> Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington, D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep ties to power players in conservative politics. > Ralston tapped conservative insiders to help set up and run Citizens for Responsible Solar. She also consulted with a longtime activist against renewable energy who once defended former President Donald Trump's unfounded claim that noise from wind turbines can cause cancer. And when Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies. It's unclear what the money to Ralston's firm was used for. Ralston has previously denied that Citizens for Responsible Solar received money from fossil fuel interests. > Ralston said in an email to NPR and Floodlight that Citizens for Responsible Solar is a grassroots organization that helps other activists on a volunteer basis. The group isn't opposed to solar, Ralston said, just projects built on farmland and timberland. Solar panels belong on "industrial-zoned land, marginal or contaminated land, along highways, and on commercial and residential rooftops," she said. >But her group's rhetoric points to a broader agenda of undermining public support for solar. Analysts who follow the industry say Citizens for Responsible Solar stokes opposition to solar projects by spreading misinformation online about health and environmental risks. The group's website says solar requires too much land for "unreliable energy," ignoring data showing power grids can run dependably on lots of renewables. And it claims large solar projects in rural areas wreck the land and contribute to climate change, despite evidence to the contrary.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/258267 > > On 15 February 2023, the researchers reached a new milestone: for the first time, they were able to achieve an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules in this device. This was 17 times higher than the best value achieved before the conversion (75 megajoules). The energy turnover results from the coupled heating power multiplied by the duration of the discharge. Only if it is possible to couple large amounts of energy continuously into the plasma and also remove the resulting heat, a power plant operation is possible. > > > The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds. This is also a new record for Wendelstein 7-X and one of the best values worldwide. Before the completion works, Wendelstein 7-X achieved maximum plasma times of 100 seconds at much lower heating power. > > > Within a few years, the plan is to increase the energy turnover at Wendelstein 7-X to 18 gigajoules, with the plasma then being kept stable for half an hour.

lithium is a trouble for many communities all over the world besides the nickel mining which is in the most hateful wars happening nowadays. what do you think about lithium as a resource?

Analysis shows the utility has raised bills $26 annually over the last 11 years.

https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/ Low on actual info, but I guess the wings create some sort of negative pressure that drives the small turbine at the bottom.

A conventional ship with an easily deployable and retractable kite sail system burns less fuel than one without it. It's a type of hybrid vehicle, that has two propulsion methods, the main reliable one, and the supplementary one, for fuel efficiency. With the system installed and the kite in use, the ship saves an estimated 15% of fuel. However: >"There's a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don't pay for the fuel – that's the charterer's duty. The charterer on the other side doesn't charter the ship for long enough a period to make installing low-carbon, but potentially expensive, untested technologies pay back." The lack of carbon emissions regulations for shipping and low fuel prices have added to these difficulties. The shipping industry is responsible for around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is about 2.5% of the world's total CO2 emissions. A company behind these (SkySails GmbH), while technically successful at cutting shipping costs and carbon emissions, has faced economic difficulties. Since then, the company (reborn as SkySails Group GmbH) has switched to land-based airborne wind energy systems for electricity production from high-altitude winds. What do you think? Yay or nay? Is this technology dead in the water? Not worth the effort? Will we see ships like these in the near or distant future? What needs to change? Some good reads: http://www.vos.noaa.gov/MWL/apr_09/skysails.shtml https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/lets-go-fly-a-kite-skysails-and-climate-change/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiPSy2bKZkE

Some key points: - nuclear causes fewer deaths, both animal and human alike - nuclear takes up far less space, and therefore destroys far less of the environment compared to solar farms, hydro, or wind farms - nuclear is stable and not an intermittent source, no issues with grid storage, unlike renewables, which currently solve this with fossil peaker plants - nuclear is hard to turn off so to meet fluctuating demand solely on it, you'd need an excess of nuclear, which is a waste - nuclear excess could encourage other use of electricity, such as electric heating or transport, however - nuclear when it does go bad, goes really bad, mostly in that a large area has to be abandoned for a long long time (historically still fewer deaths than renewables per unit of energy produced tho) - nuclear can cause the proliferation of nuclear weapons - nuclear is a lot harder to spin up, requires extensive education and is hard and takes a long time to build a plant, compared to renewables - all that nuclear waste and no plan other than shove it in somewhere, in a mountain, and keep it secret, keep it safe. Yay or Nay? What say you?

Perovskite structures are notorious for breaking down very rapidly in real-world use. Now a research team from Princeton University has developed a process for overcoming that problem, making perovskite a **real competitor to existing silicon PV technology.**