THE BRIEF [Jul 25’31’22]
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.
This week’s highlights
[#funghi] — Here’s a very interesting article on how vast underground networks of funghi can help us store carbon for a very long time. It’s a poorly understood field that researchers are just starting to learn about.
[#rainforest] — Here’s an interesting look at what Brazillian researchers are doing to prevent wildfires in the Amazon. They look at a lot of different data but primarily where recent deforestation has occurred as this is a prime predictor for where new fires might start. As ranchers clear away forest to feed their cattle, they often also use fire to clear the remaining timber and those fires often go out of control. But there’s of course more to it than that.
[#methane] — Putin’s war with Ukraine is without a doubt increase global instability as fuel, food, gas and electricity prices sky-rockets. Which once again emphasizes the need to get off fossil fuels and in particular methane. This article cites an interesting study that concluded that curbing some of the short term high potency GHGs has 4x the effect of curbing CO2 emissions. Hereby not saying that we shouldn’t curb CO2 emissions, but just that reducing those have pretty big effect also.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋