Category: Renewables

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From the Web: Tesla moves beyond electric cars with new California battery farm

The California Battery Farm project is part of Elon Musk’s plan to help transform the power grid. Located at the Mira Loma substation of Southern California Edison, this is the biggest battery farm Tesla has built to date. Southern California Edison will use the battery farm, which has been operating since December and is one of the biggest in the world, to store energy and meet spikes in demand – like on hot summer afternoons when buildings start to crank up the air conditioning.

Learn more (via The Guardian) >>

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From the Web: Germany Converts Coal Mine Into Giant Battery Storage for Surplus Solar and Wind Power

Germany is embarking on an innovative project to turn a coal mine into a giant battery that can store surplus solar and wind energy and release it when supplies are lean.

The Prosper-Haniel coal mine in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia will be converted into a 200 megawatt pumped-storage hydroelectric reservoir that acts like a giant battery. The capacity is enough to power more than 400,000 homes, according to Governor Hannelore Kraft.

Learn more (via EcoWatch) >>

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From the Web: Cleaning Urban Air Requires Radical Solutions

You might think common urban complaints in the major cities of Western Europe might be about the state of the roads, or property prices. But there’s increasingly a more serious complaint: not being able to breathe. Cities might be efficient machines for living, but when we collectively burn gas to heat our homes and then collectively sit in traffic every morning, we’re making our machines unliveable.

Despite global progress made on lowering emissions, cities from London to Beijing to São Paulo have atmospheres that are so polluted that residents are often warned not to leave their homes unless they have to. To combat the problem, three European cities–London, Paris, and Barcelona–and their mayors are pursuing radical policies to cut traffic, often to the deep chagrin of the cities’ drivers, but at great benefit to their citizens’ lungs.

Learn more (via Fast Company) >>

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From the Web: Tesla’s Kauai solar facility offsets 1.6M gallons of fuel per year

Tesla’s Kauai solar power facility is officially open for business, with a 13 MW SolarCity solar farm installation providing power to a Powerpack storage facility with 52 MWh of total capacity. The beauty of the new facility, in terms of the specific needs of the sun-soaked island in the Pacific, is that it can capture energy from the sun during peak daytime production hours, and then keep that power ready for peak consumption hours at night.

Tesla’s new solar facility in Kauai isn’t going to completely reduce its dependence on fossil fuels — the island will still rely on diesel shipped in to provide some of its power requirements. But the new facility will offset some of that use of dirty burning fuel, reducing overall usage of fossil fuels for power needs by around 1.6 million gallons per year.

Learn more (via Tech Crunch) >>

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From the Web: Clean Energy is Now as Big as Pharma Manufacturing in the US

Across the world, myriad efforts are underway to make energy systems cleaner, smarter, and more efficient.  But it’s hard to get a sense of the total size of those efforts, as they are spread across so many different industries and regions.  Navigant Research reports on the growth and size of both the national and global advanced energy industries from 2011 through 2016, and there are some very interesting findings:

Learn more (via VOX) >>

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From the Web: Heeding the Voice of the Planet: Why CSR Isn’t Enough

Here’s an article by our very own Professor Stuart L. Hart in which he writes about the Jungian concept of enantiodromia and tells us what business must do going forward.

Hart stresses that the majority of corporate growth (and later, profits) comes from new strategic initiatives rather than from the continuing development and improvement of existing businesses.

We must refocus our attention on new, transformational strategic moves (or initiatives). Rather than chasing the fantasy of rating entire corporations as to their “sustainability,” let us instead shift the “unit of analysis” and spend more time understanding (and driving) the Green Leap – new strategic initiatives within corporations focused on leapfrog, clean technology and disruptive new business models that serve and lift the poor.

Learn more >> (via NextBillion)

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From the Web: Breakthroughs in EPS, PE, PP Recycling

Only 2 percent of the 78 million tons of plastic used each year for packaging is actually recycled. The remaining 98 percent finds its way into landfills, incineration plants and the environment. New innovations and initiatives from across the U.S. and Canada, however, are offering new solutions to tackle the ever-growing plastics problem.

Part of the problem lies within product composition: Currently, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) — which comprise the majority of the world’s plastics — cannot be repurposed together. But Geoffrey Coates, professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Tisch University, and a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota may have found a solution.

Learn more (via Sustainable Brands) >>

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From the Web: Startup Lets Small Businesses Buy Wind And Solar Power

When Google decided to shift to 100% renewable energy, it worked directly with wind and solar farms to sign deals. A new U.K.-based startup called Squeaky lets small businesses easily do the same thing at a smaller scale—business owners can choose a wind farm to support, and then start buying renewable electricity at the same price they were paying for energy from fossil fuels.

The rapid growth of independent renewable generators, driven by the falling cost of wind and solar, makes a platform like Squeaky possible.

Learn more (via Fast Company) >>

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From the Web: US Solar Grows 95% In 2016

Boom.

The latest US Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) was published today, revealing that 2016 blew all expectations away. 2015 itself had been a record-breaking year, with the US solar market installing 7.5 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity. But 2016 almost doubled that total, growing 95% in one year to install a total of 14,625 megawatts (MW), and becoming the leading source of new electric generating capacity installed through the year, with 39% of new capacity across all fields.

Learn more (via Clean Technical) >>

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From the Web: Solar-powered trains?

Electric trains are by far the best long distance transport mode when it comes to carbon emissions – at least when their electricity comes from renewable sources like solar or wind.

Learn more (via The Guardian) >>