Not news: We are in a race between more carbon and higher temperatures on one side, and unprecedented growth in renewables and decarbonizing industry on the other. Doom&Gloom is also on the increase. News: Peak Carbon is coming. Or maybe it’s here.
Analysis: Global CO2 emissions could peak as soon as 2023, IEA data reveals
The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 says it now expects CO2 emissions to peak “in the mid-2020s” and an accompanying press release says this will happen “by 2025”.
Yet the IEA’s own data shows the peak in global CO2 coming as early as this year, partly due to what the outlook describes as the “legacy” of the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Bill Gates backs novel device promising wind energy at 1/3 the cost
It looks nothing like a typical "fan on a stick" wind turbine, but this oval track with evenly spaced wing blades could be an enormously disruptive addition to the renewable energy mix, since it slashes the cost of wind power to unprecedented lows.
Wyoming's Airloom Energy has come out of stealth mode with a new CEO fresh out of Google[x], US$4 million in seed funding, led by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, and a radically different technical approach that it says fundamentally upends the financial equation for wind farms.
Airloom's approach makes everything much smaller and much closer to the ground. A 2.5-MW Airloom setup would use a number of 25-m (82-ft) poles to suspend an oval-shaped track, into which a series of 10-m (33-ft) wing blades are set, joined by a cable.
Like sailboats, which can harvest motion energy from wind in any direction except dead-ahead or straight behind, these blades harvest wind energy as they travel around the track, which is oriented such that its long sides are angled for maximum wind capture and its short ends are spaces where the blades can change direction as the rest of the blades haul them around.