In 2020, France was the only EU nation not to meet its obligations for the development of renewable energy, as it still relies primarily on nuclear power. Now, the French Senate has approved a bill that should increase that markedly, requiring parking lots with a minimum of 80 spaces to be covered by solar panels, according to Public Senat.
Parking lots with between 80-400 spaces will have five years starting in July 2023 to be in compliance. Any larger lots will have less time, only three years from the same date. In all cases, at least half the area of the parking lot must be covered with solar panels. The government says the plan, aimed primarily at parking lots off freeways and major routes, could generate up to 11 gigawatts — the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors.
There are some notable exceptions. When outdoor parking lots have"technical, safety, architectural, heritage and environmental constraints," they may be exempt. Lots shaded by trees over at least half their area may also escape the requirement, as will parking lots for trucks. Finally, when the installation of panels "cannot be met under economically acceptable conditions" (something that could cover a wide range of scenarios), they can also be excluded.
On top of the solar parking lots, the government is looking at building large solar farms on vacant land next to highways, railroad tracks and agricultural areas. National railway operator SNCF also plans to install over a million square meters of solar panels by 2030, in an effort to reduce energy purchases by a quarter.
It's not clear how parking lot operators will pay for these installations, or how much financial aid the government will provide. Still, it looks like a good use of parking lots, as it will provide shade for cars and change what is usually an eyesore into a... more environmentally friendly eyesore.
Parking lots covered with solar panels are not yet that common, with one of the largest examples being the Belgium Zoo parking lot pictured above. Its 7,000 parking spaces are 70 percent covered by 62,000 overhead solar panels that generate 20 megawatts of peak power — much more than is required for the zoo.
Early this year, President Emmanuel Macron set an objective to increase of solar energy production tenfold to over 100GW and builds 50 offshore wind farms to add a further 40GW. France currently generates 25 percent of its electricity with renewables, less than its European neighbors. It has also seen delays on repairs to nuclear power plants, causing state electricity company EDF to reduce predicted output — exacerbating energy supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine.
Microplastics are a bane that harms wildlife, but you may be staring at the solution to this problem in your breakfast. Princeton researchers have used egg whites to create a lightweight, porous aerogel that can remove microplastics and salt from seawater. When you freeze-dry and superheat the whites (up to 1,652F) in an oxygen-free space, their pure protein system produces a mix of carbon fiber strands and graphene sheets that can remove 99 percent of tiny plastics from water, and 98 percent of the salt. Even fried and whipped eggs work just as well.
As you might imagine, a readily available organic material like this has its benefits. It's cheap to make, and needs only gravity to work. It won't consume energy or excess water. Activated carbon is cheap, but it's not nearly as effective as the egg white gel. And while eggs from the grocery store prompted the breakthrough, you can use other proteins that won't cut into the population's food supply.
The aerogel isn't ready for widespread use just yet. Scientists need to refine the manufacturing process before mass production is possible. If that happens, though, the implications are clear. It would be comparatively easy to remove microplastics and otherwise purify water while minimizing the environmental impact. While the salt removal may create problems in oceans, it may be very helpful for desalinization in areas where fresh drinking water is difficult to find.
There are other purposes, for that matter. The gel might also be useful for energy storage and insulation, so don't be surprised if you one day find egg-like proteins in your walls.
European lawmakers have gotten the EU's 27 member states to agree to a plan that effectively bans the sale of gas-powered cars and vans by 2035. They've come to an agreement to approve the Commission's revised reduction targets for passenger cars' and light vehicles' carbon dioxide emissions. The Commission's proposal, which European lawmakers had voted in favor of back in June, aims to reduce the emissions produced by new vehicles in those categories by 100 percent in 13 years' time. That wouldn't be achievable without stopping the sale of gas-powered vehicles and selling zero-emission models only.
European Parliament's lead negotiator Jan Huitema said:
"[P]urchasing and driving zero-emission cars will become cheaper for consumers. I am pleased that today we reached an agreement with the Council on an ambitious revision of the targets for 2030 and supported a 100% target for 2035. This is crucial to reach climate neutrality by 2050 and make clean driving more affordable."
Under the deal, new cars from 2030 must also comply with a 55 percent cut on carbon dioxide emissions compared to 2021 levels. Vans must comply with a 50 percent cut. In addition, the agreement states that existing EU funding should be spent on transitioning to zero-emission vehicles and related technologies going forward. The Commission also vows to publish a report every two years detailing the region's progress towards zero-emission road mobility starting in 2025.
The European Parliament and Council will still have to approve the agreement before it becomes official, and changes could be introduced before then. According to Reuters, the EU intends to draft a proposal on how to sell cars running on carbon dioxide-neutral fuels after 2035. That said, automakers have been preparing for the shift to zero-emission vehicles for a while now, as governments around the world adopt laws to combat climate change. The list of carmakers pledging to go fully electric over the coming years continue to grow: Ford, for instance, announced last year that its consumer vehicles will be fully electric by 2030, while GM aims to eliminate emissions from all its new "light-duty vehicles" by 2035.
General Motors is on track to secure 100 percent of the electricity it needs to power all of its US facilities with renewable energy by 2025. On Wednesday, the automaker announced it recently finalized the sourcing agreements it needs to make that feat a reality. The announcement puts GM on track to meet the most recent renewable energy target it set for itself late last year. Previously, the company had planned to power all of its US facilities with renewables by 2030. GM claims its accelerated transition will allow it to avoid producing an estimated 1 million metric tons of carbon emissions between 2025 and 2030.
As of today, GM’s energy portfolio includes sourcing agreements with 16 renewable energy plants across 10 states. The company is also working on increasing the efficiency of its factories and offices, as well as building out its on-site power generation capabilities.
“Securing the renewable energy we need to achieve our goal demonstrates tangible progress in reducing our emissions in all aspects of our business, ultimately moving us closer to our vision of a future with zero emissions,” said Kristen Siemen, GM’s chief sustainability officer.
While GM is on track toward an impressive feat, it’s worth taking a moment to contextualize what today’s announcement means in the bigger picture. Firstly, the company operates offices and factories outside of the US. Today’s announcement doesn’t cover those facilities. Secondly, even when you factor in all of GM’s buildings, they’re only a small part of the company’s total carbon footprint.
According to its most recent sustainability report, Scope 1 and 2 emissions account for only two percent of GM’s total emissions. For those who aren’t familiar with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, it’s an accounting system many companies use to source and track their emissions. The Scope 1 category includes all pollution produced directly by an organization. Scope 2, meanwhile, encompasses indirect emissions created from the electricity, heating and cooling it buys. The majority of GM’s emissions, a whopping 98 percent, aren’t produced by its facilities. Instead, they come from the company’s supply chain and the consumers using its cars.
To be fair, GM is working on reducing those emissions. In the summer of 2021, the company announced it would invest a total of $35 billion through 2025 toward electric and autonomous vehicle development. That said, the transition is something that will take time. By 2030, GM plans for EVs to account for 40 to 50 percent of the cars its sells in the US.
General Motors has been in business for more than a century, but in its 112 years, the company has never faced such challenges as it does in today's rapidly electrifying and automating industry. The assembly line jobs from Detroit's heyday have been replaced by legions of automated industrial arms, almost as quickly as the era of internal combustion engines has been supplanted by EVs. Since 2014, it's been Mary Barra's job as CEO of GM to help guide America's largest automaker into the 21st century.
In Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra, and the Reinvention of an American Icon, author and Bloomberg automotive journalist, David Welch, recounts Barra's Herculean efforts to reinvent a company that has been around since horses still pulled buggies, reimagine the brand's most iconic models and bring EVs to the masses — all while being a woman in the highest echelons of a male dominated industry. In the excerpt below, Welch examines some of GM's earliest electric initiatives, like the popular but short-lived EV1 or the loss leader Bolt, without which we likely wouldn't have many of Ultium-based vehicle offerings.
Battery-powered cars had captured the imagination of wealthy, tech-minded drivers. Tesla was the first to tap into that, becoming a hot brand in the process. Its cars began stealing customers away from the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. But in 2017, when Barra was weighing up her own plug-in play, EVs were still only about 1 percent of car sales. They were still too expensive for most consumers and even at fat prices, they lost money. EVs sold by Tesla, GM, and Nissan could take hours to charge and only Tesla models could go more than 300 miles on a charge.
GM had been working on electric batteries and developing vehicles that would run on them. In no way was Barra flat-footed. But spending billions on cars with an uncertain group of buyers was seen as speculative and risky. Internally at major car companies, there were still voices saying that EVs were a costly science project. They assumed Tesla would run out of cash one day and carmakers could carry on as they always had.
Internally, GM was weighing uncertain demand for EV sales against the risk that Tesla and Germany’s Volkswagen group and even Ford would capture the buyers who made the switch. That threatened to completely reset customer loyalties and shake up the industry. Tesla already sold most of the electric vehicles on the market. Elon Musk threatened to upend the auto industry the way Apple’s iPhone did to ’90s mobile phone kingpins Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens. GM’s future hinged not only on Barra’s courage to make a move, but also on her being wise enough to get the timing right.
Caution was understandable. At the time, Tesla was by far the top seller of electric vehicles with 100,000 sold globally and losses of about $2 billion on sales of its Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Those Teslas typically sold for more than $100,000 apiece, which is triple the price of the average gasburning family SUV. With Tesla’s $100,000 cars losing money the challenge for companies to make a buck selling EVs was daunting.
GM knew it all too well. In the 1990s, the company had sold the famous EV1, an aerodynamic two-seater priced at $34,000 that was leased to EV enthusiasts from 1996 to 1999. That was an expensive car back then. GM spent $1 billion developing it and would lose more money selling the vehicles, said [then-GM CEO G. Richard] Wagoner in an interview. I remember seeing a presentation for the car at the Detroit Auto Show in 1997. GM’s then vice chairman, Harry Pearce, talked about electric cars like the EV1 and also about hybrids that ran on gasoline engines and electric motors. For GM, it was a display of what the company’s engineers could do and a glimpse of the future, he told me. But it would be decades before it would be a real business.
The EV1 would bring GM serious credibility with environmentalists, but after leasing 1,100 of them, the company lost a lot of money. A few Hollywood actors like Ed Begley Jr. leased one and promoted it as often as he could. Francis Ford Coppola had one, and when GM ended the program and demanded that lessees return the cars, he refused to give it up and kept it. The company crushed all the cars that it had leased after retrieving them, which then made GM a pariah with the same environmentalists who loved the car.
The economics of electric cars weren’t very good twenty years later. Chevrolet started selling the Bolt in 2016 and lost a whopping $9,000 on every one of the $38,000 plug-in cars it sold. Before that, GM sold the Volt plug-in hybrid, which uses a gasoline engine and an electric motor in tandem to get forty-two miles per gallon. The Volt lost even more. Those nasty numbers would drive serious resistance to electric cars inside GM and at other major carmakers, too.
One big reason GM sold the Bolt was to meet government regulations. In California and a dozen coastal states that followed its lead, automakers had to sell electric vehicles or other super-efficient cars like hybrids to be able to sell their profitable gas guzzlers. Selling green vehicles earned ZEV credits. GM could also buy ZEV credits from Tesla, which many automakers did. But that just meant that they were helping fund Musk’s effort to eat their lunch.
In the EV race, Tesla already had the advantage of a tremendous amount of investor patience for Musk’s losses. Even though Tesla lost $2 billion that year, his company’s market capitalization ended 2017 with a total value of $52 billion. That was just $4 billion less than GM’s even though Barra brought in near record profits that year. In other words, the market would continue to fund Musk’s money-losing operation, but Barra had to fund her own vehicle development with profits from the very gas guzzlers she was seeking to replace.
That put GM and the mainstream car companies under pressure from three sides. Shareholders wanted profits from pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. But in the car market, Tesla was stealing buyers, gaining a technological advantage in battery development, and building an Apple-like brand for making the cars of tomorrow. Meanwhile, governments were putting the squeeze on with new clean-air rules.
Whales face numerous threats from humans, not the least of which are ship collisions — the World Sustainability Organization estimates 18,000 to 25,000 animals die each year. There may be a technological way to minimize those deaths, however. Reutersreports Chile's government and the MERI Foundation have deployed the first smart buoy from the Blue Boat Initiative, an effort to both safeguard whales and track undersea ecosystems. The device, floating in the Gulf of Corcovado 684 miles away from Chile, alerts ships to nearby blue, humpback, right and sei whales to help avoid incidents.
The technology uses oceanographic sensors and AI-powered Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment (LIDO) software to determine a waterborne mammal's type and location. It also checks the ocean's health by monitoring oxygen levels, temperature and other criteria. That extra data could help study climate change and its impact on sea life.
The Blue Boat Initiative currently aims to install six or more buoys to protect whales across the gulf. In the long term, though, project members hope to blanket the whales' complete migratory route between Antarctica and the equator. This could reduce collisions across the creatures' entire habitat, not to mention better inform government decisions about conservation and the environment.
The technology may be as important for humans as for the whales. On top of their roles in delicately balanced ecosystems, whales both help capture CO2 and redistribute heat through ocean currents. The more these animals are allowed to flourish, the better the ocean is at limiting global warming and its harmful effects.
I wasn't kidding when I told you that GM is going all-in on Ultium, the battery technology behind the company's electrification efforts, not to mention an entire generation of Chevy and GMC EVs. On Tuesday, the automaker announced that it is expanding its portfolio into energy management services — think big stationary batteries to store rooftop-generated solar power on a home or business — with its new spin-off business, GM Energy.
The new venture will be comprised of three smaller ones: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial and Ultium Charge 360, offering "solutions ranging from bi-directional charging, vehicle-to home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) applications, to stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, hydrogen fuel cells and more," according to GM's announcement on Tuesday.
The new company will be partnering with a number of established firms and utilities in the energy industry. For example, GM will be working with SunPower to develop and market a integrated home energy storage system that incorporates an electric vehicle with solar panels and battery banks to enable easy Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) power transfers. GM plans to have that home energy system ready for sale alongside the release of the EV Silverado next fall, 2023.
Additionally, GM Energy has partnered with California's Pacific Gas and Electric utility for another V2H pilot program that will let you run your household appliances off of your EV's battery during blackouts. Eventually, the company plans to add V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) capabilities, which will allow you to sell excess energy produced by the solar panels back to your local utility.
For businesses, Ultium Commercial may help ease the transition to an electrified fleet. Many such existing GM customers, "have fleets of vehicles are looking to electrify their fleets, but aren't really aware of how to set up the charging infrastructure, how to manage their energy," Mark Bole, vice president and Head of V2X Battery Solutions at GM said during an embargoed press briefing last week. "And so, not only do we come in as a hardware and software provider, but in a sense, really, as a strategic advisor for these commercial customers."
"There are more power failures in the US than any other country in the industrialized world," Travis Hester, vice president of GM EV Growth Operations, added. "There were 25,000 blackouts in California alone last year, over 15 and a half billion dollars of lost commerce, just in California. So when you look at the numbers, there is a desire — and we're seeing it very clearly from commercial customers reaching out to us and asking us for assistance to deal with some of these problems."
GM is also transferring its public charging station network, Ultium Charge 360, over to GM Energy. Charge 360 launched in 2021 in Washington, Florida and California. GM partnered with Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect to streamline their collective 60,000-plug network of 350 kW Level 3 DC fast chargers and provide "more seamless access" to drivers. The automaker built upon that network this past July, announcing a 500-station "coast-to-coast" expansion in partnership with EVGo. In all, GM hopes to have 2,700 such EV fast charging stations across the US and Canada under its Ultium Charge 360 banner by 2025.
Google introduced an initiative called Nest Renew last year to help you use more clean energy for your home if you have one of the brand's thermostats. Back then, only those who got an invite to preview the solution could join the program. Starting today, however, you can join Nest Renew for free, so long as you're in the continental US and have a third-gen Nest Learning Thermostat, the latest base Nest Thermostat model or a low-cost Nest Thermostat E.
The program comes with a feature called Energy Shift that can automatically activate cooling or heating when there's a higher concentration of electricity from clean sources by adjusting your thermostat accordingly. Power grids typically obtain energy from both fossil fuel and renewable sources, and the mixture isn't always 50:50. Energy Shift works by gathering power grid forecasts from across the US every five minutes and then using its algorithms to determine the best times for when to run cooling and heating for your home. For instance, it can run cooling earlier in the day when the grid is getting power from more renewable sources and before emissions from electricity use are expected to rise.
Google said the feature was designed to make changes so subtle that you won't even notice them. When the program launched, Nest product manager Jeff Gleeson told Engadget that "customers are always in control." You can manually adjust your thermostat even after Energy Shift kicks in. The tech giant also said in its announcement that Energy Shift helped users prioritize cleaner energy usage for over 20,000,000 hours in all during the preview period.
While you can join the program for free, you can also choose to pay $10 a month for Nest Renew Premium if you want to match the fossil fuel electricity used in your home with renewable energy credits generated clean energy project from Google's portfolio.
New York is following California's lead by mandating that all new cars, pickups and SUVs sold in the state must be either EVs or plug-in hybrids, Governor Kathy Hochul announced. To reach that goal, 35 percent of new cars must be zero-emission by 2026 and 60 percent by 2030. New school buses must also be zero emissions by 2035. A public hearing will be held before the rules are put into place.
Hochul ordered the state's environmental agency to create similar standards to those adopted by California that phases out all fossil-fuel-only car sales by 2035. Those rules went into last month and were designed to reduce passenger vehicle pollution 25 percent by 2037, with 9.5 fewer internal-combustion engine (ICE) only vehicles sold by 2035.
“We had to wait for California to take a step because there’s some federal requirements that California had to go first — that’s the only time we’re letting them go first,” the governor said in a press conference yesterday.
NEW: All new vehicles sold in New York must be zero emissions by 2035.
By revving up our clean transportation transition and making major investments to make EVs more accessible, we’re supercharging our fight against climate change. #NationalDriveElectricWeekpic.twitter.com/AWvSjK8b7D
The state is following California's actions for a reason. The Clean Air Act permits California to set its own pollution rules, but other states aren't allowed to do that. However, they can follow California once it acts — so California must pave the way for any emissions rules implemented by individual states.
The governor also unveiled a $10 million Drive Clean Rebate Program. That gives residents a $2,000 rebate toward the purchase of over 60 EVs and plug-in hybrids that's on top of the $7,500 federal tax rebate. The state has spent $92 million on the program to date. The state also announced the installation of its 100th fast charger as part of the EVolve charging network.
"With sustained state and federal investments, our actions are incentivizing New Yorkers, local governments, and businesses to make the transition to electric vehicles," Hochul said.
The case for heating homes with hydrogen rather than natural gas appears to be dead. In the UK, hydrogen has become an important part of the debate around decarbonizing home heating. 85 percent of all homes use natural gas to heat space and water, with the oil and gas industry pushing hydrogen as something that can leverage the existing gas pipelines. And lawmakers with close ties to the industry have claimed that hydrogen is a “silver bullet” to help the UK reach its climate targets.
According to a new study from the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO, such claims are a big pile of old nonsense. The project ran an extensive meta-analysis of research into hydrogen technology overall, finding that the promises of easy retrofit don’t add up. It said that it wasn’t clear if the existing infrastructure was actually suitable to take hydrogen without major adaptation. That was, after all, one of the major selling points of using hydrogen over switching to heat pumps and other low-carbon methods.
It’s something that Engadget already covered in its extensive report on the UK’s home heating situation back in 2021. The suitability of infrastructure is only one part of the problem, however, since many experts also asked where all of this hydrogen was coming from. Supplying the UK with enough hydrogen to heat 85 percent of its homes, without any work to reduce demand, would require around 10 million tons of hydrogen.
In that report, Tim Lord, who was previously responsible for the UK’s decarbonization strategy, said that to generate that much hydrogen cleanly, you would need around 75 gigawatts of offshore wind. The UK Government’s most recent figures say that the country’s total installed offshore wind capacity is just 10 gigawatts. It’s hard to see the economic case for installing seven-and-a-half times the total offshore wind capacity just to generate hydrogen.
The Regulatory Assistance Project’s report also found that trying to use hydrogen for space and hot water heating is a waste of a vital material. Green hydrogen could be put to better use in agricultural processes, like making fertilizer or in heavy industry. And we’ve already seen that green hydrogen has a part to play in decarbonizing industrial transport, like shipping, and in the railways where mass-electrification isn’t viable.
In its conclusions, the report adds that greater emphasis on hydrogen will only serve to delay the take up of better technologies, like heat pumps. There’s a political dimension to this, too, with The Guardian reporting that hydrogen lobbyists were out in force at the recent Labour Party conference, and are expected to attend next week’s Conservative Party conference as well.
Another study, from the MCS Charitable Foundation in partnership with energy analysts Cornwall Insight, found that hydrogen’s cost to consumers would be nightmarish. It found that switching from natural gas to hydrogen would likely see the cost increase by between 70 to 90 percent on average. It also warned that, unlike electricity, hydrogen would be subject to the same market volatility as other fossil fuels.
As before, this study raises the question about how much we can rely upon hydrogen given that many of its key needs are still untested. For instance, steam reformation of methane would still require carbon capture and storage at a vastly larger scale than present. (Not to mention the fact that methane is a far deadlier climate gas than carbon dioxide, so any leaks or accidents would be significantly more damaging for the planet.)
Fundamentally, on this and all of the other evidence, it would seem like legislators should avoid the expensive distraction of hydrogen in favor of full-scale electrification. That, as we’ve already covered, would provide a significant, and swift, reduction in emissions (and a timely boost to the economy).
