It is clear that the energy transition is underway and moving at a positive trajectory.

Our future will be driven forward by an almost 100 per cent mix of solar and wind energy coupled with battery storage – with rapid further electrification of transport and heating too.

I can confidently say that this vision is perfectly feasible within the next decade. And what’s more, this future will have a very low CO2 footprint and usher in a new era of energy security and independence.

One thing that is important to point out is that short-term compromises need to be accepted in order to achieve this long-term vision and endpoint.

Nuclear and hydrogen are important – but not the best options

For one, we should retain existing nuclear plants until they are no longer necessary, but let’s also not allow the nuclear industry to have the power source relabelled as renewable, resilient or green, it’s not – so let’s not fool ourselves.

Nuclear bears environmental and safety risks and encourages a dangerous reliance on a handful of centralised power plants. A further nuclear build-out would be a distraction insofar as it would suck in resources required to build our renewables-based future, while not providing a reliable way of generating more power within any relevant timeframe.

A similar distraction is hydrogen. It will play a niche role in coming years, such as in the production of fertiliser, and complex industrial processes, but we must not mistake hydrogen for a viable mass-power alternative.

Nuclear power has its place in the energy transition, but it’s not the most reliable or safe option.Canva

Hydrogen has received an excessive amount of attention – disproportionate to the benefits it has produced to date, or could do in future – and it also carries the risk of enabling oil and gas companies to continue business as usual, via hydrogen production from gas. 

To be clear, oil and gas companies have a role to play in the energy transition, but it should not involve the continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Instead, the funding, development and scaling of renewables such as solar and wind energy, and battery storage should be prioritised.

The truth about solar energy

Now, let’s compare this with solar – parks are being built across the globe right now, people are installing residential systems at a remarkable rate, using tried, tested and safe technology.

All of which is cheap, scalable, and reliable.

The truth is, solar carries little to no environmental downsides or risks and enjoys massive political support across the world. Just the other week, the UK government said it wanted to boost solar capacity fivefold by 2035, up from 14 GW today.

This is why we should rely on solar the most for the future of power generation.

Solar energy is fast, reliable and infinite.Getty Images

Solar power’s energy source – the sun – is the most powerful and vast one we have. The amount of energy that hits the earth from the sun is 10,000 times higher than we need for all our power demands and requires less than 1 per cent of the Sahara to capture it.

We are blessed in Europe to have acres of untapped land for solar developments that we could begin utilising tomorrow if we have the conviction to do so, scaling solar at speed in parallel to wind energy.

Solar parks actually encourage biodiversity

The solar industry has worked hard to build an enhanced awareness of the environment in which solar parks are located. It is now widely expected that operators conduct an investigation of what plants and animals exist on a site, before creating a tailored plan that ensures this biodiversity increases.

It is commonplace to have ambitious biodiversity plans that include measures such as planting meadow flowers for pollinating insects, having sheep grazing as part of vegetation management, creating roosting spaces for bats, planting hedges and tree lines beyond required fencing, and preserving wildlife corridors.

Yet even then, some would rather suitable land be left to sit, rather than power their homes, businesses, and the continent, through a free and vast energy source in the sun.

We have to reach a point where, collectively, we accept that having some land host solar panels and wind farms is better than the alternative.

Only a handful of relatively simple policy actions are needed to make solar accelerate across Europe:

Fewer barriers to land developmentReform to roofing regulationsMaking the interconnection process easier

Such measures, coupled with a willingness to utilise just a fraction of our land for solar, would enable Europe to make solar a reliable cornerstone of our power system within the next decade.

Solar farms actually encourage biodiversity.Canva

Tackling the root of emissions

Companies like Alight build out solar power with no subsidies required at all, through industrial solar installations underpinned by 10 to 20-year power purchase agreements (PPAs).

This delivers long-term cost savings to business customers by providing solar power as a service without the need to invest capital. It maintains the infrastructure, that delivers the power that is subsequently purchased per kilowatt-hour by customers through a long-term PPA – which shields them from price surges while drastically reducing their emissions from fossil power sources.

No wonder then, given the clear advantages to be had, that solar arrays at European businesses are set to jump by about 15 per cent in Europe this year compared to 2021, according to data from BloombergNEF.

This is at a time when we have still barely even scratched the surface of solar’s true potential to revolutionise the global power system through its quick, cheap and infinite modular deployment.

Battery storage systems are the next frontier in this roll-out, increasingly co-located with solar power production to give us the means through which to store the sun’s rays for flexible usage.

By embracing the potential of solar, and committing to its long-term viability, we will be on a path to a 100 per cent renewable world.

The post Why solar power is the greenest renewable we have at our disposal first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

Two tugboats are currently moving a vast array of 12,000 solar panels, the size of four football pitches, to their mooring on the reservoir.

Built by EDP, the country’s main utility company, on Western Europe’s biggest artificial lake, the shiny floating island is part of Portugal’s plan to cut reliance on imported fossil fuels whose prices have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Blessed by long hours of sunshine and Atlantic winds, Portugal has accelerated its shift to renewables. But even though the country uses almost no Russian hydrocarbons, its gas-fired power plants still feel the squeeze of rising fuel prices.

Miguel Patena, EDP group director in charge of the solar project, said on Thursday that electricity produced from the floating park, with installed capacity of 5 megawatts (MW), would cost a third of that produced from a gas-fired plant.

The panels on the Alqueva reservoir, which is used to generate hydropower, would produce 7.5 gigawatt/hours (GWh) of electricity a year, and would be complemented by lithium batteries to store 2 GWh.

Portugal’s largest solar park opening in July.Reuters

The solar panels will supply 1,500 families with power, or a third of the needs of the nearby towns of Moura and Portel.

“This project is the biggest floating solar park in a hydro dam in Europe, it is a very good benchmark,” Patena said.

Solar panels mounted on pontoons on lakes, or at sea, have been installed in a range of places from California to polluted industrial ponds in China, in the fight to cut CO2 emissions.

Floating panels do not require valuable real estate and those on reservoirs used for hydropower are particularly cost effective as they can hook up to existing links to the power grid. Excess power generated on sunny days can pump water up into the lake to be stored for use on cloudy days or at night.

EDP executive board member Ana Paula Marques said the war in Ukraine showed the need to accelerate the shift to renewables

She said the Alqueva project was part of EDP’s strategy “to go 100 per cent green by 2030”, with hydropower and other renewables now accounting for 78 per cent of EDP’s 25.6 GW of installed capacity.

In 2017, EDP installed a pilot floating solar project with 840 panels on the Alto Rabagao dam, the first in Europe to test how hydro and solar power could complement each other.

EDP already has plans to expand the Alqueva project. It secured the right in April to build a second floating farm with 70 MW installed capacity.

The post Portugal is opening Europe’s biggest floating solar park this year first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.

They look more like red Lego blocks – and stack up like them too – but ‘Power-Blox’ work in the same way as a shoal, co-founder Alessandro Medici tells Euronews Green. Just as fish can grow, split and re-group, the blocks’ batteries combine to create an ‘energy swarm’.

What we are talking about are ‘energy cubes’, with batteries powered by portable solar panels. One of these solar boxes can meet most of a home’s electrical needs, and is easily plugged into another box to generate more energy for a community.

This is a more flexible system than mini-grids, and the technology has huge potential in some of the world’s poorest and most remote places. The Swiss company has distributed some 2,000 power blocks in around 20 countries since 2018, and is now on the verge of releasing an even more powerful device.

It’s all with a key UN sustainable development goal in mind: providing affordable, clean energy for all by 2030. 10 per cent of people, mostly in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, still lack access to electricity, according to the World Bank.

Alessandro Medici wanted to create a universal battery that can be used in many different environments.PowerBlox

Simplifying that challenge is a driving force for Medici, who is also the firm’s chief technology officer. “We need a kind of internet of energy,” he says, recalling the early, centralised days of computers, before the web connected us. “We have to integrate energy systems, we have to make them individually, we have to make the possibility to combine them and scale them up, [so they still work] even if there is a breakdown in part of the grid.”

The beauty of Power-Blox technology is that it can easily expand as a community’s energy needs grow, just by plugging in more blocks and solar units. In fact it can run off wind or hydro power too, making it perfectly adaptable to different climates around the world.

Revolutionising energy from Mozambique to Vanuatu

In the village of Mabime, Mozambique, the energy storage has helped people build up their businesses.Mariano Silva/PowerBlox

Partnering with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other aid organisations, Power-Blox has brought its energy storage solution to dozens of communities so far.

In one recently electrified Mozambique village, people have used the energy to start selling items from cold drinks to fridges and offer customers mobile charging stations.

“The whole village somehow developed, you even could see that from space,” says Medici. “It’s the same on the ground; it’s not only power, it’s also power that animates people to do something because they can start various kinds of business.”

Villagers in Mabime, Mozambique, now have electricity to work and study at night too.MARIANO SILVA/PowerBlox

Power-Blox has also electrified the off-grid island of Lelepa in the Republic of Vanuatu, and last year equipped entrepreneurs in an Ugandan refugee settlement.

“We often use it in disaster relief situations where there is an earthquake or tsunami,” adds Medici. “The Swiss government flies our power blocks to the place, even though they don’t know how much [energy] is needed, in the beginning.”

The PBX-200 supplies energy within minutes.

Have they considered sending them to Ukraine? “Absolutely,” says Medici, “We have already told our partners [also numbering USAID and Médecins Sans Frontières] – if you have any questions regarding power needs in Ukraine, please approach us, we can find the right solution.”

Amid the devastating heatwave in India – which has led to a surge in electricity demand blackouts – Power-Blox is looking to help speed up the transition to sustainable transport.

What’s next for Power-Blox and the off-grid energy movement?

In Mali, solar panels are used to charge the Power-Blox.PowerBlox

The biggest check on energy swarms’ potential is, it seems, a lack of funding. Solar home systems are more limited in scope, according to Medici, but attract the bulk of investment.

Power-Blox’s partner and competitors “all face the same problem: the funding really is not there for electrification.”

But although the tech company’s continued focus is on sub-Saharan Africa – growing interest from Western countries is providing a welcome boost. Power-Blox has electrified 150 mountain huts in Switzerland, and enabled Swiss IT companies to make the switch from analogue to digital communications. 

These more power-hungry scenarios have spurred on the development of PBX-400, the “bigger brother” of the original device, which is now in its final stages.

Swarms of fish and towers of lego are Power-Blox’ enduring inspirations. But Medici traces the origin back to 2008, when he was staying on a ranch in Kenya owned by Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma. Asked to help run the eco resort on solar and wind, Medici says “I realised during this project that sustainable technology is very complex, it was really difficult to implement. You have to be an engineer, and know everything about batteries, about solar modules, inverters and a thousand other things.”

Energy cubes stacked up in a hut in Laos.PowerBlox

“How can we make that simpler?” is a question he has been asking himself ever since.

As he looks to make the design ever-more sustainable too, the engineer is encouraged by new developments with re-used and saltwater batteries. The current lithium-iron phosphate batteries could easily be swapped out for a better model, Medici says.

“We always hope that better chemistry is coming up.”

The post ‘Lego blocks’ of solar energy could power all homes by 2030 first appeared on Magazin Haber Ajansı.