This Week in CleanTech has a weekly podcast covering 15 minutes or more of the most impactful clean energy and climate stories, featuring Paul Jerk. Factor this And Mike Casey of TigerCum.
This week’s episode features special guest Ivan Halper The Washington Postwho wrote about how the global economy is accelerating renewable growth, led by China and India. How does the United States fare in the worldwide race to power the future?
This week’s “Cleaner of the Week” is Ryan Wang, former CEO of Reddit and CEO of TerraFormation. Terraformation just rolled out its latest product, a subscription-based model where individuals can fund deforestation for the monthly cost of a streaming service.
Farmers across America have different opinions about how we should use America’s farmland for solar energy. Some want panels on their land for financial gain, others want to preserve their land or maintain family traditions. Some farmers are open to having solar panels on their land if they can still grow crops or raise livestock under the infrastructure.
For example, Enel North America last year announced a partnership with the Texas Solar Sheep Company to deploy more than 6,000 sheep at eight solar projects in Texas in the largest solar grazing agreement ever. The total Anil Solar herd now stands at 13,000.
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In California, megabatteries store excess power from renewable sources and dispatch when demand peaks. In August 2020, a heat wave pushed the state’s grid to its limits and triggered a rolling blackout over two days, cutting power to more than 800,000 homes for two and a half hours, raising serious questions about reliance on intermittent renewable energy. But development of the megabattery began to accelerate. California’s battery storage capacity more than triples to 13GW of electricity, with an additional 8.6GW planned by 2027.
A standard 20ft storage unit typically delivers 5-6MWH, which is enough to power around 30,000 UK homes for an hour.
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Esmeralda 7, a collection of seven solar projects in Nevada, was to generate up to 6.2 gigawatts of energy, enough to power 2 million homes. But last week, the BLM quietly “revoked” the project’s status. The Interior Department said the change is part of a change in approach to permitting, not related to a government shutdown, and not a “repeal,” per se.
Developers can still apply for approval through individual project proposals, but the environmental review process is slow, and each project can be rejected later. The project was being moved through the permitting process under Biden, but some conservation groups and residents argued that the rows would affect critical desert wildlife habitat.
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Base Power, a two-year-old power company based in Texas, is leasing giant batteries to homeowners that it can use for extra energy as needed. Its software fills batteries when electricity is cheap and draws from them when prices rise, taking advantage of the difference and passing some of the savings back to consumers.
Since launch, BasePower has sold more than 100 megawatts of battery capacity, enough to power 33,000 American homes for one hour. A major factor in Base Power’s growth is Texas’ decentralized energy market, which allows consumers to choose their electricity providers. The company also recently qualified for a state program that allows battery fleets to combine their power and feed it back into the grid.
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While the Trump administration works to phase out fossil fuels and roll back clean energy support, the global economy is accelerating renewable growth led by China and India. While other countries are rapidly adopting solar, wind and EVs because they are cheaper and more reliable, China has dominated clean-tech manufacturing. The U.S. policy reversal has hampered investment and threatens to derail the country economically, while global forecasts show renewables outpacing energy demand, diminishing the role of fossil fuels.
Read here.
