A new design of wind turbine has broken the world record for the most amount of power generated in a 24-hour period.
Siemens Gamesa said its 14-222 DD offshore prototype generated 359 megawatt-hours in just one day – enough to power 18,000 households or a Tesla Model 3 for more than a million miles.
The renewable energy breakthrough was achieved using a set of “revolutionary” blades that are cast in a single piece of recyclable resin.
Nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, Lovins, an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal within 40 years. In the years since there is barely a major industry or government that he and his Rocky Mountain Institute have not advised.
But for much of that time efficiency was seen as a bit of an ugly sister, rather dull compared with a massive transition to renewables and other new technologies. Now, he hopes, its time may have come. Lovins is arguing for the mass insulation of buildings alongside a vast acceleration of renewables. “We should crank [them] up with wartime urgency. There should be far more emphasis on efficiency,” he says.
