The Earth; It's the only one we have
Nature Climate Change, Published online: 09 November 2023; doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01888-x
Author Correction: Distributional labour challenges and opportunities for decarbonizing the US power system
Nature Climate Change…
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
After years of pilot projects, utilities and battery companies now have networks with thousands of participants in California, Utah, and Vermont, among others.
The batteries in virtual power plants add megawatts of capacity to the grid when electricity demand is at its highest. And most of the electricity from the batteries is generated by rooftop solar.
This combination of renewable energy and groups of batteries is “a recipe for the grid of the future,” said Blake Richetta, CEO of U.S. operations for the battery maker sonnen.
Yes, sonnen has a lowercase “s,” the kind of frustrating—at least for copy editors—branding that seems appropriate for virtual power plants, a concept whose name does little to explain what it is.
So what …
Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 August 2022; doi:10.1038/s41558-022-01417-2
Hydropower will have an essential role in meeting the growing energy needs in Africa. Fully interconnecting the African power pools could reduce climate-induced changes in usable hydropower capacity and decrease variability in the electricity supply. Integrating renewables could further increase the adaptability of the power pools to climate change.
Nature Climate Change – Issue – nature.com science feed…
This story is reprinted with permission from Honolulu Civil Beat.
In January, a remote island in the Federated States of Micronesia switched on its lights for the first time since before World War II, bringing electricity to 500 households by burning waste from its new coconut-processing facility.
In a country where only one in three people has consistent energy access, electrifying Tonoas marked a step toward delivering power to every Micronesian household by 2027, which means reaching the 17 percent of the country still without it. And by 2024, half of that energy is set to be renewable.
The move in FSM represents one of several being taken throughout the Pacific to not only transition to more sustainable power generation but also remove their reliance on imported fossil fuels. The transition is a difficult and costly task for many Pacific …
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Philip Warburg
In the scramble to stave off climate change, scientists are exploring every possible source of energy that does not rely on fossil fuels. Fusion is one such resource. How close are we to being able to rely on this technology?
In December 2021, the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in Oxfordshire, UK, produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five-second period. This burst of energy – enough to boil about 60 kettles of water – was the “absolute maximum” JET could create, according to the project’s lead scientist.
One month later, China’s EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) sustained a fusion reaction at 158 million degrees Fahrenheit for more than 17 minutes – ten times longer than its prior record of 101 seconds. That earlier experiment had operated at an …