We have so many sources of Global Warming news now that it is hard for me to use them all. I have been neglecting my e-mail feeds: Bloomberg, Ember, Heatmap, Yale Climate Connections, and much more.
The DK Image Library has fallen behind the times on renewables and EVs and such.
In the six years since then, this exponential growth has continued
As I wrote in 2019, The First Green Terawatt Was the Hardest.
Renewable Tuesday: Delivery Vans and Another Terawatt
Jul 5, 2024 — Back in 2019, I wrote The First Green Terawatt Was the Hardest, and then Renewable Wednesday: Mo Green Terawatts in 2020. Now look at us go.
(and we switched over to Bluesky, too.)
The Good News
Bloomberg e-mail:
Energy spending spree
China is undertaking an energy-building boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, as Beijing seeks to ensure supply for power-hungry facilities that are key to dominating emerging industries of the future.
The nation added 543 gigawatts of new capacity across all technologies last year, according to data from the National Energy Administration on Wednesday. That’s 12% more than all the power plants combined in India as of the end of 2024. The generation China has added since the end of 2021 is also larger than the entire US system.
Heatmap e-mail:
The Other Startup Promising 100 Hours of Cheap Energy Storage
Noon Energy just completed a successful demonstration of its reversible solid-oxide fuel cell system.
Form Energy made a big splash In 2021, [when] the startup announced its plans to commercialize a 100-plus-hour iron-air battery that charges and discharges by converting iron into rust and back again The company’s CEO, Mateo Jaramillo, told The Wall Street Journal at the time that this was the “kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas power plants.” Form went on to raise a $240 million Series D that same year, and is now deploying its very first commercial batteries in Minnesota.
But it’s not the only player in the rarified space of ultra-long-duration energy storage. While so far competitor Noon Energy has gotten less attention and less funding, it was also raising money four years ago — a more humble $3 million seed round, followed by a $28 million Series A in early 2023. Like Form, it’s targeting a price of $20 per kilowatt-hour for its electricity, often considered the threshold at which this type of storage becomes economically viable and materially valuable for the grid.
Noon announced that it had completed a successful demonstration of its 100-plus-hour carbon-oxygen battery, partially funded with a grant from the California Energy Commission, which charges by breaking down CO2 and discharges by recombining it using a technology known as a reversible solid-oxide fuel cell.
Bloomberg [paywalled]:
Brazil Is Set for a Battery Boom. China Is Poised to Benefit
Multiple Chinese companies, including Huawei, are expected to bid in an upcoming Brazilian energy-storage auction.
The Brazilian government has said it hopes the auction will secure 2 gigawatts of capacity. BNEF estimates that annual battery energy storage additions in Brazil could reach around 1.3 gigawatts by 2030.
Bloomberg e-mail:
European North Sea states just gave offshore wind a boost with pledges to invest $11.3 billion by 2030. It’s another win for green investors, who poured a record amount of money into the sector last year.
Leaders and energy ministers from nine nations are met in Hamburg to sign the declaration, which will mobilize €1 trillion of capital in Europe, create 91,000 jobs and reduce power production costs by 30% by 2040, according to industry group WindEurope. The pact aims to turn the North Sea into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir,” the UK energy ministry said.
Bloomberg e-mail:
Carmakers are planning to roll out at least six new electric SUVs in the US this year with price tags at or below $35,000, products that could help ease a slowdown in EV sales.
Of the roughly 60 electric cars and trucks for sale in the US last year, only three could be had for less than $35,000; the median starting sticker price was $59,100, nearly $10,000 higher than the average price for all vehicles.
“Anything you can do to make a customer feel you’ve given them a more affordable product is an advantage to them right now,” said Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy.
The good news for auto executives: a steady drop in battery prices has improved the economics of EVs, opening a lane for small new models.
Of course WE know that an EV will save you way more than $10,000 in fuel and maintenance. Leases are still a great deal.
Slate promises a sticker price in the mid-$20,000s.
Bloomberg E-mail: Climate takes it to the banks
By Alastair Marsh
For years, climate experts have insisted that markets will naturally push companies to take climate change more seriously as risks become more apparent. Fresh research indicates that borrowers are starting to face a financial penalty for ignoring the dangers ahead.
This month, a paper published by the European Central Bank found that banks with the greatest so-called transition risks now “face significantly higher borrowing costs” in funding markets. That followed a December paper by analysts at the Central Bank of Ireland, which showed that companies facing physical climate risks are in a similar predicament, and will need to provide more collateral.
Another Bloomberg e-mail, this one quoting Ember:
One milestone after another
By Akshat Rathi
China’s rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle. By some measures, India is even further ahead.
The nation is electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development, according to a new report from the think tank Ember. It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.
That flies against “the orthodox narrative that emerging markets must follow the same path the West and China took: go from biomass to fossil fuels,” said Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at Ember and one of the authors of the report.
Ember’s analysis adjusted China’s and India’s gross domestic product for the cost of living, putting India’s income per person of about $11,000 today at the same level as China’s in 2012. That allowed the report’s authors to compare the two economies’ energy systems at a similar level of development.
But the South Asian economy’s coal and oil consumption per capita is a fraction of what China’s was at similar income levels. In absolute terms, India’s fossil fuel consumption is growing at slower rates than China’s today.
That’s mainly because India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did about a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call “modular technologies” — the production of each solar panel, battery cell and electric car enables engineers to learn how to make it more efficiently.
✁
In India, 5% of all new car sales in 2024 were electric. The country’s per-capita consumption of oil for road transport is 60% lower than when China hit that milestone. As a result, Bond says that India’s peak road-oil consumption per person will likely never reach Chinese levels.
India’s solar resources
SDG Update e-mail:
Tackling Postharvest Loss in Africa Through Passive Cooling
Passive cooling is not merely an interim or “low-tech” measure, but a foundational element of resilient food systems.
Embedding passive cooling within agricultural extension services, the design of shaded and ventilated market facilities, and nutrition-sensitive public procurement programs offers an actionable pathway to strengthen nutrition outcomes.
This approach can help reduce the risk of premature investment in active cooling and ensure that cold rooms are deployed where they are expected to add value while minimizing the risk of becoming stranded assets.
In many parts of Africa fruit and vegetables lie on the ground and rot for lack of the simplest cooling and processing facilities. That means $$Real Money$$™ (my favorite kind) that could just be shoveled up with a modest application of appropriate technology.
Global Warming Catastrophes
No New Nukes
Heatmap via Bloomberg e-mail: The technology our experts say is least ready for primetime.
As part of our annual survey of energy world insiders, Heatmap asked dozens of climate experts which key decarbonization technologies they thought were furthest from widespread deployment.
By far the most common answer — with about two in five experts agreeing — was fusion energy.
As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, even the technology’s most optimistic proponents don’t expect fusion plants to hit the grid for at least another decade. And even if fusion becomes commercially ready, bringing down its cost to a level where it can compete with existing renewable sources of electricity will be yet another challenge.
Bloomberg e-mail:
Nuclear may miss the initial AI moment
Tech companies have been unequivocal: They want nuclear energy, which [[THEY CLAIM, THE IDIOTS]] is clean and can provide round-the-clock power. Meta Platforms Inc. struck major deals with startups and Microsoft Corp. has led the charge to restart a shuttered power plant, to name two recent moves to kickstart the nuclear industry.
Yet not a single new small modular reactor, or SMR, has been built in the US, and only one design has been approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And a traditional nuclear power plant takes about a decade to stand up, far longer than the timeframe required to meet burgeoning AI demand.
Denial and Obstruction vs. Resistance and $$Real Money$$™
Venezuela’s Oil Is Only Part of Its Climate Story
The country is already suffering the effects of climate change. A lack of data makes it that much more difficult to adapt.
The nation of Venezuela perches atop a fifth of the planet’s recoverable crude oil. Due to mismanagement, corruption, failing infrastructure, and a dearth of technical expertise, its output, however, is low — less than a million barrels a day.
The opportunity of all that untapped oil is part of why the Trump administration has seized control of the extra-heavy crude in the Orinoco Basin, which is among the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive oil in the world. Many observers have remarked on the planet-warming potential of the oil takeover, and the revival of Venezuela’s fossil fuel industry would indeed be yet another nail in the coffin of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 Celsius temperature-rise goal.
But far less has been said about what a more extreme climate would mean for Venezuelans. That’s at least partially because we don’t fully know.
If they meant to strip the hydrogen off the methane and turn the carbon into agricultural biochar, we could discuss it.
A Different Level of Idiocy
Yes, as expected, the Biggest and Bestest Idiot’s EPA repealed the scientific determination that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health and the natural world.
Heatmap Daily e-mail:
What We Know About Trump’s Endangerment Finding Repeal
ROBINSON MEYER and EMILY PONTECORVO • FEBRUARY 12, 2026
The signal move would hobble the EPA’s ability to limit heat-trapping pollution from cars, trucks, power plants, and other industrial facilities. It is the most aggressive attack on environmental regulation that the president and his officials have yet attempted.
The move, which was first proposed last summer, has major legal implications. But its importance is also symbolic: It brings the EPA’s official view of climate change much closer to President Trump’s false but long-held claim that anthropogenic global warming — which scientists have long affirmed as a major threat to public health and the environment — is in fact [[ALLEGEDLY]] a “con job,” “a hoax,” and a “scam.”
“Under President Trump, the EPA is proving what previous administrations refused to accept, that we can protect the environment” and grow the economy, said EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch. “We are delivering cleaner air, land, and water while driving economic expansion.”
Hirsch was previously
Defending Freedumb, that is.
Resources
🎩 GoodNewsRoundup
Want to focus on the ENVIRONMENT:
