Enlarge / Mining operations start right at the edge of Bulqizë, Albania. (credit: Wikimedia Commons )

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.

Greenish energy source

Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.

Enlarge / NREL has taken some of the hassle out of getting permits for projects like these. (credit: owngarden )

Can government agencies develop software to help cut bureaucratic red tape through automation? The answer is “yes,” according to the promising results achieved by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which has saved thousands of hours of labor for local governments by creating a tool called SolarAPP+ (Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus) for residential solar permits.

“We estimate that automatic SolarAPP+ permitting saved around 9,900 hours of… staff time in 2022,” NREL staff wrote in the report, “ SolarAPP+ Performance Review (2022 Data) . “Based on median timelines, a typical SolarAPP+ project is permitted and inspected 13 business days sooner than traditional projects… SolarAPP+ has eliminated over 134,000 days in permitting-related delays.”

SolarAPP+ automates over 100 compliance checks in the permitting process that are usually the responsibility of city, county, or town employees, according to Jeff Cook, SolarAPP+ program lead at NREL and first author of the report. It can be more accurate, thorough, and efficient than a time-pressured local government employee would be.

Enlarge (credit: FHM/Getty Images )

Various forms of heat pumps—refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters—are estimated to consume about 30 percent of the world's electricity. And that number is almost certain to rise, as heat pumps play a very large role in efforts to electrify heating to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Most existing versions of these systems rely on the compression of a class of chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, gasses that were chosen because they have a far smaller impact on the ozone layer than earlier refrigerants. Unfortunately, they are also extremely potent greenhouse gasses, with a short-term impact several thousand times that of carbon dioxide.

Alternate technologies have been tested, but all of them have at least one major drawback in comparison to gas compression. In a paper released in today's issue of Science, however, researchers describe progress on a form of heat pump that is built around a capacitor that changes temperature as it's charged and discharged. Because the energy spent while charging it can be used on discharge, the system has the potential to be highly efficient.

Enlarge (credit: Yaorusheng )

Humanity is on the cusp of radical changes in how we produce and consume energy, according to a new evaluation by the International Energy Agency. And that leaves us in a place where small changes can produce huge differences in the energy economy by the end of the decade—even a slight drop in China's economic growth, for example, could cut coal use by an amount similar to what Europe currently consumes.

Amidst the flux, governments are struggling to set policies that either meet our needs or reflect the changing reality. By 2030, the IEA expects that we'll have the capacity to manufacture more than double the solar panels needed to meet current policy goals. And those goals will leave us falling well short of keeping warming below 2° C.

In flux

The IEA's analysis focuses on two different scenarios. One of them, which it terms STEPS, limits the analysis to the policies that governments have already committed to. Those are sufficient to have energy-driven emissions peak in the middle of this decade—meaning within the next few years. But they stay above net zero for long enough to commit us to 2.4° C warming, a level that climate scientists indicate will lead to severe consequences.

Enlarge (credit: wera Rodsawang )

A decade ago, our present renewable energy situation was unimaginable. Most projections had wind and solar as niche players on the electric grid due to their relatively high cost. In the US, the reality is anything but. Combined, wind and solar have now passed coal; throw in hydro, and they've passed nuclear, too. In most areas of the country, they're now far and away the cheapest means to generate electricity; the same holds true for most locations around the world.

Despite the changed economics, most countries have fallen behind on their climate pledges, and fossil fuels aren't being pushed off the grid fast enough to get us back on track. While the entire globe is suffering the consequences of climate change, the factors that are keeping renewables from reaching their full potential vary from country to country. What should we be doing to get past these roadblocks?

Today, I'll be at the United Nations with the chance to get some answers to that question. The UN, as part of its General Assembly meeting, is hosting a series of events called Climate Week, which includes a Sustainable Development Goals Summit. Associated with that will be a series of talks and panels on relevant topics. I'll be hosting one called "Clean Energy Trends to Power the World" that will happen at 2:25 pm Eastern Time.

Enlarge / Natural gas plants like these may find themselves burning hydrogen over the next 20 years. (credit: Ron and Patty Thomas )

Today, the Biden administration formally announced its planned rules for limiting carbon emissions from the electrical grid. The rules will largely take effect in the 2030s and apply to gas- and coal-fired generating plants. Should the new plan go into effect, the operators of those plants will either need to capture carbon or replace a large fraction of their fuel with hydrogen. The rules will likely hasten coal's disappearance from the US grid and start pushing natural gas turbines to a supplemental source of power.

Whether they go into effect will largely depend on legal maneuvering and the results of future elections. But first, the rules themselves.

Clearing the air

Back in 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act applied to greenhouse gas emissions . This allows the EPA to set state-level standards to limit the release of greenhouse gasses, with the states given some leeway on how they reach those standards. Since then, the court has clarified that these standards must be met on a per-plant basis rather than at the grid level; the EPA can't set rules that assume that the grid has more generation from solar and less from coal plants.

Enlarge / A German nuclear power plant, which is currently partially closed. (credit: Getty Images )

In 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to shut down all of its nuclear power. The process was supposed to have ended last year, but it has been extended in response to energy uncertainties caused by the war in Ukraine. As a result, even though renewable generation in Germany continues to climb, the country's carbon emissions have only trended down slowly.

While there's no indication that the US will follow Germany down this path—the Biden administration is actively subsidizing nuclear plants to keep them open—the economics of nuclear power have led to a number of plant shutdowns. It's currently the second-most expensive major source of power, just ahead of offshore wind, with the costs of wind continuing to drop. So there's a significant chance that nuclear's contribution to the US grid will shrink.

A new analysis shows that a drop in nuclear power on the current US grid will mean enough additional pollution to cause over 5,000 deaths each year, and the burden of those deaths will fall disproportionately on Black Americans. But on a future grid where renewables are present at sufficient levels to offset the loss of nuclear, almost all of these additional deaths can be avoided.

Enlarge / Aerial view/solar panel floating in the dam. (credit: SONGPHOL THESAKIT )

The cost of solar power has dropped dramatically over the past decade, making it the cheapest source of electricity in much of the world. Clearly, that can mean cheaper power. But it also means that we can potentially install panels in places that would otherwise be too expensive and still produce power profitably.

One of the more intriguing options is to place the panels above artificial bodies of water, either floating or suspended on cables. While more expensive than land-based installs, this creates a win-win : the panels limit the evaporation of water, and the water cools the panels, allowing them to operate more efficiently in warm climates.

While the potential of floating solar has been examined in a number of places, a group of researchers has now done a global analysis and find that it's huge. Even if we limit installs to a fraction of the surface of existing reservoirs, floating panels could generate nearly 10,000 TeraWatt-hours per year, while keeping over 100 cubic kilometers of water from evaporating.

Enlarge / Each of those white structures contains lots of batteries that were built for cars. (credit: B2U)

Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced that it had started operations at a 25 Megawatt-hour battery facility in California. On its own, that isn't really news, as California is adding a lot of battery power . But in this case, the source of the batteries was unusual: Many of them had spent an earlier life powering electric vehicles.

The idea of repurposing electric vehicle batteries has been around for a while. To work in a car, the batteries need to be able to meet certain standards in terms of capacity and rate of discharge, but that performance declines with use. Even after a battery no longer meets the needs of a car, however, it can still store enough energy to be useful on the electric grid. So it was suggested that grid storage might be an intermediate destination between vehicles and recycling.

But there are some significant technical and economic challenges to implementing the idea. So we talked with B2U's CEO, Freeman Hall, to find out why the company decided it was the right time to put the concept into action.