With More Bang for the Buck, Renewables Providing Most New Power ||

Renewables were the biggest new source of electricity last year as the cost of building new wind and solar farms fell. Clean energy provided 55 percent of all new capacity added worldwide, the most ever, and total investment was about double the amount for generators driven by fossil fuels, according to a report published Thursday by UN Environment, the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Investment in clean power dropped 23 percent from 2015 to $241.6 billion, meaning that the new capacity installed came at a lower price. The average capital expenditure for a megawatt of wind and solar fell more than 10 percent, according to the study, and they are some of the cheapest sources of electricity in some countries. “Renewables are much more competitive than they were five years ago,” Angus McCrone, chief editor at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in an interview. “In an increasing number of places, wind and solar may be the cheapest option.”

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Discovering more efficient storage of green energy |

“Today on a solar farm or a wind farm, storage is typically provided with batteries. But batteries are expensive, and can typically only store a fixed amount of energy,” says Sargent. “That’s why discovering a more efficient and highly scalable means of storing energy generated by renewables is one of the grand challenges in this field.”

This device efficiently splits water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, storing energy as H2. The key is a new catalyst based on abundant metals tungsten, iron and cobalt, that is three times more efficient than the current state-of-the-art.

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Energy Future lacks staying power:

If we do not aggressively change direction by 2020, it will be too late and we will be taken, by default, down the fossil fuel path. Sure, we have lots and lots of fossil fuel, enough to cover our needs for the next 500 years. Or do we? We geologists know that the concept of peak oil and peak gas referred only to conventional fossil fuel with standard methods of extraction. Peak is now irrelevant in the face of huge reservoirs of the so-called “unconventionals”, i.e., tar sands, gas shales and heavy oils, with the concomitant new methods of extraction to recover them including dangerous solvent injection and hydrofracking. We cannot ignore the horrendous environmental and health costs of a fossil fuel-dominated future because these costs are real and someone has to pay them. These very dirty “unconventionals” will not peak until far into the future, well past the next major global demographic and environmental tipping points that will alter our future beyond recognition.

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So if you see me, have some courtesy, sympathy and taste:

A Father’s Day essay on the world we’re leaving our children.
The truth is that the people we like to share the least with are our own children. “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children,” the saying goes. Right now, though, we’ve borrowed the entire Earth, trashed much of it, and don’t plan to give back. Daddy, could we have our planet back now:

Sympathy For The Antecedent:
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and fate

I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moments of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached Bombay
(woo woo, who who)

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
(who who)
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
(who who, who who)
Tell me, baby.. tell me, sweetie, what’s my name?

Troubadours & Occasional
Pirates: Jagger,Richards

Renewables Standards

Analysis shows benefits of efficiency and renewables standards: