Saturday, November 17, 2018
Big Tech Companies Are Driving Demand for Renewable Energy
Being Good Stewards Of The Earth
Publicly traded companies are under pressure from investors today to obtain the electricity they use from renewable sources. There’s something just not right about creating carbon emissions to operate the internet. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the tech industry has contracted for more renewable energy — 2,581 megawatts — than any other sector of the global economy. It has signed deals for 10.4 gigawatts more just this year.
Google is the largest consumer of green energy in the world at more than 3 gigawatts, followed by Facebook at 2 gigawatts, and Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon at around 1 gigawatt each. A typical nuclear power plant generates about 1 gigawatt of electricity.
The Internet Of Things
The internet of things is growing exponentially. There are 27 billion devices connected to the internet today, according to IHS Markit, but that number is expected to explode to 138 billion by 2030, reports Bloomberg, as everything from thermostats to doorbells to self-driving cars begin sharing data with tech companies and with each other. That means utility companies are starting to view tech companies as important new customers for the electricity they produce. IHS Markit estimates data centers are responsible for 2 to 3% of all electricity consumed in developed countries.
Many data centers are being located in Scandinavia, where abundant hydro power is available. Those countries also tend to have lower average temperatures, which reduces the cooling loads on the centers. Andreas Regnell, head of strategy at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s largest utility, tells BNEF, “In the near term, I think we will probably see data centers as the biggest driver of power demand, at least in the Nordics.”
Advances in technology may make computers and servers more efficient in the future. Jonathan Koomey, a lecturer at the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford, tells BNEF, “On one hand you have a rapid increase in computation, data transfers and number of computations. But on the other hand you have improvements in the efficiency of these computations. Operators are figuring out ways to deliver more computing using the same or less energy.”
Read more at Big Tech Companies Are Driving Demand for Renewable Energy
Friday, November 16, 2018
Climate Solutions: Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air? - by Elizabeth Kolbert
A U.S. scientific panel reports that technologies that take CO2 out of the atmosphere could be a significant part of a strategy to mitigate global warming. In an e360 interview, Stephen Pacala, the panel’s chairman, discusses how these fast-developing technologies are becoming increasingly viable.
Is there still time to avoid runaway climate change? To a large degree, the answer depends on the feasibility of “negative emissions” — techniques or technologies that suck CO2 out of the air. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), all scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius depend on negative emissions technologies, or NETs. Most 2-degree scenarios also rely on negative emissions; many call for removing billions of tons of CO2 per year by mid-century.
Yet most NETs remain either untested or unproved. To help bridge this gap, the National Academies convened a panel of scientists and asked it to propose a research agenda. The panel considered several possible techniques, ranging from the low-tech — planting more trees — to the high-tech — developing machines to scrub CO2 from the sky. It also looked at a hybrid technology that has become known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The panel recommended several billion dollars be directed to research on NETs. Such technologies, it suggested, ought to be viewed as a “component of the mitigation portfolio,” rather than as a futuristic, last-ditch effort to reduce atmospheric CO2.
Read more at Climate Solutions: Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air?
Yet most NETs remain either untested or unproved. To help bridge this gap, the National Academies convened a panel of scientists and asked it to propose a research agenda. The panel considered several possible techniques, ranging from the low-tech — planting more trees — to the high-tech — developing machines to scrub CO2 from the sky. It also looked at a hybrid technology that has become known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The panel recommended several billion dollars be directed to research on NETs. Such technologies, it suggested, ought to be viewed as a “component of the mitigation portfolio,” rather than as a futuristic, last-ditch effort to reduce atmospheric CO2.
Read more at Climate Solutions: Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air?
Brazil’s Presidential Election Could Mean Billions of Tons of Additional Greenhouse Gases
Policies leading to more destruction of the Amazon and Cerrado would have a huge impact on climate change.
Environmentalists and scientists fear that Brazil’s newly elected president, the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, will accelerate the destruction of the nation’s Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna, which rank among the world’s largest storehouses of carbon.
Both absorb massive amounts of greenhouse gas from the air, stocking it away in trees, grasses, roots, and soil. Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric and ties to agribusiness have led observers to fear he’ll push to loosen environmental rules and monitoring, says Tica Minami, coordinator of Greenpeace Brazil’s Amazon campaign. That could embolden farmers to burn down or otherwise clear more land for soybeans, sugarcane, and cattle, releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Already, as much as 15% of global climate emissions come from “deforestation and degradation of tropical forests,” studies have found.
Read more at Brazil’s Presidential Election Could Mean Billions of Tons of Additional Greenhouse Gases
Both absorb massive amounts of greenhouse gas from the air, stocking it away in trees, grasses, roots, and soil. Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric and ties to agribusiness have led observers to fear he’ll push to loosen environmental rules and monitoring, says Tica Minami, coordinator of Greenpeace Brazil’s Amazon campaign. That could embolden farmers to burn down or otherwise clear more land for soybeans, sugarcane, and cattle, releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Already, as much as 15% of global climate emissions come from “deforestation and degradation of tropical forests,” studies have found.
Read more at Brazil’s Presidential Election Could Mean Billions of Tons of Additional Greenhouse Gases
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Natural Climate Solutions Could Cancel Out a Fifth of U.S. Emissions, Study Finds
Low-tech, time-tested forest, farm and land management techniques are effective, cheap and carry benefits well beyond tackling climate change.
Conserving and restoring American forest, farm and natural lands could cut a substantial chunk of the country's emissions, helping meet greenhouse gas reduction goals without relying on undeveloped technologies, a new report finds.
A team of 38 researchers spent more than two years looking at "natural climate solutions"—a range of strategies that includes planting trees in cities, preventing the conversion of natural grassland to farmland and shifting to fertilizers that produce less greenhouse gas emissions.
In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, they report that these solutions, if deployed across agricultural lands, forests, grasslands and wetlands, could mitigate 21 percent of the country's net annual greenhouse gas emissions, getting the U.S. closer to meetings its goals under the Paris climate agreement.
"It's the same as if every car and truck in the country stopped polluting the climate," said Joseph Fargione, the study's lead author and, the science director for The Nature Conservancy North America region. "There's much bigger potential than most people realize."
Read more at Natural Climate Solutions Could Cancel Out a Fifth of U.S. Emissions, Study Finds
A team of 38 researchers spent more than two years looking at "natural climate solutions"—a range of strategies that includes planting trees in cities, preventing the conversion of natural grassland to farmland and shifting to fertilizers that produce less greenhouse gas emissions.
In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, they report that these solutions, if deployed across agricultural lands, forests, grasslands and wetlands, could mitigate 21 percent of the country's net annual greenhouse gas emissions, getting the U.S. closer to meetings its goals under the Paris climate agreement.
"It's the same as if every car and truck in the country stopped polluting the climate," said Joseph Fargione, the study's lead author and, the science director for The Nature Conservancy North America region. "There's much bigger potential than most people realize."
Read more at Natural Climate Solutions Could Cancel Out a Fifth of U.S. Emissions, Study Finds
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