While China’s deployment of solar panels is highly impressive, its actual generation from these assets is much less so. China is apparently deploying scarce solar assets irrationally, installing substantial numbers of solar panels in several renewables-poor provinces while largely ignoring sun-soaked regions. Even worse, more than half of China’s new solar installations are dedicated to “distributed” rooftop generation sites, which suffer from poor utilization factors compared with utility-scale solar from power plants.

While China’s solar deployment has been extremely wasteful from an economic or environmental perspective, the shape of Beijing’s solar build may be influenced in part by security considerations. While rooftop solar increases an electricity grid’s “attack surface” and potential exposure to cyberattacks, it also disperses generation and generally increases system resilience, especially if microgrids are employed. Beijing’s solar strategy has evidently prioritized deployment of rooftop solar for government buildings and in provinces that hold key naval bases. If tensions over Taiwan, for example, increase or even break into open conflict, mainland China’s distributed deployment of rooftop solar could reduce its overall vulnerability to cyberattacks or other disruptions, granting Beijing’s leadership greater flexibility.

In the study, Korean researchers simulated how removing large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air might affect the progress of local climate changes related to global warming. The study, based on computer modeling, examined a hypothetical scenario, in which carbon dioxide concentrations continued to rise from present-day levels for 140 years, then were gradually reduced back to the initial levels over another 140-year period.

The researchers were particularly interested in how these changes would affect vulnerable subtropical regions, which are known to suffer from more intense and more frequent droughts as climate change progresses.

The study results suggest that the local climate in these areas would not return to normal for more than 200 years after the carbon dioxide concentrations drop. The Mediterranean region, for example, plagued by ever more severe heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, would continue to suffer and could become even drier, the study found.

There’s a big winner in the record heat waves baking the United States, China and other countries — fossil fuels.

The United States is setting records for natural gas consumption this week at the power plants that keep the nation’s air conditioners humming, according to estimates from S&P Global Commodity Insights. In China, power plants are burning more coal to keep up with electricity needs, helping to feed a record-pace in demand this year for the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

That demand is feeding what the Paris energy watchdog calls a “vicious cycle” that further boosts world temperatures. As heat waves multiply and intensify, it creates more demand for fossil fuels, which add to the greenhouse-gas emissions that intensify extreme heat around the world.

The world’s power grids are still too reliant on gas and coal, complicating efforts by the Biden administration and other governments to phase down their use. Despite climate commitments, governments face immediate imperatives to prevent power blackouts and skyrocketing energy prices to cool buildings and protect people from life-threatening conditions.

A sediment core from underneath the Greenland ice sheet has provided the first direct evidence that much of the ice disappeared during an interglacial period 400,000 years ago, when global temperatures were similar to what they are today.

The findings show that even if the planet doesn’t get any warmer than it is now, ice loss from Greenland alone would add at least 1.5 metres to the global average sea level and possibly as much as 5 metres. This is in line with existing projections, but the study provides direct evidence to back them up.

“It’s a pretty sobering warning that we not only have to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve got to start taking it out if we hope to save Greenland’s ice,” says Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont.

Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use.

It takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal, the study found. That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it into power stations or homes and kitchens.

The bottom line: If gas leaks, even a little, “it’s as bad as coal,” said Deborah Gordon, the lead researcher and an environmental policy expert at Brown University and at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research organization focused on clean energy. “It can’t be considered a good bridge, or substitute.”

The peer-reviewed study, which also involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA and is set to be published next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind.

Texas solar and wind are going to double by 2035, but if the state’s grid isn’t upgraded, then all that power is going to go to waste, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The EIA’s analysis released this month, A Case Study of Transmission Limits on Renewables Growth in Texas, found that if Texas doesn’t expand ERCOT’s electrical transmission network, congestion and curtailments are going to rise. (ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, operates the state’s electrical grid.)

The study states that the “curtailments are due to both inadequate transmission capacity and surplus generation during high availability periods of variable renewable generation.” So, the grid operators need to find a balance between electricity supply and demand to achieve reliability.

A major Chinese power generator says its electricity production has reached a record high as the country grapples with a punishing heat wave.

China Energy Investment Corporation, one of the world’s largest generators of coal-fired power, says the volume of electricity it produced on Monday had hit a daily record.

The state-owned company recorded total electricity generation of 4.09 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) on that day, an increase of 210 million kWh from the day before, according to a statement on Tuesday.

Reuters interviewed six researchers who study hydrogen as green power and had exclusive access to an analysis by Rystad Energy consultancy that showed that the Biden administration's vision of low-carbon hydrogen may run into a challenge that is itself exacerbated by climate change: water scarcity.

Nine of the 33 projects on the Department of Energy shortlist for the hydrogen hubs are in highly water-stressed regions, according to Rystad data.

Those locations include Southern California, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico as well as Texas. Globally, the picture is even worse, with more than 70% of proposed green hydrogen projects located in water-stressed regions like the Middle East.

"Most of the world's planned green hydrogen projects are to be located in water-stressed regions," said Minh Khoi Le, renewable energy analyst at Rystad, adding that this would create demand for more desalination plants.

In Chase County, the water levels have dropped by 100 feet since the 1950s, a report from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that the Ogallala could be largely gone within the next century.

The Ogallala Aquifer fills naturally incredibly slowly. This means conservation efforts are ongoing to better protect the integral water source.

Hodson said Omnis intends to build a so-called quantum reformer next to the power plant. That facility would heat hydrocarbons at extremely high temperatures to produce synthetic graphite, and generate large quantities of hydrogen as a byproduct. In turn, the hydrogen would fuel Pleasants Power Station to produce electricity.

“We think there’s an opportunity to save the coal-fired plants by retrofitting them,” Hodson said. “We can’t keep shutting power plants down and not expect the cost of power to go up. We’re trying to preserve these plants wherever we can by producing two products.”