[July 11-July 17’22] Lawsuits coming for EU

Heatflation, agrivoltaics, does 1 trillion trees help and fertilizers vs climate change.

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

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

---

‼️News you can’t miss

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

🙀 Heatflation: How heat drive up food prices

😻 Agrivoltaics are hot, here’s an overview of a few notable projects

😼 Can planting one trillion trees mitigate climate change?

💩 What does fertilizers mean for climate change? (yes fertilizers come largely from fossil fuels)

---

📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#solar] — The IEA highlights that while solar PV is getting cheaper every day our reliance on China may make the solar supply chain critically imbalanced. China accounts for a whopping 80% of all solar panels made today. Obviously not a problem when everything is fine and dandy (except for the added emission cost of transportation, worker rights etc) but in a time of crises this could pose a big issue for the supplying the world with solar panels.

[#coalsolar] — Aging old coal power plants are becoming the hotbed of solar and wind power activity for the interesting reason that it’s already hooked up the grid. The cost of attaching a new big renewable energy power plant to the grid is a significant expense to the plant owner.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#ev] — In the US (and other places that give similar tax credits for purchasing an EV) EVs now pay for themselves in about year. While the purchase cost is higher that extra cost is quickly reduced to 0 due to less maintenance and fuel prices going crazy. And yes from my own experience I’ll be laughing all the way to the carport when I’m filling up my Model 3 for 12$ 🤑.

[#batteries] — Here’s a deep look at the state of advanced EV battery technologies from Quantumscape to SEAS AI and more. In short, the challenge for many of these companies is to get from labscale to mass production. One thing is being able to produce a high performing battery once, but do it in a stable fashion many many many times is the challenge many of these companies are working on right now.