Green Energy

When the record was broken, solar was serving about 22% of load. A new record for solar energy generation in ERCOT was also set.

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From January through July of this year, wind and solar in the U.S. generated more net electricity than power from coal, according to recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

According to the EIA’s Monthly Energy Review for July 2024, electricity net generation from renewable energy outpaced coal for the first seven months of the year so far, a first for the U.S.

Further, wind energy generation alone beat coal energy generation in two consecutive months: March and April. As CleanTechnica reported, wind energy installations produced 45.9 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in March and a record high 47.7 GWh in April, compared to the 38.4 GWh in March and 37.2 GWh in April generated by coal-fired power plants.

A solar well went into operation a few days ago in Dêrik in Northern and Eastern Syria. The well in the Şehid Xebat district is a central component of the district's water supply after the infrastructure in large parts of the region was destroyed by air strikes by the Turkish military. The project, funded by the Berlin State Office for Development Cooperation (LEZ), was implemented by the Berlin twin town partnership Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg – Dêrik together with the city administration in Dêrik and the "Make Rojava Green Again" initiative.

Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have discovered a new method to increase the efficiency of solar cells by a factor of 1,000. The team of scientists achieved this breakthrough by creating crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which were alternately placed on top of one another in a lattice structure.

Their findings, which could revolutionize the solar energy industry, were recently published in the journal Science Advances.

"Even under the most unfavourable assumptions, we did not find a significant increase in noise levels from multiple heat pumps. The cumulative noise impact of multiple ASHP installations in a high-density neighbourhood would not typically be distinguishable from that of a nearby single air source heat pump installed within MCS guidelines."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/25985192

This isn't yet a viable technology, even in the lab, but I thought it was interesting enough to share, and definitely screams solarpunk if it became viable in the future after much more research and development.