the needs of future astronauts, who will likely be doing complex missions outside their spacecraft.

Analog oceans aren’t exactly a new idea in the defense sector either; the US Navy, for instance, has an “indoor ocean” in Maryland, called the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin. It is 35 feet deep at its lowest point and is used to test scale models of subs. But existing facilities weren’t necessarily made for the seagoing vehicles of today, which are often autonomous, drone-like, or both.

Water worlds

If they succeed, Blue Abyss’ projects will provide access via the private sector to the same types of facilities that are today, in some cases, run by governments. The pools will be for humans (be they space explorers or divers or small-craft conductors) and robots (be they remotely operated vehicles or autonomous underwater vehicles). “Centers will provide training, certification, and technology demonstration, ensuring that divers, operators, and other underwater professionals have the skills and knowledge to operate safely and effectively in challenging circumstances,” says Vickers.

Or at least, that’s the idea. “We’re still in the phase of trying to find funding,” Pletser tells those at the conference. “So the project that we have in England, in Cornwall, is going much slower than the one that we have here in the States.”

The Cleveland area—an aerospace hub—has been supportive of the venture, says Vickers, but the company has had a harder time in its home territory of England, the original proposed site. “Brexit, the pandemic, and a lack of sufficient vision within parts of government have meant that what should have been the world’s first site may now come second,” he says.

It likely isn’t the interest of the analog astronauts gathered to hear Pletser speak that makes the general idea feasible, regardless of what country the pools are constructed in. After all, the world doesn’t have that many astronauts to train.

But Blue Abyss is hoping to attract a much larger potential pool of people, and of money, from other contexts. Those in the offshore energy sector could practice working with cables and pipes, inspecting the foundations of wind turbines, and checking out vessels—without the serious dangers that come with conducting operations in the open ocean, where unpredictable currents, sea creatures, and other X factors can provide potentially deadly complications. Divers could train regardless of the weather. Scientists could test undersea research tools before sending them into an actual oceanic abyss. And makers of submersibles could test their craft and practice tricky maneuvers in a controlled environment. “So we not only address the space sector, but also the marine sector,” says Pletser.

Importantly, that marine sector includes the defense field, where contractors help navies and coast guards make sense of the ocean’s mysteries.

Wet work

One contractor that does such military work is General Dynamics. “We have a number of programs of record with the US Navy,” says Michael Guay, director for autonomous undersea systems. (A subsidiary, General Dynamics Electric Boat, makes nuclear subs for the Navy.) One of General Dynamics’ programs, Knifefish, has created a vehicle that can detect, classify, and identify mines placed underwater. Similar autonomous vehicles are also useful to the military for surveillance, reconnaissance, and even anti-submarine warfare.

Autonomous vehicles can also do hydrographic surveys. Such vehicles, which use sensors to measure aspects of the water like turbidity, salinity, and fluorescence, are useful for exploring for new oil and gas drilling sites and doing scientific assessments of the oceanic environment.

General Dynamics has its own “full-ocean-depth-simulating pressure test tank,” says Guay, and its tanks can test full vehicles or just their parts. One of its facilities is in Quincy, Massachusetts, “So we have rapid access to Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay,” he says.

Another company, called SEAmagine, sells small submarines and submersible boats—specifically those that require human drivers, which has been going out of fashion. “We didn’t believe that we were going to know our oceans by simply putting cameras and robots in the water,” says Charles Kohnen, SEAMagine’s co-founder. “Somehow the human element has to remain for us to understand.”

Today, SEAmagine, based in California, offers its craft to tourists, scientific researchers, yacht operators, and the defense sector. Its manned marine craft are specifically of interest to coast guards, which use them for search and rescue. Argentina’s, for instance, uses a SEAmagine vehicle to recover bodies from the ultra-deep water in the mountainous country. “They have these lakes that are 500 meters deep in the Andes,” says Kohnen. “And they’re very full of tourists because it’s beautiful. There’s a lot of tourists, and then lots of accidents.” These diminutive subs can ride on trailers on highways and be backed into the water like regular boats—not the case for your typical submersible.

But before either company does any of that fieldwork, its vehicles have to undergo rigorous testing. “The first, most important part of testing before you go in the ocean is going to be the pressure testing of the hull,” says Kohnen.

That happens in pressure chambers, like the ones Blue Abyss’ facilities will include. “There aren’t that many in the world that are large enough and deep enough,” says Kohnen. Today, SEAmagine uses a variety of different chambers in the US to test its hulls and other components, but Kohnen says there’s room for more. “I’d like to see more testing facilities that can do the under-pressure testing,” he says. “As you build more of a blue economy for all these marine industries, the world could use some more labs.”

Blue Abyss hopes its facilities will be useful in certifying early-stage technology—the kind of tech that companies may not want to experiment with in the actual sea—validating and demonstrating sensors and components and autonomous capabilities at work in their relevant environments. That way, they can know that the technology either works or needs a tweak, and then they can demonstrate to agencies or customers that the parts and systems are ready.

And analog astronauts may be eager to take the plunge, too.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Citizen scientists have taken photos of this boulder every year for three decades

J. Besl/Hakai Magazine — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 01:00:00 +0000

In 2022, rockweed was flourishing again. Photo by David Janka/NOAA

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

David Janka stands at the helm of the Auklet, an 18-meter charter boat that’s traveled Alaska’s waters longer than the region has been an American state. It’s the peak of summer as he putters into Snug Harbor, a shallow curve in a shoreline of Knight Island walled by towering cliffs and stands of cedar, spruce, and hemlock. He steers toward the beach, aiming for a potato-shaped rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He’s here to take its picture.

For 33 years, someone has traveled here each summer to photograph the unassuming boulder, nicknamed Mearns Rock. Collectively, the photos are an unexpected offshoot of one of the United States’ worst environmental disasters.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, dumping 40 million liters of thick black crude into Prince William Sound. Oil spread to Snug Harbor, 80 kilometers away. Mearns Rock and all its marine denizens were “totally painted in oil,” says Alan Mearns, the rock’s eponym, who worked on the hazmat team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the spill’s aftermath.

Just two years after being coated in crude oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, this Volkswagen Beetle–sized boulder boasted a healthy crop of rockweed. Photo by Alan Mearns/NOAA

During the cleanup, Exxon crews and contractors power washed oil off shorelines into the ocean, where it was easier to corral. But the effort also ripped away marine life.

“Our concern immediately became, Is a cleanup going to be worse than leaving the oil on?” says Mearns.

In the end, Exxon washed some sections of the coast and left others untreated. Mearns Rock remained oiled. For the next decade, Mearns and a team of NOAA chemists and biologists returned to dozens of sites in the region to assess the ecosystem’s recovery from oil exposure and power washing. Mearns started photographing these research visits, using boulders like Mearns Rock as landmarks. When the larger study ended, Mearns and his NOAA colleague John Whitney secured funding to keep taking yearly photos until 2012. Since then, the project has survived on the enthusiasm of volunteers like Janka, who now consistently photograph eight of the original sites, stopping in when they’re nearby. The dedicated group has included skippers, scientists, and local coast guard volunteers.

Side by side, the 33 images of Mearns Rock look like a collection of a child’s yearly school photos. In one, the boulder boasts a thick topper of rockweed. Another year, it’s buzz-cut bare, followed by a stubbly growth of barnacles the next summer. Together, the photos demonstrate the dynamism of the intertidal zone, where mussels, barnacles, and seaweed clamor for real estate.

“There’s a lot that we can learn from a simple picture,” says Scott Pegau, a research manager at the Oil Spill Recovery Institute in Cordova, Alaska. This June, during an aerial herring survey, he’ll dock his floatplane in Shelter Bay, 20 kilometers southwest of Snug Harbor, to photograph two refrigerator-sized boulders named Bert and Ernie.

By 1994, the seaweed had died back and mussels were elbowing in. Photo by Alan Mearns/NOAA

The decades-long photo series is also helping researchers understand the region’s natural variability, where the intertidal zone changes from boulder to boulder, bay to bay, year to year.

While mussels and barnacles rebounded to natural numbers within a few years of the spill, not all species were so lucky. Several populations still haven’t recovered, including a local killer whale pod. To this day, when Janka has guests on the Auklet, he can stop at certain beaches and find pockets of toxic oil just a spoonful of sand beneath the surface.

Janka has been intimately familiar with the oil spill since the night of the Exxon Valdez wreck. He shuttled journalists into the disaster zone during the five frenzied days after the spill, and he met Mearns when NOAA later hired him to ferry scientists to their sites. Though he retired from chartering this year, Janka plans to return to Mearns Rock to snap another photo this summer.

The Exxon Valdez proved to Janka the power of visual documentation. So many positive things happened because images of the spill were passed around the world, he says. The US government implemented oil spill legislation, formed citizen councils to oversee Prince William Sound’s oil industry, and legislated double-hulled tankers. “I don’t think that would have happened if there weren’t photographs,” he says.

In 2002, barnacles dominated the rock’s surface. Photo by Alan Mearns/NOAA

The ongoing project feels less attached to the 1989 oil spill and more focused on the future, says Mearns, who retired from NOAA in 2018 but continues to steward the photo collection. Prince William Sound has made a tentative recovery but could be devastated again. Alaska’s waters are warming, new species are moving north, and rising seas are pushing the intertidal zone up the shoreline. A citizen council just flagged the Valdez oil terminal in Prince William Sound as an “unacceptable safety risk.” Who knows what the next 33 years will bring? The team is actively looking for volunteer photographers to keep the project running.

“I turn 80 this summer. I keep thinking, well, maybe I should back off. But I can’t. It’s fun,” Mearns says. As long as his friends keep sending photos, he’ll keep building the boulder albums, checking out each rock’s latest look as he adds another photo to the end of the line.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified those responsible for cleaning the beaches. Exxon hired the crews that power washed oil off shorelines, not NOAA.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This concept cruise ship will have solar-paneled sails, an AI copilot, and zero emissions

Andrew Paul — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:00:00 +0000

The ship's three retractable sails will be covered in solar panels. VARD Design

Today’s cruise ships are environmental nightmares. Just one vessel packed with a veritable petri dish of passengers can burn as much as 250 tons of fuel per day, or about the same emissions as 12,000 cars. If the industry is to survive, it will need to adapt quickly in order to adequately address the myriad ecological emergencies facing the planet—and one Norwegian cruise liner company is attempting to meet those challenges head-on.

Earlier today, Hurtigruten Norway unveiled the first designs for a zero-emission cruise ship scheduled to debut by the end of the decade. First announced in March 2022 as “Sea Zero,” Hurtigruten (Norwegian for “the Fast Route”) showed off its initial concept art for the craft on Wednesday. The vessel features three autonomous, retractable, 50m-high sail wing rigs housing roughly 1,500-square-meters of solar panels. Alongside the sails, the ship will be powered by multiple 60-megawatt batteries that recharge while in port, as well as wind technology. Other futuristic additions to the vessel will include AI maneuvering capabilities, retractable thrusters, contra-rotating propellers, advanced hull coatings, and proactive hull cleaning tech.

[Related: Care about the planet? Skip the cruise, for now.]

“Following a rigorous feasibility study, we have pinpointed the most promising technologies for our groundbreaking future cruise ships,” said Hurtigruten Norway CEO Hedda Felin. Henrik Burvang, Research and Innovation Manager at VARD, the company behind the ship concept designs, added the forthcoming boat’s streamlined shape, alongside its hull and propulsion advances, will reduce energy demand. Meanwhile, VARD is “developing new design tools and exploring new technologies for energy efficiency,” said Burvang.

With enhanced AI capabilities, the cruise ships’ crew bridge is expected to significantly shrink in size to resemble airplane cockpits, but Hurtigruten’s futuristic, eco-conscious designs don’t rest solely on its next-gen ship and crew. The 135-meter-long concept ship’s estimated 500 guests will have access to a mobile app capable of operating their cabins’ ventilation systems, as well as track their own water and energy consumption while aboard the vessel.

Credit: VARD Design

Next up for Hurtigruten’s Sea Zero project is a two-year testing and development phase for the proposed tech behind the upcoming cruise ship, particularly focusing on battery production, propulsion, hull design, and sustainable practices. Meanwhile, the company will also look into onboard hotel operational improvements, which Hurtigruten states can consume as much as half a ship’s overall energy reserves.

Hurtigruten also understands if 2030 feels like a long time to wait until a zero-emission ship. In the meantime, the company has already upgraded two of its seven vessels to run on a battery-hybrid-power system, with a third on track to be retrofitted this fall. Its additional vessels are being outfitted with an array of tech to CO2 emissions by 20-percent, and nitrogen oxides by as much as 80 percent.

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675 million people still didn’t have access to electricity in 2021

Andrew Paul — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:00 +0000

The UN's latest report paints a grim picture of progress towards sustainability goals. Deposit Photos

In 2015, the United Nations announced a series of interdependent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) meant to provide a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” In the years since, the UN and various partner organizations have released periodic progress reports that assess global movement towards these benchmarks. The latest annual recap, published on Tuesday, focuses on SDG 7’s aim at providing “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy” to the world, alongside universal access to clean cooking and electricity, doubling historic levels of efficiency improvements, and increasing renewable energy usage by the end of the decade.

The UN’s 2023 assessment of efforts so far? Not great.

According to the Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report, the world’s current pace is simply not en route to achieving “any of the 2030 targets.” Although the commission acknowledges some regions’ improvements in various areas such as renewable energy availability, the number of people globally lacking electricity access is likely to have actually increased for the first time in decades due to the ongoing energy crisis exacerbated by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report also explains the most pressing factors styming progress towards SDG 7 include the uncertain global economic outlook, high inflation, currency fluctuations, the growing number of countries dealing with debt distress, and supply chain issues.

[Related: 1 in 5 people are likely to live in dangerously hot climates by 2100.]

At humanity’s current trajectory, nearly 2 billion people will still lack clean cooking facilities in 2030, with another 660 million without reliable electricity access. The report’s summary notes that, according to the World Health Organization, over 3 million people die every year due to illnesses stemming from polluting technologies and fuel that increase exposure to toxic household air pollution.

“We must protect the next generation by acting now,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said in a statement. “Investing in clean and renewable solutions to support universal energy access is how we can make real change.” “Clean cooking technologies in homes and reliable electricity in healthcare facilities can play a crucial role in protecting the health of our most vulnerable populations,” Ghebreyesus added.

[Related: Extreme weather and energy insecurity can compound health risks.]

There is at least one bright spot in the discouraging report, however. According to the UN Statistics Division, even accounting for recent electrification slowdowns, the number of people lacking electricity has halved over the past ten years—down to 675 million in 2021 versus around 1.1 billion in 2010.

“Nonetheless, additional efforts and measures must urgently be put in place to ensure that the poorest and hardest-to-reach people are not left behind,” explained Stefan Schweinfest of the UN’s Statistics Division in the UN’s statement. “To reach universal access by 2030, the development community must scale up clean energy investments and policy support.”

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It will cost up to $21.5 billion to clean up California’s oil sites. The industry won’t make enough money to pay for it.

Mark Olalde/ProPublica — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 23:00:00 +0000

An oil pumpjack stands idle near homes in Signal Hill, California, on Feb. 9. Mario Tama/Getty Images
This article was originally published on ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Co-published with LAist and KVPR.

For well over a century, the oil and gas industry has drilled holes across California in search of black gold and a lucrative payday. But with production falling steadily, the time has come to clean up many of the nearly quarter-million wells scattered from downtown Los Angeles to western Kern County and across the state.

The bill for that work, however, will vastly exceed all the industry’s future profits in the state, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Thursday and shared with ProPublica.

“This major issue has sneaked up on us,” said Dwayne Purvis , a Texas-based petroleum reservoir engineer who analyzed profits and cleanup costs for the report. “Policymakers haven’t recognized it. Industry hasn’t recognized it, or, if they have, they haven’t talked about it and acted on it.”

The analysis, which was commissioned by Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank that studies how the transition away from fossil fuels impacts markets and the economy, used California regulators’ draft methodology for calculating the costs associated with plugging oil and gas wells and decommissioning them along with related infrastructure. The methodology was developed with feedback from the industry.

The report broke down the costs into several categories. Plugging wells, dismantling surface infrastructure and decontaminating polluted drill sites would cost at least $13.2 billion, based on publicly available data. Adding in factors with slightly more uncertainty, like inflation rates and the price of decommissioning miles of pipeline, could bring the total cleanup bill for California’s onshore oil and gas industry to $21.5 billion.

Meanwhile, California oil and gas production will earn about $6.3 billion in future profits over the remaining course of operations, Purvis estimated.

Compounding the problem, the industry has set aside only about $106 million that state regulators can use for cleanup when a company liquidates or otherwise walks away from its responsibilities, according to state data. That amount equals less than 1% of the estimated cost.

Taxpayers will likely have to cover much of the difference to ensure wells are plugged and not left to leak brine, toxic chemicals and climate-warming methane.

“These findings detail why the state must ensure this cost is not passed along to the California taxpayer,” state Sen. Monique Limón, a Santa Barbara Democrat who has written legislation regulating oil, said in a statement. “It is important that the state collect funding to plug and abandon wells in a timely and expeditious manner.”

Representatives of the state’s oil regulatory agency, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment on the report’s findings.

Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association, an industry trade group, said in a statement that companies spent more than $400 million last year to plug and clean up thousands of oil and gas wells in the state. “This demonstrates their dedication to fulfilling their obligations and mitigating the environmental impact of their operations,” he said.

Fees on current oil and gas production will offset some of the liabilities, but they’re nowhere near enough to address the shortfall quantified by the new report.

“It really scares me,” Kyle Ferrar, Western program coordinator with environmental and data transparency group FracTracker Alliance, said of the report’s findings. “It’s a lot for the state, even a state as big as California.”

Industry in Decline

High oil prices have translated to huge profits for the industry in recent years, but Carbon Tracker’s report found that’s likely to be short-lived. Only two drilling rigs were operating in the state at one point this year, meaning few new wells will be coming online, and more than a third of all unplugged wells are idle.

Judson Boomhower, an environmental economist and assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego who has studied California’s oil industry, said there are inherent uncertainties in estimating future oil revenues. For example, one variable is how quickly the country shifts from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric. But, he said, Carbon Tracker’s estimates for environmental liabilities track with his research.

“It’s a state in the twilight of its production period, and that means big liabilities,” Boomhower said. He added that now is the time for regulators to prevent companies from offloading their wells to “thinly capitalized firms” unable to shoulder the cleanup.

As ProPublica reported last year, the major oil companies that long dominated in California and have the deep pockets necessary to pay for environmental cleanup are selling their wells and leaving the state, handing the task to smaller and less well-financed companies.

Roughly half of the wells drilled in California have changed hands through sales and bankruptcies since 2010, according to data Ferrar analyzed.

Smaller companies are often one bankruptcy away from their wells being orphaned, meaning they’re left to taxpayers as companies dissolve. The Biden administration recently committed $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds to plug orphan wells.

And the industry’s environmental liabilities in California are far bigger than Carbon Tracker’s report quantifies.

Purvis only included environmental liabilities associated with onshore oil and gas production. Billions of dollars more will be needed to plug offshore wells, remove rigs and reclaim artificial islands used for drilling off the coast of Long Beach, Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Additionally, the report did not quantify the emerging risk of “zombie wells,” which were plugged years ago to weaker standards and are likely to leak if they aren’t replugged. That’s an expensive endeavor, as the average cost to plug one well in California — to say nothing of cleaning up surface contamination — is $69,000, according to Purvis’ research. But some California wells have already begun failing, including in neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

“They’re Not Going to Have Money to Do It Later”

Time is running out to rectify the funding shortfall, for example by increasing the money companies must set aside for well plugging.

Carbon Tracker’s report — using state production data and financial futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange — estimated that as production declines, 58% of all future profits from drilling oil and gas in the state are likely to come over the next two years.

“We have our backs up against the wall in California right now,” Ferrar said. “If companies don’t put money towards it now, they’re not going to have money to do it later.”

Environmental policies could accelerate the industry’s decline. California voters will decide on a ballot initiative in 2024 that would reinstate large buffer zones between communities and oil wells, limiting drilling.

Purvis said acting quickly to plug wells would also “stimulate economic activity” and help smooth the transition for oil and gas workers who stand to lose well-paying jobs in the shift away from climate-warming fossil fuels. Spending large sums to plug old wells would create short-term employment for oil field workers.

As California faces the consequences of its failure to quickly clean up aging oil and gas infrastructure, there are likely several million more wells around the country that are either low-producing or already orphaned and will soon need to be decommissioned.

“California’s going to be a test case or the leading edge of this,” Boomhower said. “This same problem is eventually going to manifest everywhere.”

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Plant-covered roofs could help chill Brazil’s heat-stricken favelas

Jill Langlois/Undark — Fri, 26 May 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Favela do Alemao in Rio de Janeiro. Low-income urban communities like these tend to lack greenery and are more likely to face extreme heat than their wealthier or more rural counterparts. Ratao Diniz/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images

This article was originally featured on Undark.

Sweat was dripping down Luis Cassiano’s face. It was 2012, and Rio de Janeiro’s hottest day to date: At nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the seaside city had just barely beaten its previous record set in 1984.

Cassiano and his mother, then 82, had lived in the same narrow four-story house since they moved to Parque Arará, a favela in northern Rio, some 20 years earlier. Like many other homes in the working-class community — one of more than 1,000 favelas in the Brazilian city of over 6.77 million — its roof is made of asbestos tiles. But homes in his community are now often roofed with corrugated steel sheets, a material frequently used for its low cost. It’s also a conductor of extreme heat.

While the temperatures outside made his roof hot enough to cook an egg — Cassiano said he once tried and succeeded — inside felt worse. “I only came home to sleep,” said Cassiano. “I had to escape.”

Parque Arará mirrors many other low-income urban communities, which tend to lack greenery and are more likely to face extreme heat than their wealthier or more rural counterparts. Such areas are often termed “heat islands” since they present pockets of high temperatures — sometimes as much as 20 degrees hotter than surrounding areas.

That weather takes a toll on human health. Heat waves are associated with increased rates of dehydration, heat stroke, and death; they can exacerbate chronic health conditions, including respiratory disorders; and they impact brain function. Such health problems will likely increase as heat waves become more frequent and severe with climate change. According to a 2021 study published in Nature Climate Change, more than a third of the world’s heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018 could be attributed to a warming planet.

The extreme heat worried Cassiano. And as a long-time favela resident, he knew he couldn’t depend on Brazil’s government to create better living conditions for his neighbors, the majority of whom are Black. So, he decided to do it himself.

While speaking with a friend working in sustainable development in Germany, Cassiano learned about green roofs: an architectural design feature in which rooftops are covered in vegetation to reduce temperatures both inside and outdoors. The European country started to seriously explore the technology in the 1960s, and by 2019, had expanded its green roofs to an estimated 30,000 acres, more than doubling in a decade.

“Why can’t favelas do that too?” he recalled thinking.

Scientific research suggests green infrastructure can offer urban residents a wide range of benefits: In addition to cooling ambient temperatures, they can reduce stormwater runoff, curb noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, and ease anxiety.

More than 10 years since that hot day in 2012 — and several heat records later — Cassiano heads Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit he started to educate residents about how they can build their own green roofs. Favela construction comes with its own set of technical peculiarities and public policy problems, and Cassiano enlisted the help of local scientists to research best practices and materials. But covering the roofs of an entire neighborhood requires time and — even with cost-reducing measures — a big budget.

His work has been steady, but slow. He is still far from converting every roof in his community of some 20,000 people. And with the effects of climate change arriving quickly, time may not be on their side. Still, Cassiano sees Teto Verde Favela as a template for others in similar situations around the world.

“I started to imagine the whole favela with green roofs,” he said. “And not just this favela, but others, too.”

Green roofs have been around for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that the modern-day version really took off, thanks to new irrigation technology and protection against leaks developed in Germany.

The technology cools local temperatures in two ways. First, vegetation absorbs less heat than other roofing materials. Second, plant roots absorb water that is then released as vapor through the leaves — a process known as evapotranspiration that offers similar cooling effects to how sweat cools human skin.

Green roofs can also help prevent flooding by reducing runoff. A conventional roof might let 100 percent of rain run off, allowing water to pour into streets, but a green roof, depending on its structure and slope, “can reduce this runoff generation rate to anywhere from 25 to 60 percent,” Lucas Camargo da Silva Tassinari, a civil engineer who researches the effectiveness of green roofs, wrote in an email to Undark.

Such interventions could be helpful in Brazil, where flooding is an ongoing issue, and temperatures are rising. A 2015 study showed that land surface temperatures in the city’s heat islands had increased 3 degrees over the previous decade. But greenery appears to help: Researchers from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, or UFRJ, found a 36 degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city’s warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas.

In Parque Arará, Cassiano said the temperature regularly rises well above what is registered as the city’s official temperature, often measured in less dense areas closer to the ocean. He decided his community’s first green roof prototype would be built on his own home. As he researched the best way to get started, Cassiano came across Bruno Rezende, a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis at UFRJ. When he told him about his idea, Rezende came to Parque Arará right away.

There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to green roofs. A designer must take into account each location’s specific climate and building type in order for the project to not only be effective, but also structurally sound.

The problem is that green roofs can be quite heavy. They require a number of layers, each serving its own unique purpose, such as providing insulation or allowing for drainage. But Parque Arará, like all of Rio’s favelas, wasn’t built to code. Homes went up out of necessity, without engineers or architects, and are made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks, cinder blocks, asbestos tiles, and sheet metal. And that informal construction couldn’t necessarily hold the weight of all the layers a green roof would require.

After looking at Cassiano’s roof, Rezende’s first suggestion was to cover it with rolls of bidim, a lightweight nonwoven geotextile made of polyester from recycled drink bottles. Inside those rolls of bidim, leftover from a recent construction project, they placed several types of plants: basket plants, inchplants, creeping inchplants, and spiderworts. They set the rolls in the grooves of the asbestos roof, and then created an irrigation system that dripped water down.

With a cheap way to install lightweight green roofs, Rezende brought Cassiano to meet his advisers and present what they had found. The university agreed that the project showed such promise that it would provide materials for the next step, Cassiano said.

Once the plants on Cassiano’s roof had time to grow, Rezende and André Mantovani, a biologist and ecologist at Rio’s Botanical Gardens, returned to see what effect it had on Cassiano’s home. With several sensors placed under the roofs, the researchers compared the temperature inside his house to that of a neighbor’s for several days. (The researchers intended the study to last longer, but the favela’s unreliable energy system kept cutting power to their sensors.)

Despite the study’s limitations, the results were encouraging. During the period that researchers recorded temperatures, Cassiano’s roof was roughly 86 degrees. His neighbor’s, on the other hand, fluctuated between 86 and 122 degrees. At one point, the roofs of the two homes differed by nearly 40 degrees.

For Cassiano, the numbers confirmed what he suspected: If he wanted to make a difference, he needed to put green roofs on as many homes as possible.

“When we talk about green roofs, we think about one house. But that’s not enough,” said Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. “When you start to imagine a street, a block, a neighborhood, and a city or a community as a whole with several green roofs, then you have something. Because it’s about the collective. It benefits everyone.”

But thinking on a larger scale comes with a host of new challenges. In order for a green roof to be safe, a structure has to be able to support it, and studying the capacity of individual buildings takes time. And even with low-cost materials such as bidim, installing green roofs on hundreds or thousands of homes requires significant funds.

“The biggest obstacle is the cost,” said Bia Rafaelli, an architect based in São Paulo who has worked with communities like Cassiano’s to teach them about sustainable building options. “To make this all viable on a large scale,” installing green roofs on all the favelas, she said, “there would need to be sponsorship from companies or help from the government.”

While some municipalities in Brazil have legislation requiring green roofs on new construction when possible, Rio de Janeiro does not. A bill that would create a similar law to those in other cities has been at a standstill in Rio’s city council since May 2021.

Rio does, however, incentivize builders to install green roofs and other sustainable options — like solar panels and permeable paving. But such efforts don’t typically benefit residents of the favelas, where most building is done informally, without construction companies looking to legislation for guidelines and benefits.

In addition to red tape and other bureaucratic hurdles, any project related to the favelas also faces longstanding racism. According to a 2021 study conducted by Instituto Locomotiva, Data Favela, and Central Única das Favelas, 67 percent of the population in favelas across Brazil is Black. That’s disproportionately higher than the country’s general population, which is 55 percent Black.

“Public policy doesn’t reach” favelas, said Diosmar Filho, a geographer and senior researcher at the research association Iyaleta, where he heads studies on inequality and climate change. The working-class communities, he said, are heat islands because of environmental racism — the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color — which has left much of Brazil’s Black population with inadequate housing and health care, both of which are aggravated by the effects of climate change.

Such trends aren’t isolated to Brazil. A 2020 study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning found that White neighborhoods in South African cities had disproportionately higher access to urban green infrastructure, including parks and green roofs — which the authors dubbed a “green Apartheid.” In a 2019 study, researchers at the University of Michigan used a spatial analysis to determine that green roofs were predominantly located in the city’s downtown, which they noted was more White and affluent than the rest of the city. (The study had limited data, however, and only analyzed 10 green roofs.)

Without support from the government or other authorities, Filho said, Black people often turn to each other for help. “It’s always the Black population that’s producing quality of life for the Black population,” he said, referring to people like Cassiano and projects like Teto Verde Favela.

“The actions of Teto Verde would be a great point of reference for urban housing policy for the reduction of impacts of climate change,” said Filho. But when municipalities deny people of color the right to safe housing and ways to push back against climate change, he added, “that’s when it becomes a case of environmental racism.”

Back in Rio, Cassiano continues to collaborate with research scientists and students at UFRJ. Together, they test new materials and methods to improve on the initial green roof prototype first installed on his home more than 10 years ago. To adapt for favela construction, his primary focus has been to reduce cost and reduce weight.

Instead of using an asphalt blanket as a layer of waterproof screening, Cassiano uses a vinyl sheet sandwiched between two layers of bidim. This means the cost of roofs installed by Teto Verde Favela is roughly 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot; conventional green roofs, though difficult to estimate in cost, can run as much as 53 Brazilian reais ($11) for the same amount of space. His roofs also started out hydroponic, meaning no soil was used, in order to decrease their weight.

Cassiano’s mother, now 93, loves caring for the plants on their roof. It not only helps lower the temperature in their home on hot days and retains rainwater to help prevent flooding in a downpour, but Cassiano said it also gives their mental health a much-needed boost.

“Now I couldn’t live here in this house without this green roof,” said Cassiano. “It makes me so happy when I see birds, when I see butterflies, when I see a flower or a fruit,” he added.

“It’s so much more than I ever imagined.”

Jill Langlois is an independent journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and TIME, among others.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Charlotte Hu — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:00:00 +0000

An Ioniq 6 electric vehicle. Hyundai

These days, it seems like every carmaker—from those focused on luxury options to those with an eye more toward the economical—is getting into electric vehicles. And with new US policies around purchasing incentives and infrastructure improvements, consumers might be more on board as well. But many people are still concerned about whether electric vehicles are truly better for the environment overall, considering certain questions surrounding their production process.

Despite concerns about the pollution generated from mining materials for batteries and the manufacturing process for the EVs themselves, the environmental and energy experts PopSci spoke to say that across the board, electric vehicles are still better for the environment than similar gasoline or diesel-powered models.

When comparing a typical commercial electric vehicle to a gasoline vehicle of the same size, there are benefits across many different dimensions.

“We do know, for instance, if we’re looking at carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, that electric vehicles operating on the typical electric grid can end up with fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the life of their vehicle,” says Dave Gohlke, an energy and environmental analyst at Argonne National Lab. “The fuel consumption (using electricity to generate the fuel as opposed to burning petroleum) ends up releasing fewer emissions per mile and over the course of the vehicle’s expected lifetime.”

[Related: An electrified car isn’t the same thing as an electric one. Here’s the difference.]

How the electricity gets made

With greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also worth considering how the electricity for charging the EV is generated. Electricity made by a coal- or oil-burning plant will have higher emissions compared to a natural gas plant, while nuclear and renewable energy will have the fewest emissions. But even an electric vehicle that got its juice from a coal plant tends to have fewer emissions compared to a gasoline vehicle of the same size, Gohlke says. “And that comes down to the fact that a coal power plant is huge. It’s able to generate electricity at a better scale, [be] more efficient, as opposed to your relatively small engine that fits in the hood of your car.” Power plants could additionally have devices in place to scrub their smokestacks or capture some of the emissions that arise.

EVs also produce no tailpipe emissions, which means reductions in particulate matter or in smog precursors that contribute to local air pollution.

“The latest best evidence right now indicates that in almost everywhere in the US, electric vehicles are better for the environment than conventional vehicles,” says Kenneth Gillingham, professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale School of the Environment. “How much better for the environment depends on where you charge and what time you charge.”

Electric motors tend to be more efficient compared to the spark ignition engine used in gasoline cars or the compression ignition engine used in diesel cars, where there’s usually a lot of waste heat and wasted energy.

Let’s talk about EV production

“It’s definitely the case that any technology has downsides. With technology you have to use resources, [the] raw materials we have available, and convert them to a new form,” says Jessika Trancik, a professor of data, systems, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And that usually comes with some environmental impacts. No technology is perfect in that sense, but when it comes to evaluating a technology, we have to think of what services it’s providing, and what technology providing the same service it’s replacing.”

Creating an EV produces pollution during the manufacturing process. “Greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing an electric vehicle are almost twice that of an internal combustion vehicle…that is due primarily to the battery. You’re actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions to produce the vehicle, but there’s a net overall lifecycle benefit or reduction because of the significant savings in the use of the vehicle,” says Gregory Keoleian, the director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. “We found in terms of the overall lifecycle, on average, across the United States, taking into account temperature effects, grid effects, there was 57 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for a new electric vehicle compared to a new combustion engine vehicle.”

In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with operating the vehicles, fully battery-powered electric vehicles were the best, followed by plug-in hybrids, and then hybrids, with internal combustion engine vehicles faring the worst, Keoleian notes. Range anxiety might still be top of mind for some drivers, but he adds that households with more than one vehicle can consider diversifying their fleet to add an EV for everyday use, when appropriate, and save the gas vehicle (or the gas feature on their hybrids) for longer trips.

The breakeven point at which the cost of producing and operating an electric vehicle starts to gain an edge over a gasoline vehicle of similar make and model occurs at around two years in, or around 20,000 to 50,000 miles. But when that happens can vary slightly on a case-by-case basis. “If you have almost no carbon electricity, and you’re charging off solar panels on your own roof almost exclusively, that breakeven point will be sooner,” says Gohlke. “If you’re somewhere with a very carbon intensive grid, that breakeven point will be a little bit later. It depends on the style of your vehicle as well because of the materials that go into it.”

[Related: Why solid-state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

For context, Gohlke notes that the average EV age right now is around 12 years old based on registration data. And these vehicles are expected to drive approximately 200,000 miles over their lifetime.

“Obviously if you drive off your dealer’s lot and you drive right into a light pole and that car never takes more than a single mile, that single vehicle will have had more embedded emissions than if you had wrecked a gasoline car on your first drive,” says Gohlke. “But if you look at the entire fleet of vehicles, all 200-plus-million vehicles that are out there and how long we expect them to survive, over the life of the vehicle, each of those electric vehicles is expected to consume less energy and emit lower emissions than the corresponding gas vehicle would’ve been.”

To put things in perspective, Gillingham says that extracting and transporting fossil fuels like oil is energy intensive as well. When you weigh those factors, electric vehicle production doesn’t appear that much worse than the production of gasoline vehicles, he says. “Increasingly, they’re actually looking better depending on the battery chemistry and where the batteries are made.”

And while it’s true that there are issues with mines, the petrol economy has damaged a lot of the environment and continues to do so. That’s why improving individual vehicle efficiency needs to be paired with reducing overall consumption.

EV batteries are getting better

Mined materials like rare metals can have harmful social and environmental effects, but that’s an economy-wide problem. There are many metals that are being used in batteries, but the use of metals is nothing new, says Trancik. Metals can be found in a range of household products and appliances that many people use in their daily lives.

Plus, there have been dramatic improvements in battery technology and the engineering of the vehicle itself in the past decade. The batteries have become cheaper, safer, more durable, faster charging, and longer lasting.

“There’s still a lot of room to improve further. There’s room for improved chemistry of the batteries and improved packaging and improved coolant systems and software that manages the batteries,” says Gillingham.

The two primary batteries used in electric vehicles today are NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) and LFP (lithium-ferrous-phosphate). NMC batteries tend to use more precious metals like cobalt from the Congo, but they are also more energy dense. LFP uses more abundant metals. And although the technology is improving fast, it’s still in an early stage, sensitive to cold weather, and not quite as energy dense. LFP tends to be good for utility scale cases, like for storing electricity on the grid.

[Related: Could swappable EV batteries replace charging stations?]

Electric vehicles also offer an advantage when it comes to fewer trips to the mechanic; conventional vehicles have more moving parts that can break down. “You’re more likely to be doing maintenance on a conventional vehicle,” says Gillingham. He says that there have been Teslas in his studies that are around eight years old, with 300,000 miles on them, which means that even though the battery does tend to degrade a little every year, that degradation is fairly modest.

Eventually, if the electric vehicle markets grow substantially, and there’s many of these vehicles in circulation, reusing the metals in the cars can increase their benefits. “This is something that you can’t really do with the fossil fuels that have already been combusted in an internal combustion engine,” says Trancik. “There is a potential to set up that circularity in the supply chain of those metals that’s not readily done with fossil fuels.”

Since batteries are fairly environmentally costly, the best case is for consumers who are interested in EVs to get a car with a small battery, or a plug-in hybrid electric car that runs on battery power most of the time. “A Toyota Corolla-sized car, maybe with some hybridization, could in many cases, be better for the environment than a gigantic Hummer-sized electric vehicle,” says Gillingham. (The charts in this New York Times article help visualize that distinction.)

Where policies could help

Electric vehicles are already better for the environment and becoming increasingly better for the environment.

The biggest factor that could make EVs even better is if the electrical grid goes fully carbon free. Policies that provide subsidies for carbon-free power, or carbon taxes to incentivize cleaner power, could help in this respect.

The other aspect that would make a difference is to encourage more efficient electric vehicles and to discourage the production of enormous electric vehicles. “Some people may need a pickup truck for work. But if you don’t need a large car for an actual activity, it’s certainly better to have a more reasonably sized car,” Gillingham says.

Plus, electrifying public transportation, buses, and vehicles like the fleet of trucks run by the USPS can have a big impact because of how often they’re used. Making these vehicles electric can reduce air pollution from idling, and routes can be designed so that they don’t need as large of a battery.

“The rollout of EVs in general has been slower than demand would support…There’s potentially a larger market for EVs,” Gillingham says. The holdup is due mainly to supply chain problems.

Switching over completely to EVs is, of course, not the end-all solution for the world’s environmental woes. Currently, car culture is very deeply embedded in American culture and consumerism in general, Gillingham says, and that’s not easy to change. When it comes to climate policy around transportation, it needs to address all the different modes of transportation that people use and the industrial energy services to bring down greenhouse gas emissions across the board.

The greenest form of transportation is walking, followed by biking, followed by using public transit. Electrifying the vehicles that can be electrified is great, but policies should also consider the ways cities are designed—are they walkable, livable, and have a reliable public transit system connecting communities to where they need to go?

“There’s definitely a number of different modes of transport that need to be addressed and green modes of transport that need to be supported,” says Trancik. “We really need to be thinking holistically about all these ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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Extreme weather and energy insecurity can compound health risks

Carla Delgado — Thu, 25 May 2023 17:00:00 +0000

People who need electronic medical devices and live in poor housing conditions tend to experience higher rates of energy insecurity. DepositPhotos

In 2020, about 34 million households in the United States experienced some degree of energy insecurity. Energy insecurity is defined as the inability to meet basic household energy needs, like reducing or foregoing basic necessities to pay energy bills. Others may maintain unsafe temperatures at home due to cost concerns, both of which are “chronic” forms of energy insecurity. Individuals may also experience “acute” energy insecurity, or a short-term disruption to energy sources due to infrastructural or environmental reasons, much like power outages.

People who need electronic medical devices and live in poor housing conditions tend to experience higher rates of energy insecurity. A recent Nature Communications study characterized power outages across the country from 2018 to 2020 and found that there were almost 17,500 power outages lasting more than eight hours. Outages of this duration are considered medically relevant because of potential health hazards for vulnerable groups, especially those who require electricity-dependent durable medical equipment (DME) such as oxygen concentrators and infusion pumps. Although some DME can have backup battery power, they only last a few hours.

“Understanding to what extent power outages affect health motivated us to create the county-level power outages dataset,” says Joan Casey, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, who was involved in the study. “As our grid ages and climate change worsens, we need to understand who power outages affect.”

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

The authors used local indicators of spatial association (LISA) to identify countries with high levels of social and medical vulnerability alongside frequent power outages. In particular, counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Michigan experience frequent medically-relevant power outages and have a high prevalence of electricity-dependent DME use. They “face a high burden and may have more trouble responding effectively, which could result in more adverse health outcomes,” says Casey.

The authors also determined the overlap between climate events occurring on the same day as medically-relevant power outages. They reported that about 62 percent of such outages co-occurred with extreme weather events, like heavy precipitation, anomalous heat, and tropical cyclones. Furthermore, medically-relevant outages are 3.4 times more common on days with a single event and 10 times more common on days with multiple events. Weather and climate events may drive large-scale outages, but increased energy demand from an aging electrical grid may play a role in county-level outages.

Upgrading the grid and relying further on distributed generation like generating and storing renewable energy are necessary to prevent power outages and ensure that huge areas won’t go offline, says Casey. The Department of Energy intends to modernize the grid to increase resiliency, add capacity for clean energy, and optimize power delivery. The department is also investing in energy infrastructure like microgrids, which can disconnect from national infrastructure and continue to run even when the main grid is down, and grid-scale energy storage devices, which store clean electricity to help provide power during peak loads.

“Certain communities and individuals may experience more and more severe power outages or have less ability to respond,” says Casey. “These groups may be persistently marginalized and lack access to generators, charging centers, or health care.”

Communities of color have unequal access to energy generation and battery storage, even though they tend to be the hardest hit when it comes to power outages following extreme climate events. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, rural and Black communities in Puerto Rico appeared to have the longest restoration times. Higher percentages of Hispanic/Latino populations were also associated with longer outages in Florida after Hurricane Irma in 2017. Meanwhile, counties with a higher proportion of Hispanic/Latino residents faced more severe power outages during the 2021 Texas winter storm. Black residents reported more day-long outages as well.

“We need to work to understand who is most at risk during an outage and provide support to these populations,” says Casey. “This could involve preparing health systems to receive patients, community charging stations for those that rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment, or weatherproofing homes to keep indoor temperature at more optimal levels.”

[Related: Heart disease-related deaths rise in extreme heat and extreme cold.]

Developing a registry for individuals medically dependent on electricity would establish a national estimate for this vulnerable population and document their geographic location. This can help state, territorial, and local health departments prioritize efforts and anticipate the resources that first responders should deploy during emergencies. At present, the Department of Health and Human Services only keeps the record of over 2.9 million Medicare beneficiaries who need electricity-dependent DME. The number of DME users covered by other insurance programs is not known.

Jurisdictions with a high prevalence of prolonged outages could also help vulnerable populations by establishing temporary emergency power stations. Such a solution could make electricity more accessible and reduce avoidable emergency department visits, which may prevent crowding. Together, upgrading the grid, mitigating climate change, and providing alternative electricity sources can all minimize the impacts on power supply faced by vulnerable populations and communities of color.

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A new material creates clean electricity from the air around it

Andrew Paul — Wed, 24 May 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Ambient air's water molecules can be harvested to generate clean electricity at a nanoscale level. Derek Lovley/Ella Maru Studio

Researchers recently constructed a material capable of generating near constant electricity from just the ambient air around it—thus possibly laying the groundwork for a new, virtually unlimited source of sustainable, renewable energy. In doing so, and building upon their past innovations, they now claim almost any surface could potentially be turned into a generator via replicating the electrical properties of storm clouds… but trypophobes beware.

According to a new study published today with Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated a novel “air generator” (Air-gen) film that relies on microscopic holes smaller than 100 nanometers across—less than a thousandth the width of a single human hair. The holes’ incredibly small diameters rely on what’s known as a “mean free path,” which is the distance a single molecule can travel before colliding with another molecule of the same substance.

[Related: The US could reliably run on clean energy by 2050.]

Water molecules are floating all around in the air, and their mean free path is around 100 nm. As humid air passes through Air-gen material’s miniscule holes, the water molecules come into direct contact with first an upper, then lower chamber in the film. This creates a charge imbalance, i.e. electricity.

It’s the same physics at play in storm clouds’ lightning discharges. Although the UMass Amherst team’s product generates a miniscule fraction of a lightning bolt’s estimated 300 million volts, its several hundred millivolts of sustained energy is incredibly promising for scalability and everyday usage. This is particularly evident when considering that air humidity can diffuse in three-dimensional space. In theory, thousands of Air-gen layers can be stacked atop one another, thus scaling up the device without increasing its overall footprint. According to the researchers, such a product could offer kilowatts of power for general usage.

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid.]

The team believes their Air-gen devices could one day be far more space efficient than other renewable energy options like solar and wind power. What’s more, the material can be engineered into a variety of form factors to blend into an environment, as contrasted with something as visually noticeable as a solar farm or wind turbine.

“Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go,”Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the paper’s senior author, said in a statement. “The generic Air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.”

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Chevron’s carbon offsets are mostly ‘junk,’ according to global watchdog investigation

Laura Baisas — Wed, 24 May 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Climate justice campaigners march from the Shell Centre to Trafalgar Square to demand urgent climate finance and reparations for loss and damage for global south communities on November, 12 2022 in London. The march was organized by the Climate Justice Coalition as part of a Global Day of Action called by African climate campaign groups at COP27. Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images

Update May 25, 2023: This post has been updated with a comment from Chevron.

The already questionable $2 billion a year voluntary emissions offset market is facing even more scrutiny. An investigation by transnational corporate watchdog Corporate Accountability first reported in The Guardian found that carbon offsets from fossil fuel giant Chevron are mostly worthless—could also cause harm. The investigation found that the company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies. These actions do little to offset the company’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new research from Corporate Accountability found that between 2020 and 2022, 93 percent of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted towards their climate targets from voluntary carbon markets were actually too environmentally problematic to be considered as anything other than worthless or junk.

[Related: Many popular carbon offsets don’t actually counteract emissions, study says.]

Carbon offsets are tradable “rights” or certificates that allow the buyer to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses. These offsets are usually in the form of an investment in emissions-reducing environmental projects in other parts of the world.

An investigation by The Guardian and Germany’s Die Zeit, and the nonprofit journalism outfit, SourceMaterial earlier this year found that the world’s leading provider of these offsets, Verra, may be making the climate worse. Verra is often used by major corporations like Shell and Disney, but over 90 percent of Verra’s most popular rainforest offset credits were discovered to be “phantom credits” that do not result in “genuine carbon reductions.”

Carbon offsets are considered worthless or having low environmental integrity if the project is linked to a plantation, forest, or green energy project. This includes hydroelectric dams that don’t lead to any additional reductions in greenhouse gasses, or exaggerates the benefits and minimizes risks of emitting emissions, among some other factors.

Chevron often purchased offsets that focused on large dams, plantations, or forests, according to the report. It found that many of these “worthless” offsets are also linked to some alleged social and environmental harms. These harms are primarily in communities in the global south, which happen to face the most harm by the climate crisis that Big Oil helped create.

“Chevron’s junk climate action agenda is destructive and reckless, especially in light of climate science underscoring the only viable way forward is an equitable and urgent fossil fuel phase-out,” Rachel Rose Jackson from Corporate Accountability told The Guardian.

Chevron is the second-largest fossil fuel company in the United States and its vast operations stretch north to Canada and the United Kingdom and south towards Brazil, Nigeria, and Australia. It reported over $35 billion in profits in 2022 and its projected emissions between 2022 and 2025 are equal to those from 364 coal-fired power plants per year. This is more than the total emissions of 10 European countries combined for a similar three-year period, according to the report.

[Related: BP made $28 billion last year, and now it’s backtracking on its climate goals.]

Chevron “aspires” to achieve net zero upstream emissions by 2050, largely relying on carbon offset schemes and carbon capture and storage to do this. Carbon offsets rely on environmental projects to cancel out a company’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new report further argues that the widespread use of these worthless offsets undermines the company’s net zero aspiration. Their net-zero aspirations only apply to less than 10 percent of the company’s carbon footprint–the upstream emissions that are produced from the production and transport of gas and oil. It excludes the downstream or end use emissions that are due to burning fossil fuels.

“Any climate plan that is premised on offsets, CCS, and excludes scope 3 [downstream] emissions is bound to fail,” Steven Feit, fossil economy legal and research manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian. “It’s clear from this report and other research that net zero as a framework opens the door for claims of climate action while continuing with business as usual, and not moving towards a low-carbon Paris [agreement]-aligned 1.5-degree [2.7 degree] future.”

Bill Turenne, an external affairs coordinator from Chevron, added via email that Chevron believes the report is “biased against our industry and paints an incomplete picture of Chevron’s efforts to advance a lower carbon future.” The offsets reviewed in the Corporate Accountability report are “compliance-grade offsets accepted by governments in the regions where we operate,” Turenne said.

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These massive, wing-like ‘sails’ could add wind power to cargo ships

Sara Kiley Watson — Tue, 23 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Bon voyage!. Oceanbird

The concept of a sailboat might conjure up thoughts of swanky sailing holidays or fearsome pirates—and some companies are hoping to bring them back into the mainstream, albeit in a modern, emissions-focused way. According to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), there are seven types of Wind Propulsion Technologies, or sails, which could potentially help the organization bring down the shipping industry’s currently massive carbon footprint.

[Related: Colombia is deploying a new solar-powered electric boat.]

Wired reports that a Swedish company called Oceanbird is building a sail that can fit onto existing vessels. The Wingsail 560 looks kind of like an airplane wing placed vertically like a mast on a boat, and this summer the company plans to test out a prototype on land. If all goes well, next year it could be making its oceanic debut on a 14-year-old car carrier, also known as a roll-on/roll-off or RoRo shipping container, called the Wallenius Tirranna.

This is how the sail, coming in at 40-meters high and weighing 200 metric tons, works—the sail has two parts, one of which is a flap that brings air into a more rigid, steel-cored component that allows for peak, yacht-racing inspired aerodynamics, according to Wired. Additionally, the wing is able to fold down or tilt in order to pass underneath bridges and reduce wind power in case of an approaching storm. One Oceanbird sail placed on an existing vessel is estimated to reduce fuel consumption from the main engine by up to 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel each year, according to trade publication Offshore Energy.

But, the real excitement is the idea of a redesigned vessel built especially for the gigantic sails. According to Wired, the Oceanbird-designed, 200-meter-long car carrier Orcelle Wind could cut emissions by at least 60 percent compared to a sailless RoRo vessel. The company themselves even estimates that it could reduce emissions by “up to 90 percent if all emissions-influencing factors are aligned.” However, it will still be a few years before one of these hits the high seas.

[Related: Care about the planet? Skip the cruise, for now.]

Oceanbird isn’t the only company setting sail—according to Gavin Allwright, secretary general of the International Windship Association, by the end of the year there could be 48 or 49 wind-powered vessels on the seas. One such ship already took a voyage from Rotterdam to French Guiana in late 2022 using a hybrid propulsion of traditional engines and sails. However Allwright tells Wired “we’re still in pretty early days.”

The IMO has already set a climate goal of halving emissions between 2008 and 2050, but experts have called this goal “important, but inadequate” to keep emissions low enough for a liveable future. Currently, these goals are still not being reached, with a Climate Action Tracker assessment showing that emissions are set to grow until 2050 unless further action is taken.

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Plugging methane leaks could open up thousands of jobs in Texas

Martha Pskowski/Inside Climate News — Mon, 22 May 2023 01:00:00 +0000

A pump jack works in Texas' Permian Basin as the EPA proposes a new rule to reduce methane leaks in oil and gas operations. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

A new report finds that methane regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency could spur job growth in Texas as oil and gas operators measure, monitor and mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas.

While Texas officials argue the methane regulations would kill jobs, the report, published today by the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the Ray Marshall Center at the University of Texas, Austin, found that new federal methane regulations could create between 19,000 and 35,000 jobs in the state.

Oil and gas producing regions, including the Permian Basin, would need a significant workforce to detect methane leaks, replace components known to leak the gas and plug abandoned wells. Previous research shows the methane mitigation industry is already growing.

In the absence of state methane rules, the EPA’s draft methane rule, first issued in November 2021 and strengthened in a supplemental filing last November, along with a new methane fee under the Inflation Reduction Act, will have a major impact on oil and gas operations in the Lone Star state.

“We want to show that environmental policies are not job killers,” said Christopher Agbo, research and policy coordinator for the Texas Climate Jobs Project, an affiliate of the Texas AFL-CIO. “You can create tens of thousands of good-paying, family-sustaining union jobs while also cutting back on emissions.”

Changing the Methane Narrative

The EPA’s methane regulations, to be finalized later this year, would reduce methane emissions 87 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

Reducing methane emissions is one of the most effective short-term measures to slow the pace of climate change because methane traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide.

But Texas has been a stubborn opponent of federal methane regulations. In January 2021, shortly after Biden ordered the EPA to develop new methane rules, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order directing state agencies to use every legal avenue to oppose federal action challenging the “strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”

After the EPA released its draft methane rule in 2021, Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian issued a statement that “anti -oil and -gas policies will kill jobs, stifle economic growth, and make America more reliant o[n] foreign nations to provide reliable energy.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission submitted joint public comments to the EPA, referring to provisions of the proposed methane rules as “burdensome,” “economically unreasonable” and “onerous.”

The new report, Mitigating Methane in Texas, seeks to change the narrative on methane regulations in Texas, concluding that the methane mitigation sector could grow rapidly as new regulations go into effect.

Slashing methane emissions in Texas would be a mammoth undertaking. The effort would require the creation of thousands of new jobs, from deploying drones to measure emissions to decommissioning orphaned wells to installing flare systems on storage tanks.

The report authors found that to comply with methane regulations, Texas would need at least 19,000 workers and up to as many as 35,000, which would add between six and nine percent to the number employed in the oil and gas industry in 2022.

“We are the largest emitter of methane in the country,” Agbo said. “So all this funding and regulations toward methane mitigation are going to play a huge role in Texas.”

He and co-author Greg Cumpton, of the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at UT Austin, found that methane mitigation would create long-term maintenance jobs in the oil and gas sector, including leak inspection and detection, leak repair and storage tank maintenance. Short-term replacement and abatement jobs would include replacing methane-emitting components like pneumatic controllers.

The biggest labor demand would be in the Permian Basin, where the authors estimate addressing methane emissions would require an additional 7,556 jobs. The report authors urge new jobs in methane mitigation be unionized and protected under prevailing wage laws and other high road employment practices.

“Part of ensuring that the jobs created in areas like the Permian Basin are good-paying jobs would be implementing Department of Labor-registered apprenticeship programs,” Agbo said. “There needs to be collaboration between labor unions, local, state and local governments, and also workforce development boards in the area.”

“A Big Growth Field”

Oil and gas operators around the world are already working to reduce methane emissions. Some turn to Austin-based SeekOps, a company that pairs sensor technology with autonomous drones to measure emissions. While many of the firm’s clients are in Europe—where methane regulations have been in effect for years—SeekOps expects its U.S. clientele to grow.

“It’s a big growth field,” said Paul Khuri, SeekOps vice president of business development. “Next year is going to be a huge year, because the IRA taxes start on Jan. 1.”

SeekOps currently has 30 employees, including data analysts, atmospheric scientists, software and hardware engineers and drone pilots. The company was founded in California but relocated to Austin to be closer to potential customers in the energy industry.

Khuri said SeekOps clients include oil and gas companies that have voluntarily committed to emissions reductions, regardless of the local regulatory framework. He said he will be watching how the federal government enforces the new methane fees to gauge how much the methane mitigation industry could grow.

“That will be a really good indicator of where the market is going to head and see whether this will be a massive growth area,” Khuri said.

A 2021 Environmental Defense Fund report found that the methane mitigation sector was already growing rapidly. The report identified 215 firms manufacturing technology or providing services to manage methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The number of manufacturing firms had increased by 33 percent from 2014 to 2021 and the number of service firms had increased by 90 percent between 2017 and 2021.

The EDF report found that more companies mitigating methane had employees located in Texas than any other state. Companies headquartered in Texas include Solar Injection Systems in Odessa, which manufactures solar-powered chemical injection pumps; Cimarron Energy, an emissions control company in Houston, and CI Systems in Carrollton, which commercializes infrared remote sensing technology.

Arvind Ravikumar, an engineering professor and co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at UT Austin, said that oil and gas companies are facing pressure on multiple fronts to reign in methane emissions. More buyers of U.S. natural gas in Europe and Asia are tracking supply chain methane emissions and some utilities are seeking “certified natural gas” with lower associated methane emissions.

“Even if the EPA methane regulations were not in place, the majority of these emissions detection and reduction efforts would go on,” Ravikumar said.

Because methane emissions occur through venting and leaking, not combustion, direct on-site measurements are necessary, Ravikumar said. This bodes well for job creation.

“Methane mitigation or methane emissions detection is not something you can do remotely. You have to be on the ground,” he said. “What that means is you’re going to put a lot more people in some of the most remote, rural corners of the country.”

Ravikumar said many facets of methane measurement and accounting must still be ironed out. But he agreed the economic benefits to oil and gas producing regions of Texas cannot be overlooked.

“Having a policy that’s going to create jobs exclusively in remote parts of the country is really hard to do,” Ravikumar said. “And methane is one place where you can do that successfully.”

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How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid

Rob Verger — Sat, 13 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

The four white units are the batteries, which can provide about three megawatts of power over four hours. Rob Verger

On a small patch of land in the northeast Bronx in New York City sits a tidy but potent battery storage system. Located across the street from a beige middle school building, and not too far from a Planet Fitness and a Dollar Tree, the battery system is designed to send power into the grid at peak moments of demand on hot summer afternoons and evenings.

New York state has a goal of getting a whopping six gigawatts of battery storage systems online in the next seven years, and this system, at about three megawatts, is a very small but hopefully helpful part of that. It’s intended to be able to send out those three megawatts of power over a four-hour period, typically between 4 pm and 8 pm on the toastiest days of the year, with the goal of making a burdened power grid a bit less stressed and ideally a tad cleaner.

The local power utility, Con Edison, recently connected the battery system to the grid. Here’s how it works, and why systems like this are important.

From power lines to batteries, and back again

The source of the electricity for these batteries is the existing power distribution lines that run along the top of nearby poles. Those wires carry power at 13,200 volts, but the battery system itself needs to work with a much lower voltage. That’s why before the power even gets to the batteries themselves, it needs to go through transformers.

Adam Cohen, of NineDot Energy, at the battery facility in January. Rob Verger

During a January tour of the site for Popular Science, Adam Cohen, the CTO of NineDot Energy, the company behind this project, opens a gray metal door. Behind it are transformers. “They look really neato,” he says. Indeed, they do look neat—three yellowish units that take that voltage and transform it into 480 volts. This battery complex is actually two systems that mirror each other, so other transformers are in additional equipment nearby.

After those transformers do their job and convert the voltage to a lower number, the electricity flows to giant white Tesla Megapack battery units. Those batteries are large white boxes with padlocked cabinets, and above them is fire-suppression equipment. Not only do these battery units store the power, but they also have inverters to change the AC power to DC before the juice can be stored. When the power does flow out of the batteries, it’s converted back to AC power again.

Transformer units like these convert the electricity from 13,200 volts to 480 volts. Rob Verger

The battery storage system is designed to follow a specific rhythm. It will charge gradually between 10 pm and 8 am, Cohen says. That’s a time “when the grid has extra availability, the power is cheaper and cleaner, [and] the grid is not overstressed,” he says. When the day begins and the grid starts experiencing more demand, the batteries stop charging.

In the summer heat, when there’s a “grid event,” that’s when the magic happens, Cohen says. Starting around 4 pm, the batteries will be able to send their power back out into the grid to help destress the system. They’ll be able to produce enough juice to power about 1,000 homes over that four-hour period, according to an estimate by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

The power will flow back up into the same wires that charged them before, and then onto customers. The goal is to try to make the grid a little bit cleaner, or less dirty, than it would have been if the batteries didn’t exist. “It’s offsetting the dirty energy that would have been running otherwise,” Cohen says.

Of course, the best case scenario would be for batteries to get their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind, and the site does have a small solar canopy that could send a teeny tiny bit of clean energy into the grid. But New York City and the other downstate zones near it currently rely very heavily on fossil fuels. For New York City in 2022 for example, utility-scale energy production was 100 percent from fossil fuels, according to a recent report from the New York Independent System Operator. (One of several solutions in the works to that problem involves a new transmission line.) What that means is that the batteries will be drawing power from a fossil-fuel dominant grid, but doing so at nighttime when that grid is hopefully less polluting.

NineDot Energy says that this is the first use of Tesla Megapacks in New York City. Rob Verger

How systems like these can help

Electricity is very much an on-demand product. What we consume “has to be made right now,” Cohen notes from behind the wheel of his Nissan Leaf, as we drive towards the battery storage site in the Bronx on a Friday in January. Batteries, of course, can change that dynamic, storing the juice for when it’s needed.

This project in the Bronx is something of an electronic drop in a bucket: At three megawatts, the batteries represent a tiny step towards New York State’s goal to have six gigawatts, or 6,000 megawatts, of battery storage on the grid by 2030. Even though this one facility in the Bronx represents less than one percent of that goal, it can still be useful, says Schuyler Matteson, a senior advisor focusing on energy storage and policy at NYSERDA. “Small devices play a really important role,” he says.

One of the ways that small devices like these can help is they can be placed near the people who are using it in their homes or businesses, so that electricity isn’t lost as it is transmitted in from further away. “They’re very close to customers on the distribution network, and so when they’re providing power at peak times, they’re avoiding a lot of the transmission losses, which can be anywhere from five to eight percent of energy,” Matteson says.

And being close to a community provides interesting opportunities. A campus of the Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning sits on the third floor of the middle school across the street. There, two dozen students have been working in collaboration with a local artist, Tijay Mohammed, to create a mural that will eventually hang on the green fence in front of the batteries. “They are so proud to be associated with the project,” says Karlene Buckle, the manager of the enrichment program at the schools.

Student council representatives at the Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning (BBL2) participate in a mural project for the battery facility. Kevin Melendez / Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning

Grid events

The main benefit a facility like this can have is the way it helps the grid out on a hot summer day. That’s because when New York City experiences peak temperatures, energy demand peaks too, as everyone cranks up their air conditioners.

To meet that electricity demand, the city relies on its more than one dozen peaker plants, which are dirtier and less efficient than an everyday baseline fossil fuel plant. Peaker plants disproportionately impact communities located near them. “The public health risks of living near peaker plants range from asthma to cancer to death, and this is on top of other public health crises and economic hardships already faced in environmental justice communities,” notes Jennifer Rushlow, the dean of the School for the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School via email. The South Bronx, for example, has peaker plants, and the borough as a whole has an estimated 22,855 cases of pediatric asthma, according to the American Lung Association. Retiring them or diminishing their use isn’t just for energy security—it’s an environmental justice issue.

So when power demand peaks, “what typically happens is we have to ramp up additional natural gas facilities, or even in some instances, oil facilities, in the downstate region to provide that peak power,” Matteson says. “And so every unit of storage we can put down there to provide power during peak times offsets some of those dirty, marginal units that we would have to ramp up otherwise.”

By charging at night, instead of during the day, and then sending the juice out at peak moments, “you’re actually offsetting local carbon, you’re offsetting local particulate matter, and that’s having a really big benefit of the air quality and health impacts for New York City,” he says.

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier]

Imagine, says Matteson, that a peaker plant is producing 45 megawatts of electricity. A 3-megawatt battery system coming online could mean that operators could dial down the dirty plant to 42 megawatts instead. But in an ideal world, it doesn’t come online at all. “We want 15 of [these 3 megawatt] projects to add up to 45 megawatts, and so if they can consistently show up at peak times, maybe that marginal dirty generator doesn’t even get called,” he says. “If that happens enough, maybe they retire.”

Nationally, most of the United States experiences a peak need for electricity on hot summer days, just like New York City does, with a few geographic exceptions, says Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow focusing on energy storage at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “Pretty much most of the country peaks during the summertime, in those late afternoons,” he says. “And so we traditionally build gas turbines—we’ve got hundreds of gigawatts of gas turbines that have been installed for the past several decades.”

A very small amount of power can come from this solar canopy on site—a reminder that the cleanest energy comes from renewable sources. Rob Verger

While the three-megawatt project in the Bronx is not going to replace a peaker plant by any means, Denholm says that in general, the trend is moving towards batteries taking over what peaker plants do. “As those power plants get old and retire, you need to build something new,” he says. “Within the last five years, we’ve reached this tipping point, where storage can now outcompete new traditional gas-fired turbines on a life-cycle cost basis.”

Right now, New York state has 279 megawatts of battery storage already online, which is around 5 percent of the total goal of 6 gigawatts. Denholm estimates that nationally, nearly nine gigawatts of battery storage are online already.

“There’s significant quantifiable benefits to using [battery] storage as peaker,” Denholm says. One of those benefits is a fewer local emissions, which is important because “a lot of these peaker plants are in places that have historically been [environmental-justice] impacted regions.”

“Even when they’re charging off of fossil plants, they’re typically charging off of more efficient units,” he adds.

If all goes according to plan, the batteries will start discharging their juice this summer, on the most sweltering days.

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Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass

Laura Baisas — Thu, 11 May 2023 16:00:00 +0000

The electricity sector generates about 25 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution in the United States. Deposit Photos

On May 11, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose new limits on the greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. Second only to the nation’s transportation sector, the electricity sector generates about 25 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution in the US.

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why.]

According to the EPA, the proposal for coal and new natural gas power plants would keep up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide from spilling into the air through 2042. This is the equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of about half the cars in the United States. The EPA estimates that the net climate and health benefits of these new standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion through 2042.

“By proposing new standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, EPA is delivering on its mission to reduce harmful pollution that threatens people’s health and wellbeing,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. “EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future. Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people—cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

The new rules will likely not mandate the use of technologies that capture carbon emissions before they leave a smokestack, such as direct air capture. It will instead set caps on pollution rates that planet operators will have to meet by either using a different technology or switching to a fuel source like green hydrogen.

The new limits represent the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to date to roll back the pollution from the US’ second-largest contributor to climate change. It also follows the current administration’s plans to cut car tailpipe emissions by speeding up the transition to mostly elective vehicles and curb methane leaks from gas and oil wells.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is adding over $370 billion into clean energy programs and the administration hopes that these new actions push the US further in the fight to constrain further human-made global warming.

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

These investments and regulations could put the US on track to meet President Biden’s pledge that the US will cut greenhouse gasses in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. While more policies are needed to reach the 2050 target, scientists say these goals must be met by all major industrialized nations to keep average global temperatures from increasing by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre industrial levels. Beyond that temperature tipping point, catastrophic flooding, drought, heat waves, flooding, species extinction, and crop failure will become significantly harder for humanity to handle. Earth has already warmed by two degrees Fahrenheit.

If these regulations are finalized, they would mark the first time that the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. It extends to all current and future electric plants as well.

The plan will face steep opposition from the fossil fuel industry and Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

Despite these proposed new regulations, Biden has also faced criticism from many environmentalists for the decision to approve the Willow oil project in Alaska this March. Environmental groups call this massive oil drilling plan by ConocoPhillips a “carbon bomb” that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day.

Many younger voters and young climate activists say Biden broke a major 2020 campaign promise by approving Willow. With this in mind, EPA officials will announce these new regulations at the University of Maryland.

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