Electrek Green Energy Brief

As Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida, Goal Zero, a Bluffdale, Utah-based portable clean energy company, released survey results that found 84% of Americans worry about power outages and 26% feel vulnerable to power outages. So here’s how Americans feel about mitigating blackouts with backup power.

Italian startup Energy Dome yesterday announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Danish wind giant Ørsted. Together, they will run a feasibility study on the deployment of a 20 megawatt (MW)/200 MWh energy storage facility using Energy Dome’s CO2 Battery technology at one or more Ørsted sites.

Queensland, which has the highest dependence on coal of any Australian state, has announced that it will spend AU $776 million (US $500 million) to build Australia’s largest publicly owned wind farm.

The UK’s power sector can bring natural gas generation down to just 1% of electricity by 2030, which would avoid £93 billion ($99.6 billion) in gas costs in the same period, according to new modeling from London-based independent energy think tank Ember.

After getting the world’s first offshore wind turbine with recyclable blades up and spinning in August, Siemens Gamesa has just launched its RecyclableBlade for onshore wind power projects.

A global renewable energy employment report released today by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) reveals which countries are leading the world in wind and solar manufacturing and installation.

The Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) line, will deliver 1,250 megawatts of clean electricity from Canada’s Hydro-Québec, the fourth-largest hydropower producer in the world, to New York City.

San Rafael, California-based Ojjo, whose solar foundations will hold the photovoltaic panels on one of the largest solar farms in the United States, just closed a $40 million Series C funding round.

LONGi Green Energy, the world’s largest solar company, is going to launch solar panels into space to test whether they can successfully work in orbit and transmit power back to Earth.

Equally important as adopting renewables is ensuring the buildings they power are also sustainable. Electrek spoke with Breana Wheeler, US director of operations at BREEAM, the world’s first green building certification program, about what the ideal decarbonized building looks like and how US real estate investors should see climate change as an opportunity.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday released a study stating that 80% of US coal power plant sites could be converted to nuclear power plant sites in order to help the US achieve net zero by 2050.

Campbell, California-based solar-powered EV charger company Paired Power has just debuted a modular, off-grid electric vehicle charger that is powered by a solar canopy.

London-based SolarBotanic Trees officially launched its “solar tree” prototype today, and the company wants to use it to power EV charging stations first.

Five of Asia’s biggest economies are expected to see exponential growth of solar, positioning the region to become a global hub of solar power, according to independent energy think tank Ember.

UK-based solar tech developer Naked Energy’s rooftop solar vacuum tubes, which produce both electricity and heat, will soon be sold in the United States.

US shipments of solar panels – including imports, exports, and domestically produced and shipped panels – rose to a record electricity-generating capacity of 28.8 million peak kilowatts (kW) in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). That was up from 21.8 million peak kW in 2020.

The UK’s Hornsea 2, the world’s largest single offshore wind farm, is now fully operational.

American homeowners are expected to install a record 5.6 gigawatts of residential solar in 2022, according to a new analysis from Bloomberg NEF (BNEF).

In March 2021, Electrek reported that scientists published a feasibility study about the benefits of erecting solar panels over canals. That study is about to become a reality when a pilot project breaks ground in California.

Renewables provided more than 25% of electrical generation in the United States during the first half of 2022, according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

In research that could jumpstart work on a range of technologies including fuel cells – key to storing solar and wind energy – MIT researchers have found a relatively simple way to increase the lifetimes of these devices: changing the “pH” of the system.