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.
Germany saw the addition of 615 MW of new PV capacity in June, according to the latest figures from the Federal Network Agency – the Bundesnetzagentur.
This compares to 548 MW in May this year and 428.5 MW in June 2021. The newly installed solar power generation capacity for the first six months of this year was 3.8 GW. In the same period a year earlier, 2.75 GW of solar capacity was added.
Of the monthly new additions, 364.5 MW was represented by PV installations with a capacity lower than 300 kW, built under the country’s feed-in tariff scheme, while the remaining capacity comes from PV systems selected in auctions for PV systems exceeding 750 kW in size.
Canada has begun supplying the world with minerals critical to a greener economy with the country’s first rare earth mine delivering concentrated ore.
“Canada and its allies are gaining independence from the rare earth supply chain from China,” said David Connelly of Cheetah Resources, which owns the Nechalacho Mine southeast of Yellowknife.
Rare earths are a series of exotically named elements such as ytterbium, lanthanum and gadolinium. They are crucial to computers, LED displays, wind turbines, electric cars and many other products essential to a low-carbon world.
If nations do all that they’ve promised to fight climate change, the world can still meet one of two internationally agreed upon goals for limiting warming. But the planet is blowing past the other threshold that scientists say will protect Earth more, a new study finds.
The world is potentially on track to keep global warming at, or a shade below, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial times, a goal that once seemed out of reach, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
That will only happen if countries not only fulfill their specific pledged national targets for curbing carbon emissions by 2030, but also come through on more distant promises of reaching net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, the study says.
Across social media, internet forums and some climate science denier blogs, there has been furious cutting-and-pasting of chunks of common text attacking the environmental credentials of electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines.
About 200 tonnes of the “Earth’s crust” needs to be mined for each electric vehicle battery, and 11 tonnes of brine are needed just for the lithium, claims the text, which also says solar panels and wind turbine blades can’t be recycled.
Some claims are made definitively and without context, and don’t try to compare electric vehicle batteries to the fossil fuelled cars they are replacing. Solar panels can be recycled and fully recyclable turbine blades are now being produced.
The former resources minister and Queensland senator Matt Canavan was another to share some of the text that sat above a picture of a hollowed-out landscape. It took a few seconds to discover the scary but irrelevant image was of a diamond mine in Canada.
