Neat idea, I think. Dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy, changing coal mines over to pumped hydro, wind farms in the Gobi Desert, geothermal at schools, trading a gas-fueled power plant in on a giant grid battery, EV motors without rare earth metals, heat pumps for cold climates, and on and on.
Incredible 60% of Europe’s Electricity Was Powered by Clean Energy in the First Two Months of 2024
According to an energy think tank, Europe’s generation of 516.5 terawatt hours of renewable electricity in January and February satisfied 60% of overall power demand.
The generation is a year-over-year gain of 12% from the same period in 2023, and was driven by strong year-on-year growth in hydro and wind, and a rebound in nuclear.
Coinciding with this was a 12% year-over-year fall in the use of fossil fuels, with a 15% drop in energy from coal-fired power plants, the think tank Ember, reports.
Canary Media: This Kentucky coal mine could transform into pumped hydro grid storage
The vision of converting coal country into a clean energy powerhouse looms large in the American energy transition. Politicians love to tout the possibility, and climate advocates see it as crucial for a just transition that avoids leaving populations behind as coal power fades away. But finding the right form of clean energy to achieve this is harder in practice — putting some solar panels over a coal mine doesn’t replicate the economic engine that once existed there.
A company called Rye Development thinks the way to go is constructing pumped-hydro energy storage on old coal mining sites, turning them into resources that help stabilize the grid for decades to come. Last week, the Department of Energy selected Rye to receive $81 million to develop one of these projects in the southeastern corner of Kentucky, on land that has hosted mining for at least 70 years. The Lewis Ridge project would deliver up to 287 megawatts of power for up to 8 hours, giving it more storage in the tank than the biggest lithium battery plants built thus far.
This California city is trading an old gas plant for a giant grid battery
MENIFEE, California — For a decade, twin smokestacks loomed against the bright blue skies of Menifee, in Southern California’s Inland Empire. But the old gas combustion plant came down, and on the flat industrial site it left behind an army of batteries is now being assembled.
When it comes online this summer, developer Calpine’s Nova power bank will store more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S. The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years.
The facility embodies the clean energy transition in multiple ways. The power plant itself will shift from an 800-megawatt combined cycle plant, installed by GE in 2008 as a model of efficiency, only to languish when its 12-hour startup time made it a poor fit for the era of cheap gas and weather-dependent renewable production. The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles, dulling the rays that inspired the name for nearby Sun City, which sprang up in the 1950s as home for heliotropic retirees. And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels.
India Approves Massive $9 Bil. Rooftop Solar Plan with Panels for 10 Million Homes
The program was cooked up because India had fallen woefully behind on its planned installations for rooftop solar. In many parts of the subcontinent, the sun is absolutely brutal and relentless, but by 2022, Indian rooftop solar power generation topped out at 11 gigawatts, which was 29 gigawatts under a national target set a decade ago.
Part of the challenge, Euronews reports, is that approval from various agencies and departments—as many as 21 different signatures in some cases—was needed to place a solar array on your house. Aside from this bureaucratic nightmare, the cost of installation was often higher than $5,000; more than half the average yearly income for a working Indian urbanite.
Friday, April 5, 2024: WHAT THEY ARE SAYING: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Historic $20 Billion in Awards to Expand Access to Clean Energy and Climate Solutions and Lower Energy Costs for Communities Across the Nation
Friday, April 5, 2024: Remarks by Vice President Harris on the Historic Investments in Climate Action
Quantum Material Breakthrough for Next Generation Solar Panels?
In the 2-D quantum materials the researchers were experimenting on [atoms of zerovalent copper between layers of a two-dimensional material made of germanium selenide (GeSe) and tin sulfide (SnS)], a single photon is able to generate an average of 1.9 electrons through the ‘magic’ of multiple exciton generation (MEG) which involves quantum effects within "van der Waals gaps"
Professor Wolf Gero Schmidt and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Marvin Krenz, of the University of Paderborn, used the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart's Hawk supercomputer to simulate how excitons — bound pairings of an electron and an electron hole — could be controlled and moved within solar cells. In the process, they discovered that certain defects strategically inserted into the system could improve efficiency.
US climate law cuts carbon emissions www.reuters.com/...
The U.S. has doubled the pace of cutting carbon emissions since President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022
Despite the various industry complaints, the climate law has helped the U.S. reduce carbon emissions by 4% annually, double the pace of 2% a year before the law
The IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law last year provided $239 billion for clean energy, electric vehicles (EVs), electrification of buildings, and carbon management in the U.S., up 38% from 2022
early winners have been sectors such as electrical power, battery manufacturing and traditional clean energies like wind and solar. The law encouraged Asian and European companies to invest more in the U.S.
Geothermal cuts emissions and costs at these Minnesota schools
Geothermal heating and cooling is emerging as a go-to technology for Minnesota school district St. Paul Public Schools as it seeks to renovate aging facilities in line with the district’s climate action plan.
Minnesota’s second-largest school district is also one of the city’s largest property owners, with 73 buildings comprising a total of more than 7.7 million square feet. Its climate action plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 45% by 2030.
These startups help busy contractors get rebates faster
Rebates are a cornerstone of the bid to electrify the roughly 115 million U.S. homes that still need to ditch fossil-fuel equipment to meet climate targets.
Utilities already offer more than an estimated $2 billion in residential efficiency and electrification rebates across North America each year, which go to installing heat-pump AC/heaters, heat-pump water heaters, insulation and more. Another $8.8 billion in home energy rebates from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is expected to start flowing to states in the coming months.
But wrangling rebates can be tricky. Contractors — often the ones to do the work of claiming rebates, either for themselves or on behalf of customers — say that juggling various federal, state, local and utility programs can be a logistical headache. They have to navigate different eligibility rules, file step-by-step project documentation and deal with uncertainty over when and whether the rebate will come through. To manage what can be a complicated process, some installers will even outsource the work to services that specialize in handling rebates.
“Contractors are not accountants,” Lacey Tan, a building-electrification expert at the climate think tank RMI, explained via email. “Time spent completing applications, doing trainings, marketing and communicating incentives, etc., takes time away from their sales and installs.” (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
That’s why a growing number of companies are developing software that contractors can use, right on their smartphones, to get home-decarbonization rebates more easily than ever before. These tools aim to aggregate multiple incentives in one place, streamline the process of applying and notify contractors as soon as applications are approved.
Sometimes you need to give people a little treat to get them to ditch fossil fuels, these guys make it easier to do that.
Indiana steel plant to host carbon capture experiment
Martin Keighley, CEO of CarbonFree, thinks his carbon capture company offers a “unique proposition” compared to its competitors: It can actually make money, today.
On Wednesday, the San Antonio, Texas-based company announced its first large-scale effort to prove that proposition — a $150 million project at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works blast furnace in Gary, Indiana. When completed in 2026, it will capture 50,000 metric tons per year of the carbon dioxide the plant currently dumps into the atmosphere, “mineralize” it, and ultimately turn it into the ubiquitous industrial product calcium carbonate.
The technology is far from a complete solution to the steelmaking facility’s climate impact — let alone its other toxic industrial emissions. The project will capture less than 1 percent of the roughly 10 million metric tons per year of carbon dioxide that Gary Works emits.
But “importantly, this is the demonstration of a real commercial solution” for capturing carbon emissions, Keighley said — one that turns what are usually regarded as waste streams into a valuable product that will ideally fund much more CO2 removal.
EPA’s new green bank will benefit disadvantaged communities
How can $20 billion in federal funding unleash hundreds of billions of dollars in private-sector financing for clean energy, transportation and housing — and expand access to all of those things for disadvantaged communities across the country?
Jessie Buendia, vice president of sustainability for nonprofit Dream.Org, has spent the past year and a half working with environmental justice groups and clean investment experts to come up with ideas for how to accomplish that. This week, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green bank program, the coalition Buendia works with got the money to start putting those ideas into practice.
On Thursday, the Biden administration named eight groups that will receive a total of $20 billion in funding from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the official name for the green bank program. The structure is largely modeled after the green banks that now operate in 17 states — government-backed and nonprofit entities that offer low-cost loans and other financial support for rooftop solar, efficiency retrofits, electric heat pumps, EV charging and other carbon and pollution-reducing projects, with a focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.
Canary Media: Better heat pumps for commercial buildings are coming soon
The Department of Energy is convening manufacturers and customers like IKEA and Amazon to get next-gen heat pumps ready for commercial rooftops by 2027.
The DOE Residential Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge pushed manufacturers — some of which are also participating in the commercial accelerator — to develop new models that could brave freezing conditions, achieving 40 percent greater efficiencies than conventional heat pumps and blasting heat at full capacity down to 5˚F.
Manufacturers are now field testing prototypes from that program in homes across 10 states.