July 2, 2022

Weekend Reads: Where the Supreme Court Ruling Leaves the EPA; The Perks of Floating Solar

It's the weekend! Kick back and catch up with these must-read articles from around the web.

EPA Isn’t ‘Knocked Out,’ But Doing Its Job Just Got Much Harder (Bloomberg) The Supreme Court ruling Thursday that curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s flexibility to curb power-plant emissions on a systematic basis is setting the stage for a piecemeal approach to the issue. But the decision didn’t erase the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas pollutants more broadly, nor did it leave it entirely toothless in the fight against climate change. The agency still maintains the ability to regulate emissions from individual power plants, but now must move forward with more caution.

Why Big Tech is pouring money into carbon removal (CNBC) The market for carbon removal is expanding rapidly, and private money is pouring in from tech companies seeking to help early-stage carbon capture and storage startups scale up and bring costs down. The wave of funding comes as reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change double down on the need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air, emphasizing that emissions-reductions efforts alone are not be enough.

Nuclear power is gaining support after years of decline. But old hurdles remain (NPR) At the Nuclear Energy Assembly in Washington, D.C., this June, speaker Maria Korsnick urged the audience of hundreds to picture a world in which nuclear energy is triumphant. "In this clean energy future, hundreds of reactors — from the existing models that we have today to advanced reactors both large and small — dot the landscape," said Korsnick, who's president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association. Such a future would have been harder to even imagine a few years ago.

Floating Solar: The Most Practical Green Technology? (Forbes) Earlier this month, the US Army launched a large floating solar array at Camp Mackall on Fort Bragg in North Carolina— the country’s largest domestic military base. This launch marks a critical moment for floating photovoltaics (FPVs) which have yet to attract mainstream attention in the USA. Two-thirds of the planet’s surface is covered by water, but despite their immense promise, these “floatovoltaics”, FPVs, only make up 2 percent of all domestic solar installations. Floatovoltics have the potential to solve several of the problems plaguing conventional solar energy: exclusive land use, energy distribution, and heat dispersion.

The world’s first CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage is being commercialized [update] (Electrek) Italian startup Energy Dome has now begun to commercialize the world’s first CO2 Battery, which was launched earlier this month in Sardinia, Italy. The battery uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy on the grid, and Energy Dome says the technology can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world. June 28 update: Energy Dome today announced that it has secured $11 million in bridge funding, which will enable it to buy equipment for a 20-megawatt/200-megawatt-hour/10-hour duration facility for Italian utility A2A, with which it has a memorandum of understanding.

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