Adam Clare

China Leads Renewable Investments

A graph showing increasing investment in renewables with China outpacing other countries. — The country has nearly tripled spending on renewables since 2015

China is clearly winning the global race to renewable energy, with a near trebling of investment into the sector over the last decade. China’s manufacturing industry is primed to produce solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, and so on for the rest of the world. There’s a lot of profit to be made as the globe gets fully electrified and moves away from fossil fuels. The Republicans in the USA have guaranteed victory to China in their recent budget. Of course, other nations can all vie for second and ought to as the future is green power and whichever nation can produce renewable energy in the most economical way will dominate the later half of the century.

China is on an absolute tear installing wind and solar power. The country reached nearly 900 gigawatts of installed capacity for solar at the end of 2024, and the rapid pace of building has continued into this year. An additional 198 GW was installed between January and May, with 93 GW coming in May alone.

For context, those additions over the first five months of the year account for more than double the capacity of the grid in California. Not the renewables capacity of that state—the entire grid.

How Microgrids in Puerto Rico Help During Hurricanes

A picture of a microgrid setup in Puerto Rico

Back in 2017 Puerto Rico was hit hard by Hurricane Maria and lost power for an extended period of time and led to nearly 3,000 lives lost due to the loss of power. Puerto Ricans decided that they would never let that happen again, so they started a massive roll out of renewable energy. The island now has a series of microgrids that won’t lose power when the main grid goes down. Renewable energy means a sustainable planet and a sustainable connection to energy.

At the end of March, LUMA reported over 1.14 gigawatts of grid-connected distributed solar capacity, with an additional 2.34 gigawatt-hours of distributed batteries connected to the grid. Solar power produces over 2 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, which accounts for more than 12.5 percent of Puerto Rico’s total residential electricity consumption annually. The majority of that power is generated from residential solar, and capacity continues to grow as more residents install systems with private financing.

Adjuntas, which has a population of about 18,000, took a more experimental approach. The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised. It’s what kept multiple areas in Adjuntas electrified during April’s island-wide blackout.

Fig Trees Figured Out Carbon Storage

The humble fig tree can help us in extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by converting it in into stone. All trees remove CO2 from the air and store it in their wood, however as the wood biodegrades the CO2 is released again. Fig trees, on the other hand, combine the CO2 within itself to form stone!

“What was really a surprise, and I’m still kind of reeling from, is that the [calcium carbonate] had really gone far deeper into the wood structures than I expected,” says Rowley, who will present the work at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, the Czech Republic, this week. “I expected it to be a superficial process in the cracks and weaknesses within the wood structure.”

How Canada Can Have Affordable Housing

Ever since the federal government stopped building housing in the 90s and let the housing market function without intervention the cost of housing in the country has skyrocketed. The lack of action and leadership at both the federal and the provincial levels has led to our current housing crisis. An organization, More and Better Housing, has plotted out Canada can easily solve our housing issues.

Four Pathways to Housing Affordability

Making home ownership and rent more affordable by cutting building costs.
Keeping property taxes and transportation costs in check by allowing more building in convenient locations.
Lowering insurance and maintenance costs by building sturdier homes in safer areas.
Reducing utility bills with energy-efficient homes.

The new report analyzes specific recommendations from the Blueprint, finding that they give governments the tools to drive down five key shelter costs, which make up over 40% of middle-class household budgets.

Cities Address Climate Crisis Faster than Nations

Your local city council is doing more to protect the future than your national leaders. Cities are on the front lines of the climate crisis and are working hard to ensue that their people are protected from the effects of a warming planet. Cities can react swiftly to climate related issues due to a variety of factors and by addressing issues head on cities can solve more than one problem at a time.

And by literally greening their cities, mayors solve a bunch of their citizens’ problems at once. In Quezon City in the Philippines, the government turned unused land into 337 gardens and 10 model farms, while training more than 4,000 urban farmers. The report also notes that Freetown, Sierra Leone, planted more than 550,000 trees, creating more than 600 jobs. In addition to significantly reducing urban temperatures, these green spaces also mitigate flooding by soaking up rainwater. “It is becoming clear, I think, to a lot of municipalities that this type of action will be absolutely essential,” said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate solutions group Project Drawdown, which wasn’t involved in the report. “It’s not just about being uncomfortable. This is about protecting people’s lives.”