In last week’s energy auction, Chile accepted a bid from Spanish developer Solarpack Corp. Tecnologica for 120 megawatts of solar at the stunning price of $29.10 per megawatt-hour (2.91 cents per kilowatt-hour or kwh). This beats the 2.99 cents/kwh bid Dubai received recently for 800 megawatts. For context, the average residential price for electricity in the United States is 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Seasonally planet Earth is hottest in July. Northern summers are hotter because of the greater land mass in the Northern Hemisphere. This July was a scorcher, being the hottest single month since records began:
Missouri lawyer Joshua Neally was driving his Tesla Model X home from his office when he suffered piercing pain in his stomach and chest. Rather than call an ambulance he set his Tesla Model X in self-driving mode and headed for a hospital 20 miles (32km) down the road. He was able to park it and check himself in.
He suffered a pulmonary, a potentially fatal obstruction of a blood vessel in the lungs. Very probably, the car saved his life. Continue reading Climate clippings 180→
NOAA’s annual State of the Climate report has recently been released, showing the climate change is proceeding apace on all fronts. The 300 page report compiled by 450 scientists from 62 countries confirmed there was a “toppling of several symbolic mileposts” in heat, sea level rise and extreme weather in 2015. From The Guardian:
“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State, told the Guardian. “They are playing out before us, in real time. The 2015 numbers drive that home.”
Angela Merkel has struck a deal with the German states to slow down the growth of green power, capping the expansion of onshore wind power at 2.8 gigawatts in capacity per year. The reason given is:
Generous green subsidies have led to a boom in renewable energy, such as wind and solar power. But the rapid expansion has pushed up electricity costs in Europe’s biggest economy and placed a strain on its grid.
The latest Morgan Stanley report is bullish about the growth of battery storage in the Australian market. They think we’ll have 6.6GWh of battery storage in Australia by 2020, which is what the Australian Energy Market Operator last week predicted for 2035. Continue reading Climate clippings 176→
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been converted to rock and stored underground in a trial in Iceland.
Most CO₂ sequestration projects inject and store “supercritical CO₂”, which is CO₂ gas that has been compressed under pressure to considerably decrease its volume*. However, supercritical CO₂ is buoyant, like a gas, and this approach has thus proved controversial due to the possibility of leaks from the storage reservoir upwards into groundwater and eventually back to the atmosphere.
To put it briefly, in the trial they dissolved CO₂ in water which then is acidic and attacks the rocks to form solid carbonate minerals. Continue reading Climate clippings 175→
Our government seems bent on saving the tourist industry by airbrushing the Great Barrier Reef out of UN reports. The report “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”, published jointly by UNESCO, the United Nations Environment Program and the Union of Concerned Scientists, initially had a key chapter on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as small sections on Kakadu and the Tasmanian forests.
