February 19, 2022

Weekend Reads: Floating Solar Panels Are About to Have Their Moment; EVs Take a Starring Role in Super Bowl Ads

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

Longer, more frequent outages afflict the U.S. power grid as states fail to prepare for climate change (The Washington Post) Every time a storm lashes the Carolina coast, the power lines on Tonye Gray’s street go down, cutting her lights and air conditioning. After Hurricane Florence in 2018, Gray went three days with no way to refrigerate medicine for her multiple sclerosis or pump the floodwater out of her basement. “Florence was hell,” said Gray, 61, a marketing account manager and Wilmington native who finds herself increasingly frustrated by the city’s vulnerability. “We’ve had storms long enough in Wilmington and this particular area that all power lines should have been underground by now. We know we’re going to get hit.”

China Says the Winter Olympics Are Carbon Neutral. They Aren't (Bloomberg) The Beijing Winter Olympics’ claim to “carbon neutrality” is based on junk offsets that do little or nothing to counteract the emissions of the games, making the assertion little more than marketing. “We have a shrinking window of time to substantially rein in our emissions,” said Barbara Haya, research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. Offsets allow all kinds of organizations to “claim to be decarbonizing when they're just paying for business-as-usual,” she added. To back its carbon-neutral claim, BOCOG secured 1.7 million offset credits, each of which is supposed to neutralize the impact of one ton of CO₂ emissions. BOCOG estimates the games’ total carbon footprint is about 1.3 million tons of CO₂. Offsets, if they worked well, would more than compensate for the climate impact. But the climate math doesn’t add up.

Floating solar panels could be the next big thing in clean energy (Popular Science) Solar panels can be placed on your roof, on a plot of land, or basically anywhere else where they are anchored to something solid. That said, there are only so many solid spaces available to install them. To beat climate change, our electricity mix is going to need a lot more renewable energy systems to take over fossil fuels. Many in the solar industry are looking for a new home for solar panels—possibly even floating on water.

Comparing the Carbon Footprint of Transportation Options (Visual Capitalist) As concern about climate change has grown, individuals are becoming increasingly conscious of their impact on the environment. Transportation emissions often make up the largest portion of our individual carbon footprints. For that reason, evaluating transport options is a natural place to start, whether it is for a daily commute or a leisure trip abroad. So, what’s the most eco-friendly way to go from one place to another? The above infographic charts the carbon footprint of transportation per passenger-kilometer for different vehicles based on data from the UK Government’s methodology paper for greenhouse gas reporting.

Why electric vehicles are so hot in the 2022 Super Bowl ads (Vox) The Super Bowl is a singular moment for automakers: a chance to unveil big-budget ads with ridiculous premises, celebrity cameos, heartfelt ballads, and ... robot puppies. This year will be no different — except that a record number of the seven-figure ads that drop will also star an electric vehicle. The average Super Bowl spot this year cost a record $6.5 million for 30 seconds, so it’s telling that General Motors, BMW, Kia, and Polestar have gone all in on ads featuring electric cars and SUVs. Nissan, one of the few car companies that chose not to solely advertise an EV, gave its electric SUV Ariya a brief cameo.

Read These Related Articles:

• Weekend Reads: The U.S.'s New Climate Goal; Sustainable Fleet Trailblazers
• Weekend Reads: MIT on Where to Site Renewables; AI's Promise for Energy Efficiency
• Weekend Reads: London's Eye-Catching EV Buses; Earth's Giant 'Batteries'
• Weekend Reads: COP29 on Energy Efficiency; Unscrambling Hydrogen
• Weekend Reads: Five Things to Know About COP29; Rethinking Gas Stations

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