"The expansion of #RooftopSolar in #NewEngland is keeping the lights on during #winter, surprising the region’s grid operator and challenging long-standing assumptions that the growth of #RenewableEnergy could destabilize the power system."
If you're an anti-monarchist (Republican in the European sense) & are also an advocate of #renewableenergy (and specifically #offshore#wind) then I have some bad news for you:
You may know the Crown Estates own the seabed out to 12 nautical miles, and so they are the recipients of the fees from offshore wind licences.
The latest tranche of six licenses has lifted CE's profits from £129mn to £442mn... and where does 25% of that money go - straight to the #RoyalFamily!
Six Flags Magic Mountain in California is building a massive canopy of solar panels over its 30-acre parking lot that will power all of the rides and offset 100% of the amusement park’s energy usage while providing shade to the cars parked beneath.
When completed, it will be California’s largest solar energy project & the world’s largest renewable energy site built by a for-profit organization.
Rich countries need to stop #redlining entire continents.
"The #Netherlands has almost the same amount of solar generating capacity as the whole continent of #Africa. That must be, in part, because the #interest on a loan to set up a windfarm in Africa is about 17% more than one to do the same in #Europe.
Many poor countries enjoy vast natural resources of wind and sun yet struggle to access #RenewableEnergy because of the crippling cost of capital imposed on them."
The Canada Energy Regulator has just released Canada’s Energy Future 2023, its first long-term outlook on what achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 might look like for Canada.
(Spoiler: the future is electric. Though the report mentions biomass, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage as well. It'll be interesting to see what happens with these technologies in the next 7 years...)
The #EdenProject today switches on its 5km deep #geothermal heat source to help power its climate control in the biomes (reducing their #energy bills by around 40%).
While there're issues of network connectivity (long delays currently) & expense (drilling these shafts is not cheap), the solution that has worked in #Iceland so well, may offer some benefit in our #renewableenergy mix....
so lets home we don't wait another 37 years for the next major geothermal project!
"In the #ClimateChange discourse, #Africa is typically cast as a victim. But what if it could instead become our #hero?
Some envision a different path for Africa, in which investors place its 54 countries at the heart of a green Industrial Revolution. The continent has three things going for it – a young workforce, abundant natural resources and the potential for #RenewableEnergy."
The more powerful the AI, the more energy it takes.
Making generative AI more efficient is the subject of research currently, but the good news is that AI can run on renewable energy. And as a consumer, you can do your part to put pressure on companies and research labs to publish the carbon footprint of their AI models, as some already do.
May was a great month for our #photovoltaic system. The total production was 1.24 MWh (an amount of energy that would power an EV for ~8000 km), it reduced our consumption from the grid by 90% and the surplus we sold to the grid was 580 kWh.
"Scientists Find a Way to Harvest Clean Energy From Nothing But Air
Engineers have demonstrated something marvelous. Almost any material can be used to create a device that continuously harvests energy from humid air.
It's not a development that's ready for practical application, but it does, its creators say, transcend some of the limitations of other harvesters. All the material needs is to be pocked with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. That's around a thousandth of the width of a human hair, so easier said than done but far simpler than expected.
Such material can harvest the electricity generated by microscopic water droplets in humid air, according to a team led by engineer Xiaomeng Liu of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
They have called their discovery the "generic Air-gen effect"."
Engineers use nanotechnology to pull electricity from thin air?
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a method to harvest continuous electricity from air humidity. They say a device using their tech could be capable of delivering kilowatt-level power.
Not sure if this is a pipe dream or another one of those "good news if scalable" stories but the science seems cool!
Theory of #RenewableEnergy is that it’s very low surface power density, and the practice is that because of this, it occupies vast amounts of one non-renewable resource that everyone forgets about: land surface. In terms of surface power density PV outputs 6.63 W/m2, wind power 1.84 W/m2. Nuclear - 240.81 W/m2. That means for one 1 W of power you need to allocate 120x more land for wind than nuclear, and that is not only for the space occupied by the actual plant but everything: mining, manufacturing, operations, decommissioning.
Some people will argue that utility-scale renewables are not good indeed, but we should stick to decentralised rooftop or wall PV installations. Except that decentralisation requires vast redundancy of infrastructure (cabling, inverters), much lower efficiency, which results in 4x higher production cost (LCOE) per kWh, thus nullifying the claimed lower cost of renewables.
Engineers have been trying to get that message to the broad public long ago: a PV farm or wind turbine look really nice at distance. But an utility-scale renewables power plant is what any other power plant is: a huge, industrial compound, installed on steel and concrete foundation interfering with the land it occupies.
Wenn ihr mit euren #heimspeicher n was für die Netzstabilität und gg. Netzentgelte tun wollt, dann schiebt eure Ladezeiten in den Mittag, zumind. nach 10h. Beide Außenflanken des Solarertrags sind wertvoll fürs Netz und die Ertragsspitze Mittags gilt es abzukappen, das kann euer Speicher.
Gleiches gilt auch für Wärmepumpen und eAutos. Alles Mittags, 7-10h und 17-Ende eher ins Netz schieben. #PVbuddies#Solarenergie#renewableenergy
Solar will be in “unassailable position” as cheapest source of electricity (pv-magazine-usa.com)
Solar levelized cost of electricity will reach $30 per MWh in 2050 as global capacity grows 22-fold, said DNV.