The Weekly Anthropocene, February 28 2024
New U.S. grid capacity in 2024 is 96% clean energy, fin whales in New York Bight, solar build-out in India, an Indigenous-led battery factory in Canada, deep-sea marvels off Chile, & more!
United States of America
The U.S. Energy Information Administration issued its annual update on the new electricity-generating projects set to come online in America this year, and it’s a show-stopper. Solar and batteries together, the exponentially growing workhorses of the renewables revolution, account for a whopping 81% of new capacity coming online in 2024. Wind accounts for another 13%. Nuclear another 2%. Natural gas, the only fossil fuel on the list1, accounts for just 4%!
That’s such an amazing stat that it really deserves a bit more emphasis. NINETY-SIX PERCENT OF NEW ELECTRICITY-GENERATING CAPACITY COMING ONLINE IN THE U.S.A. IN 2024 WILL BE CLEAN ENERGY! That is freaking spectacular. At this point, it’s only a matter of time before renewables completely replace fossil fuels in providing America’s electricity. A really important matter of time, to be clear, a matter of time where speeding it up or slowing it down by a few years makes a massive lives-changing difference in terms of air pollution deaths and contribution to climate change. But the direction of change is now more than clear, and it’s hard to judge this colossal transition as anything other than inevitable. Now we need to make it happen as fast as we can.
Here are some more updates from America’s ongoing clean energy Biden Boom!
Texas overtook California in installed solar in 2023, and now is on course to overtake California in installed grid-scale batteries by 2025! And California’s still building solar and batteries; Texas is just moving forward even faster.
U.S. power sector emissions fell by 8% in 2023! Total emissions from across the American economy fell 1.9% in 2023, while the economy grew by 2.4%!
A new survey finds that while renewable energy is growing fast in the United States in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, community opposition to new projects is one of the major factors slowing down deployment2 and preventing the clean energy transition from advancing even faster at its full potential.
Wyoming will soon be getting its first agrivoltaics project, with sheep grazing under shade-providing solar panels!
South Carolina is becoming a major EV manufacturing hub region thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s long been known that humpback whales have returned to New York Harbor, lured by abundant supplies of menhaden fish amidst lower water pollution. Now, new research has found that just a bit further offshore, rapidly recovering fin whales (formerly one of the species most devastated by the industrialized whaling of the 1900s) are thriving year-round in the New York Bight waters off New York and New Jersey. Researchers’ passive acoustic monitoring buoys detected fin whale song in every month of the year, likely indicating that the fin whales both forage and breed in the area, off the coast of one of humanity’s great cities. Yet another step in the epic global cetacean renaissance—long may it continue! Great news.
“While they may not be seen as close to shore as other whales and dolphins, it is truly remarkable that the second largest animal to have ever lived on this earth is here in the New York Bight year-round off our coasts.”
-Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, Wildlife Conservation Society
Ski resorts in Vermont are using new, cheaper, more efficient snow-making equipment to stay open through warmer winters, while using less water and electricity than traditional “snow guns.”
An African-American community group in Chicago is using Inflation Reduction Act funding to set up a neighborhood-level geothermal heating system shared across four city blocks.
A landmark new study found that substantial reforestation in the eastern United States during the 20th century has resulted in a considerable local cooling effect even as the planet warms. The researchers calculated that eastern U.S. forests cool the land surface by 1–2°C compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with a cooling effect as strong as 2–5°C during summer at midday. The major way trees cool the surrounding area is through transpiration, water vapor emitted from their leaves in a way akin to human sweating. The shade also helps!
Tree-planting has come under deserved criticism lately as a questionable way to reduce or draw down carbon emissions (trees can burn down or fall victim to plagues, selling carbon credits based on them has so far been a bad idea), but reforestation is undeniably a spectacular climate adaptation and resilience measure! And it works on an intuitive hyper-local scale, too. From backyards to parks to city streets, reforestation helps communities and ecosystems survive and thrive in the warming Anthropocene.
India
India’s renewables build-out continues to advance by leaps and bounds!
India’s largest-ever grid-scale battery system (100 MW dispatchable capacity!) was just installed in the state of Chhattisgarh.
And the first section of the titanic Khavda renewables park, located in the deserts of Gujarat, was just switched on by mega-developer Adani Group, only 12 months after starting work. That first section alone consists of a whopping 551 MW of solar! When completed in 2029, the entire Khavda project is projected to have 30 GW (30,000 MW) of renewables capacity (enough for 16.1 million homes), making it the largest renewable energy installation in the world.
Spectacular work!
On a completely different note, conservationists drew on local community knowledge to describe for science India’s first-ever breeding population and nesting site of the critically endangered Asian giant softshell turtle, on the banks of the Chandragiri River in the southern state of Kerala. These fascinating reptiles may be able to reach 1 meter in length and over 100 kilograms in mass, and only need to surface twice a day to breathe. They’ve lost much of their range across South and Southeast Asia (to the point where they were feared extinct in the 2000s before a rediscovery in Cambodia), so this new stronghold is precious.
After the euphoria of the initial discovery, the research team rescued some of the species’ eggs from nests that had flooded, and are now working on establishing a community hatchery and nursery near the site! Great work.
Canada
On Vancouver Island, the Malahat First Nation have partnered with Energy Plug Technologies to build a 100,000 square foot lithium-iron-phosphate battery gigafactory. (The Malahat First Nation has already recently built a skywalk and is building a film studio). The indigenous nation will retain a 51% ownership stake in the final project, which plans to produce 100 MW of battery packs by the end of its first year, and scale up to 1,000 MW annually by its fifth year. Another awesome example of indigenous-led clean energy development!
“Hopefully it becomes a model that can be replicated in other First Nations across B.C. and across Canada.”
-Tristan Gale, Malahat First Nation
Albania
Readers of this newsletter have already heard about the emerging potential of white hydrogen, naturally occurring hydrogen deposits that can be drilled and burned to produce carbon emissions-free electricity. Now, hot on the heels of the white hydrogen deposit discovered in France, a new one has been identified in Albania, after an explosions problem at a chromium mine was found to be because they had unknowingly drilled into a “nearly pure” natural hydrogen reservoir. A potential future income source for the small Balkan country? Hopefully!
Switzerland
Switzerland has formally requested that the United Nations explore the possibility of the solar radiation management (SRM) method of geoengineering, a proposed anti-global warming measure that would seed sulfur dioxide particles in the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The Swiss proposal advocates for the formation of a UN expert group to gather information on current solar geoengineering research and create an advisory panel to suggest future options. This is a commonsense step to understand what options we have and gain more understanding of SRM’s potential risks and benefits; here’s hoping it goes forward!
Chile
An international expedition used an underwater robot to discover over 100 possible new species living on ten seamounts in the Nazca and Salas y Gómez ridges off the coast of Chile, including deep-sea corals, glass sponges, sea urchins, squat lobsters, and many more. This life-rich world continues to amaze us!
This is related to why Texas is overtaking California on solar and batteries: now that renewables are a mature and highly economically competitive technology, lower-regulation “easy to build things” states are now taking the lead, as NIMBY interests and a few deeply misguided environmentalists oppose renewables projects in blue states. Come on, progressives: rally behind clean energy!
As usual, a smogasbord of really good news to start our day. Looks like Texas has learned the lessons of their disastrous fling with fossil fuels. On their way to becoming a major exporter of clean energy! From the wonderful revival of the whales to the winsome and charismatic toadfish-a lot of good stuff this week!
Love the whole of this column except this bit that I need to call out. Don’t call us progressives and don’t call anyone deeply misguided. Or: do that and show the world who you are, not who they are. (For an example, birds matter. Situating of turbines matters. Colour of turbine blades matters. Using radar to detect and slow down/stop turbines during bird and bat events, matters. We’ve known this for 10+ years and we still play the same nonsense push-paper/narrative games, to avoid just taking pragmatic actions. Saying “don’t kill birds here” is not deeply misguided!)
Parsing environmentalism into left-right narratives is complete and utter warfare on the planet, and not just the planet, for every topic under the sun: It occurred to me about a decade ago (and as things usually occur to me a decade before everyone else starts head-scratching and thinking “but wait…” and I’m waiting for the shoe to drop) that political branding and marketing is exactly that, political branding and marketing. What folly y’all are practicing to allow it any play in your own lives, and in not holding your political “representative” to account over it. 1) The world is full of actual problems and so should be overwhelmingly focused on the efforts to solve them, not gallery-commentary / hand-waving about them, and 2) your democratically-elected, or even imposed, representative is there to represent you as their constituent, regardless of whether the lot of you agree, and make sure that you are listened to and your concerns conveyed into the process – but their job is to see a line through competing interests and negotiate an acceptable mandate to solve the problem, or at least come up with the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So that means everybody needs to Cut It Out with this nonsense, manufactured “progressive” “conservative” wah wah wah and really try to describe the complexities of issues from all angles. You will need them all to get that BATNA.
Almost all of these political narratives amounts to people running away with group/ running away from their own psychology, with the bottom line, in this budget-built civil society, being the cleverest bodies competing for rents and incentives (and, basically, the last oxygen in the tank). All we see is about 60-80% You/Me problems and 40%-20% Actual Problems, some of which are caused by You/Me problems. With over a century of science and well over a millennia of philosophy about understanding how humans think and behave, anyone who can’t figure out what is a You/Me problem over a Real World problem is part of the problem. Those who aren’t part of that problem, are still part of the problem, if they do not extend the critically important psychological and human-resource skill of Putting the You/Me people to Work on the Real problems to the best of their capacity. This is also the productive juncture at which one can limit the scope of how You/Me people impose You/Me problems onto things they have no business distorting; we’ve all seen and dealt with this during the normal course of business (notwithstanding academia and places where funding is hidden and clients are tractable). Good productive work will take care of that, and after a few years, former You/Me people turn into reasonable Real Problem solvers.
The most able, the most responsible, of us need to attend to what’s coming down the pipe, and to be such an adult, you have to be the most prepared to accept the outside perspective. And you don’t do that if you’re entrenched in your worldview.