#Solar Electricity.

[reasonsforhope]

Masterpost: Reasons I firmly believe we will beat climate change

Posts are in reverse chronological order (by post date, not article date), mostly taken from my "climate change" tag, which I went through all the way back to the literal beginning of my blog. Will update periodically.

Especially big deal articles/posts are in bold.

Big picture:

Mature trees offer hope in world of rising emissions (x)

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (x)

Good news: Tiny urban green spaces can cool cities and save lives (x)

Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected (x)

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world (x)

Sun Machines: Solar, an energy that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge (x)

Wealthy nations finally deliver promised climate aid, as calls for more equitable funding for poor countries grow (x)

For Earth Day 2024, experts are spreading optimism – not doom. Here's why. (x)

Opinion: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (x)

The World’s Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think (x)

‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief (x)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (x)

Young Forests Capture Carbon Quicker than Previously Thought (x)

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how. (x)

Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows (x)

The global treaty to save the ozone layer has also slowed Arctic ice melt (x)

The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past (x)

Scientists Find Methane is Actually Offsetting 30% of its Own Heating Effect on Planet (x)

Are debt-for-climate swaps finally taking off? (x)

High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN (x)

How Could Positive ‘Tipping Points’ Accelerate Climate Action? (x)

Specific examples:

Environmental Campaigners Celebrate As Labour Ends Tory Ban On New Onshore Wind Projects (x)

Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa (x)

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution (x)

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds [Scotland] (x)

The American Climate Corps take flight, with most jobs based in the West (x)

Waste Heat Generated from Electronics to Warm Finnish City in Winter Thanks to Groundbreaking Thermal Energy Project (x)

Climate protection is now a human right — and lawsuits will follow [European Union] (x)

A new EU ecocide law ‘marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals’ (x)

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII [United States] (x)

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren. [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study (x)

Chart: Wind and solar are closing in on fossil fuels in the EU (x)

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (x)

Countries That Generate 100% Renewable Energy Electricity (x)

Indigenous advocacy leads to largest dam removal project in US history [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world (x)

China is set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early, new report finds (x)

‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis (x)

Largest-ever data set collection shows how coral reefs can survive climate change (x)

The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What Does It DO? [United States] (x)

Good Climate News: Headline Roundup April 1st through April 15th, 2023 (x)

How agroforestry can restore degraded lands and provide income in the Amazon (x) [Brazil]

Loss of Climate-Crucial Mangrove Forests Has Slowed to Near-Negligable Amount Worldwide, Report Hails (x)

Agroecology schools help communities restore degraded land in Guatemala (x)

Climate adaptation:

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives' (x)

‘Sponge’ Cities Combat Urban Flooding by Letting Nature Do the Work [China] (x)

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala (x)

A green roof or rooftop solar? You can combine them in a biosolar roof — boosting both biodiversity and power output (x)

Global death tolls from natural disasters have actually plummeted over the last century (x)

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be (x)

This city turns sewage into drinking water in 24 hours. The concept is catching on [Namibia] (x)

Plants teach their offspring how to adapt to climate change, scientists find (x)

Resurrecting Climate-Resilient Rice in India (x)

Other Masterposts:

Going carbon negative and how we're going to fix global heating (x)

[ghosttai]

”Choose to sit safely out of the sun Away from rays so blinding to the eye”

if someone has done a joke that’s adjacent to this one please show me it

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - October 8-14

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles on Patreon!

1. All 160 dogs at Florida shelter found homes ahead of Hurricane Milton

“[The shelter] offered crates, food and anything else the dogs would need in exchange for the animals to spend just five days with the foster parents if the human didn't want to keep them for longer. […A]fter about a day of receiving around 100 messages every 30 minutes, Bada said, all 160 were gone from the shelter and in safe and warm homes.”

2. Restoring Ecosystems and Rejuvenating Native Hawaiian Traditions in Maui

“[Volunteers] are restoring water flow to the refuge, removing invasive species, and restoring a loko iʻa kalo using ʻike kūpuna, ancestral knowledge. […] This human-made ecosystem will provide food for community members and habitat for wildlife while protecting coral reefs offshore.”

3. Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries

“In contrast to other solar-driven desalination designs, the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid. […] The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day[….]”

4. Threatened pink sea fan coral breeds in UK aquarium for first time

“The spawning is part of University of Exeter Ph.D. student Kaila Wheatley Kornblum's research into the reproduction, larval dispersal and population connectivity of Eunicella verrucosa. […] Pink sea fans are believed to have been successfully bred by only one other institution, Lisbon Oceanarium, in 2023.”

5. Tiny 'backpacks' are being strapped to baby turtles[….]

““We analysed the data and found that hatchlings show amazingly consistent head-up orientation – despite being in the complete dark, surrounded by sand [… and] they move as if they were swimming rather than digging[…. This new observation method is] answering questions about best conservation practices,” says Dor.”

6. New California Law Protects Wildlife Connectivity

“A new state law in California will instruct counties and municipalities to conserve wildlife corridors when planning new development. […] This could entail everything from creating wildlife crossings at roads or highways, employing wildlife-safe fencing, or not developing on certain land.”

7. ‘I think, boy, I’m a part of all this’: how local heroes reforested Rio’s green heart

“By 2019, [the program] had transformed the city’s landscape, having trained 15,000 local workers like Leleco, who have planted 10m seedlings across […] roughly 10 times the area of New York’s Central Park. Reforested sites include mangroves and vegetation-covered sandbars called restinga, as well as wooded mountainsides around favelas.”

8. Alabama Town Plans to Drop Criminal Charges Over Unpaid Garbage Bills

““Suspending garbage pickup, imposing harsh late penalties and prosecuting people who through no fault of their own are unable to pay their garbage and sewage bills does not make payment suddenly forthcoming,” West said. [… The city] has agreed to drop pending criminal charges against its residents over unpaid garbage bills.”

9. New Hampshire’s low-income community solar program finally moves forward

“The state energy department is reviewing seven proposals for community solar arrays that will allocate a portion of their bill credits to low-income households. […] New Hampshire’s strategy of working with utilities to automatically enroll households that have already been identified streamlines the process.”

10. The Future Looks Bright for Electric School Buses

“EPA has awarded about $3 billion in grants from the infrastructure law, which paid to replace about 8,700 buses. Of those, about 95 percent are electric. [… Electric buses are] cheaper to operate and require less maintenance than diesel buses and will soon be at cost parity when looking at the lifetime cost of ownership[….]”

October 1-7 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[birdboy-blues]

(I hope you're happy now I've merged dark and light!)

[I always knew that we could be intertwined]

[thesolarpunkworkshop]

Day 5 or 6 of working on the solar bike. The main bike is effectivaly finished. Decided to go lightweight on everything and it was definantly the way to go. On the back is a 24qt milk crate big enough to hold another few bike batteries. That has a thin as possible sheet of hobby plywood above it that is ziptied to the 50w flexible solar panel. And mounted to the milkcrate with hobby screws. The panel recharges the bike through a mppt step up charge controller. The front panel charges just a simple 5v battery pack for my phone. All in all, I think it turned out well.

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Kia PV5 WKNDR Concept, 2024. A camper prototype baed on the PV5 electric van that was presented at this year's SEMA show. The modular design means that during the week you can drive your five-passenger electric van, then at the weekend you can install the module focused on relaxation and leisure including a roof tent with solar panels

[karemandohan1999]

Is it true that there is 4G internet in the world? The internet in Gaza is 2G!

I don't know how the internet is strong or how the electricity is when it is on for two continuous hours. The electricity has been cut off for more than a year and we operate our phones We ship it using solar energy.

If you want to help. gofundmy Donate here

Or through PayPal here

[politijohn]

Source

[mapsontheweb]

Percentage of power that come from solar.

[heavenly-halcyon]

Ouhhhhh yeahhh im totally undressing him with my eyes

[atompowers]

Envision Our Energizing-Vibrant Renewable Future Now

[reasonsforhope]

"It is 70 years since AT&T’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper...

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches."

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

[maskedraven456]

So... anyone else do this as Boogaloo...just me?

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - November 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (sorry it's slightly late, the links didn't wanna work and I couldn't figure it out all day)

1. Wyoming's abortion ban has been overturned, including its ban on abortion medication

“Wyoming is the second state to have its near-total abortion ban overturned this month[…. Seven other states] also approved amendments protecting the right to an abortion. A lawsuit seeking to challenge the [FDA]’s approval of abortion medication recently failed when the Supreme Court refused to hear it[….]”

2. Patches of wildflowers in cities can be just as good for insects as natural meadows – study

“This study confirmed that small areas of urban wildflowers have a high concentration of pollinating insects, and are as valuable to many pollinators as larger areas of natural meadow that you would typically find rurally.”

3. Paris could offer new parents anti-pollution baby 'gift bags' to combat 'forever chemicals'

“The bag includes a stainless steel baby cup, a wooden toy, reusable cotton wipes, and non-toxic cleaning supplies as part of a "green prescription". […] The city will also have 44 centres for protecting mothers and infants that will be without any pollutants[….]”

4. Indigenous guardians embark on a sacred pact to protect the lowland tapir in Colombia

“The tapir is now the focus of an Indigenous-led conservation project[… A proposed “biocultural corridor”] will protect not only the populations and movements of wildlife such as tapirs, but also the cultural traditions and spirituality of the Inga and other neighboring Indigenous peoples[….]”

5. Denmark will plant 1 billion trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

“[…] 43 billion kroner ($6.1 billion) have been earmarked to acquire land from farmers over the next two decades[.… In addition,] livestock farmers will be taxed for the greenhouse gases emitted by their cows, sheep and pigs from 2030, the first country to do so[….]”

6. The biggest grid storage project using old batteries is online in Texas

“[Element operates “used EV battery packs” with software that can] fine-tune commands at the cell level, instead of treating all the batteries as a monolithic whole. This enables the system to get more use out of each cell without stressing any so much that they break down[….]””

7. Durable supramolecular plastic is fully ocean-degradable and doesn't generate microplastics

“The new material is as strong as conventional plastics and biodegradable, [… and] is therefore expected to help reduce harmful microplastic pollution that accumulates in oceans and soil and eventually enters the food chain.”

8. Big Oil Tax Could Boost Global Loss and Damage Fund by 2000%

“[… A] tax on fossil fuel extraction, which would increase each year, combined with additional taxes on excess profits would […] generate hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the decade to assist poor and vulnerable communities with the impact of the climate crisis[….]”

9. Rooftop solar meets 107.5 pct of South Australia’s demand, no emergency measures needed

“[T]he state was able to export around 658 MW of capacity to Victoria at the time[….] The export capacity is expected to increase significantly as the new transmission link to NSW[…] should be able to allow an extra 150 MW to be transferred in either direction by Christmas.”

10. Light-altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen the fruit growing season in less sunny countries

“[Scientists] have developed a spray coating for greenhouses that could help UK farmers to produce more crops in the future using the same or less energy[… by optimising] the wavelength of light shining onto the plants, improving their growth and yield.”

November 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[birdboy-blues]

In the end I'd like to say: no one's better than you.

flipped version if anyone wants it

[thesolarpunkworkshop]

Day 2 of the solar ebike project. I managed to get more power input on this thing, the problem is it's way more janky. With all the hinges and panels on them it's going to clang itself apart with a big enough pothole.

Oh well, I'll think of a solution.