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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

The post This nuclear byproduct is fueling debate over Fukushima’s seafood appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.  

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 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.

The post The EPA wants to tighten up their ‘zero-emission’ building definition appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.”

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.)

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

Making homes more efficient and more electric is critical to combating climate change. But the undertaking can be expensive and beyond the financial reach of many families. 

Help, however, is on the way.

Residential energy use accounts for one-fifth of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. President Biden’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, takes aim at this issue by allocating $8.8 billion to home energy efficiency rebates primarily for at low- and moderate-income households.

“For the federal government, this is the largest investment in history,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “These rebates have the potential to provide tremendous support, particularly for low-income households, in terms of reducing pollution, reducing energy costs, and making homes more comfortable.” 

States will administer the rebate programs under guidance the Department of Energy released in late July. The money could become available to consumers as early as the end of this year, though the bulk is expected throughout 2024. In some cases, the incentives could cover the entire cost of a project. 

Incentives will fall into two buckets, with about half designated for home electrification and the remainder going toward overall reductions in energy use. The funding will be tied to household income. 

States must allocate about 40 percent of the electrification money they receive to low-income single-family households and another 10 percent toward low-income multifamily buildings. The rest of the electrification rebates must go to moderate-income households. These are minimums, said Kresowik, noting that states can, and some likely will, make even more of the rebates need-based.

Income limits are location dependent and set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Low income is defined as 80 percent of area’s median household income, while moderate income is up to 150 percent. What that means can vary widely. In San Francisco, for instance, the low income threshold for a family of four is $148,650, while in Bullock County, Alabama it’s $52,150. 

The rebates also are larger for low-income households. On the electrification front, the guidelines call for up to $8,000 for heat pumps, $840 for induction stoves, and $4,000 to upgrade an electric panel, among other incentives. That said, no single address can receive more than $14,000 over the life of the program. The discounts are largely designed to be available when the items are purchased, which avoids having to paying out of pocket and waiting for a check from the government. 

“These are advanced technologies. Therefore they often cost more, but they save more energy and help save the climate,” said Kara Saul-Rinaldi, president and CEO of the AnnDyl Policy Group, an energy and environment strategy firm. “If we want our low-income communities to invest in something that’s going to benefit everyone, like the climate, we need to provide them with additional resources.”

For the energy-reduction incentives, the type of technology used doesn’t matter as long as households lower their overall energy use. Homeowners could do this by installing more insulation, sealing windows, or upgrading to more efficient heating and cooling systems, among other options. The rebate amounts are a bit more complex to calculate but are based on either modeled or actual energy savings, and increase if you save more energy or are low income. 

Kresowik says efficiency retrofits can cost $25,000 to $30,000 or more. For many people, the Inflation Reduction Act could help put such projects within reach for the first time. While a homeowner cannot claim both an electrification and efficiency rebate for the same improvement, the incentives can be added to other federal weatherization and tax credit initiatives and any offers from utility companies. 

But the latest rebates will be available only after states have set up their respective programs. For that reason, “the families who most need that help will be better served to wait if they can,” said Sage Briscoe, director of federal policy for the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America. Of course, that may not be feasible if, say, an appliance breaks, but doing so could potentially net a low-income household thousands of dollars in savings. 

“The key is to start planning,” Kresowik said of the coming rebates. Talking to a contractor now, he said, can position households to take advantage of the programs as soon as they start accepting claims.

The rebates, though, may not be available everywhere. Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota have so far declined to apply for Inflation Reduction Act funds and could reject the home energy rebates as well. That means a sizable number of Americans may not see a boon from these latest rebates, either because they earn too much money or live in a state that refuses to participate in IRA programs. 

Federal tax credits, however, are available now to help anyone pursuing projects such as installing solar panels or heat pump water heaters. The credits reset annually, but because they offset tax liabilities, the ability to fully utilize them often depends on a filer’s tax burden. 

“There are those among us who are privileged enough that they probably can go ahead and start making those investments now,” said Briscoe. Rewiring America is in the process of launching tools to help people plan for, claim, and receive incentives, which can be complicated. But experts say that even this influx in funding won’t ultimately be enough to meet the need nationally.  

“This is just a drop in the bucket,” said Saul-Rinaldi. Kresowik notes that there are 26 million low income households that still use fossil fuels for heating. At $30,000 each, electrifying those homes alone would cost $780 billion.

Saul-Rinaldi also sees a risk that the current program is limited by quirks in the guidance from the Department of Energy that may keep some contractors from participating, such as mandating in-person energy audits, even when utility data would suffice. But, she says, there is still time to smooth out those issues, and she hopes that the programs are “so successful that there is a wide demand across the country for additional funds so that we can continue to upgrade and electrify America’s homes.”

Ideally, Briscoe wants to see high-efficiency appliances and design become the norm, and she thinks incentives can help push the market in that direction. Previous federal rebate efforts, such as a Great Recession stimulus bill included $300 million in appliance efficiency funding, didn’t quite do that. But Briscoe says this latest attempt through the Inflation Reduction Act is not only orders of magnitude more ambitious but also more holistic and works in concert with other programs — such as installer training initiatives — to ensure the rebates aren’t operating in a vacuum.

“There’s some real urgency to making sure that we try to get the fossil fuels out of our homes,” said Briscoe. “The climate isn’t going to wait.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/buildings/electrifying-your-home-is-about-to-get-a-lot-cheaper/. 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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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.

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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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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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.

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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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.

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 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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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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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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. 

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.” 

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.

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.

The post An Israeli wind project draws scrutiny on turbines and people’s health appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post Artificial nests could give endangered birds a home near new offshore wind farm appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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. 

“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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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.

The post An American start-up claims it just set a geothermal energy record appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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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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.

If you’re camping and want to charge up your lantern, phone, or other devices, a solar generator sure would be convenient. Or perhaps you’re van-living your way across the country, and you need to work on the go and keep your conversion electrified—yet another solid case for a solar-powered generator. 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’re here to help you find the right one for you.

• 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 portable: Anker 545
• 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 ebikes. 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

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 portable: Anker 545

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Buy it used or refurbished: eBay

Why it makes the cut: If you’re looking for highly portable power, the Anker 545 delivers.

Specs

• Storage capacity: 778Wh
• Input capacity: 240W
• Output capacity: 770W
• Dimensions: 11.81 x 8.03 x 7.28 inches
• Weight: 18.2 lbs
• Price: $559.99

Pros

• Lightweight and compact
• Plenty of capacity
• Built-in lights

Cons

• Slower input capacity

When portability is a priority, the Anker 545 offers the compact size and reduced weight you’re looking for and packs fairly substantial power to boot. Roughly the size of a shoebox and lighter than a case of beer, it’s easy to pack along with camping gear and move around without too much effort.

To get something so light, though, you have to compromise on power. The Anker 545 has a capacity of 778Wh and an output capacity of 770W, which is plenty of power for keeping your devices charged. Specifically, that should provide about 55 phone charges, 10 for a laptop, or 38 for a camera. Unfortunately, the outlets only output at up to 500W, so it cannot power more demanding devices like hair dryers or electric stoves.

That said, the Anker 545 has some bells and whistles, including an integrated flashlight and ambient light. All told it’s a solid option if you need a highly mobile generator.

Best budget: Jackery Explorer 300

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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

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 portable: Anker 545
• 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 2023, tested and reviewed appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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.”

The post This tiny hydrogen-fueled car just broke a world record for going the distance appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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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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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“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. 

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.

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.

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]

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.

The post How does electricity work? Let’s demystify the life-changing physics. appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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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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Moving away from gasoline-powered cars won’t just help with climate change. It also could have major health benefits, according to a new report by the American Lung Association. 

The United States could save 89,000 lives and nearly $1 trillion in health costs by mid-century if drivers stop buying conventional combustion-engine cars and if the country cleans up its power grid by 2035, the organization found. 

“There’s a real significant health benefit to be achieved and significant suffering to be avoided — premature deaths to be avoided, children having asthma attacks avoided — by making this transition to technology that exists today,” said William Barrett, who works on clean air and climate policy at the American Lung Association and authored the report. 

The gasses and particles spewed from tailpipes are linked to a range of illnesses, including asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease. The potential health benefits of electric vehicles stem from the fact that they don’t produce the same toxic byproducts, like smog-forming oxides of nitrogen, as combustion engines. Although there have been relatively few real-world studies on EVs and air pollution, the American Lung Association’s report aligns with research showing that cars without combustion engines pollute less and lead to fewer respiratory illnesses than their gas-powered counterparts. 

The association’s findings come as states adopt policies to phase out gas-powered cars. Seven states, such as California and Oregon, have set targets to make all passenger vehicle sales by 2035 “zero-emissions” — meaning EVs, hydrogen fuel-cell cars, or plug-in hybrids. And the Environmental Protection Agency this spring proposed tailpipe emissions standards that could make electric vehicles two-thirds of all new cars sold by 2032. 

While the report’s authors note these developments and credit two pieces of legislation passed in recent years — the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — with spurring production of EVs and helping decarbonize the power grid, they said stronger state and federal standards are still needed to achieve the health gains outlined in the report. The report calls on more states to adopt regulations pioneered by California that promote zero-emissions vehicles while strengthening rules to slash pollution from gas-powered cars.   

To be sure, EV sales have grown rapidly in recent years but still only make up about 6 percent of the U.S. market. With an average cost of about $60,000, new electric cars are still a luxury purchase. In California, for instance, they’re concentrated mainly in wealthy, majority white and Asian neighborhoods. 

Key to saving the 89,000 lives projected in the report is an assumption that the whole country will be running on clean energy. 

“The assumption of having a clean grid is really important for these calculations,” said Sara Adar, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who studies environmental health, including traffic pollution, and was not involved with the Lung Association’s report. “If we fail in our attempt to clean the grid and we are still generating electricity based on coal, I think those estimates will no longer be accurate,” Adar added.

Adar also offered a solution that didn’t come up in the report: “Not driving is absolutely the way to go.” 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/rapid-shift-electric-cars-save-89000-lives-renewables/. 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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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.

“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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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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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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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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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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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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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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The race to electrify the world’s vehicles and store energy will require batteries — so many of them, in fact, that meeting the demand we will see by 2040 will require 30 times the amount of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that those industries currently use.

That presents an enormous challenge, one exacerbated by the mining industry’s alarming allegations of labor crimes, environmental destruction, and encroachments on Indigenous land. There are ways to mitigate electrification’s extractive impacts, one of which may seem obvious: Recycle every battery we make. 

Doing so would reduce the world’s need to mine these minerals by 10 percent within 16 years, because the critical materials in batteries are infinitely reusable. Eventually, a robust circular battery economy could all but eliminate the need to extract them at all.

Of course, that would require recovering every EV pack at the end of its life, a sizable undertaking as the United States prepares for hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles to retire by the end of the decade. A nascent ecosystem of startups is working toward that goal, and the Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits to incentivize the practice. But some electrification advocates say those steps do not go far enough. While the European Union recently passed a regulation mandating EV battery recycling, there is no such law in the U.S. Proponents of a federal recycling standard say that without one, batteries that could be recycled might get left behind, increasing the need for mining and undermining electrification’s environmental benefits. 

“We need a coordinated federal response to truly have a large-scale impact on meeting our demand,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a policy advocate at Earthjustice, which favors a federal recycling requirement. “If you compare us to the EU, we are woefully behind and need to move much more quickly.”

That movement would have to come from Congress, according to Miller-McFeeley. Historically, however, regulating recycling has been left up to the states and local jurisdictions. The Biden administration has instead been supporting the country’s budding EV battery recycling industry, mainly by making it good business to recover critical materials. 

The Department of Energy wants to establish a “battery ecosystem” that can recover 90 percent of spent lithium batteries by 2030. It has granted billions in loans to battery recyclers to build new facilities. Automakers are incentivized to buy those recyclers’ products, because part of the federal EV tax credit applies only to cars with batteries that include a minimum amount of critical minerals that were mined, processed or recycled in the U.S. or by a free-trade partner. Manufacturers also get a tax credit for producing critical materials (including recycled ones) in the U.S.

Daniel Zotos, who handles public advocacy at the battery recycling startup Redwood Materials, said in an email that a healthy market for recycled materials is emerging. “Not only is there tremendous value today in recycling these metals, but the global demand for metals means that automakers need to source both more mined and recycled critical minerals.”

Zotos said Redwood Materials agrees with the approach the federal government has taken. “The U.S. has in fact chosen to help incentivize, rather than mandate, recycling through provisions established in the Inflation Reduction Act, which we’re deeply supportive of.”

During a pilot project in California last year, the company recovered 95 percent of the critical materials in 1,300 lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride EV and hybrid batteries. The cost of retrieving packs from throughout the state was the biggest barrier to profitability, but Zotos said that expense will subside as the industry grows.

A tiny but growing secondary market for EV batteries is also driving their reuse. Most batteries will be retired once their capacity dwindles to about 70 to 80 percent, due to the impact on the car’s range. But they’re still viable enough at that point to sustain a second life as storage for renewable energy like wind and solar power. 

B2U Storage Solutions used 1,300 retired batteries from Nissan and Honda to create 27 megawatts hours of storage at its solar farm just north of Los Angeles in Lancaster, California. Photovoltaic panels charge the packs all day, and B2U sells the stored power to the local utility during peak demand in the evening. “There is more value in reuse,” said company president Freeman Hall, “and we’re not doing anything more than deferring recycling another four or five years.” 

Homeowners and hobbyists are embracing second-life batteries, too. Henry Newman, co-owner of the auto dismantler EV Parts Solutions in Phoenix, said customers buy his Tesla and Nissan Leaf batteries to convert classic cars or create DIY power storage at home. Any batteries that Newman can’t sell are picked up by Li-Cycle, a lithium-ion battery recycler with a plant in Gilbert, Arizona. 

Newman said dismantlers and customers seem to want to do the right thing. “I know there will be people who don’t follow regulation, but my experience in the last six to seven years is that the industry is pretty conscious of it and tries to mitigate throwing these things in the trash,” he said. A law could help prevent mishandling, but Newman worries about any overreach or added costs that would come with more regulation. 

But relying on the market to ensure proper stewardship is risky, said Jessica Dunn, a senior analyst in the clean transportation program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The recycling of cars has traditionally been a market-based environment,” she said. “But we’re dealing with a completely different system now. EV batteries are big and have a lot of critical materials in them that we need to get out of them no matter if it’s economical or not.” 

Transporting EV batteries, which can weigh more than 1,500 pounds, is expensive (as much as one-third of the cost of recycling them), dangerous, and logistically challenging. Packs can catch fire if improperly handled, and they are classified as hazardous material, which requires special shipping permits. If the battery is in a remote location or is damaged, a recycler could deem it too much trouble to retrieve without a mandate to do so.

Dunn also said that not all batteries contain enough valuable materials for it to make financial sense to go through the trouble of recovering them. While most EV batteries currently contain high-value cobalt and nickel, a new generation of cheaper lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP, batteries don’t use those metals. Tesla, Ford, and Rivian all recently announced they will use LFPs in some models.

“Just because there aren’t nickel and cobalt in them doesn’t mean that the lithium isn’t something that we should be recovering,” said Dunn. Redwood Materials said it collects lithium-ion phosphate batteries and uses the lithium within them to assemble new battery components, and that they collect all battery packs no matter their condition.

Finally, without guidelines in place, viable batteries may not be repurposed before being recycled, which Dunn said undermines their sustainability. “You’ve already put all that literal energy — and the environmental impacts that go along with that — into manufacturing these batteries,” she said. “So if you can squeak an extra five to 10 years out of them, that’s a really good option.” 

With the U.S. poised to see about 165,000 electric vehicle batteries retire in 2030, Dunn said the time to ensure no batteries are stranded is now. “We’re not seeing a big wave now, but that’s coming, and so we need to be prepared for that.”

There has been some federal movement toward a recycling requirement. The 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed the Department of Energy to establish a task force to develop an “extended battery producer responsibility framework” to address battery design, transport, and recycling.

Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, is the approach that the EU took in its battery regulation that passed last December. EPR puts the onus on the manufacturer to ensure that what they produce is properly repurposed and then recycled, either by compelling them to pay for the recycling or to handle it themselves. 

Thirty-three states have such laws, covering 16 products ranging from mattresses to packaging. “It is a paradigm shift for how waste is managed in the United States,” said Scott Cassel of the Product Stewardship Institute. But Congress has never passed such a law. 

EV battery recycling might be the issue that could garner bipartisan support for one. Access to critical materials is a foreign policy and national security issue: China processes more than half the world’s lithium and cobalt, which means a steady domestic supply from recycling would help alleviate dependency on a geopolitical rival. 

Building out the infrastructure to dismantle, recover, and process battery materials could also create thousands of jobs, an accomplishment most lawmakers are happy to align themselves with.  

Republican senators alluded to both benefits when supporting the bipartisan Strategic EV Management Act of 2022, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act last year. It requires multiple agencies to work on guidelines for “reusing and recycling” batteries from vehicles retired from the federal fleet. 

Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said in a statement that the bill would ensure agencies could “reap the full economic benefits of EV investments … and do so in a manner that lessens our dependence on communist China.” 

These laws set in motion efforts to design recycling frameworks, but the timelines to develop them span years. In the meantime, a few states are weighing their own mandates. “The states don’t want to wait for any of these bills to move,” Cassel said. “They’re ready to act right now.”

In California, a Senate bill would require battery suppliers to ensure that all “vehicle traction batteries” be recovered, reused, repurposed, or recycled. The bill passed unanimously this week and is headed to the Assembly. Senator Ben Allen, who introduced the bill, said there is bipartisan political and industry support for creating a framework. “You need a system in place,” he said. “That’s like saying, ‘Oh, the people will drive just fine to and from work. We don’t need traffic laws.’” 

As it has been with other clean-vehicle targets, California could be a bellwether for a standard that would eventually take hold nationally.

“We’d love to create a system that could help to inform national policy,” said Allen. “And in this case, with this industry support and bipartisan backing, there actually may be a blueprint here.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/technology/the-u-s-doesnt-have-a-law-mandating-ev-battery-recycling-should-it/. 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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Given America’s penchant for gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs, you might be surprised to learn that the country’s gasoline usage is going down, maybe for good. Even though only about 1 percent of cars on the road today are electric, some say the United States has already passed “peak gasoline” — the pivotal moment when the fuel’s use finally begins a permanent decline after a century of growth. 

Gasoline consumption has not fully bounced back to levels seen before local governments began lockdowns in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people stopped driving to work every day. Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2018, Americans burned an average of 392 million gallons of gasoline, more than one gallon every day for every person in the country. Since that annual peak, a combination of remote work, high gas prices, and fuel economy standards that require that new cars get better gas mileage have diminished demand. To stay profitable, oil refiners have cut back on production.

Demand for gasoline this year could end up at around 366 million gallons per day, down 7 percent from 2018, according to analysis provided to Grist by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research and advocacy nonprofit. With recent policies like the Inflation Reduction Act offering a tax credit of up to $7,500 for an electric vehicle and the Biden administration’s new emissions rules — which require two-thirds of new passenger vehicles be electric by 2031 — gasoline demand could decrease almost a quarter by 2030, according to the research group, compared to current levels.

That’s still not fast enough to hit important targets to slash greenhouse gases, says Janelle London, the co-executive director of Coltura, an organization advocating for the end of gasoline. “Scientists are saying that we have to cut emissions from all sources in half by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and gasoline use just is not on track,” she said. The majority of the country’s transportation-related carbon emissions come from burning gasoline in cars, trucks, and SUVs. And transportation is currently the country’s largest source of pollution. London says that the fastest way to cut consumption is to target electric vehicle incentives toward “gasoline superusers”: the 10 percent of population that drives the most and guzzles nearly a third of the country’s gas. 

That’s not who’s buying electric vehicles right now. The typical EV driver is likely to be among those who drive the least, London said. “The only way we’re going to solve this near-term problem is to get the biggest gasoline users to switch to EVs, like, now, as soon as possible.” California, for instance, is on track for a 10 percent cut in gasoline use by 2030, far from its goal of halving gasoline use by the end of the decade. If superusers in California bought electric vehicles before everyone else, it would result in a steep, 43 percent drop that would move the state much closer to its climate goals.

London says that federal tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act “could be much better designed,” and she’s not the only one who thinks so. Ashley Nunes, director of federal climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, says the credits aren’t necessarily prompting people to give up their gas-powered cars. They’re just adding another vehicle. An estimated 44 percent of households with an electric vehicle have at least two other cars, if not three — nearly all of which run on gas. “First and foremost, I think that electric vehicle incentives should not be given to people who are not turning in their gasoline-powered car,” Nunes said. “We’re not paying for you to add another car in your garage.” 

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society, Nunes and other researchers found that offering blanket subsidies for electric vehicles isn’t an economically effective way of reducing carbon emissions. Targeting subsidies at households with only one vehicle and toward taxi or Uber drivers produces more bang for the federal buck. “You want to target people who drive their cars a lot, because that’s where you see the real emission benefits associated with EVs,” Nunes said.

In some states, there’s new interest in getting frequent drivers to switch to EVs. A bill in Vermont, for instance, would allow the Burlington Electric Department to use funds to help gasoline superusers buy electric vehicles. It passed through the state legislature this month and is headed to Republican Governor Phil Scott’s desk. If signed, it’ll be the first legislation in the country to offer EV incentives specifically to “superusers,” a term coined by Coltura two years ago.

Coltura makes the case that converting the biggest gasoline users into EV owners means less money for gas stations and more for power providers. “Utilities have a huge interest in getting these superusers to switch to EVs,” London said. “Suddenly, they’d be using a lot of electricity, right?” Someone who uses 1,000 gallons of gasoline a year, if switched to an EV, would use about 9,000 kilowatts of extra electricity each year, according to Coltura. Using the average cost of gasoline and electricity in February 2023, that means they’d spend about $1,150 on electricity instead of $3,390 on gas, saving roughly $2,000 a year.

There’s another effort underway in California that would allow superusers to receive more funding, in addition to federal tax credits, to switch. Assembly Bill 1267 would have directed the California Air Resources Board to institute a program that maximizes the reduction in gasoline — and thus the climate impact — for each dollar spent on incentives for superusers. After passing unanimously through two committee hearings this spring with bipartisan support, the bill died last week. (London said that it will likely be reintroduced next year.) The state already has a hodgepodge of programs that help lower-income residents buy electric cars — including one that offers grants of up to $9,500 to replace a gas guzzler with a cleaner vehicle — though they have suffered from a lack of funding.

The superusers who make less than the state’s median income wind up spending 10 percent of their income just on putting gas in their car. “People say you can’t afford an EV,” London said. “If you’re a superuser, you can’t afford to keep paying for gasoline.” 

The average price of an electric car is about $59,000, higher than the $48,000 average for all cars. But London says that average EV cost is “irrelevant” since there are cheaper options on the market. “The question is, is there an EV at the price point that I can afford one?” she asks. While the cheapest EV model, the Chevy Bolt, is being discontinued, a new Nissan Leaf starts at just under $30,000, and tax credits can knock the price down further.

Clayton Stranger, a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said that there was a “compelling” economic case to target superusers with EV incentives, though the savings alone might not be enough to make people switch: The infrastructure needs to be built in rural places to make people feel comfortable driving an electric car, giving them confidence there’s a place to charge if they need it.

And then there’s the other aspect of ending the gasoline era: getting Americans out of their cars and into buses and trains, and onto bike lanes and sidewalks. “We also need to significantly reduce the amount of driving that is done,” Stranger said. “EVs alone don’t get us all the way there.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/peak-gasoline-superusers-electric-vehicle-incentives/. 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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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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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.]

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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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This article originally appeared in Grist.

In the Mon Valley of western Pennsylvania, steel was once a way of life, one synonymous with the image of rural, working-class Rust Belt communities. At its height in 1910, Pittsburgh alone produced 25 million tons of it, or 60 percent of the nation’s total. Bustling mills linger along the Monongahela River and around Pittsburgh, but employment has been steadily winding down for decades.  

Though President Trump promised a return to the idealized vision of American steelmaking that Bruce Springsteen might sing about, the industry has changed since its initial slump four decades ago. Jobs declined 49 percent between 1990 and 2021, when increased efficiency saw the sector operating at its highest capacity in 14 years. Despite ongoing supply chain hiccups and inflation, demand continues growing globally, particularly in Asia. But even as demand for this essential material climbs, so too does the pressure to decarbonize its production.

Earlier this month, the progressive Ohio River Valley Institute released a study that found a carefully planned transition to “green” steel — manufactured using hydrogen generated with renewable energy — could be a climatic and economic boon. It argues that as countries work toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, a green steel boom in western Pennsylvania could help the U.S. meet that goal, make its steel industry competitive again, and employ a well-paid industrial workforce.

“A transition to fossil fuel-free steelmaking could grow total jobs supported by steelmaking in the region by 27 percent to 43 percent by 2031, forestalling projected job losses,” the study noted. “Regional jobs supported by traditional steelmaking are expected to fall by 30 percent in the same period.”

In a world struggling to keep global climate change below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the traditional coke-based process of making steel, which uses coal to power the furnaces that melt iron ore, remains a big problem. The industry generates 7.2 percent of all carbon emissions worldwide, making it more polluting than the entire European Union. Old-school steel manufacturing relies on metallurgical coal — that is, high-quality, low-moisture coal, which still releases carbon, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants. About 70 percent of today’s steel is made that way, much of it produced cheaply in countries with lax environmental regulations. However, only 30 percent of U.S. production uses this method.

Technological improvements and pressure to reduce emissions have led to increased use of leftover, or “scrap,” steel during production. When products made of traditional, coke-based steel have reached the end of their useful life, they can be returned to the furnace and recycled almost infinitely. This reduces the labor needed to produce the same amount and quality of steel as traditional production methods, and it accounts for about 70 percent of the nation’s output.

The scrap is melted in an electric arc furnace and uses hydrogen, rather than coke, to process iron ore. It requires less energy than traditional methods, particularly if renewable energy powers the furnace and generates the hydrogen. Nick Messenger, an economist who worked on the Institute’s study, believes this approach could revitalize the Rust Belt by placing the region at the forefront of an innovation the industry must inevitably embrace.

“What we actually show is that by doing that three-step process and doing it all close to home in Pennsylvania,” he said, “each step of that process has the potential to create jobs and support jobs in the community” — from building and operating solar panels and turbines, to operating electrolyzers to produce electricity, to making the steel itself.

The study claims a business-as-usual approach would follow current production and employment trends, leading to a 30 percent reduction in jobs by 2031. A transition to hydrogen-based electric arc manufacturing could increase jobs in both the steel and energy industries by as much as 43 percent. The study calls western Pennsylvania an ideal location for this transition, given its proximity to clean water, an experienced workforce, and 22,200 watts of wind and solar energy potential.

To make it work for the Mon Valley, the study notes, manufacturers must get started as soon as possible. The quest for green steel isn’t just an ideological matter, but a question of global economic power. “There’s a huge new race, in a sense, to get in on the ground floor,” Messenger said. “When you’re the first one, you attract the types of capital, you attract the types of businesses and entrepreneurs and industries that cause that kind of flourishing boom to happen around this particular sector.” 

The Ohio Valley’s fabled steel mills may be looking, if cautiously, toward a decarbonized future. Two years ago, U.S. Steel canceled a $1.3 billion investment in the Mon Valley Works complex, citing, in part, its net-zero goals and the need to switch to electric arc steel production. Of course, the biggest challenge is that while the Mon Valley has massive wind energy potential, very little of it has been tapped. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, federal subsidies and tax breaks could give clean energy developers a boost.

The Biden administration has shown faith in green steel through a series of grant programs, subsidies and tax credits, including $6 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act to decarbonize heavy industry. But Europe has the advantage. Nascent projects in Sweden, Germany, and Spain dot the European Union, with the United Kingdom close behind. Some are using hydrogen, but others are experimenting with biochar, electrolysis, or other ways to power the electric arc process. 

In the United States, a company called Boston Metal is experimenting with an oxide electrolysis model, hoping to make the U.S. a leader in green steel technology. This model eliminates the need for coal by creating a chemical reaction that emulates the reaction that turns iron ore into steel. The company is in the process of commercializing its technology and plans to license it to steel manufacturers. Adam Rauwerdink, the company’s senior vice president of business development, hopes to see its first adopter by 2026.

Rauwerdink believes the world is moving away from traditional steel manufacturing and  that U.S. companies will be playing catch up if they don’t adapt. He has seen more and more companies and investors get on board in the past five years, including ArcelorMittal, the world’s second biggest steel producer. It invested $36 million in Boston Metal this year. He considers that investment a clear sign that the race for green steel is on, and it’s time for manufacturers to embrace the technology — or get left behind.

“Historically, you would have built a steel plant near a coal mine,” he said. “Now you’re going to be building it where you have clean power.”

This story has been updated to clarify that Boston Metal is still commercializing its technology.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/steel-built-the-rust-belt-green-steel-could-help-rebuild-it/. 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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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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.” 

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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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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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.

WHEN A NUCLEAR-POWERED satellite crashes to Earth, whom do the authorities call? What about when a derailed train spills toxic chemicals? Or when a wildfire burns within the fenceline of a nuclear-weapons laboratory? When an earthquake damages a nuclear power plant, or when it melts down? 

Though its name isn’t catchy, the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) is on speed dial for these situations. If hazardous material—whether of the nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical, or natural variety—gets spewed into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to trace its potentially deadly dispersion. The center’s scientists use modeling, simulation, and real-world data to pinpoint where those hazards are in space and time, where the harmful elements will soon travel, and what can be done.

The landscape of emergency response

NARAC is part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which is run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which itself is part of the Department of Energy—the organization in charge of, among other things, developing and maintaining nuclear weapons. 

Plus, NARAC is part of a group called NEST, or the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. That team’s goal is to both prevent and respond to nuclear and radiological emergencies—whether they occur by accident or on purpose. Should a dirty bomb be ticking in Tempe, they’re the ones who would search for it. Should they not find it in time, they would also help deal with the fallout. In addition, NEST takes preventative measures, like flying radiation-detecting helicopters over the Super Bowl to make sure no one has poisonous plans. “That’s a very compelling national mission,” says Lee Glascoe, the program leader for LLNL’s contribution to NEST, which includes NARAC. “And NARAC is a part of that.”

And if a suspicious substance does get released into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to provide information that NEST personnel can use in the field and authorities can use to manage catastrophe. Within 15 minutes of a notification about toxic materials in the air, NARAC can produce a 3D simulation of the general situation: what particles are expected where, where the airflow will waft them, and what the human and environmental consequences could be. 

In 30 to 60 minutes, they can push ground-level data gathered by NEST personnel (who are out in the field while the NARAC scientists are running simulations) into their supercomputers and integrate it into their models. That will give more precise and accurate information about where plumes of material are in the air, where the ground will be contaminated, where affected populations are, how many people might die or be hurt, where evacuation should occur, and how far blast damage extends. 

Modeling the atmosphere

These capabilities drifted into Lawrence Livermore decades ago. “Livermore has a long history of atmospheric modeling, from the development of the first climate model,” says John Nasstrom, NARAC’s chief scientist.

That model was built by physicist Cecil “Chuck” Leith. Leith, back in the early Cold War, got permission from lab director Edward Teller (who co-founded the lab and was a proponent of the hydrogen bomb) to use early supercomputers to develop and run the first global atmospheric circulation model. Glascoe calls this effort “the predecessor for weather modeling and climate modeling.” The continuation of Leith’s work split into two groups at Livermore: one focused on climate and one focused on public health—the common denominator between the two being how the atmosphere works. 

In the 1970s, the Department of Energy came to the group focused on public health and asked, says Nasstrom, whether the models could show in near real time where hazardous material would travel once released. Livermore researchers took that project on in 1973, working on a prototype that during a real event could tell emergency managers at DOE sites (home to radioactive material) and nuclear power plants who would get how much of a dose and where.

The group was plugging along on that project when the real world whirled against its door. In 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania partially melted down. “They jumped into it,” Nasstrom says of his predecessors. The prototype system wasn’t yet fully set up, but the team immediately started to build in 3D information about the terrain around Three Mile Island to get specific predictions about the radionuclides’ whereabouts and effects.

After that near catastrophe, the group began preemptively building that terrain data in for other DOE and nuclear sites before moving on to the whole rest of the US and incorporating real-time meteorological data. “Millions of weather observations today are streaming into our center right now,” says Nasstrom, “as well as global and regional forecast model output from NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the National Weather Service, and other agencies.” 

NARAC also evolved with the 1986 Chernobyl accident. “People anticipated that safety systems would be in place and catastrophic releases wouldn’t necessarily happen,” says Nasstrom. “Then Chernobyl went wrong, and we quickly developed a much larger-scale modeling system that could transport material around the globe.” Previously, they had focused on the consequences at a more regional level, but Chernobyl lofted its toxins around the globe, necessitating an understanding of that planetary profusion.

“It’s been in a continuous state of evolution,” says Nasstrom, of NARAC’s modeling and simulation capabilities. 

‘All the world’s terrain mapped out’

Today, NARAC uses high-resolution weather models from NOAA as well as forecast models it helped develop. Every day, the center brings in more than a terabyte of weather forecast model data. And those 3D topography maps they previously had to scramble to make are all taken care of. “We already have all the world’s terrain mapped out,” says Glascoe. 

NARAC also keeps up-to-date population information, including how the distribution of people in a city differs between day and night, and data on the buildings in cities, whose architecture changes airflow. That’s on top of land-use information, since whether an area is made up of plains or forest changes the analysis. All of that together helps scientists figure out what a given hazardous release will mean to actual people in actual locations around actual buildings.

Helping bring all those inputs together, NARAC scientists have also created ready-to-go models specific to different kinds of emergencies, such as nuclear power plant failures, dirty bomb detonations, plumes of biological badness, and actual nuclear weapons explosions. “So that as soon as something happens, we can say, ‘Oh, it’s something like this,’ that we got something to start with.” 

Katie Lundquist, a scientist specializing in scientific computing and computational fluid dynamics, is NARAC’s modeling team lead. Her team helps develop the models that underlie NARAC’s analysis, and right now it is working to improve understanding of how debris would be distributed in the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation and how radioactive material would mix with the debris. She’s also working on general weather modeling and making sure the software is all up to snuff for next-generation exascale supercomputers. 

“The atmosphere is really complex,” Lundquist says. “It covers a lot of scales, from a global scale down to just tiny little eddies that might be between buildings in an area. And so it takes a lot of computing power.”

NARAC has also striven to improve its communications game. “The authorities make the decision, but in a crisis, you can’t just give them all the information you’ve generated technically,” Glascoe says. “You can’t give them all sorts of pretty images of a plume.” They want one or two pages telling them only what the potential impact is. “And what sort of guidelines might help their decision making of whether people should shelter, evacuate, that sort of thing,” says Glascoe. 

To that end, NARAC has made publicly available examples of its briefing products, outlining what an emergency manager could expect to see in its one to two pages about dirty bombs, nuclear detonations, nuclear power plant accidents, hazardous chemicals, and biological agents.

The sim of all fears

Recently, the team has been assisting with radioactive worries in Ukraine, where Russia has interfered with the running of nuclear power plants. It also previously kept an analytical eye on the 2020 fires in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone and the same year’s launch of the Mars Perseverance rover. The rover had a plutonium power source, and NARAC was on hand to simulate what would happen in the event of an explosive accident. Going farther back, the team mobilized for weeks on end during the partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactors in Japan in 2011. 

But one of the events Glascoe is most proud of happened in late 2017, when sensors in Europe started picking up rogue radioactive activity. Across the continent, instruments designed to detect elemental decay saw spikes indicating ruthenium-106, with more than 300 total detections. “We were activated to try and figure out, ‘Well, what’s going on? Where did this come from?’” says Glascoe. 

As NARAC started its analysis, Glascoe remembered an internal research project involving the use of measurement data, atmospheric transport models, statistical methods, and machine learning that he thought might be helpful in tracing the radioactivity backward, rather than making the more standard forward prediction. “As the data comes in, the modeling gets adjusted to try and identify where likely sources are,” says Glascoe. 

Like the prototype that DOE had called up for use with Three Mile Island, this one wasn’t quite ready, but Glascoe called headquarters for permission anyway. “I said, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t really kicked the tires too much on this thing, except they did conclude this project and it looks like it works.’” They agreed to let him try it. 

Four days and many supercomputer cycles later, the team produced a map of probable release regions. The bull’s-eye was on a region with an industrial center. “And sure enough, a release from that location would do the trick,” says Glascoe. 

The suspect spot was in Russia, and many now believe the radioactivity came from the Mayak nuclear facility, which processes spent nuclear fuel. Mayak is located in a “closed city,” one that tightly controls who goes in and out. 

Ultimately, no one can stop the atmosphere’s churn, or its tendency to push particles around. The winds don’t care about borders or permits. And NARAC is there to scrutinize, even if it can’t stop, that movement.

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After embracing artificial intelligence, Microsoft is taking another gamble on a promise from OpenAI’s CEO for one more moonshot goal—nuclear fusion. As CNET reports, Microsoft announced it has entered into a power purchase agreement with a startup company called Helion Energy that is slated to go into effect in 2028. Unlike AI’s very immediate realities, however, experts suspectbelieve the project’s extremely short timeframe and technological constraints make this timeline unrealisticcould easily prove disastrous.

Nuclear fusion is considered by many to be the end-all be-all of clean, virtually limitless energy production. Compared to fission reactions within traditional nuclear power plants that split atoms apart, fusion occurs when atoms are forced together within extremely high temperatures to produce a new, smaller mass atom, thus generating comparatively massive amounts of energy in the process. Researchers accomplished important fusion advancements in recent years, but a sustainable, affordable reactor has yet to be designed. What’s more, many experts estimate achieving this milestone won’t happen without “a few decades of research,” if ever.

Helion was founded in 2013, and received a $375 million investment from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2021, shortly after it became the first private company to build a reactor component capable of reaching 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). The optimum temperature for fusion, however, is roughly double that temperature. Meanwhile, Altman’s OpenAI itself garnered a massive partnership with Microsoft earlier this year, and has since integrated its high-profile generative artificial intelligence programming into its products, albeit not without its own controversy.

[Related: Physicists want to create energy like stars do. These two ways are their best shot.]

Helion aims to have its first fusion generator online in 2028. This generator would theoretically provide at least 50 megawatts following a one-year ramp up period—enough energy to power roughly 40,000 homes near a yet-to-be-determined facility location in Washington state. From there, Microsoft plans to pay Helion for its electricity generation as part of its roadmap to match its entire energy consumption with zero-carbon energy purchases by the end of the decade. As CNBC notes, because it’s a power purchase agreement, Helion could face financial penalties for not delivering on its aggressive goal.

In 2015, Helion’s CEO David Kirtley estimated their company would achieve “scientific net energy gain” in nuclear fusion within three years. Within nuclear fusion research, this energy gain refers to the ability to viably emit more power than it takes to produce. When asked this week by MIT Technology Review if Helion met those goals, a representative declined to comment, citing competitiveness concerns, but said its “initial timeline projections” had assumed the company would raise funds faster than it ultimately managed.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” Helion CEO David Kirtley also admitted in a statement released Wednesday,  but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world’s first fusion power facility.”

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Satellite data reveals that methane leaks from two main fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan caused more global heating last year than all of the carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. The satellite data was produced by French energy and environmental geo-analytics company Kayrros for the Guardian.

[Related: Methane is the greenhouse gas we can no longer afford to ignore.]

The data, as reported by the Guardian, shows that the western western fossil fuel field on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan leaked over 2.9 million tons (2.6 million metric tonnes) of methane in 2022. The eastern field emitted almost 2 million tons (1.8 million metric tonnes) during that timeline. Because methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide, the two fields emit the equivalent of more than 403 million tons (366 million metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide, or more than the annual emissions by the United Kingdom. China and the United States are the largest emitters of CO₂ in the world and the UK ranks at 17.

Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that is emitted during the production and transport of oil, natural gas, and coal. Emissions can also result from agriculture and livestock practices, land use, and the decay of organic waste in landfills, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 2021, methane accounted for 12 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the US, which is especially concerning since  it is 25 percent more effective at trapping heat than CO_2.

Methane was officially added to the list of climate change priorities to address this decade by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021. The amount of methane emitted by human activity has been underestimated in the past and emissions have surged in the past 15 years. A 2020 study by the University of Rochester found that levels of “naturally released” methane reported in the atmosphere were 10 times too high, and fossil fuel-based methane is actually about 25 to 40 percent higher than scientists previously predicted. 

“The big take-home nugget for me is they said if you look at all the warming activity done by humans over the last century … carbon dioxide has contributed 0.75 degrees Celsius, while methane has contributed to 0.5 degrees Celsius,” Bob Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, told PopSci in 2021. 

Previous reporting from the Guardian found that Turkmenistan is a top country for methane “super emitting” leaks and it is possible that switching from a process called flaring to venting methane might be behind the explosion in emissions. Flaring burns unwanted gas and adds CO₂ into the atmosphere, but it is an easy process to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon. Venting releases the invisible methane into the air completely unburned and has been harder to track until more recent developments in satellite technology. Since methane traps 80 times more heat than CO₂  over two decades, venting is far worse for the climate.

[Related: Everything you should know about methane as regulations loosen.]

“Methane is responsible for almost half of short-term [climate] warming and has absolutely not been managed up to now – it was completely out of control,” Kayrros president Antoine Rostand, told the Guardian.  “We know where the super emitters are and who is doing it,” he said. “We just need the policymakers and investors to do their job, which is to crack down on methane emissions. There is no comparable action in terms of [reducing] short-term climate impacts.”

Turkmenistan is currently China’s second biggest supplier of gas and the country is planning to double its exports to China. Until 2018, Turkmen citizens received free gas and electricity, but the country is also incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. The likelihood of severe drought is projected to increase “very significantly” over the course of this century, and crop yields are expected to fail.

The upcoming 2023 COP28 climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates is seen by some to be an opportunity for change in the region. One source told the Guardian that diplomatic efforts are being made to urge Turkmenistan to cut its methane emissions. “We are really hoping Cop28 is a forcing mechanism,” the source said.

The post Satellites traced super methane plumes to Turkmenistan’s gas fields appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

A Gallup survey released in late April found that 55 percent of U.S. adults support the use of nuclear power. That’s up four percentage points from last year and reflects the highest level of public support for nuclear energy use in electricity since 2012. 

The survey found that Republicans are more likely to favor nuclear energy than Democrats, consistent with previous Gallup polls. Experts say that partisan divide is particularly visible at the state level, with more pro-nuclear policies adopted in Republican-controlled states than left-leaning ones. But Democratic support for nuclear energy is on the rise, and advances in nuclear technologies and new federal climate laws could be behind the broader shift in public opinion toward nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy has historically been a source of immense controversy. A series of high-profile nuclear accidents and disasters, from Three Mile Island in 1979 to Chernobyl in 1986 to Fukushima in 2011, have raised safety concerns — even though the death toll from fossil fuel power generation far outstrips that of nuclear power generation. Several government nuclear programs have also left behind toxic waste that place disproportionate burdens on Indigenous communities.

But nuclear power doesn’t produce carbon emissions, and it’s more consistent and reliable than wind and solar energy, which vary depending on the weather. For these reasons, the Biden administration has identified nuclear energy as a key climate solution to achieve grid stability in a net-zero future. The administration is pushing for the deployment of a new generation of reactors called “advanced nuclear”: a catch-all term for new nuclear reactor models that improve on the safety and efficiency of traditional reactor designs. 

In a recent report, the Department of Energy found that regardless of how many renewables are deployed, the U.S. will need an additional 200 gigawatts of advanced nuclear power — enough to power about 160 million homes — to reach President Joe Biden’s goal of hitting net-zero emissions by 2050. 

Gallup has tracked several swings in public opinion since first asking about nuclear in 1994. From 2004 to 2015, a majority of Americans favored nuclear power use, with a high of 62 percent in support in 2010. But in 2016, the survey found a majority opposition to nuclear power for the first time. Gallup speculated that lower gasoline prices that year may have “lessened Americans’ perceptions that energy sources such as nuclear power are needed.” In recent years, views on nuclear power had been evenly divided until the latest poll, conducted between March 1 and 23.

The new poll found that 62 percent of Republicans support the use of nuclear power, compared to 46 percent of Democrats. The support from Republicans is likely driven by “a focus on energy independence, supporting innovation, supporting American leadership globally, and supporting American competition with folks like China and Russia specifically in terms of the nuclear space,” said Ryan Norman, senior policy advisor at the center-left think tank Third Way.

Matt Bowen, a senior research scholar on nuclear energy at Columbia University, points out that those political differences in public opinion have played out at the state level. As he puts it, conservative states tend to have “a much more supportive environment” for nuclear energy policies. 

In Tennessee, for example, Republican Governor Bill Lee announced a plan in February to allocate $50 million in the state budget to support nuclear power-related businesses. In 2021, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon welcomed the arrival of a planned advanced nuclear reactor site in his state, set to be one of the first advanced reactors to operate in the country. And last February, West Virginia repealed the state’s ban on construction of nuclear power plants. 

Many of the states passing laws to enable nuclear infrastructure have experienced major job losses as a result of a declining coal sector, Norman observes.

Meanwhile, states that have placed restrictions on the construction of new nuclear power facilities are largely Democratically controlled. Those 12 states include Democratic strongholds like California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. 

On a national level, Norman from Third Way emphasized that the recent Gallup poll reflects growing support from people of all political backgrounds. 

Democratic support for nuclear power jumped up 7 percent this year, up from 39 percent in 2022. Recent studies on decarbonization pathways and the Biden administration’s climate goals have spotlighted nuclear power as a potential clean energy solution — a possible reason for the uptick.

In addition to the Department of Energy’s modeling, the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario found that in order to fully decarbonize the global economy, worldwide nuclear power capacity would need to double between 2022 and 2050. 

In Congress, nuclear power has enjoyed some rare moments of bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have joined forces to pass a few successful pro-nuclear laws. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law injected $6 billion toward maintaining existing nuclear power plants. And while the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was an entirely Democratic effort, it included a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon energy that can be used for nuclear power plants. The climate spending law also allocates millions in investments for advanced nuclear research and demonstration.

Bowen credits Democratic lawmakers’ newfound openness to nuclear power to the increasing urgency of addressing climate change. As he put it, nuclear could be one answer to a question policymakers are increasingly asking themselves: “How do you achieve these deep decarbonization scenarios, especially since we have less and less time?”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/us-support-for-nuclear-power-soars-to-highest-level-in-a-decade/. 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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This story from the March 2012 issue of Popular Science covered the nuclear fusion experiments of Taylor Wilson, who was then 16. Wilson is currently 28 and a nuclear physicist who’s collaborated with multiple US agencies on developing reactors and defense technology. The author of this profile, Tom Clynes, went on to write a book about Wilson titled The Boy Who Played With Fusion.

“PROPULSION,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up.

And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

WHEN I MEET Taylor Wilson, he is 16 and busy—far too busy, he says, to pursue a driver’s license. And so he rides shotgun as his father zigzags the family’s Land Rover up a steep trail in the Virginia Mountains north of Reno, Nevada, where they’ve come to prospect for uranium.

From the backseat, I can see Taylor’s gull-like profile, his forehead plunging from under his sandy blond bangs and continuing, in an almost unwavering line, along his prominent nose. His thinness gives him a wraithlike appearance, but when he’s lit up about something (as he is most waking moments), he does not seem frail. He has spent the past hour—the past few days, really—talking, analyzing, and breathlessly evangelizing about nuclear energy. We’ve gone back to the big bang and forward to mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter. In between are fission and fusion, Einstein and Oppenheimer, Chernobyl and Fukushima, matter and antimatter.

“Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground. It started with his first, and most pedestrian, interest: construction. As a toddler in Texarkana, the family’s hometown, Taylor wanted nothing to do with toys. He played with real traffic cones, real barricades. At age four, he donned a fluorescent orange vest and hard hat and stood in front of the house, directing traffic. For his fifth birthday, he said, he wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.”

This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive.

To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

At 10, Taylor hung a periodic table of the elements in his room. Within a week he memorized all the atomic numbers, masses and melting points. At the family’s Thanksgiving gathering, the boy appeared wearing a monogrammed lab coat and armed with a handful of medical lancets. He announced that he’d be drawing blood from everyone, for “comparative genetic experiments” in the laboratory he had set up in his maternal grandmother’s garage. Each member of the extended family duly offered a finger to be pricked.

The next summer, Taylor invited everyone out to the backyard, where he dramatically held up a pill bottle packed with a mixture of sugar and stump remover (potassium nitrate) that he’d discovered in the garage. He set the bottle down and, with a showman’s flourish, ignited the fuse that poked out of the top. What happened next was not the firecracker’s bang everyone expected, but a thunderous blast that brought panicked neighbors running from their houses. Looking up, they watched as a small mushroom cloud rose, unsettlingly, over the Wilsons’ yard.

For his 11th birthday, Taylor’s grandmother took him to Books-A-Million, where he picked out The Radioactive Boy Scout, by Ken Silverstein. The book told the disquieting tale of David Hahn, a Michigan teenager who, in the mid-1990s, attempted to build a breeder reactor in a backyard shed. Taylor was so excited by the book that he read much of it aloud: the boy raiding smoke detectors for radioactive americium . . . the cobbled-together reactor . . . the Superfund team in hazmat suits hauling away the family’s contaminated belongings. Kenneth and Tiffany heard Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor, who had recently taken a particular interest in the bottom two rows of the periodic table—the highly radioactive elements—read it as a challenge. “Know what?” he said. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I can actually do them.”

A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America’s technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school’s (and parents’) ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they’d long outgrown.

David Hahn had been bored too—and, like Taylor, smart enough to be dangerous. But here is where the two stories begin to diverge. When Hahn’s parents forbade his atomic endeavors, the angry teenager pressed on in secret. But Kenneth and Tiffany resisted their impulse to steer Taylor toward more benign pursuits. That can’t be easy when a child with a demonstrated talent and fondness for blowing things up proposes to dabble in nukes.

Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old
radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.

Drawn in by what he calls “the surprise properties” of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?

As Taylor began to wrap his head around the mind-blowing mysteries at the base of all matter, he could see that atoms, so small but potentially so powerful, offered a lifetime’s worth of secrets to unlock. Whereas Hahn’s resources had been limited, Taylor found that there was almost no end to the information he could find on the Internet, or to the oddities that he could purchase and store in the garage.

On top of tables crowded with chemicals and microscopes and germicidal black lights, an expanding array of nuclear fuel pellets, chunks of uranium and “pigs” (lead-lined containers) began to appear. When his parents pressed him about safety, Taylor responded in the convoluted jargon of inverse-square laws and distance intensities, time doses and roentgen submultiples. With his newfound command of these concepts, he assured them, he could master the furtive energy sneaking away from those rocks and metals and liquids—a strange and ever-multiplying cache that literally cast a glow into the corners of the garage.

Kenneth asked a nuclear-pharmacist friend to come over to check on Taylor’s safety practices. As far as he could tell, the friend said, the boy was getting it right. But he warned that radiation works in quick and complex ways. By the time Taylor learned from a mistake, it might be too late.

Lead pigs and glazed plates were only the beginning. Soon Taylor was getting into more esoteric “naughties”—radium quack cures, depleted uranium, radio-luminescent materials—and collecting mysterious machines, such as the mass spectrometer given to him by a former astronaut in Houston. As visions of Chernobyl haunted his parents, Taylor tried to reassure them. “I’m the responsible radioactive boy scout,” he told them. “I know what I’m doing.”

One afternoon, Tiffany ducked her head out of the door to the garage and spotted Taylor, in his canary yellow nuclear-technician’s coveralls, watching a pool of liquid spreading across the concrete floor. “Tay, it’s time for supper.”
“I think I’m going to have to clean this up first.”
“That’s not the stuff you said would kill us if it broke open, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not instantly.”

THAT SUMMER, Kenneth’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ashlee, then a college student, came to live with the Wilsons. “The explosions in the backyard were getting to be a bit much,” she told me, shortly before my own visit to the family’s home. “I could see everyone getting frustrated. They’d say something and Taylor would argue back, and his argument would be legitimate. He knows how to out-think you. I was saying, ‘You guys need to be parents. He’s ruling the roost.’ “

“What she didn’t understand,” Kenneth says, “is that we didn’t have a choice. Taylor doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘can’t.’ “

“And when he does,” Tiffany adds, “he doesn’t listen.”

“Looking back, I can see that,” Ashlee concedes. “I mean, you can tell Taylor that the world doesn’t revolve around him. But he doesn’t really get that. He’s not being selfish, it’s just that there’s so much going on in his head.”

Tiffany, for her part, could have done with less drama. She had just lost her sister, her only sibling. And her mother’s cancer had recently come out of remission. “Those were some tough times,” Taylor tells me one day, as he uses his mom’s gardening trowel to mix up a batch of yellowcake (the partially processed uranium that’s the stuff of WMD infamy) in a five-gallon bucket. “But as bad as it was with Grandma dying and all, that urine sure was something.”

Taylor looks sheepish. He knows this is weird. “After her PET scan she let me have a sample. It was so hot I had to keep it in a lead pig.

“The other thing is . . .” He pauses, unsure whether to continue but, being Taylor, unable to stop himself. “She had lung cancer, and she’d cough up little bits of tumor for me to dissect. Some people might think that’s gross, but I found it scientifically very interesting.”

What no one understood, at least not at first, was that as his grandmother was withering, Taylor was growing, moving beyond mere self-centeredness. The world that he saw revolving around him, the boy was coming to believe, was one that he could actually change.

The problem, as he saw it, is that isotopes for diagnosing and treating cancer are extremely short-lived. They need to be, so they can get in and kill the targeted tumors and then decay away quickly, sparing healthy cells. Delivering them safely and on time requires expensive handling—including, often, delivery by private jet. But what if there were a way to make those medical isotopes at or near the patients? How many more people could they reach, and how much earlier could they reach them? How many more people like his grandmother could be saved?

As Taylor stirred the toxic urine sample, holding the clicking Geiger counter over it, inspiration took hold. He peered into the swirling yellow center, and the answer shone up at him, bright as the sun. In fact, it was the sun—or, more precisely, nuclear fusion, the process (defined by Einstein as E=mc2) that powers the sun. By harnessing fusion—the moment when atomic nuclei collide and fuse together, releasing energy in the process—Taylor could produce the high-energy neutrons he would need to irradiate materials for medical isotopes. Instead of creating those isotopes in multimillion-dollar cyclotrons and then rushing them to patients, what if he could build a fusion reactor small enough, cheap enough and safe enough to produce isotopes as needed, in every hospital in the world?

At that point, only 10 individuals had managed to build working fusion reactors. Taylor contacted one of them, Carl Willis, then a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate living in Albuquerque, and the two hit it off. But Willis, like the other successful fusioneers, had an advanced degree and access to a high-tech lab and precision equipment. How could a middle-school kid living on the Texas/Arkansas border ever hope to make his own star?

When Taylor was 13, just after his grandmother’s doctor had given her a few weeks to live, Ashlee sent Tiffany and Kenneth an article about a new school in Reno. The Davidson Academy is a subsidized public school for the nation’s smartest and most motivated students, those who score in the top 99.9th percentile on standardized tests. The school, which allows students to pursue advanced research at the adjacent University of Nevada–Reno, was founded in 2006 by software entrepreneurs Janice and Robert Davidson. Since then, the Davidsons have championed the idea that the most underserved students in the country are those at the top.

On the family’s first trip to Reno, even before Taylor and Joey were accepted to the academy, Taylor made an appointment with Friedwardt Winterberg, a celebrated physicist at the University of Nevada who had studied under the Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. When Taylor told Winterberg that he wanted to build a fusion reactor, also called a fusor, the notoriously cranky professor erupted: “You’re 13 years old! And you want to play with tens of thousands of electron volts and deadly x-rays?” Such a project would be far too technically challenging and hazardous, Winterberg insisted, even for most doctoral candidates. “First you must master calculus, the language of science,” he boomed. “After that,” Tiffany said, “we didn’t think it would go anywhere. Kenneth and I were a bit relieved.”

But Taylor still hadn’t learned the word “can’t.” In the fall, when he began at Davidson, he found the two advocates he needed, one in the office right next door to Winterberg’s. “He had a depth of understanding I’d never seen in someone that young,” says atomic physicist Ronald Phaneuf. “But he was telling me he wanted to build the reactor in his garage, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my lord, we can’t let him do that.’ But maybe we can help him try to do it here.”

Phaneuf invited Taylor to sit in on his upper-division nuclear physics class and introduced him to technician Bill Brinsmead. Brinsmead, a Burning Man devotee who often rides a wheeled replica of the Little Boy bomb through the desert, was at first reluctant to get involved in this 13-year-old’s project. But as he and Phaneuf showed Taylor around the department’s equipment room, Brinsmead recalled his own boyhood, when he was bored and unchallenged and aching to build something really cool and difficult (like a laser, which he eventually did build) but dissuaded by most of the adults who might have helped.

Rummaging through storerooms crowded with a geeky abundance of electron microscopes and instrumentation modules, they came across a high-vacuum chamber made of thick-walled stainless steel, capable of withstanding extreme heat and negative pressure. “Think I could use that for my fusor?” Taylor asked Brinsmead. “I can’t think of a more worthy cause,” Brinsmead said.

NOW IT’S TIFFANY who drives, along a dirt road that wends across a vast, open mesa a few miles south of the runways shared by Albuquerque’s airport and Kirkland Air Force Base. Taylor has convinced her to bring him to New Mexico to spend a week with Carl Willis, whom Taylor describes as “my best nuke friend.” Cocking my ear toward the backseat, I catch snippets of Taylor and Willis’s conversation.

“The idea is to make a gamma-ray laser from stimulated decay of dipositronium.”

“I’m thinking about building a portable, beam-on-target neutron source.”

“Need some deuterated polyethylene?”

Willis is now 30; tall and thin and much quieter than Taylor. When he’s interested in something, his face opens up with a blend of amusement and curiosity. When he’s uninterested, he slips into the far-off distractedness that’s common among the super-smart. Taylor and Willis like to get together a few times a year for what they call “nuclear tourism”—they visit research facilities, prospect for uranium, or run experiments.

Earlier in the week, we prospected for uranium in the desert and shopped for secondhand laboratory equipment in Los Alamos. The next day, we wandered through Bayo Canyon, where Manhattan Project engineers set off some of the largest dirty bombs in history in the course of perfecting Fat Man, which leveled Nagasaki.

Today we’re searching for remnants of a “broken arrow,” military lingo for a lost nuclear weapon. While researching declassified military reports, Taylor discovered that a Mark 17 “Peacemaker” hydrogen bomb, which was designed to be 700 times as powerful as the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, was accidentally dropped onto this mesa in May 1957. For the U.S. military, it was an embarrassingly Strangelovian episode; the airman in the bomb bay narrowly avoided his own Slim Pickens moment when the bomb dropped from its gantry and smashed the B-36’s doors open. Although its plutonium core hadn’t been inserted, the bomb’s “spark plug” of conventional explosives and radioactive material detonated on impact, creating a fireball and a massive crater. A grazing steer was the only reported casualty.

Tiffany parks the rented SUV among the mesquite, and we unload metal detectors and Geiger counters and fan out across the field. “This,” says Tiffany, smiling as she follows her son across the scrubland, “is how we spend our vacations.”

Willis says that when Taylor first contacted him, he was struck by the 12-year-old’s focus and forwardness—and by the fact that he couldn’t plumb the depth of Taylor’s knowledge with a few difficult technical questions. After checking with Kenneth, Willis sent Taylor some papers on fusion reactors. Then Taylor began acquiring pieces for his new machine.

Through his first year at Davidson, Taylor spent his afternoons in a corner of Phaneuf’s lab that the professor had cleared out for him, designing the reactor, overcoming tricky technical issues, tracking down critical parts. Phaneuf helped him find a surplus high-voltage insulator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Willis, then working at a company that builds particle accelerators, talked his boss into parting with an extremely expensive high-voltage power supply.

With Brinsmead and Phaneuf’s help, Taylor stretched himself, applying knowledge from more than 20 technical fields, including nuclear and plasma physics, chemistry, radiation metrology and electrical engineering. Slowly he began to test-assemble the reactor, troubleshooting pesky vacuum leaks, electrical problems and an intermittent plasma field.

Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor and Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. Yet what would set Taylor apart from the others was not the machine itself but what he decided to do with it.

While still developing his medical isotope application, Taylor came across a report about how the thousands of shipping containers entering the country daily had become the nation’s most vulnerable “soft belly,” the easiest entry point for weapons of mass destruction. Lying in bed one night, he hit on an idea: Why not use a fusion reactor to produce weapons-sniffing neutrons that could scan the contents of containers as they passed through ports? Over the next few weeks, he devised a concept for a drive-through device that would use a small reactor to bombard passing containers with neutrons. If weapons were inside, the neutrons would force the atoms into fission, emitting gamma radiation (in the case of nuclear material) or nitrogen (in the case of conventional explosives). A detector, mounted opposite, would pick up the signature and alert the operator.

He entered the reactor, and the design for his bomb-sniffing application, into the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The Super Bowl of pre-college science events, the fair attracts 1,500 of the world’s most switched-on kids from some 50 countries. When Intel CEO Paul Otellini heard the buzz that a 14-year-old had built a working nuclear-fusion reactor, he went straight for Taylor’s exhibit. After a 20-minute conversation, Otellini was seen walking away, smiling and shaking his head in what looked like disbelief. Later, I would ask him what he was thinking. “All I could think was, ‘I am so glad that kid is on our side.’ “

For the past three years, Taylor has dominated the international science fair, walking away with nine awards (including first place overall), overseas trips and more than $100,000 in prizes. After the Department of Homeland Security learned of Taylor’s design, he traveled to Washington for a meeting with the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which invited Taylor to submit a grant proposal to develop the detector. Taylor also met with then–Under Secretary of Energy Kristina Johnson, who says the encounter left her “stunned.”

“I would say someone like him comes along maybe once in a generation,” Johnson says. “He’s not just smart; he’s cool and articulate. I think he may be the most amazing kid I’ve ever met.”

And yet Taylor’s story began much like David Hahn’s, with a brilliant, high-flying child hatching a crazy plan to build a nuclear reactor. Why did one journey end with hazmat teams and an eventual arrest, while the other continues to produce an array of prizes, patents, television appearances, and offers from college recruiters?

The answer is, mostly, support. Hahn, determined to achieve something extraordinary but discouraged by the adults in his life, pressed on without guidance or oversight—and with nearly catastrophic results. Taylor, just as determined but socially gifted, managed to gather into his orbit people who could help him achieve his dreams: the physics professor; the older nuclear prodigy; the eccentric technician; the entrepreneur couple who, instead of retiring, founded a school to nurture genius kids. There were several more, but none so significant as Tiffany and Kenneth, the parents who overcame their reflexive—and undeniably sensible—inclinations to keep their Icarus-like son on the ground. Instead they gave him the wings he sought and encouraged him to fly up to the sun and beyond, high enough to capture a star of his own.

After about an hour of searching across the mesa, our detectors begin to beep. We find bits of charred white plastic and chunks of aluminum—one of which is slightly radioactive. They are remnants of the lost hydrogen bomb. I uncover a broken flange with screws still attached, and Taylor digs up a hunk of lead. “Got a nice shard here,” Taylor yells, finding a gnarled piece of metal. He scans it with his detector. “Unfortunately, it’s not radioactive.”

“That’s the kind I like,” Tiffany says.

Willis picks up a large chunk of the bomb’s outer casing, still painted dull green, and calls Taylor over. “Wow, look at that warp profile!” Taylor says, easing his scintillation detector up to it. The instrument roars its approval. Willis, seeing Taylor ogling the treasure, presents it to him. Taylor is ecstatic. “It’s a field of dreams!” he yells. “This place is loaded!”

Suddenly we’re finding radioactive debris under the surface every five or six feet—even though the military claimed that the site was completely cleaned up. Taylor gets down on his hands and knees, digging, laughing, calling out his discoveries. Tiffany checks her watch. “Tay, we really gotta go or we’ll miss our flight.”

“I’m not even close to being done!” he says, still digging. “This is the best day of my life!” By the time we manage to get Taylor into the car, we’re running seriously late. “Tay,” Tiffany says, “what are we going to do with all this stuff?”

“For $50, you can check it on as excess baggage,” Willis says. “You don’t label it, nobody knows what it is, and it won’t hurt anybody.” A few minutes later, we’re taping an all-too-flimsy box shut and loading it into the trunk. “Let’s see, we’ve got about 60 pounds of uranium, bomb fragments and radioactive shards,” Taylor says. “This thing would make a real good dirty bomb.”

In truth, the radiation levels are low enough that, without prolonged close-range exposure, the cargo poses little danger. Still, we stifle the jokes as we pull up to curbside check-in. “Think it will get through security?” Tiffany asks Taylor.

“There are no radiation detectors in airports,” Taylor says. “Except for one pilot project, and I can’t tell you which airport that’s at.”

As the skycap weighs the box, I scan the “prohibited items” sign. You can’t take paints, flammable materials or water on a commercial airplane. But sure enough, radioactive materials are not listed.

We land in Reno and make our way toward the baggage claim. “I hope that box held up,” Taylor says, as we approach the carousel. “And if it didn’t, I hope they give us back the radioactive goodies scattered all over the airplane.” Soon the box appears, adorned with a bright strip of tape and a note inside explaining that the package has been opened and inspected by the TSA. “They had no idea,” Taylor says, smiling, “what they were looking at.”

APART FROM THE fingerprint scanners at the door, Davidson Academy looks a lot like a typical high school. It’s only when the students open their mouths that you realize that this is an exceptional place, a sort of Hogwarts for brainiacs. As these math whizzes, musical prodigies and chess masters pass in the hallway, the banter flies in witty bursts. Inside humanities classes, discussions spin into intellectual duels.

Although everyone has some kind of advanced obsession, there’s no question that Taylor is a celebrity at the school, where the lobby walls are hung with framed newspaper clippings of his accomplishments. Taylor and I visit with the principal, the school’s founders and a few of Taylor’s friends. Then, after his calculus class, we head over to the university’s physics department, where we meet Phaneuf and Brinsmead.

Taylor’s reactor, adorned with yellow radiation-warning signs, dominates the far corner of Phaneuf’s lab. It looks elegant—a gleaming stainless-steel and glass chamber on top of a cylindrical trunk, connected to an array of sensors and feeder tubes. Peering through the small window into the reaction chamber, I can see the golf-ball-size grid of tungsten fingers that will cradle the plasma, the state of matter in which unbound electrons, ions and photons mix freely with atoms and molecules.

“OK, y’all stand back,” Taylor says. We retreat behind a wall of leaden blocks as he shakes the hair out of his eyes and flips a switch. He turns a knob to bring the voltage up and adds in some gas. “This is exactly how me and Bill did it the first time,” he says. “But now we’ve got it running even better.”

Through a video monitor, I watch the tungsten wires beginning to glow, then brightening to a vivid orange. A blue cloud of plasma appears, rising and hovering, ghostlike, in the center of the reaction chamber. “When the wires disappear,” Phaneuf says, “that’s when you know you have a lethal radiation field.”

I watch the monitor while Taylor concentrates on the controls and gauges, especially the neutron detector they’ve dubbed Snoopy. “I’ve got it up to 25,000 volts now,” Taylor says. “I’m going to out-gas it a little and push it up.”

Willis’s power supply crackles. The reactor is entering “star mode.” Rays of plasma dart between gaps in the now-invisible grid as deuterium atoms, accelerated by the tremendous voltages, begin to collide. Brinsmead keeps his eyes glued to the neutron detector. “We’re getting neutrons,” he shouts. “It’s really jamming!”

Taylor cranks it up to 40,000 volts. “Whoa, look at Snoopy now!” Phaneuf says, grinning. Taylor nudges the power up to 50,000 volts, bringing the temperature of the plasma inside the core to an incomprehensible 580 million degrees—some 40 times as hot as the core of the sun. Brinsmead lets out a whoop as the neutron gauge tops out.

“Snoopy’s pegged!” he yells, doing a little dance. On the video screen, purple sparks fly away from the plasma cloud, illuminating the wonder in the faces of Phaneuf and Brinsmead, who stand in a half-orbit around Taylor. In the glow of the boy’s creation, the men suddenly look years younger.

Taylor keeps his thin fingers on the dial as the atoms collide and fuse and throw off their energy, and the men take a step back, shaking their heads and wearing ear-to-ear grins.

“There it is,” Taylor says, his eyes locked on the machine. “The birth of a star.”

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Back in 2021, President Joe Biden announced the administration’s new Justice40 Initiative through Executive Order 14008. The program’s aim is that 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities. Investments related to climate change, clean energy, reduction of legacy pollution, and the development of water and wastewater infrastructure, among others, all fall within the initiative.

The administration doesn’t intend the program to be a one-time investment, but rather, a way to improve the distribution of the benefits of government programs and ensure that they reach disadvantaged communities. Since it was established, 19 federal agencies have released a total of nearly 470 covered programs, with three agencies joining just last month. While it’s promising that the administration recognizes the need to address long-standing equities, it’s critical to assess how they plan to make environmental justice a reality.

Marginalized and underserved communities must be prioritized to advance environmental justice

Hannah Perls, senior staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program (EELP), says that many of the environmental injustices around the country today are the result of a legacy of disinvestment in low-income communities. This is especially true in communities of color where “racist policies barred or discouraged public and private investment in housing, critical infrastructure, public transit, and natural spaces.”

[Related: Stronger pollution protections mean focusing on specific communities.]

These communities often face greater exposure to industrial pollution, higher health risks from deteriorating infrastructure, and more energy and housing burdens than wealthier, white communities, says Perls. They also lose out often in competitive federal funding processes—and in some cases, funding is intentionally withheld. This only reinforces existing wealth disparities. By explicitly targeting that 40 percent of federal climate investments reach these communities, the Justice 40 Initiative hopes to combat the legacy of disinvestment and equitably distribute the benefits of the transition to renewable energy, she adds.

To identify disadvantaged communities, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has put out its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a geospatial mapping tool that identifies overburdened and underserved census tracts across all states.

“Agencies can build upon the CEJST as needed, again on a program-by-program basis,” says Perls. “One benefit of this flexibility is that agencies can incorporate burdens specific to their jurisdiction. For example, the Department of Energy’s definition incorporates five measures of energy burden and two measures of fossil dependence.”

The CEJST is an exciting starting point that the federal government can continue to refine. That said, “environmental justice burdens don’t necessarily follow census boundaries, so there should be opportunities for communities to make the case to receive federal dollars if their community is not identified by the tool,” says Silvia R. González, director of climate change, environmental justice, and health research at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

How to ensure that the benefits reach disadvantaged communities

All covered programs are required to consult the community stakeholders, ensure their involvement in determining program benefits, and report data on said benefits. An established number of 40 percent provides clear guidelines and expectations for agencies. To strengthen that goal, a team of researchers and advocates recommend that the 40 percent be a minimum for direct investments in disadvantaged communities.

“A direct investment means the percentage is not just a goal that relies on counting trickle-down benefits,” says González, who was involved in the report. “The straightforward nature of a direct benefit strategy would enhance transparency and accountability to taxpayers because it is tough to measure trickle-down benefits.”

To ensure investment objectives are met, transparency in reporting and evaluation is necessary, she adds. Accountability mechanisms are a must in guaranteeing equitable, effective, and efficient implementation.

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms.]

“We currently have no federal environmental justice law,” says Perls. “As a result, most of the administration’s environmental justice commitments, including the Justice40 Initiative, are established via Executive Order and are therefore not judicially enforceable.”

Fortunately, there are some ways to monitor how the government is living up to its promises. The administration recently published the first version of the Environmental Justice Scorecard, a government-wide assessment of the actions taken by federal agencies to achieve environmental justice goals. Harvard Law School’s EELP also has a Federal Environmental Justice Tracker that tracks the progress of the administration’s environmental justice commitments and other agency-specific initiatives.

Overall, experts say it’s a positive sign that the Justice40 Initiative has catalyzed critical discussions to face climate change and historical disinvestment head-on. But as with any ambitious policy agenda, the implementation will need to overcome many hurdles, says González. The most vulnerable communities tend to be those that are least resourced, and they should not get left behind. Some communities or households may be under-resourced due to language, technology, trust, and capacity barriers to programs that can help them develop financial and health resiliency. There will need to be capacity-building and technical assistance for under-resourced communities to apply for and manage these investments, she adds.

In general, there is strong potential for Justice40-covered programs to bring transformational change from the bottom up. The knowledge and lived experiences of disadvantaged communities could shape targeted investments to ensure that their needs are met. “I hope Justice40 builds a framework rooted in principles of self-governance and self-determination, direct engagement, and collaboration with communities,” says González, “instead of top-down solutions.”

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The Biden administration wants cryptocurrency miners to pay up if they intend to continue consuming more electricity than every television in the US combined each year. On Tuesday, the White House announced its 2024 proposed budget featuring the Digital Asset Mining Energy (DAME) tax, which aims to slap a 30 percent surcharge on crypto firms’ power intake.

“Currently, cryptomining firms do not have to pay for the full cost they impose on others, in the form of local environmental pollution, higher energy prices, and the impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the climate,” reads the Biden administration’s statement released earlier this week. “The DAME tax encourages firms to start taking better account of the harms they impose on society.”

[Related: Bitcoin’s steep environmental costs go beyond its hunger for energy.]

Recent studies have shown that crypto mining’s extremely high energy costs negatively impact the environment, electricity grids, and quality of life for those living nearby. The pollution generated often disproportionately affects low-income areas and communities of color, while the stress on power infrastructure can also raise consumer prices while straining equipment and endangering the public. Despite these issues, the Biden administration argues that crypto firms offer neither local nor national benefits that often come from other businesses consuming the same amounts of electricity.

“There is little evidence of benefits to local communities in the form of employment or economic opportunity, and research has found that minor increases in local tax revenue are more than offset by increased energy prices for firms and households,” the White House adds.

[Related: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested and charged with fraud.]

Fueled by viral media coverage and big-name endorsements, many cryptocurrencies (particularly its most popular variant, Bitcoin) experienced dramatic speculative runs beginning in late 2020. Following Bitcoin’s all-time high of nearly $69,000 per coin in November 2021, numerous financial scandals hit the industry, most notably the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange firm FTX and subsequent arrest of its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of fraud. Since then, values have since plummeted to around $29,000 for 1 BTC at the time of writing.

In March, members of Congress announced the Crypto-Asset Environmental Transparency Act, a bill that would force cryptominers to disclose their annual emissions. “When one year of U.S. Bitcoin mining creates as many carbon emissions as 7.5 million gas-powered cars—we have a problem,” bill co-sponsor Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote on Twitter at the time. “The crypto industry is growing, but so is the fight for climate justice. We will hold these companies accountable.”

If passed, the Biden administration estimates the DAME tax would raise around $10.5 billion in revenue over the next decade.

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Decarbonizing the energy sector requires ramping up power generation from renewable sources. However, increasing renewable energy generation poses some challenges, like mismatches between production and demand. Output from renewables varies seasonally and annually due to insolation differences and trends in weather, which means there may be periods of over- and undergeneration.

Seasonal heating and cooling—usually the largest energy expenses in households—don’t align often with renewable energy generation patterns, says Amarasinghage T. Perera, an associate research scholar in the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment at Princeton University. For instance, there is higher heating demand in the winter, but more renewable energy generation during the summer. In such cases, it’s important to store additional energy in the summer to cater to the winter heating demand, he adds. This explains why long-term energy storage is needed to support renewable technologies.

According to a recent study published in Applied Energy, underground water has the potential for storing much-needed renewable energy. This approach, called aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES), uses naturally occurring groundwater or aquifers for long-term storage of thermal energy that can be used to assist the heating and cooling of buildings, says Perera, who was involved in the study.

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

In an ATES system, there are two wells connected to the same groundwater reservoir. During the summer, cold groundwater is pumped up to provide cooling, warmed at the surface, and then stored. During the winter, the opposite happens—the warm groundwater is pumped up to provide heating, cooled at the surface, and then stored. The cycle repeats seasonally.

Energy storage is often discussed in relation to decarbonizing the transportation sector by replacing internal combustion engine vehicles with those supported by battery and hydrogen storage. However, for grid storage, the materials required to store electric charge in batteries have a high energy cost, while hydrogen storage results in significant energy losses. Perera says more research funding can help identify the broader potential of thermal energy storage technologies.

“Compared to conventional groundwater heat pumps, the extraction of heated or cooled groundwater which was previously injected into the subsurface enables a more efficient operation,” says Ruben Stemmle, a researcher from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)’s Institute of Applied Geosciences in Germany who was not involved in the study. ATES systems can also store excess heat from industrial processes, combined heat and power plants, or solar thermal energy. Overall, it helps bridge the seasonal mismatch between the demand and availability of thermal energy, he adds.

Long-term seasonal storage and demand-driven utilization of previously unused heat sources, like waste heat or excess solar thermal energy, can promote the decarbonization of the heating and cooling sector, as well as reduce primary energy consumption, says Stemmle.

According to the study, ATES can improve the flexibility of the energy system, allowing it to withstand fluctuations in renewable energy demand and generation from future climate variations. It could make urban energy infrastructure more resilient by preventing additional burdens on the grid during hot or cold months.

[Related: How can electrified buildings handle energy peaks?]

ATES has very high storage capacities due to large volumes of groundwater available in many areas like major groundwater basins and complex hydrological structures. This enables ATES application for district heating and cooling or large building complexes with high energy demands, says Stemmle. It can significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels compared to conventional types of heating and cooling, he adds, like gas boilers and compression chillers.

Currently, there are over 3,000 ATES systems in the Netherlands alone. Some are also found in Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium. They aren’t as widely used in the US yet, but adding ATES to the grid could reduce the consumption of petroleum products by up to 40 percent.

To increase ATES deployment, policymakers can support funding programs for ATES systems and related technologies, like heat pumps and heating grids, says Stemmle. He emphasizes the importance of decreasing market barriers as well, which can be achieved by establishing a simple and rapid permitting procedure and a uniform regulatory framework governing ATES operations. The deployment of such thermal energy storage systems could help achieve a more climate change-resilient grid in the future.

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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.

Industrial mining in the deep ocean is on the horizon. Despite several countries including Germany, France, Chile, and Canada calling for a pause on the field’s development, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the organization tasked with both regulating and permitting deep-sea mining efforts, is nearing the deadline to finalize rules for how companies will operate. Companies, meanwhile, are busy testing the capabilities of their machines—equipment designed to collect polymetallic nodules, rocks rich in cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese that litter some parts of the seafloor.

Top of mind for many scientists and politicians is what ramifications deep-sea mining might have on fragile marine ecosystems, including those far from the mining site. At the heart of the debate is concern about the clouds of sediment that can be kicked up by mining equipment.

“Imagine a car driving on a dusty road, and the plume of dust that balloons behind the car,” says Henko de Stigter, a marine geologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “This is how sediment plumes will form in the seabed.”

Scientists estimate that each full-scale deep-sea mining operation could produce up to 500 million cubic meters of discharge over a 30-year period. That’s roughly 1,000 six-meter-long shipping containers full of sediment being discharged into the deep every day, spawning from a field of mining sites spread out over an area roughly the size of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany.

These sediment plumes threaten to smother life on the ocean floor and choke midwater ecosystems, sending ripples throughout marine ecosystems affecting everything from deep-sea filter-feeders to commercially important species like tuna. Yet discussions of the plumes’ potential consequences are clouded by a great deal of uncertainty over how far they will spread and how they will affect marine life.

To clarify just how murky deep-sea mining will make the water, scientists have been tagging along as companies conduct tests.

Two years ago, Global Sea Mineral Resources, a Belgian company, conducted the first trials of its nodule-collecting vehicles. Scientists working with the company found that more than 90 percent of the sediment plume settled out on the seafloor, while the rest lingered within two meters of the seabed near the mined area. Other studies from experiments in the central Pacific Ocean found that the sediment plumes reached as far as 300 meters away from the disturbed site, though the thickest deposition was within 100 meters. This is a shorter spread than earlier models, which predicted deep-sea mining plumes could spread up to five kilometers from the mining site.

Beyond the sediment kicked up by submersibles moving along the seafloor, deep-sea mining can muddy the water in another way.

As polymetallic nodules are lifted to the surface, the waste water that’s sucked up along with the nodules is discharged back into the ocean. Doug McCauley, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says this could potentially create “underwater dust storms” in upper layers of the water column. Over the course of a 20-year mining operation, this sediment could be carried by ocean currents up to 1,000 kilometers before sinking to the seabed.

Some particularly fine-grained particles could remain suspended in the water column, traveling long distances with the potential to affect a wide range of marine animals. According to another recent study, it’s these tiny particles that are the most harmful to filter-feeders like the Mediterranean mussel.

To avoid these consequences on midwater ecosystems, at least, scientists are advising would-be deep-sea miners to discharge waste water at the bottom of the ocean where mining has already created a disturbance. This would be a departure from the ISA’s messaging, which is to not specify at what depth waste water should be released.

For its own trials last December, the Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian company, says it worked hard to minimize the amount of sediment discharged in the waste water it released at a depth of 1,200 meters.

“We’ve optimized our system to leave as much sediment on the seabed as possible,” says Michael Clarke, environmental manager at TMC. Clarke says he’s skeptical of previously published research projecting vast sediment plumes. “When we were trying to measure the [midwater] plume a few hundred meters away from the outlet, we couldn’t even find the plume because it diluted so much.”

Clarke says the company is currently analyzing both baseline and impact data for its test mining, including looking at how far small particles spread and how long they remain suspended. The results will be submitted to the ISA as part of an environmental impact assessment.

As deep-sea mining inches closer and scientists ramp up their research efforts, it’s important to keep one thing clear: “I can tell you that we’re not going to discover that deep-sea mining is good for marine ecosystems,” McCauley says. “The question is, How bad will it be?”

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

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

In the premier episode of Apple TV’s climate show, Extrapolations, it’s 2037 and Earth is in turmoil. Global temperatures have reached record highs. Wildfires rage on every continent. People lack clean drinking water, while a stone-faced billionaire hoards patents to life-saving desalination technology. 

People are understandably upset. Because it’s nearly a decade and a half in the future, protests now include towering holograms and desperate calls to limit global warming — which has long since blown past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — to 2 degrees C. One thing is eerily familiar, though: In one scene, demonstrators chant “net-zero now!” — a catchphrase with origins at the end of the last decade. 

To some, this is a surprising slogan to hear today, let alone in 2037. Although the concept of global net-zero is rooted in climate science, today’s carbon neutrality pledges from individual governments and corporations have been criticized in some quarters as a “con,” because they allow polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases. The carbon offset projects that are supposed to neutralize all those residual emissions are often questionable, if not a sham.

“If today’s version of net-zero is still the rallying cry for climate action 15 years from now, we are in big, big trouble,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy for the nonprofit Corporate Accountability. “I hope we’re headed down a different path.”

Just what that path looks like, however, remains a matter of debate.

The concept of net-zero is rooted in the climate science of the early 2000s. Between 2005 and 2009, a series of research articles showed that global temperatures would continue rising alongside net emissions of carbon dioxide. The “net” acknowledged the role of long-term processes like deep-ocean carbon uptake, in which the seas absorb the pollutant from the air. These processes occur over decades, even centuries.

The term “net-zero” doesn’t appear in the Paris Agreement of 2015, but it was at about that time that it went mainstream. Based on recommendations from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, countries agreed in Article 4 of the accord to achieve a “balance” between sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions during the second half of the century.

So far, so good; this is relatively noncontroversial. “Global net-zero is nonnegotiable if you’re serious about climate targets,” said Sam Fankhauser, a professor of climate change economics and policy at the University of Oxford. Where things start to skew, however, is when individual countries and businesses adopt net-zero targets for themselves. “That’s where you leave the science and get into the realm of policy and opinion,” Fankhauser said.

Sweden became the first country to legislate a midcentury net-zero goal in 2017. Since then, that target has exploded in popularity, almost to the exclusion of other pledges. Some 92 percent of the global economy is now covered by a patchwork of such commitments, made by entities including 130 countries and 850 of the planet’s largest publicly traded companies. 

Fankhauser considers that good news. “None of those firms or organizations had any targets at all before, so they’re moving in the right direction,” he said, although he added that there’s lots of room for improvement in the integrity of those promises. A global analysis published last year found that 65 percent of the largest corporate net-zero targets don’t meet minimum reporting standards, and only 40 percent of municipal targets are reflected in legislation or policy documents.

Others, however, have harsher words for something they consider little more than “rank deception” from big polluters. With heads of state and fossil fuel companies pledging net-zero yet planning to expand oil and gas reserves, Jackson said the logic behind carbon neutrality has been “completely lit on fire” by greenwashing governments and corporations. “They have entirely co-opted the net-zero agenda,” she said. 

At the heart of the issue lies that little word, “net,” and the offsets it implies. When companies or governments can’t get their climate pollution to zero, they can pay for offset projects to either remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent hypothetical emissions — like by protecting a stand of trees that otherwise would have been razed. Under ideal conditions, a third party evaluates these offsets and converts them into “credits” polluters can use to claim that some of their emissions have been neutralized.

The problem, however, is these offsets are too often bogus — the market for them is “honestly kind of a Wild West,” said Amanda Levin, interim director of policy analysis for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. For projects claiming to avoid emissions, it’s difficult to prove the counterfactual: Would a given forest really have been cut down without the offset project? And carbon removal schemes like those based on afforestation — planting trees that will store carbon as they grow — might last only a few years if a disease or forest fire comes along.

Levin said polluters too often use poorly regulated and opaque “junk offsets” to delay the absolute emissions reductions required to combat climate change. Although the IPCC includes offsets in nearly all of its pathways to keep global warming well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), experts agree those offsets should be considered a last resort used only when it’s no longer possible to further cut climate pollution. 

“Net-zero does not mean that we don’t have to take steps to directly reduce our emissions,” Levin said. 

Many, many others — from environmental groups to scientists to policymakers — agree. Where opinions differ, however, is what to do about it. Many net-zero critiques are paired with suggestions for reform, like a 2022 report from a U.N. panel that blasted nongovernmental net-zero pledges as “greenwash.” It recommended tighter guidelines on reporting and transparency, as well as new measures to ensure the integrity of offsets.

Carbon Market Watch, a European watchdog and think tank, takes a slightly different approach. In a February letter to members of the European Parliament, the organization called for a total ban on “carbon neutrality” claims for companies’ products, arguing that such boasts give consumers the false idea that business as usual can continue without adverse impacts on the climate or environment. 

“To say that you neutralize your climate impact by investing in an avoided deforestation program halfway across the world? That’s not scientifically sound,” said Lindsay Otis, a policy expert for Carbon Market Watch. “It deters from real mitigation efforts that will keep us in line with our Paris Agreement goals.”

To Otis, it’s not necessarily offset projects that should be banned. Although she acknowledged that many are problematic, she said mitigation efforts like reforestation can have “a potential real-world benefit,” and it would be a mistake to stop funding them. Instead, she considers this a communication problem: Rather than allowing companies to claim carbon mitigation projects cancel out residual emissions, Carbon Market Watch favors a “contribution claim” model, in which polluters advertise only their financial support for such projects. Some carbon credit sellers like Myclimate are embracing a version of that model, as is the global payment service Klarna.

Carbon Market Watch distinguishes between “carbon neutrality” claims, which describe companies’ products and current environmental performance, and “net-zero” claims about what companies say they’ll do in the future, as in “net-zero by 2050.” It says the latter are still permissible, but only if backed by a detailed plan to quickly drive down emissions and not offset them.

On its face, this is similar to an alternative benchmark that has gained popularity in recent years: “real zero,” which involves the rapid elimination of all fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas emissions without the use of offsets. At least two major companies, the utilities NextEra and National Grid, have eschewed their own net-zero goals in favor of real zero. However, some environmental groups — including a coalition of 700 organizations from around the world — take the concept further. They see real zero as a whole new lens with which to view equitable climate action, one that rejects a single-minded, technocratic focus on greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The real zero framing puts at the center not just the urgency” of climate mitigation, “but also fairness,” said Jackson, the policy director at Corporate Accountability. She and others say real zero is an opportunity to reorient the international climate agenda around new priorities, like funneling climate finance to the developing world and protecting Indigenous land rights. It also sets faster decarbonization timelines for the biggest historical polluters and demands that they pay reparations to communities most harmed by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

It’s a far-reaching and ambitious agenda, and its calls for climate justice are broadly supported by experts and policy wonks. Still, some push back, returning to the idea of net-zero as a global necessity. 

“While real zero is a valuable guiding light, net-zero is still a worthy and necessary goal,” said Jackie Ennis, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her modeling shows that even the most ambitious carbon mitigation scenarios will require offsets for the hardest-to-abate corners of the economy, which she defined to include waste management and animal agriculture. She pointed to work from the independent Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market to define criteria that define a “high-quality” offset — including whether it contributes to sustainable development goals and doesn’t violate the rights of Indigenous peoples.

According to Fankhauser, the “gold standard” here is geological removal, in which carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and locked up in rock formations. This technology can’t yet handle even a tiny fraction of the planet’s overall carbon emissions, but experts say it could one day enable offsets that are less prone to double-counting and more likely to sequester carbon for the long haul.

Fankhauser suggested a sort of middle ground between real and net-zero, in which governments set different decarbonization targets for different sectors: net-zero for those like shipping and steel-making for which zero-carbon alternatives aren’t yet viable, and the total elimination of emissions for the rest of the economy. Some jurisdictions already do something like this. The economy-wide net-zero target set by New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act prohibits offsets for the power sector and caps them at 15 percent for the state’s overall emissions by 2050. That means 85 percent of Empire State emissions reductions must come from actually reducing emissions. 

“That’s a perfect example of how policymakers are trying to constrain the use of offsets so they’re being used where it’s most valuable,” said Levin, with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

More global efforts, however, are hard to come by, likely because there’s so much contention around the net-zero agenda. One thing people seem to agree on, however, is that the status quo is not working. Although thousands of companies and governments have pledged to reach net-zero sometime in the next several decades, the planet is still on track for dangerous levels of global warming — 2.8 degrees C (5 degrees F), to be precise. That’s more than enough to “cook the fool out of you,” as one protester in Extrapolations so eloquently put it.

“The current trajectory is one of failure,” Jackson told Grist, though she said it’s not too late to turn things around. “The money exists, the technology exists, the capacity exists — it’s only the lack of political will. If we’re brave enough to alter course and redirect toward what we know is needed, then a totally different world is possible.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. 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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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.

Offshore wind is one of the fastest-growing sources of renewable energy, and with its expansion comes increasing scrutiny of its potential side effects. Alessandro Cresci, a biologist at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, and his team have now shown that larval cod are attracted to one of the low-frequency sounds emitted by wind turbines, suggesting offshore wind installations could potentially alter the early life of microscopic fish that drift too close.

Cresci and his colleagues made their discovery through experiments conducted in the deep fjord water near the Austevoll Research Station in Norway. The team placed 89 cod larvae in floating transparent mesh chambers that allowed them to drift naturally, then filmed as they subjected half the fish in 15-minute trials to the output of an underwater sound projector set to 100 Hz to mimic the deep thrum put out by wind turbines.

When left to their own devices, all of the cod larvae oriented themselves to the northwest. Like the closely related haddock, cod have an innate sense of direction that guides their ocean swimming. When the scientists played the low-frequency sound, the baby fish still had a northwest preference, but it was weak. Instead, the larvae favored pointing their bodies in the direction of the sound. Cresci thinks the larvae may be attracted to the 100-Hz sound waves because that low frequency is among the symphony of sounds sometimes part of the background din along the coastline or near the bottom of the ocean where the fish might like to settle.

As sound waves propagate through water, they compress and decompress water molecules in their path. Fish can tell what direction a sound is coming from by detecting changes in the motion of water particles. “In water,” says Cresci, fish are “connected to the medium around them, so all the vibrations in the molecules of water are transferred to the body.”

Like other creatures on land and in the sea, fish use sound to communicate, avoid predators, find prey, and understand the world around them. Sound also helps many marine creatures find the best place to live. In previous research, scientists have shown that by playing the sounds of a thriving reef near a degraded reef they could cause more fish to settle in the area. For many species, where they settle as larvae is where they tend to be found as adults.

Even if larval fish are attracted to offshore wind farms en masse, what happens next is yet unknown.

Since fishers typically can’t safely operate near turbines, offshore wind farms could become pseudo protected areas where fish populations can grow large. But Ella Kim, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who studies fish acoustics and was not involved with the study, says it could go the other way.

Kim suggests that even if fish larvae do end up coalescing within offshore wind farms, the noise from the turbines and increased boat traffic to service the equipment could drown out fish communication. “Once these larvae get there,” Kim says, “will they have such impaired hearing that they won’t be able to even hear each other and reproduce?”

Aaron Rice, a bioacoustician at Cornell University in New York who was not involved with the study, says the research is useful because it shows that not only can fish larvae hear the sound, but that they’re responding to it by orienting toward it. Rice adds, however, that the underwater noise from real wind turbines is far more complex than the lone 100-Hz sound tested in the study. He says care should be taken in reading too much into the results.

As well as noise pollution, many marine species are also at risk from overfishing, rising ocean temperatures, and other pressures. When trying to decide whether offshore wind power is a net benefit or harm for marine life, says Rice, it’s important to keep these other elements in mind.

“The more understanding that we can have in terms of how offshore wind [power] impacts the ocean,” he says, “the better we can respond to the changing demands and minimize impacts.”

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

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The foundation for the world’s deepest offshore wind turbine has just been installed 17 miles off the coast of Scotland. Last week, the roughly 441,000-pound “jacket,” or foundation, was placed at a depth of 58.6 meters—just over 192 feet—by the Sapiem 7000, the world’s third largest semi-submersible crane vessel. It was the 112th jacket installed at the 114-wind turbine Seagreen wind farm, which will be Scotland’s largest when it is fully operational later this year.

Wind turbines like these work like an inverse fan. Instead of using electricity to generate wind, they generate electricity using wind. The thin blades are shaped like aircraft wings and as the wind flows across them, the air pressure on one side decreases. This difference in air pressure across the blade generates both lift and drag, which causes the rotor to spin. The spinning rotor then powers a generator, sending electricity to the grid. 

Offshore wind farms like Seagreen have a number of advantages over land-based wind turbines. Since wind speeds at sea tend to be faster and more consistent than they are over land, it’s easier to reliably generate greater amounts of electricity. Even small increases in wind speed can have a dramatic effect: in a 15-mph wind, a turbine can generate double the amount of electricity it can generate in a 12-mph wind.

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

Also, coastal areas frequently have high energy requirements. In the US, more than 40 percent of the population, some 127 million people, live in coastal counties. By generating power offshore close to where it’s used, there is less need for long-distance energy transmission, and cities don’t have to dedicate already scarce space to power plants. 

But of course, the biggest advantage of any wind farm is that they can provide renewable energy without emitting toxic environmental pollutants or greenhouse gasses. They don’t even need or consume important non-petrochemical resources like water, although they can have other environmental impacts that engineers are trying to solve for.

The recently installed foundations at Seagreen will each support a Vestas V164-10 MW turbine. With a rotor diameter of roughly 540-feet—that’s more than one-and-a-half football fields—and standing up to 672 feet tall—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty—these turbines will be absolutely huge. Each one will be capable of generating up to 10,000 kilowatts (KW) of power in good conditions.

Although Seagreen actually started generating electricity last summer, when the wind farm is fully operational later this year, the 114 wind turbines will have a combined total capacity of 1,075 megawatts (MW). While that’s not enough to crack the top 100 power stations in the US, the wind farm is projected to produce around 5,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity each year, which is enough to provide clean and sustainable power to more than 1.6 million UK households. That’s around two-thirds of the population of Scotland. 

Really, the Seagreen site shows how far wind power has come. While wind farms don’t yet have the capacity to fully replace fossil fuel power plants, Seagreen will still displace more than 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise have been released by Scottish electricity generation. According to Seagreen, that’s the equivalent of removing a third of all Scotland’s cars from the road. 

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This article was originally featured on The Drive.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed Wednesday perhaps its most sweeping changes to vehicle emissions controls in its history, a far-reaching measure that could effectively mandate a tenfold increase in EV sales by the middle of the next decade. Under the proposed plan, electric-car sales would comprise more than two-thirds of overall light-duty new car sales and nearly half of all medium-duty car sales by 2032. The plan would also ratchet up emissions targets for internal combustion-powered vehicles by roughly 13 percent every year from 2027 to 2032, compared to 5-10 percent increases proposed for 2023-2026 model-year cars. The EPA’s proposal will likely face a mountain of legal challenges before it’s adopted. Still, regulators said they would build in language that would make the standards tougher to repeal for subsequent administrations.

“By proposing the most ambitious pollution standards ever for cars and trucks, we are delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

The EPA said its proposal could save the average new-car buyer $12,000 over the lifetime of the vehicle, compared to an ICE engine. The proposal for light- and medium-duty vehicles was accompanied by a proposal for heavy-duty fleets to electrify 25 percent of their trucks and half of all new buses to be electric by 2032. This week the EPA also proposed recalculating how efficiency is measured among electrified vehicles to represent the impact of those cars more accurately in Corporate Average Fuel Economy figures. Combined, the total impact of the EPA’s suggested regulations could vastly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced on America’s roadways. However, the ambitious targets exceed President Joe Biden’s initial target of 50 percent EV sales by the decade’s end. 

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most major automakers in America, CEO John Bozzella called the proposal “aggressive by any measure. By that I mean it sets automotive electrification goals in the next few years that are … very high,” he wrote, according to Automotive News. 

Automakers and unions are likely to push back against the regulations, which they’ve said could cost jobs and further hike the prices of new cars. Last year, EV sales accounted for less than 6 percent of overall vehicle sales and 2 percent of heavy-truck sales. In addition to building battery facilities in the U.S. that won’t come online for several years, automakers have warned that existing and planned charging infrastructure may not handle such a dramatic increase in EVs, and critical mineral supplies wouldn’t be enough. The Biden administration has offered trillions in spending to accelerate both while pushing forward with ambitious targets. The EPA doesn’t have the mandate to quantify overall vehicle sales but instead can set targets to force automakers to otherwise comply with those stringent rules. 

Going forward, the plan will be open to public comment and face scrutiny from legislators and others, likely including legal challenges. 

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Best Overall		HQST Solar Panel 2pcs 100 Watt 12V Monocrystalline		SEE IT	Get renewable energy for the campsite, RV, or even the home with these impressive monocrystalline solar panels.
Best for the Money		Nekteck 21W Solar Charge		SEE IT	Lightweight and affordable, these monocrystalline solar panels are ideal for backpacking or hiking.
Best for Camping		Goal Zero Boulder 200 Watt Briefcase		SEE IT	This foldable pair of solar panels is easy to pack into a vehicle and set up at a campsite using the built-in kickstand to get the best angle.

Hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar panels all represent the future of renewable energy. But why wait for everyone else to figure out the benefits when you can take the initiative to start relying on renewable energy today? Whether you are looking to completely power a home, generate power for an RV, or just charge your phone at the campsite, have the best solar panels are an excellent choice. 

The best solar panels are typically made with monocrystalline silicon wafers. Their high efficiency and power output make them ideal for powering a home. However, polycrystalline and thin film solar panels are also effective choices that are more affordable. To get a better understanding of the various products available, take a look at this list of top products, then keep reading for detailed information on solar panel types, size, weight, and device integration to help you find the best solar panels for long-lasting renewable energy.

• Best overall: HQST Solar Panel 2pcs 100 Watt 12V Monocrystalline
• Best for the money: Nekteck 21W Solar Charger
• Best for camping: Goal Zero Boulder 200 Watt Briefcase
• Best portable: Jackery SolarSaga 60W Solar Panel
• Best for RVs: Renogy 200 Watt Monocrystalline

How we chose the best solar panels

Having used solar panels to power camp stoves, mobile devices, and power stations for many camping trips, this first-hand experience helped to found the basis for the selection criteria, though extension research was also required in order to choose the best products from over 30 different panels. The top choices were selected based on the type of solar panel, the size and weight of each product, as well as the suitability of the solar panel for various uses, like powering solar generators, hiking, camping, or heading out in the RV.

Monocrystalline products represent the best options available simply because they outperform both polycrystalline and thin film solar panels in both efficiency and power output. The size and weight of a panel impacts the suitability of the product for specific uses. For instance, a 50-pound solar panel isn’t a good choice for hiking, but it works perfectly well for powering the home or even mounting on an RV. Lighter-weight products may blow off a home or RV. The efficiency and power output of each product impacted our decision-making, but the individual ranges were typical representations of each type. Monocrystalline products offer the best efficiency and power output. Polycrystalline panels are the second best, while thin film products rely more on affordability and portability to stand out.  

The best solar panels: Reviews & Recommendations

Whether you’re using a solar panel to power a solar generator for an outdoor party or preparing to go off the grid, we have plenty of choices to fit your lifestyle, budget, and use. Look on the bright side of life by checking out our recommendations below.

Best overall: HQST Solar Panel 2pcs 100 Watt 12V Monocrystalline

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Why it made the cut: These monocrystalline panels have corrosion-resistant aluminum frames to ensure the solar panels can be used outdoors for an extended period of time.

Specs

• Type: Monocrystalline
• Output: 100 Watts
• Weight: 12.1 pounds

Pros

• High efficiency rating of 21 percent
• Suitable for houses, boats, caravans, RVs, or camping
• Durable, corrosion-resistant aluminum frame

Cons

• Must connect to compatible power station to charge mobile devices

The HQST 2-Piece Solar Panel Set comes with two 100-watt panels that each measure 40.1 inches tall by 20 inches wide. They’re just 1.2 inches thick. These best-quality solar panels have predrilled holes in the back of their frames that make it much easier to mount the panels to Z-brackets, pole mounts, or tilt mounts. 

Each panel weighs 12.1 pounds and they can either be used separately or collectively to generate electricity. However, it should be noted that these solar panels are made for charging power stations, backup batteries, and any vehicles that operate with a 12V battery. This means that they are not equipped with outlets for USB, USB-C, or any other adapters for mobile devices. 

The panels are supported by a durable aluminum frame that is specifically designed to resist corrosion, withstand snow loads of up to 112.8 pounds per square foot (PSF), and weather any winds of up to 140 miles per hour. With a high-efficiency rating of 21 percent and the versatility to be used for a house, boat, caravan, RV, or even camping, these panels are an excellent option for safe, renewable energy.

Best for the money: Nekteck 21W Solar Charger

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Why it made the cut: Pack this lightweight product into a backpack to take to the campsite and take advantage of the two built-in USB ports for mobile device charging.

Specs

• Type: Monocrystalline
• Output: 21 Watts
• Weight: 1.1 pounds

Pros

• High efficiency rating of 21 to 24 percent
• Foldable and compact for easy storage
• Best suited for hiking, backpacking, and camping

Cons

• Can easily blow away in moderate wind if not secured

These best solar panels for the money are lightweight and essential for camping, backpacking, and hiking trips that require the user to carry everything they need in a backpack. The Nekteck 21W Solar Charger weighs just 1.1 pounds and can fold up to just a quarter of the original size, saving space in the user’s backpack. When this product is unfoldable it reveals three monocrystalline solar panels that each have an efficiency rating of about 21 to 24 percent, ensuring that a high level of energy is captured from the sun and transferred to the USB outputs.

Plug in up to two USB devices at once to draw power directly from the 21-watt panels. It’s flexible, so it’s easy to arrange in such a way that it gets a good look at the sun. Simply adjust the angle and position of the solar panels according to the current position of the sun. Just keep in mind that this product only weighs 1.1 pounds, so even moderate winds can carry the panels away if they are not secured.

Best for camping: Goal Zero Boulder 200 Watt Briefcase

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Why it made the cut: Pack the briefcase-style monocrystalline panels into the truck or car and use the built-in kickstand for optimal positioning.

Specs

• Type: Monocrystalline
• Output: 200 Watts
• Weight: 46.2 pounds

Pros

• High efficiency rating of 21 percent
• Built-in kickstand
• Folds to just half the original size
• Comes with a carrying case and handle

Cons

• Too heavy to carry on hikes or backpacking trips 

The goal of camping is to get out into the wilderness and enjoy the outdoors, but it doesn’t have to mean totally abandoning technology. In fact, it’s advised to at least have an emergency radio available at all times to stay up to date on current and future weather conditions, as well as call for help in emergencies. The Goal Zero Boulder 200-Watt Solar Panels is an excellent option to ensure that the campsite has power for the emergency radio, mobile device, electric camp stoves, and any other items that users take with them camping. 

Each solar panel has a power output of 100 Watts, but both panels are attached and cannot be used independently, so these monocrystalline panels have a combined output of 200 Watts and an efficiency rating of 21 percent. The panels come with a carrying case, a built-in handle, and a kickstand to make transporting and setting up the panels easier. Even with those portability features, the 46.2-pound weight makes this the best solar panels for camping but a poor option for hiking or backpacking. 

Best portable: Jackery SolarSaga 60W Solar Panel

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Why it made the cut: A built-in kickstand and handle make this foldable 60-Watt solar panel easy to carry and set up.

Specs

• Type: Monocrystalline
• Output: 60 Watts
• Weight: 6.6 pounds 

Pros

• High efficiency rating of 23 percent
• Built-in kickstand and handle
• Lightweight and compact

Cons

• Vulnerable to high winds
• Low power output

Despite its small size, the Jackery Solar Saga Solar Panel has a high-efficiency rating of 23 percent due to the premium monocrystalline construction. However, while the size doesn’t impact the efficiency of the silicon wafers, it does reduce the overall power output to just 60 Watts. That stream is still more than enough to charge up to two devices at once through the USB-C and USB-A ports. Additionally, the panels can connect to an available power station to simply store the collected energy until the sun goes down and the camp lights come out. 

These best portable solar panels can fold in half and it has built-in handles to make it easier to carry. It weighs just 6.6 pounds, which is ideal for hiking, backpacking, and camping, though the slight weight does leave the panels vulnerable to high winds. The built-in kickstand helps to support the panels, but it’s advised to secure them to be certain that they do not get blown away.

Best for RVs: Renogy 200 Watt Monocrystalline

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Why it made the cut: Set up these monocrystalline panels to get an output of up to 200 Watts at an efficiency rating of 21 percent.

Specs

• Type: Monocrystalline
• Output: 200 Watts
• Weight: 35.9 pounds

Pros

• High efficiency rating of 21 percent
• Comes with a solar charge controller
• Adjustable, corrosion-resistant aluminum stand
• Built-in handles

Cons

• Too heavy for hiking or backpacking

Operate the accessories and charging ports on an RV or a boat with these impressive Renogy 200-Watt Panels. These best solar panels for RVs come equipped with a solar charger controller to convert the solar power to usable electricity for both 12V and 24V batteries. The controller has a clear LCD display so that the user can review the operating information, switch between Amp and Volts on the display, and use the controller to set the battery type. 

Mount the panels to the RV or simply use the built-in stand to set these panels up in the optimal position to absorb energy from the sun. This product is made with monocrystalline silicon wafers with an efficiency rating of 21 percent and a combined power output of 200 Watts, though it should be mentioned that each solar panel has an individual output of just 100 Watts. These panels weigh 35.9 pounds, so they are not the best for hiking or backpacking, but the heavy weight and adjustable, corrosion-resistant aluminum stand ensure that the panels can hold up in poor weather.

Things to consider when buying the best solar panels

Solar panels are an investment that should be carefully considered in order to ensure that you get the best option for your situation. There are significant differences between the capabilities of the various solar panel types, but the size, weight, portability, and device integration can also help to determine which products are the best solar panels for camping, backpacking, or installing on the roof of your home. Take some time to learn about these important factors before making a decision. 

Solar panel types

The type of solar tech you choose for your panels can have a profound effect on the appearance, cost, efficiency, and power absorption. The three main types can be differentiated by the material that is used to make the solar cells, including monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and thin film.

• Monocrystalline solar panels are made with silicon wafers that are cut from a single silicon crystal. This construction method and material results in higher efficiency and power output than either polycrystalline or thin film panels. Monocrystalline products tend to have an efficiency that exceeds 20 percent, while the power output can range from 100 Watts (W) to over 400 Watts. However, these products usually cost more than both polycrystalline and thin film solar panels.
• Polycrystalline solar panels can immediately be differentiated from monocrystalline due to the blue solar cells instead of black cells. The color differences, as well as the lower efficiency and power output, can be linked to the way in which polycrystalline solar panels are made. Instead of using a single silicon crystal to create the silicon wafers, a polycrystalline solar panel is made up of silicon crystal fragments that have been melted together through a superheating process. This type of panel typically has an efficiency rating between 15 to 17 percent and will usually have a maximum output of 200 Watts.
• Thin film solar panels are the most affordable option available. They are made with several different materials including cadmium telluride (CdTe), amorphous silicon (a-Si), and copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS). These products also typically incorporate conducting layers made of glass, ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), aluminum, or steel. While this type of panel only has an efficiency rating of about 11 percent and a maximum power output of 100 Watts, they are usually lightweight and may even be flexible, making thin film panels great for camping, hiking, and backpacking.

Size & weight 

The specific size and weight of a solar panel is a key consideration when you are trying to determine the suitability of a product. For instance, compact lightweight solar panels are excellent for hiking, backpacking, and camping because they can fit into a backpack and don’t cause excessive fatigue. However, these panels are vulnerable to the wind because of their broad, flat shape and low weight, meaning that they can be carried away easily.

Alternatively, broad heavy panels are great for mounting on the roof of the house or an RV, but they are much too bulky to pack into a vehicle or set up at a campsite. So, it’s important to figure out how you want to use the solar panel before deciding on a specific product. 

Device & battery integration

The purpose of solar panels is to absorb the solar power from the sun and convert it to usable electricity for a range of different devices and batteries. However, each product will have different devices that they can connect to, like USB-charging mobile devices, 12V batteries, or power stations. Before investing in solar panels, make sure that the specific product can be used as intended. 

If you are looking for a way to charge your mobile devices, then it’s necessary to find solar panels that have USB outlets, but if the goal is to charge a boat battery, then solar panels that connect to 12V batteries would be best. If you aren’t quite sure what you want to use the panels to charge then it’s advised to invest in a power station that can collect, store, and convert the energy from the panels into usable electricity for a variety of different purposes.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best solar panels

• Best overall: HQST Solar Panel 2pcs 100 Watt 12V Monocrystalline
• Best for the money: Nekteck 21W Solar Charger
• Best for camping: Goal Zero Boulder 200 Watt Briefcase
• Best portable: Jackery SolarSaga 60W Solar Panel
• Best for RVs: Renogy 200 Watt Monocrystalline

The highly efficient HQST Solar Panels are suitable for mounting to the RV, setting up at the campsite, or even mounting to the home to help save money on electric bills. However, if you are looking for a smaller solar panel for backpacking or hiking, then the affordable Nekteck 28W Solar Charger is the right way to go.

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 panels of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

Last year, U.S. renewable electricity generation surpassed coal for the first time, according to newly released federal data. The report marks a major milestone in the transition to clean energy, but experts say that much faster progress is needed to reach international climate targets.

According to the Energy Information Administration, a federal statistical agency, combined wind and solar generation increased from 12 percent of national power production in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022. Hydropower, biomass, and geothermal added another 7 percent — for a total share of 21 percent renewables last year. The figure narrowly exceeded coal’s 20 percent share of electricity generation, which fell from 23 percent in 2021. 

The growth in renewable electricity was largely driven by a surge in added wind and solar capacity, the agency said. Texas was the top wind-generating state last year, producing more than a quarter of all U.S. wind generation. It was also the leading state for natural gas and coal power. Iowa and Oklahoma landed at second and third in wind generation, accounting for 10 percent and 9 percent of national wind power respectively. 

California took the lead in solar, clocking in with 26 percent of the nation’s solar electricity. Texas came in second at 16 percent, followed by North Carolina at 8 percent. Renewable generation also exceeded nuclear for the second year in a row, after surging ahead for the first time in 2021. 

But the report found that fossil fuels still dominate the country’s energy mix. Natural gas remained the top source of electricity in the U.S. — its share rose from 37 percent of electricity generation in 2021 to 39 percent in 2022. 

For 2023, the Energy Information Administration forecasts additional growth in renewables. The agency predicts wind power will increase from 11 percent to 12 percent of total power generation this year. Solar is projected to rise from 4 percent to 5 percent. Coal is expected to further decline from 20 percent to 17 percent. Meanwhile, natural gas generation is expected to remain unchanged.

Despite the encouraging news, some energy experts say the uptick in renewables still isn’t fast enough. On Tuesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization, announced that global annual investments in renewables need to more than quadruple to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The assessment echoes the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top climate science body, which called for a rapid scale-down of greenhouse gas emissions largely produced from fossil fuels. 

Melissa Lott, director of research for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told the Associated Press that the $369 billion in clean energy spending authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act should have a “tremendous” impact on further accelerating domestic renewable energy growth. But to reach that potential, the U.S. may need new policies to remove hurdles that stand in the way of building new clean energy infrastructure. 

In the United States, rapid deployment of renewable energy has been hindered by practical barriers including delays in connecting projects to aging electric grids. At the end of 2021, thousands of wind, solar, and battery storage projects were waiting to connect to grids across the country. According to data from the Department of Energy, less than 20 percent of wind and solar projects waiting to be connected are successfully completed. And even when projects are approved, developers often discover they need to pay for new transmission lines to deliver power to residents and businesses. Those transmission lines often face further permitting delays.

“It doesn’t matter how cheap the clean energy is,” Spencer Nelson, the managing director of research at the nonprofit ClearPath Foundation, recently told the New York Times. “If developers can’t get through the interconnection process quickly enough and get enough steel in the ground, we won’t hit our climate change goals.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. 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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A new, colorful material partially made from wood pulp and cotton could one day help lower building temperatures when exposed to sunlight. And while similar films already exist utilizing either white or mirrored finishes, the newest variant offers iridescent hues thanks in part to cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and the behavior of soap bubbles.

[Related: Scientists think this tiny greenhouse could be a game changer for agrivoltaics.]

Generally speaking, most objects will warm as they absorb the sun’s UV, infrared, and visible light. What isn’t absorbed is then reflected out as visible color. That said, a process known as passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) can occasionally counteract the rising temperatures caused by absorbing light. PDRC occurs when a surface reflects a large amount of solar light back out as infrared rays without absorbing much else. This allows for surfaces that can be many degrees cooler than the air around it. Recently, researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered they could replicate this ability by capitalizing on certain plant cellulose properties alongside “structural color,” which results from light interacting with a surface’s varying thicknesses. This ability is most commonly seen within soap bubbles, which diffuse light in different directions across their varyingly thick surfaces to create kaleidoscopic patterns.

As New Scientist also notes, adding color pigment to a material usually increases the amount of light, and therefore heat, it absorbs. However, when researchers extracted cellulose nanocrystals from plants, then layered them atop a reflective sheet made of ethyl cellulose, they were able to use their prismatic properties to create red, green, and blue-colored films. Even with their new hues, the coatings remained around 3 degrees Celsius cooler than surrounding temperatures in direct sunlight. 

[ Related: Scientists use quantum computing to create glass that cuts the need for AC by a third.]

With additional experimentation on the layers of ethyl cellulose, the team also managed to produce multicolored films with a variety of textures, such as various woodgrains and finishes. Although the new films’ durability still needs improvement, their potential utility could one day extend to the building facades, vehicles, and indoor wall paints as an eco-friendly alternative to the use of A/C units, which are notorious for both energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The team is presenting their latest results at the American Chemical Society’s annual spring meeting, and hopes to continue their research to improve future generations of the material. 

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Update (November 9, 2023): This week the journal Nature retracted the lutetium superconductivity study on request of some of the co-authors and other physicists who questioned the electrical resistance data. The story below, which focused on the challenge of achieving room-temperature superconductivity and the controversy around the lutetium claims, has been updated to reflect the retraction.

In the future, wires might cross underneath oceans to effortlessly deliver electricity from one continent to another. Those cables would carry currents from giant wind turbines or power the magnets of levitating high-speed trains.

All these technologies rely on a long-sought wonder of the physics world: superconductivity, a heightened physical property that lets metal carry an electric current without losing any juice.

But superconductivity has only functioned at freezing temperatures that are far too cold for most devices. To make it more useful, scientists have to recreate the same conditions at regular temperatures. And even though physicists have known about superconductivity since 1911, a room-temperature superconductor still evades them, like a mirage in the desert.

What is a superconductor?

All metals have a point called the “critical temperature.” Cool the metal below that temperature, and electrical resistivity all but vanishes, making it extra easy to move charged atoms through. To put it another way, an electric current running through a closed loop of superconducting wire could circulate forever. 

Today, anywhere from 8 to 15 percent of mains electricity is lost between the generator and the consumer because the electrical resistivity in standard wires naturally wicks some of it away as heat. Superconducting wires could eliminate all of that waste.

[Related: This one-way superconductor could be a step toward eternal electricity]

There’s another upside, too. When electricity flows through a coiled wire, it produces a magnetic field; superconducting wires intensify that magnetism. Already, superconducting magnets power MRI machines, help particle accelerators guide their quarry around a loop, shape plasma in fusion reactors, and push maglev trains like Japan’s under-construction Chūō Shinkansen.

Turning up the temperature

While superconductivity is a wondrous ability, physics nerfs it with the cold caveat. Most known materials’ critical temperatures are barely above absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit). Aluminum, for instance, comes in at -457 degrees Fahrenheit; mercury at -452 degrees Fahrenheit; and the ductile metal niobium at a balmy -443 degrees Fahrenheit. Chilling anything to temperatures that frigid is tedious and impractical. 

Scientists made it happen—in a limited capacity—by testing it with exotic materials like cuprates, a type of ceramic that contains copper and oxygen. In 1986, two IBM researchers found a cuprate that superconducted at -396 degrees Fahrenheit, a breakthrough that won them the Nobel Prize in Physics. Soon enough, others in the field pushed cuprate superconductors past -321 degrees Fahrenheit, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen—a far more accessible coolant than the liquid hydrogen or helium they’d otherwise need. 

“That was a very exciting time,” says Richard Greene, a physicist at the University of Maryland. “People were thinking, ‘Well, we might be able to get up to room temperature.’”

Now, more than 30 years later, the search for a room-temperature superconductor continues. Equipped with algorithms that can predict what a material’s properties will look like, many researchers feel that they’re closer than ever. But some of their ideas have been controversial.

The replication dilemma

One way the field is making strides is by turning the attention away from cuprates to hydrates, or materials with negatively charged hydrogen atoms. In 2015, researchers in Mainz, Germany, set a new record with a sulfur hydride that superconducted at -94 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of them then quickly broke their own record with a hydride of the rare-earth element lanthanum, pushing the mercury up to around -9 degrees Fahrenheit—about the temperature of a home freezer.

But again, there’s a catch. Critical temperatures shift when the surrounding pressure changes, and hydride superconductors, it seems, require rather inhuman pressures. The lanthanum hydride only achieved superconductivity at pressures above 150 gigapascals—roughly equivalent to conditions in the Earth’s core, and far too high for any practical purpose in the surface world.

[Related: How the small, mighty transistor changed the world]

So imagine the surprise when mechanical engineers at the University of Rochester in upstate New York presented a hydride made from another rare-earth element, lutetium. According to their results, which have since been retracted, the lutetium hydride superconducts at around 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 1 gigapascal. That’s still 10,000 times Earth’s air pressure at sea level, but low enough to be used for industrial tools.

“It is not a high pressure,” says Eva Zurek, a theoretical chemist at the University at Buffalo. “If it can be replicated, [this method] could be very significant.”

Scientists, however, have seen this kind of an attempt before. In 2020, the same research group claimed they’d found room-temperature superconductivity in a hydride of carbon and sulfur. After the initial fanfare, many of their peers pointed out that they’d mishandled their data and that their work couldn’t be replicated. Eventually, the University of Rochester engineers caved and retracted that paper as well.

Now, they’re facing the same questions with their lutetium superconductor. “It’s really got to be verified,” says Greene. The early signs are inauspicious: A team from Nanjing University in China recently tried to replicate the experiment, without success.

“Many groups should be able to reproduce this work,” Greene adds. “I think we’ll know very quickly whether this is correct or not.”

But if the new hydride does mark the first room-temperature superconductor—what next? Will engineers start stringing power lines across the planet tomorrow? Not quite. First, they have to understand how this new material behaves under different temperatures and other conditions, and what it looks like at smaller scales.

“We don’t know what the structure is yet. In my opinion, it’s going to be quite different from a high-pressure hydride,” says Zurek. 

If the superconductor is viable, engineers will have to learn how to make it for everyday uses. But if they succeed, the result could be a gift for world-changing technologies.

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