[Jul 18-24’22] Balcony solar FTW

Lithium, balcony solar, talk talk talk and new BBC documentary.

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

A bit light week this week. Probably because most of EU is away on summer vacation 😅 even though there’s little reason currently to go south to get more heat 🥴.

P.S. Substack editor had some troubles this week (again) which is why the image appears above the “welcome” this week 😅.

---

‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Lithium price increase and other factors are putting pressure on battery companies.

😻 Rooftop solar: Check. Balcony solar?

😼 Remember, the most important thing you can do to help solve the climate crisis is to talk about it.

💩 New 3-part documentary on BBC called “Big oil v the world”

---

👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#rain] — A new study sheds light on how much more additional rain we can expect to get with climate change. And the answer is a lot. By end of century it could be as much as a 30% increase in a medium emissions scenario.

[#melt] — A temperature anomaly in Greenland has caused the melting of 120B tons of water over just two days. That’s enough to cover all of the state of West Virginia in water.

---

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#balconysolar] — An entrepreneur from Ukraine has developed vertical solar panels that can be mounted on people’s balconys. OMG it’s such a deliciously simple idea. Why do research in all transparent solar cells to put on windows when we haven’t yet covered entire buildings in solar. The company launched in February, the month that Putin started his war.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#solidstatebatteries] — A new study by NGO Transport & Environment shows that solid state batteries could reduce carbon emissions by 24-39% simply because their energy densities are higher, hence less materials are needed to produce them.