By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
If you wanted to build a standalone microgrid in Africa, powered by local renewable resources, and make it reliable enough to run a neonatal intensive care clinic, how would you do it?
By Iain Staffell, Carbon Brief
Rapid progress towards clean energy is needed to meet the global ambition to limit warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
By Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine
What does it mean for a society to have “energy security”? Although there are more than forty different definitions of the concept, they all share the fundamental idea that energy supply should always meet energy demand.
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently highlighted a little-discussed benefit of using renewables like wind and solar to produce electricity: Unlike most power sources, they require “almost no water.”
By Tim Jackson, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity
It’s probably fitting that Michael Liebreich’s The Secret of Eternal Growth was published so close to Halloween. It’s so full of outlandish bogeymen, it sits perfectly alongside the ghouls and the ghosts of the trick-or-treat season.
By Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine
Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is considered to be an important component of a renewable power grid, because it could store surplus power from wind turbines and solar panels on a large scale. However, in its present form, the technology suffers from large energy losses and depends on natural gas to operate.
By Darrin Qualman, Darrin Qualman blog
At the most foundational level, however, there are just two sources of energy. Two sources provide more than 99 percent of the power for our civilization: solar and nuclear. Every other significant energy source is a form of one of these two. Most are forms of solar.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
More on organic farming, trade-offs, energy futures and small-farm definitions in this post. Veritably, it’s your one stop shop for a pick ‘n’ mix of eco-futurism…partly because indeed I have a few addendums to report on recent posts, and partly because despite my flippant recent remarks, I’m a bit too busy on the farm and on other things just now to put together a properly structured post.
By Simon Evans, Carbon Brief
For the first time in 2017, global solar capacity grew faster than all fossil fuels combined, including coal, oil and gas-fired power stations. That’s one finding of the latest annual report on global trends in renewable energy finance, from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
Prices for solar, wind, and battery storage are dropping so rapidly that renewables are increasingly squeezing out all forms of fossil fuel power, including natural gas.