Tag • #energy

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Ecuador’s president won’t give up on oil drilling in the Amazon. We plan to stop him – again | Nemonte Nenquimo

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 16 June - 13:06 · 1 minute

This forest is our home, our existence and our children’s future. Politicians who can’t resist selling it for oil cash will feel the strength of the Waorani people

In 2019 I helped lead a movement that defeated the Ecuadorian government’s plans to auction half a million acres of Waorani territory in the Amazon to oil companies. We showed in court that the government had violated its legal obligation to obtain free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous communities. We won a moral and legal victory on behalf of our ancestral home in that moment – or so we thought. Now, however, Ecuador’s president plans to plough through that legal judgment and recommence oil drilling on nearby Indigenous lands. He obviously hasn’t reckoned with the strength and tenacity of the Waorani people.

In winning that landmark legal case, we protected pristine rainforest lands, Indigenous autonomy and our planet’s climate from further deforestation. We protected our homes, our children’s future and the forests where I grew up playing with my siblings and pet monkeys, learning to garden and make fresh chicha, and where my people still live today. No more destroying our lives, homes and forests to pump the blood of our ancestors from beneath the soil.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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Will I need to spend a lot insulating my home to get a heat pump?

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 13 June - 14:15

Many people fear the UK’s draughty old properties are too great a challenge for the technology

Heat pumps could be the single largest step a household can take to reduce their carbon emissions while saving money on their bills. But many in Britain fear that, even though millions of homes across Europe have benefited from the shift away from gas or oil boilers, the UK’s draughty old homes could prove too great a challenge for the technology.

The concern is unsurprising given that the UK has some of the least energy efficient homes in Europe. A study by the smart home company tado° monitored 80,000 users across Europe to find how quickly properties lose heat when outdoor temperatures fall to zero. It found that UK homes lost on average 3C after five hours without heating, compared with just 1C in Germany and 0.9C in Norway.

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Ugandan oil pipeline protester allegedly beaten as part of ‘alarming crackdown’

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 12 June - 13:02

Stephen Kwikiriza is one of 11 campaigners against EACOP targeted by authorities in past two weeks, rights group says

A man campaigning against the controversial $5bn (£4bn) east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) is recovering in hospital after an alleged beating by the Ugandan armed forces in the latest incident in what has been called an “ alarming crackdown ” on the country’s environmentalists.

Stephen Kwikiriza, who works for Uganda’s Environment Governance Institute (EGI), a non-profit organisation, was abducted in Kampala on 4 June, according to his employer. He was beaten, questioned and then abandoned hundreds of miles from the capital on Sunday evening.

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Salt, air and bricks: could this be the future of energy storage?

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 1 April, 2024 - 07:00

Start-ups turn to heat over batteries as they aim to industrialise the practice

Think of battery ingredients and lithium, cadmium and nickel come to mind. Now think again. What about salt, air, bricks, and hand-warmer gel? In our electricity-hungry future they’re set to provide heat to manufacturers who need it, and to help keep the lights on at times when energy is short.

Energy storage has a dual purpose: it plugs gaps when the wind drops or the sun stops shining, and it allows users to buy cheap off-peak power and use it when they need it.

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Surge of new oil and gas activity threatens to wreck Paris climate goals

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March, 2024 - 06:00

World’s fossil-fuel producers on track to nearly quadruple output from newly approved projects by decade’s end, report finds

The world’s fossil-fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted oil and gas from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way in a surge of activity that threatens to blow apart agreed climate goals, a new report has found.

There can be no new oil and gas infrastructure if the planet is to avoid careering past 1.5C (2.7F) of global heating, above pre-industrial times, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has previously stated . Breaching this warming threshold, agreed to by governments in the Paris climate agreement, will see ever worsening effects such as heatwaves, floods, drought and more, scientists have warned.

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Sellafield’s head of information security to step down

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March, 2024 - 16:21

Richard Meal is second senior leader to depart following Guardian investigation into failings at UK nuclear waste site

A former Royal Air Force officer who has led Sellafield’s information security for more than a decade is to leave the vast nuclear waste site in north-west England, it can be revealed.

Richard Meal, who is chief information security officer at the Cumbrian site, is to leave later this year.

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Perovskite + silicon solar panels hit efficiencies of over 30%

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 7 July, 2023 - 17:58 · 1 minute

Images of rows of solar panels in a grassy area.

Enlarge (credit: audioundwerbung )

In most industrialized countries, solar panels account for only a quarter to a third of the overall cost of building a solar farm. All the other expenses—additional hardware, financing, installation, permitting, etc—make up the bulk of the cost. To make the most of all these other costs, it makes sense to pay a bit more to install efficient panels that convert more of the incoming light into electricity.

Unfortunately, the cutting edge of silicon panels is already at about 25 percent efficiency, and there's no way to push the material past 29 percent. And there's an immense jump in price between those and the sorts of specialized, hyper-efficient photovoltaic hardware we use in space.

Those pricey panels have three layers of photovoltaic materials, each tuned to a different wavelength of light. So to hit something in between on the cost/efficiency scale, it makes sense to develop a two-layer device. This week saw some progress in that regard, with two separate reports of two-layer perovskite/silicon solar cells with efficiencies of well above 30 percent. Right now, they don't last long enough to be useful, but they may point the way toward developing better materials.

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Gulf states’ inactive, uncapped oil and gas wells a $30 billion liability

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 8 May, 2023 - 22:03

Enlarge (credit: Tad Denson )

Oil and gas producers in the US are required by law to seal and cap their wells once they're finished producing. But a new survey of wells along the Gulf of Mexico coast indicates that there are 14,000 wells that aren't producing, are unlikely to be brought back into service, and are uncapped.

The bad news is that the estimated cost of capping them all would run into the area of $30 billion dollars. The good news is that, in most cases, one of the major oil companies will be responsible for these costs.

Put a cork in it

The basic risk of uncapped wells is that material doesn't necessarily stop coming out of them when the equipment the well was connected to is switched off and removed. One obvious potential problem is continued seepage of hydrocarbons. Light material like methane and simple hydrocarbons typically ends up being digested by microbial life, which converts it to carbon dioxide that will typically find its way to the atmosphere. More complicated molecules will be insoluble and remain behind as contamination.

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Nuclear Waste Borehole Demonstration Center started

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 17 March, 2023 - 17:44 · 1 minute

A diagram of what a waste borehole might look like, with various additional objects included for scale.

Enlarge / An artist’s impression of a deep borehole for nuclear waste disposal by Sandia National Laboratories in 2012. Red lines show the depth of mined repositories: Onkalo is the Finnish one, and WIPP is the US DOE repository for defense waste in New Mexico. (credit: Sandia National Laboratories)

Deep Isolation , a company founded in 2016 and headquartered in California, launched a “ Deep Borehole Demonstration Center ” on February 27. It aims to show that disposal of nuclear waste in deep boreholes is a safe and practical alternative to the mined tunnels that make up most of today’s designs for nuclear waste repositories.

But while the launch named initial board members and published a high-level plan, the startup doesn’t yet have a permanent location, nor does it have the funds secured to complete its planned drilling and testing program.

Although the idea to use deep boreholes for nuclear waste disposal isn’t new , nobody has yet demonstrated it works. The Deep Borehole Demonstration Center aims to be an end-to-end demonstration at full scale, testing everything: safe handling of waste canisters at the surface, disposal, possible retrieval, and eventual permanent sealing deep underground. It will also rehearse techniques for ensuring that eventual underground leaks will not contaminate the surface environment, even many millennia after disposal.

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