Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: sustainability

Americans installed 2.5 gigawatts of solar panels in the first quarter of the year—a 13 percent increase from a year earlier, according to a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association. That made solar the leading source of new energy generation at 55 percent, dominating over wind and natural gas turbines. This was in spite of the fact that President Donald Trump imposed tariffs earlier this year on imported panels and their parts, reported Bloomberg News. Total installations are on track to reach 10.8 gigawatts at the end of the year, with installations reaching more than 14 gigawatts by 2023.

Read it at Bloomberg.

Read more

As technology changes the way people live and work, cities are undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Those that have the infrastructure and strategy to manage this rapid technological shift are set to become the most competitive.

Globally, city economies in India, Vietnam and China have the strongest short-term momentum. The pace and scale of change in these markets is extraordinary, as they build out their skylines and infrastructure platforms to meet booming demand. While these changes present opportunities, many of these cities are facing challenges to their longer-term development prospects, with strains on infrastructure, high levels of inequality, issues around affordability, and environmental degradation.

Such rapid transformation is often eye-catching. But it is cities that are investing in a sustainable future, and laying the groundwork for ongoing success, that deserve recognition. These cities are “future-proofing” to ensure positive, long-term momentum. Key elements of future-proofing include: the ability to drive and manage technological change; infrastructure that contributes to a high quality of life; a long-term city vision; and attracting and retaining talent.

Read more

Scientists from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a new control system for wind turbines in offshore wind farms that allows power transmission to the coast in a more flexible and cheaper way than current solutions.

This innovation allows the use of a diode rectifier station in the offshore platform of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) link. In this way, the turbine’s alternating current (AC) can be easily converted into direct current (DC) for HVDC transmission.

The researchers have developed a distributed control system to synchronise and regulate the electrical voltage and frequency of the of the . This allows the transmission of energy to the general network through an HVDC link with a diode rectifier station. “It is less complicated, cheaper and more flexible than other current solutions,” explains co-author Santiago Arnaltes Gómez, head of the UC3M Power Control Group.

Read more

Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight.

The successful field test of their larger, next-generation harvester proved what the team had predicted earlier in 2017: that the harvester can extract drinkable water every day/night cycle at very low humidity and at low cost, making it ideal for people living in arid, water-starved areas of the world.

“There is nothing like this,” said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science.”

Read more

For the last several years, CleanTechnica has covered renewable energy development in India quite closely. Several years ago, India set what seemed like a lofty target of 175 gigawatts of wind and solar energy by March 2022. Few believed that was a practical target, but then India plowed forward and happily impressed the world. This week that goal was increased to 227 gigawatts!

Currently, India has added a little more than 70 gigawatts of that goal. Assessing the progress to date on a linear scale, the trend would seem to indicate the country is behind. However, renewable energy growth is not linear.

Read more

Right now, there are roughly 16 sextillion liters of water suspended in the atmosphere. The air around you is a river, you just can’t see it.

Harvesting water from air would be a game-changing solution to tackling freshwater scarcity, which is increasing as the world warms. It would be especially vital in places with very little humidity in the air, like the desert. But while it’s technically possible—you just need to get the water content in the air to condense around something—doing so efficiently has been difficult, until now.

The challenge with this technology is cooling. Water vapor will only condense into a liquid if the material it condenses on is cooler than the surrounding air. That’s why droplets of condensation will appear on a soda can the moment you take it out of the fridge. But how do you leave a piece of machinery in the desert sun all day and keep it cooler than the surrounding air? One way would be to install a cooling system. But it takes a a lot of energy to perpetually cool an object in a hot place, and isn’t feasible in places where energy is expensive. We also don’t want to increase the amount of energy demand in a world already struggling to reduce emissions.

Read more

The Kennedy Space Center might be getting a major upgrade and expansion soon if Elon Musk gets his way. NASA published a plan submitted by SpaceX that dramatically reimagines the company’s presence at KSC in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The plans include everything from a control tower that resembles a flying saucer to a “rocket garden,” showcasing futuristic designs that will expand the space company’s footprint and potential influence within the US agency.

NASA published a draft environmental review for the proposed SpaceX Operations Area, as first reported by Florida Today on Friday. According to the document, SpaceX is seeking permission to build on a 67-acre patch of land about one mile north of KSC’s visitor center complex.

SpaceX wants to build a 133,000-square-foot Falcon hangar to process the used boosters and other rocket materials that it recovers. The hangar would facilitate more efficient recycling of the materials which could potentially save the company billions of dollars per launch.

Read more

We shouldn’t underestimate the powerful attraction of a ‘sustainable blue economy’, which – I firmly believe – will feed and support the lives of our children and those who come after them. Getting it right – whether through aquaculture, offshore energy, green shipping or ecotourism – is vital not just for SDG14, but for the future of the global commons, and for humankind itself. To do this we must move with purposeful steps. Here are five that could be taken immediately.

Curtail subsidies

Let us stop throwing good money after bad, and resolve to prohibit subsidies that support harmful and illegal fishing. A critical opportunity to eliminate them is looming at the 2019 ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation. It must not be missed.

Read more

Researchers at MIT and Israel’s Technion have a multi-layered surface material that will help solar cells turn more sunlight into energy. In addition to more efficient solar cells, the new innovation opens the door for more powerful and sophisticated semiconductors, LEDs and more.

Read more

Microsoft is leveraging technology from submarines and working with pioneers in marine energy for the second phase of its moonshot to develop self-sufficient underwater datacenters that can deliver lightning-quick cloud services to coastal cities. An experimental, shipping-container-size prototype is processing workloads on the seafloor near Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Microsoft announced today.

The deployment of the Northern Isles datacenter at the European Marine Energy Centre marks a milestone in Microsoft’s Project Natick, a years-long research effort to investigate manufacturing and operating environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate lights out on the seafloor for years.

“That is kind of a crazy set of demands to make,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and Research, who leads the New Experiences and Technologies, or NExT, group. “Natick is trying to get there.”

Read more