October 15, 2022

Weekend Reads: A Look at the Tech That Could Help Industry Go Electric; The Sexiest Part of the Energy Transition

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

Breakthroughs Are Helping Even Cement and Steel Go Electric (Bloomberg) If humans were to build a modern civilization from scratch today, there would be no way around making use of cement and steel. However, we would prefer not to use the primitive methods of making those materials. And, fortunately, a series of innovations in recent years are likely to make that dream possible. For thousands of years, cement and steel have been made in largely the same way. Take ore from mines and burn it up in a coal-fired furnace. In the process, generate huge amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions and plenty of mining waste.

The Sexiest Part of the Clean Energy Transition Is Big-Ass Power Lines (Esquire) It’s good to have solar panels on your house, and we should encourage people to harness renewable energy in their own backyards wherever possible. But a real clean-energy transition will depend on big, centralized renewable power facilities not unlike our classic power plants. And the most productive solar and wind farms will not be located right next door to our population centers. Broadly speaking, they’ll be in more rural areas in the middle of the country, while the majority of people live on the coasts. Many of the rest live in metro areas inland. We need to move clean power from the places where we’ll harvest the bulk of it to the places where we’ll consume the bulk of it.

Can E-Bikes Go Mainstream? (The New York Times) Growing up in the Netherlands, with its network of pathways, its flat landscape and its bicycle-friendly traffic laws, the brothers Ties and Taco Carlier were commuting with their parents on bikes by age 4. Many families in the country didn’t own cars. But traveling to New York and other cities as adults, the Carliers realized that few people commuted on bikes in the same way they did back home, turned off by the sprawl, the hills and the weather. The experience planted the seed for what would become one of the world’s hottest bicycle brands. 

The Green Jobs Sector Continues Upward Momentum (CleanTechnica) The green jobs sector is robust and getting stronger by the year. In fact, the median salary in a green job is $76,530/year – 31% more than the national median salary for the US workforce at $58,260. Not only is the overall growth rate for green jobs higher than for the overall workforce (+7.7%), some of the green occupations are among the fastest growing in the entire country. Clean energy jobs are on a growth trajectory, while dirty energy jobs are stagnating or declining. These jobs are projected to grow 8.6% and add 114,300 jobs over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A turbine prototype just broke a 24-hour wind power world record (Electrek) Siemens Gamesa’s 14-222 DD offshore wind turbine prototype has, according to the Spanish-German wind giant today, set a world record for the most power output by a single wind turbine in a 24-hour period: 359 megawatt-hours.  This would be enough energy, according to the company, for a mid-sized electric vehicle – think a Tesla Model 3 – to drive around 1.12 million miles (1.8 million km). Siemens Gamesa’s huge wind turbine achieved this power output milestone only 10 months after it produced its first electricity and delivered it to the grid at the test center in Østerild, Denmark.

Read These Related Articles:

• Weekend Reads: COP29 on Energy Efficiency; Unscrambling Hydrogen
• Weekend Reads: Five Things to Know About COP29; Rethinking Gas Stations
• Weekend Reads: Where Climate Triumphed at the Polls; Iceland Goes to Space for Solar
• Weekend Reads: Candidates Avoid Clean Energy; Costco (Cautiously) Adds EV Charging
• Weekend Reads: The Carbon Offset Debate; New Powder Captures CO2

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