Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

How ‘green’ electricity from wood harms the planet — and people

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02676-z

[wjfox]

China's plunging coal plant approvals signal energy policy pivot, report says

August 22, 2024

A sharp drop in new coal plant permits in China suggests the world's largest builder of the polluting power plants is pivoting its energy policy towards more renewable development, although coal will keep playing a major role, a report said on Thursday.

China approved just 10 new coal plants with 9 gigawatts of capacity in the first half of 2024 - an 83% drop on the year, according to a report by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and U.S.-based Global Energy Monitor.

The report found China has added over 400 GW of wind and solar since 2023, which led to a 7% drop in coal power output between June 2023 and June 2024.

"With new renewable energy build-outs now capable of meeting all incremental power demand in China, the need for new coal is waning, and there are signs the central government may be embracing this change," the report said.

"This economic powerhouse has transformed clean energy from a climate policy component into a cornerstone of China's broader energy and economic strategies," it said.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 024-08-22/

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Some articles on that:

https://www.power-technology.com/news/o ... g-denmark/
https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-uks-las ... d-fossils/

[weatheriscool]

[Time_Traveller]

England’s nature-friendly farming budget to be cut by £100m

Tue 3 Sep 2024 13.12 BST



The government is to slash the nature-friendly farming budget in England by £100m in order to help fill what ministers say is a £22bn Treasury shortfall, the Guardian can reveal.

Nature groups and farmers have called this a “big mistake”, saying it jeopardised the government’s legally binding targets to improve nature.

This cut would mean at least 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland, according to research by the RSPB, and this could increase if the smaller budget puts farmers off applying.

Civil service sources told the Guardian ministers were blaming an underspend of £100m a year from the £2.4bn budget for the cut, saying that because the Conservative government failed to spend the whole pot, it made it impossible to justify keeping it at that level to the Treasury.

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has asked departments including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to each find more than £1bn in savings, with others ordered to find hundreds of millions of pounds in order to help close the funding gap in the nation’s budget that Reeves says was left by the Tories.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ut-by-100m

[Time_Traveller]

‘Citizen scientists’ to check UK rivers for sewage and pollution

Sat 7 Sep 2024 06.00 BST



Rivers will be checked for sewage and other pollution by the general public this month in an attempt to assess the health of British waterways.

Cuts to the UK regulators and a change in the law to allow water company self-monitoring of pollution in England mean there is little independent monitoring of the state of rivers in the UK.

When the UK was in the EU, it was subject to the water framework directive, which meant it had to carry out detailed pollution analysis of waterways and report every year. There has not been a survey done under the WFD since 2019, and the Conservative government began the process of removing the EU standards from UK legislation. The Labour government has not indicated whether it intends to continue this deregulation.

’Citizen scientists’ have therefore been intensifying efforts to check rivers for pollution to try to find the true scale of the problem.

The Rivers Trust has developed an app for its Big River Watch and is asking users to spend 15 minutes by their local river and fill in a survey, building up a picture of the damage done to rivers around the UK. The survey includes questions on river wildlife, signs of pollution, and health and wellbeing.

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

Chinese Radar Spots Plasma Bubbles Over the Pyramids of Giza
by Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
September 10, 2024

Introduction:

(IFL Science) The higher atmosphere is full of peculiar phenomena and an important one for communication and navigation is equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). These are hot pockets of superheated gas that form at low latitudes, usually after sunset. They remain poorly understood, and given that they impact Earth’s connection to space, it is important to know what is going on.

The finding of a massive bubble of plasma over Egypt is not itself major news. Tens of these EPBs form every year over that specific region. What’s interesting is from where the bubble was observed. Observations are usually from space to get a global view. They can also be done from the ground, observing the nearest region of the ionosphere, however, thanks to the curvature of the ground radar can have difficulty seeing targets below the horizon. Now, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences report a detection over Egypt from the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles) away.

There, China has built the Low lAtitude long Range Ionospheric raDar, or LARID. This is a radar system that can keep an eye on the irregularities created by plasma bubbles. Just as radio transmissions can be sent across the world by making them reflect against the plasma of the ionosphere, radar can be sent the same way. LARID's ability is in receiving the signals back and interpreting them as the variation created by these plasma bubbles. Its detection range is a whopping 9,600 km (5,965 miles), a distance that has tripled in less than half a year as its performance has improved.

So the bubble over Giza is nothing new, but seeing changes in real time from China is outstanding. The researchers suggest that creating a network of such radars could be revolutionary for the monitoring of these events.

“The results provide meaningful insight for building a low latitude OTH [Over-The-Horizon] radar network in future, that consists of three to four OTH radars [and] could have the capability to obtain global EPBs in real time,” the authors wrote in their paper.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/chinese-rad ... za-75896

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

400 years' worth of gas.

What could possibly go wrong?

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NT Beetaloo Basin has enough gas to 'supply Australia for the next 400 years', company about to start drilling the region says

September 19, 2024 - 12:28PM

The head of a company developing gas in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin says the “huge” resource has the potential to transform the Australian energy market, lowering gas prices and reducing emissions.

Empire Energy managing director Alex Underwood told Sky News his company expected to produce the first gas from the Beetaloo by mid-2025.

“Just in the next five or six weeks we’ll be drilling our first full-scale pilot development well and then all things going well, we’ll be installing the gas processing plant just after the wet season and commencing production from the Beetaloo from the middle of next year,” he said.

The Beetaloo Basin is an onshore gas field about 500 kilometres south of Darwin that covers an area of about 28,000 square kilometres – almost the size of Belgium.

“This is a huge resource, I think the Beetaloo contains around enough gas to supply Australia for the next 400 years,” Mr Underwood said.

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-ne ... fea3c9ed53

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

End of an era as Britain’s last coal-fired power plant shuts down

Mon 30 Sep 2024 00.01 BST

Britain’s only remaining coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire will generate electricity for the last time on Monday after powering the UK for 57 years.

The power plant will come to the end of its life in line with the government’s world-leading policy to phase out coal power which was first signalled almost a decade ago.

The closure marks the end of Britain’s 142-year history of coal power use which began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, the Holborn Viaduct power station, began generating electricity in 1882.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... shuts-down



Credit: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

[caltrek]

The closure marks the end of Britain’s 142-year history of coal power use which began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, the Holborn Viaduct power station, began generating electricity in 1882.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Karl Marx died just a year later. Meaning that most of his understanding of capitalism and economics was based on observations made before coal fired power plants arrived on the scene.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Buoyancy-driven hybrid energy platform moves to full-scale pilot
By Loz Blain
October 08, 2024

Swedish company NoviOcean has tested a third-gen prototype of its combination wind/solar/wave energy platform, a floating platform rated for up to 1 megawatt of consistent clean energy around the clock thanks to a fascinating buoyancy-driven mechanism. Next step: a full-scale pilot.

This renewable energy platform will have a relatively small footprint once built at full size: 38 x 9 m (125 x 30 ft), the platform itself extending some 4 m (13 ft) above the water surface, and a further 12 m (39 ft) down below. Tiny, then, in comparison to some of the monstrous offshore wind turbines we're starting to see, like the colossal 20-MW MingYang turbine that's currently the world's largest.

https://newatlas.com/energy/noviocean-w ... re-energy/

[weatheriscool]

In landmark move, EPA requires removal of all U.S. lead pipes in a decade

By Amudalat Ajasa and Silvia Foster-Frau
October 8, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday requiring water utilities to replace all lead pipes within a decade, a move aimed at eliminating a toxic threat that continues to affect tens of thousands of American children each year.

The move, which also tightens the amount of lead allowed in the nation's drinking water, comes nearly 40 years after Congress determined that lead pipes posed a serious risk to public health and banned them in new construction.

Research has shown that lead, a toxic contaminant that seeps from pipes into the drinking water supply, can cause irreversible developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems among children. In adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lead exposure can cause increased blood pressure, heart disease, decreased kidney function and cancer.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ing-water/