Green energy app lets your car charge when electricity is cheapest

Renewable energy supplier Bulb has created a specific off-peak tariff for electric cars and an app to simplify how people charge their vehicles Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269744-green-energy-app-lets-your-car-charge-when-electricity-is-cheapest/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

The Empire State Building and Its Related Buildings Are Now Powered By Wind

The iconic Empire State Building that has crowned Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s is now a game changer in American architecture in a different way: by becoming completely powered with renewable energy. The Hill reports: Announced on Wednesday, Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) confirmed that it struck a three-year contract with Green Mountain Energy to power its entire commercial real…

New Study: A Zero-Emissions America is Now Pretty Cheap

“Until recently, it was unclear whether variable renewable energy, nuclear, or fossil fuel with carbon capture and storage would become the main form of generation in a decarbonized electricity system,” argues a recently-published analysis titled Carbon-Neutral Pathways for the United States. “The cost decline of variable renewable energy over the last few years, however, has definitively changed the situation.” Ars Technica…

GM Will Sell Only Zero-Emission Vehicles By 2035

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: General Motors said Thursday it would phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035, a seismic shift by one of the world’s largest automakers that makes billions of dollars today from gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles. The announcement could put…

BP Slashes Its Oil Exploration Team by 85%, Starts Switching to Renewables

Reuters reports on big changes at BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum):
Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney. “The winds have turned very chilly in the…

Are We Slowing Global Warming?

This week New York Magazine featured a new article by journalist David Wallace-Wells about the state of the fight against global warming. He warns that “Already, the planet is warmer, at just 1.2 degrees, than it has ever been…” But there’s also some good news:
Just a half-decade ago, it was widely believed that a “business as usual” emissions path would bring…

The Site of Hawaii’s First Tesla Supercharger? Probably Larry Ellison’s 3,400-Person Island

Electrek reports that 2021 will bring one of Tesla’s fast-charging Supercharger to a state that’s never had one before: Lanai Island, a former pineapple plantation that was almost entirely (98%) purchased by Oracle founder and Tesla board member Larry Ellison for $300 million in 2012, is the first in Hawaii to see a Supercharger permit filed by Tesla… The 145-square-mile island…

How Bill Gates Would Fight Climate Change

“There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Thursday: “climate change.” As I have tried to make clear on this blog over the past two years, we have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean…

Engineers Are Building Huge Salt Caves To Store Huge Amounts of Hydrogen

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Scientists are going back to the salt mines, literally, to find a revolutionary new way to store large quantities of hydrogen for energy. Proponents say this could be a step toward unlocking hydrogen for renewables — something that could change the energy landscape if it were resolved. “The project would initially have…