Energy

Note: CCL’s Nuclear Energy Action Team monitors new “4th generation” projects and supports adding safe nuclear capacity capable of providing “baseload” when solar and wind aren’t producing.

Support for nuclear power, by both governments and the public, has increased significantly over the last few years. Below is a compilation of recent stories that give specific examples:

Note: This Wall Street Journal article concludes that the future of renewables is still bright. But recent policies that make it harder and more costly to import solar panels [from China and Germany] add costs. “Rising interest rates, labor costs and delays in permitting or getting projects hooked up to the power grid have made building solar and wind projects more expensive.”

A similar energy transition is already well underway in Europe and elsewhere. But the United States is catching up, and globally, change is happening at a pace that is surprising even the experts who track it closely. Wind and solar power are breaking records, and renewables are now expected to overtake coal by 2025 as the world’s largest source of electricity.

One look at your energy bills this winter might have convinced you that the 1950s idea that electricity would, in the near future, become “too cheap to meter” was not so much a false promise as a sick joke. That over-excited claim was prompted by hopes that nuclear fusion – the process

By Nathaniel Bullard Shell Plc recently published two energy security scenarios, its latest in a long series of thorough and (at least to energy analysts) memorable views into energy’s possible futures. The first, called Archipelagos, is an extension of the…

from Bloomberg Lithium-ion battery storage has expanded by orders of magnitude since the 1990s, with new devices creating ever-larger demand. Camcorders came first, followed by personal computers and then smartphones and other personal electronics. In the 2010s,…

This is a newsletter summary of a full IEEE Report, Renewables 2022.   As the chart shows, renewables are growing, but they need to scale faster, bigger.  Carbon pricing (and more green bank financing) would help!

Engineers at Princeton University have developed a new class of renewable solar energy technology. The team successfully manufactured a perovskite solar cell that can operate above industry standards for close to 30 years, a significant increase over the prior threshold of 20 years. The new technology is efficient and performs at the same level as silicon-based cells.