Mountains Storing Clean Energy

Mountains—could soon store a whole lot of clean energy. These vertically blessed places are ideal spots for a well-established form of energy storage that is getting renewed attention: pumped storage hydropower.

As the country transitions to a clean power grid, researchers are searching for the best ways to store energy to use when winds slow down, clouds block the sun, and the grid needs a boost. 

Some experts are hoping to forge better batteries, like the well-loved lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars. But batteries are like cheetahs—they often run best for short distances. 

Pumped storage hydropower may be older technology but, like us endurance-running humans, can outlast their competition, often storing energy for eight to 12 hours at a time or more. 

Utility-scale batteries are often too expensive if they are built to store more than four hours of energy.  READ MORE...

Greenwashing Scam

A Chevron drilling site near Midland, Texas. It’s unlikely PR firms will be able to serve the fossil-fuel industry as they have in the past. Photograph: Jessica Lutz/Reuters


This week a peer-reviewed study confirmed what many have suspected for years: major oil companies are not fully backing up their clean energy talk with action. Now the PR and advertising firms that have been creating the industry’s greenwashing strategies for decades face a reckoning over whether they will continue serving big oil.

The study compared the rhetoric and actions on climate and clean energy from 2009 to 2020 from the world’s four largest oil companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers from Tohoku University and Kyoto University in Japan conclude that the companies are not, in fact, transitioning their business models to clean energy.

“The magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse,” they write. “Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.”

Although this isn’t the first time that oil companies have been accused of overstating their climate bona fides, it has never been set out quite so comprehensively, according to environmental sociologist Dr Robert Brulle at Brown University. “This is the first robust, empirical, peer-reviewed analysis of the activities–of the speech, business plans, and the actual investment patterns of the major oil companies regarding their support or opposition to the transition to a sustainable society,” he says.

Brulle says PR firms and advertising agencies that have created campaigns around the oil firms’ net-zero claims are now on notice. “There’s no plausible deniability that they are unaware of the activities of these companies after this paper has been published,” he says. “This paper clearly shows that these companies aren’t walking the talk.”  READ MORE...

A Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

Nuclear scientists using lasers the size of three football fields said Tuesday they had generated a huge amount of energy from fusion, possibly offering hope for the development of a new clean energy source.

Experts focused their giant array of almost 200 laser beams onto a tiny spot to create a mega blast of energy – eight times more than they had ever done in the past.

Although the energy only lasted for a very short time – just 100 trillionths of a second – it took scientists closer to the holy grail of fusion ignition, the moment when they are creating more energy than they are using.

"This result is a historic advance for inertial confinement fusion research," said Kim Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which operates the National Ignition Facility in California, where the experiment took place this month.

Nuclear fusion is considered by some scientists to be a potential energy of the future, particularly because it produces little waste and no greenhouse gases.

It differs from fission, a technique currently used in nuclear power plants, where the bonds of heavy atomic nuclei are broken to release energy.

In the fusion process, two light atomic nuclei are "married" to create a heavy one.  In this experiment, scientists used two isotopes of hydrogen, giving rise to helium.  READ MORE