[Jul 25-31’22] Coal is back!

Coal demand on track to reach all-time high, battery becomes first to supply critical grid services, vertical solar might be better and US power companies have fought clean energy

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

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

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‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Coal demand on track to reach an all-time high despite being declared dead a year or so ago.

😻 The Tesla Big Battery becomes the first battery to provide critical so called inertia services to the grid

😼 Initial research reveals that vertical solar panels might be more efficient than tilted ones.

💩 Leaked documents reveals that US power companies have been fighting clean energy.

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#heat] — 2022 looks to be another hot one. This detailed carbon brief article looks at the summer so far and how it has become incredibly hot over many land-areas of the world, in fact: June 2022 saw the warmest temperatures on land ever recorded since recording began in 1850.

[#ukheat] — A new study has found that the UK heatwave last week that shattered all former records would have been extremely unlikely if it weren’t for climate change.

[#flooding] — Here’s a nicely detailed article that looks into how much climate change is affecting floods. Because it’s not as simple as we can attribute all flood events to climate change as there are many factors that increase and decrease the likelihood and impact of a flood.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#solarwindows] — The research into solar windows are heating up, this article looks at some of the newest tech. However, I must admit that I feel like we failed to apply good ol’ Occam’s razor here. Why are we developing solar windows when we haven’t yet covered all surfaces of buildings with solar panels yet? Despite the number of glass box buildings in the world I wanna bet that there are more that aren’t made out of just glass. Sooo.. shouldn’t we be covering those first? Still cool tech, but research is in it’s infancy as the highest achieved efficiency is just 7%, compare that to the most effective regular perovskite solar cell at 23.6%.