Green Energy

The most steel-intensive power source – by far – is the modern wind turbine. The steel intensity of a wind turbine depends on its size. A single, large wind turbine requires significantly more steel per megawatt of installed power than two smaller wind turbines.

The link is from the-most-solarpunk-website and is mostly about steel in general, but I wanted to pull out that one fact.

Wind and solar energy are not "good for the environment"; they pollute; it's just that we hope they pollute less than the alternative. One major reason they pollute is because they require a lot of steel to build. But the household-scale or village-scale ones use less

de Decker is citing: Topham, Eva, et al. “Recycling offshore wind farms at decommissioning stage.” Energy policy 129 (2019): 698-709.

Title taken from the article version of this newsletter; posting the newsletter version because that has no paywall.

Some large PVs for rooftops were at a street market for €35 each. I’m not deeply knowledgable about them.. I just know that there are two varieties of solar panels and that the kind that are used from small appliances (e.g. calculators, speakers, lawn lights, etc) are junk. And that junk variety is sometimes used in large rooftop panels. What I was looking at resembled the kind I see on a bluetooth speaker with a slight blue tint so I was skeptical. The info on the backside of the panel indicated “1000 V”. The other thing is, all solar panels degrade over time and reach end of life after like 15 years (though this is improving). They may have been a good deal but I passed on them because I didn’t want to buy them on a blind risk.

How would I know how much life a used PV has left? Would a volt meter give that info, assuming it’s sunny when I encounter them again?

This article was almost surely placed because it came out that the tech firms were using accounting techniques to obscure their impact:

https://archive.is/f5O4p

When the record was broken, solar was serving about 22% of load. A new record for solar energy generation in ERCOT was also set.

This post uses a gift link but registration may be required. There are also archived copies:

• archive.today
• ghostarchive.org

A solar well went into operation a few days ago in Dêrik in Northern and Eastern Syria. The well in the Şehid Xebat district is a central component of the district's water supply after the infrastructure in large parts of the region was destroyed by air strikes by the Turkish military. The project, funded by the Berlin State Office for Development Cooperation (LEZ), was implemented by the Berlin twin town partnership Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg – Dêrik together with the city administration in Dêrik and the "Make Rojava Green Again" initiative.

From January through July of this year, wind and solar in the U.S. generated more net electricity than power from coal, according to recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

According to the EIA’s Monthly Energy Review for July 2024, electricity net generation from renewable energy outpaced coal for the first seven months of the year so far, a first for the U.S.

Further, wind energy generation alone beat coal energy generation in two consecutive months: March and April. As CleanTechnica reported, wind energy installations produced 45.9 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in March and a record high 47.7 GWh in April, compared to the 38.4 GWh in March and 37.2 GWh in April generated by coal-fired power plants.

Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have discovered a new method to increase the efficiency of solar cells by a factor of 1,000. The team of scientists achieved this breakthrough by creating crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which were alternately placed on top of one another in a lattice structure.

Their findings, which could revolutionize the solar energy industry, were recently published in the journal Science Advances.