The Weekly Anthropocene, April 10 2024
Elephants and trains in India, a self-recharging solar drone, captive-breeding zebra sharks, the hyenas of Harar, America's green bank and grid-scale battery boom, and more!
India
As India develops, it’s rapidly building out a subcontinent-spanning (and increasingly electrified!) passenger rail system. And years of conservation work have led to an increasing population of Asian elephants in India, with their numbers rising from around 16,000 in 1980 to around 27,000 in 2017. These two good things have led to a new problem in recent years: an increase in elephant/train collisions, often deadly.
Fortunately, there’s a lot of amazing work being done to help elephants and trains share the landscape. In Uttar Pradesh, the Mathura elephant hospital has begun to rehabilitate an injured elephant survivor of a train collision. And more proactive solutions are being developed; the state of Tamil Nadu has already installed an AI-powered sensor network to alert trains when elephants approach the tracks, and West Bengal is deploying early-warning sirens and has built at least one elephant overpass. Fascinating new forms of coexistence are evolving!
A team of researchers from Mumbai’s Thackeray Wildlife Foundation have discovered two new species of geckos in the Cnemapsis genus on an expedition to southern India’s Western Ghats mountain range. One of the new species, Cnemapsis vangoghi, was dubbed the “Van Gogh’s starry dwarf gecko” as its coloration brought to mind the artist’s renowned Starry Night painting. The new gecko is just 1.5 inches long, and is an example of “micro-endemism,” being native to a very small area. The team hopes to discover up to 50 new species in the biologically rich region as their expeditions continue. A fascinating addition to Earth’s magnificent treasures of biodiversity!
India’s total cumulative installed solar capacity amounted to over 75 gigawatts (i.e. over 75,000 MW) as of February 2024. Much, much more is on the way!
United Kingdom
British researchers have published a new study detailing their invention of the Micro Solarcopter, the world’s smallest-ever solar-powered multi-rotor drone. It weighs just 0.071 kilograms and measures 150 centimeters on each side, but carries solar panels, lithium batteries, and a video camera. With its tiny ultra-light battery, it can fly for only 3.5 minutes at a time, but given normal sunlight conditions can recharge itself with solar panels in just 68 minutes. The battery system can also safely hibernate for up to 40 days, allowing the drone’s electronics to survive prolonged rain or cloud conditions.
The potential for wildlife monitoring alone is astounding: imagine a fleet of camera drones that can just be left out there, moving around in short hops every few hours and recharging themselves! Solar plus batteries plus robotics is creating an extraordinary future.
“The advantage…is that the Micro Solarcopter can land, hibernate and independently recharge its battery without having to return to a home base.”
-Abidali et al. 2024
Laos
In the landlocked Southeast Asian nation of Laos, the Wildlife Conservation Society has been working for years with the “head-starting” conservation technique to protect the critically endangered Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis). With head-starting, young crocodiles are collected from wild nests, raised in captivity until they’re large enough to fend off most predators, then reintroduced, an approach which has successfully reduced mortality rates from about 90% to 5%.
Now, a new study has chronicled the first recorded instance where one of the headstarted-and-reintroduced Siamese crocodiles has grown to adulthood, nested, and produced her own hatchlings. Her nest was found in 2022 in the Greater Xe Champhone Wetland Complex, and a camera trap revealed that she successfully defended it from dogs. The two hatchling crocodiles from this nesting are now being head-started themselves! Another great example of the emergent “Anthropocene school” of proactive and compassionate conservation.
Indonesia
As part of the global ReShark coalition, the Shark Reef Aquarium in Las Vegas is captive-breeding endangered zebra sharks (Stegostoma tigrinum) and shipping the eggs around the world to a hatchery in the Raja Ampat archipelago of Indonesia. This is the first-ever large scale shark rewilding project, and it’s going well so far! Raja Ampat is estimated to have only 20 wild zebra sharks left, but the rewilding project plans to release 500 new zebra sharks within 10 years of the project’s start date in 2022.
It’s a good candidate to become a stronghold for the species; all of Raja Ampat is a designated shark sanctuary, and the lush archipelago is also home to a network of nine more strictly regulated marine protected areas that have already encouraged the return of manta rays. Spectacular work!
Ethiopia
Hyenas have a terrible reputation across most of Africa (and due to The Lion King, in much of the rest of the world as well). As discussed in our recent interview with hyena biologist Dr. Christine Wilkinson, the smart, social, matriarchal predators are undeservedly associated with corruption, deviance, and witchcraft. But in one part of Ethiopia, they’ve forged a longstanding partnership with the local people. Many inhabitants of the walled city of Harar believe that their hyenas are messengers to dead saints and can scare away (or just eat) evil djinn. Legend holds that a local saint made a pact with hyenas to stop eating people in centuries past, and the hyenas are offered porridge at shrines during the annual Ashura festival. The city even has “hyena doors” built into the walls to let the animals enter at night and clean up edible garbage on the streets of the old town, and some “hyena men” charge tourists to watch them feed the hyenas. Feeding wild animals is often a bad idea, but the hyenas and humans of Harar seem to have found an equilibrium that’s worked for hundreds of years. The Ethiopian government is now hoping to build a hyena-themed “eco-park” to capitalize on this extraordinary cultural-ecological link.
United States
Much of the United States experienced a rare total solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024. This writer was fortunate enough to view the magnificent event from a site in Maine near the Bingham Wind Farm, within the path of totality. In Texas, grid-scale batteries helped smoothly compensate for the brief dip in solar power production.
The Biden Administration has announced $20 billion in grants awarded through the Inflation Reduction Act-created Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is essentially a national “green bank” supporting community renewables revolution projects across America. Grant recipients consist of several community finance groups (including Appalachian Community Capital, Power Forward Communities, Opportunity Finance Network, and more) who will fund a wide array of small-scale projects such as supporting homeowners’ installation of heat pumps and the creation of community solar farms. Notably, 70% of GGRF green bank funds (so $14 billion of these grants!) is reserved for historically disadvantaged communities, such as victims of redlining. More incredible progress from a transformative presidency!
America’s total cumulative battery storage capacity doubled from 2021 to 2022. Then it doubled again from 2022 to 2023. Now, it’s set to nearly double for a third year in a row from 2023 to 2024, as the grid-scale battery boom continues to reach new heights! The EIA predicts that a titanic 14 gigawatts (14,000 MW) of new battery storage capacity will be built in the USA in 2024, reaching a new cumulative total of 31.1 GW by year’s end. Prices for batteries have hit record lows and Inflation Reduction Act tax credits provide new federal support; it’s never been a better moment to build batteries. Spectacular!
And here’s an example of what this looks like on the ground: in the inland town of Menifee, California, developer Calpine is replacing a disused natural gas plant with the Nova power bank, a massive 680-megawatt grid-scale battery project. When complete in summer 2024, it will become the second-largest in America, storing enough juice to power 680,000 California homes for four homes! Modern super-batteries have just solved the intermittency problem; many people don’t realize this yet, but utilities and energy developers really, really do!
An interesting carbon capture experiment is set to take place at a U.S. Steel blast furnace in Gary, Indiana. The plan, from startup CarbonFree, is to combine carbon extracted from furnace emissions with calcium extracted from steel slag by-products to “mineralize” and produce calcium carbonate, a widely used industrial input. It’ll take a while to see if this pans out, but this holds fascinating potential as a rare money-making carbon capture process!
America’s first fully-electric battery-powered tugboat, the eWolf, has docked at the Port of San Diego (its new workplace!), after traversing the Panama Canal from its shipyard of origin in Alabama. The great electrification of everything keeps on keepin’ on!
A new study has found that leatherback sea turtles are following jellyfish, their favored food, further north along the U.S. East Coast, with a major new leatherbacks-eating-jellyfish hotspot emerging off the coast of Massachusetts’ Nantucket island.
In March 2024 on the independent “ERCOT” grid of Texas, solar power generated more electricity than coal power for the first time! Coal also generated just 9% of Texas’ electricity, falling below 10% for the first time ever. More great news for progress on air pollution and climate change.
Love all this good news!! Thank you, Sam.
Lots of good stuff here! Referring back to an earlier conversation, I learned why the EIA counts battery storage as generation, separate from other sources like wind and solar. I had been thinking this was double counting. It’s because it can provide energy at peak when all other sources are also producing. It’s not just backup, which is how I was thinking of it.