South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared a National State of Disaster over the country’s worst-ever rolling blackouts. Many customers have been without power for as much as 12 hours per day to keep aging coal-fired power plants — the backbone of the country’s electricity network — running. Ramaphosa called the power crisis “an existential […]
A leaked video of a deep-sea mining test showing a plume of sediment being released into the ocean is reigniting concerns about the controversial practice.
BMW, Peugeot and Renault all make popular plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), but are the cars as climate-friendly as they claim? Not according to a new set of on-road tests conducted by researchers who say the vehicles emit much more carbon dioxide than official measures from standard lab tests report. According to the researchers at […]
In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Joe Biden touted progress made on climate and the environment during his first two years in office and called out Big Oil for raking in record profits during the energy crisis. However, while he rallied the nation behind addressing the climate crisis, he gave no […]
Switzerland’s longest dam — also the highest dam in Europe — has now been adorned with nearly 5,000 solar panels. The added solar panels help provide additional energy, particularly during the winter months. The 2.2 megawatt project, called AlpinSolar, will provide about 3.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, with half of that energy […]
A new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects 54% of new electric-generating capacity in the U.S. to come from solar energy for 2023. Developers are planning to add 54.5 gigawatts of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the country’s power grid this year, most of it being solar, according to EIA’s Preliminary Monthly Electric […]
Germany is in the midst of a debate about when it will stop using coal. While the current coalition government under Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to phase out the highly polluting fossil fuel by 2030, states in the country’s east want to maintain an earlier, less ambitious target of 2038. Now, a report […]
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have revealed a new battery material, which they call the Quick-Release Binder, to make battery recycling easier and more affordable. While lithium-ion battery use is expected to grow elevenfold from 2020 to 2030, materials in these batteries, like lithium, cobalt and nickel, are in increasingly limited supply, […]
The race to decarbonize passenger cars and light-duty trucks in the U.S. is accelerating. Battery electric vehicles accounted for almost 6% of all new vehicle sales in 2022, up from close to 3% in 2021, and demand is outstripping supply, even as manufacturers roll out new models and designs. The Biden administration is spending billions of dollars to build out EV charging networks and providing incentives for purchasing new and used EVs.