Green Energy

California's solar energy boom is often hailed as a green success story but a new study reveals a murkier reality beneath the sunlit panels. Researchers uncover seven distinct forms of corruption threatening the integrity of the state s clean energy expansion, including favoritism, land grabs, and misleading environmental claims. Perhaps most eyebrow-raising are allegations of romantic entanglements between senior officials and solar lobbyists, blurring the lines between personal influence and public interest. The report paints a picture of a solar sector racing ahead while governance and ethical safeguards fall dangerously behind.

Solar energy has become the #1 source of new electricity generation capacity in the United States in recent years, like in other markets around the world. Solar energy is just cheaper, more resilient, quicker to build, and good for energy independence and energy security.

These solar facts are courtesy of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)

Sellafield - the most hazardous building in Britain - is still leaking radioactive water.

The MSSS has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018, releasing enough water to fill an Olympic swimming pool every three years, and is likely to continue leaking until the oldest section of the building has been emptied in the 2050s, around a decade later than previously expected.

Pointing to the fact that Sellafield Ltd had missed most of its annual targets for retrieving waste from buildings, including the MSSS, the committee warned: “The consequence of this underperformance is that the buildings are likely to remain extremely hazardous for longer.”

In Halifax County, Virginia, a futuristic farm is taking shape, where a 65-megawatt solar farm is sharing space with grazing lambs and a 10-hive apiary that is home to 500,000 bees.

The bees are taking flight at Crystal Hill Solar, an agrivoltaic site with the capacity to power 10,800 homes per year, according to the operator, Urban Grid. The farm spans 620 acres, and the new apiary will be positioned near an edge of the land, CleanTechnica reported.

Urban Grid said the 10-hive apiary, developed in partnership with Siller Pollinator Company, is expected to produce around 400 pounds of honey per year, with some of the honey being distributed to local schools, food banks and faith-based organizations.

The solar farm already accommodates lamb, which graze on the site to help maintain it and reduce the need for mowing, in partnership with Gray’s Lambscaping. According to Gray’s Lambscaping, the lambs can help cut mowing needs by more than half.

As CleanTechnica reported, the lambs benefit from the grazing as well as additional shade provided by the solar panels.

Learn why microgrids are the essential tool for building their own cleaner, fairer, and more reliable energy systems.

The past decade has seen “a consistent, sustained pattern" of violence against Indigenous people who oppose corporate human rights abuses.

Although Indigenous peoples make up 6 percent of the world population, they accounted for one-fifth of the crimes documented in the report. They also were more likely than others to be killed, particularly in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.

Fossil fuel companies were hardly the only offenders, however. Dobson and her team identified several cases involving renewable energy sectors, where projects have been linked to nearly 365 cases of harassment and more than 100 killings of human rights defenders.

But mining, including the extraction of “transition minerals,” leads every sector in attacks on defenders. Forty percent of those killed in such crimes were Indigenous, a reflection of the fact that more than half of all critical minerals lie in or near Indigenous land.

The report: Defending rights and realising just economies: Human rights defenders and business (2015-2024)

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Grist article
• report cited

https://archive.is/8QOBS

BENGALURU, India (AP) — One of the most carbon-polluting countries, India is also making huge efforts to harness the power of the sun, wind and other clean energy sources.

Most of the electricity in India, the world’s most populous nation, still comes from coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. But coal’s dominance is dropping, going from 60% of installed power capacity 11 years ago to less than 50% today, according to India’s power ministry.

At the same time, India had its largest ever addition of clean power in the fiscal year between April 2024 and April of this year, adding 30 gigawatts — enough to power nearly 18 million Indian homes.

With a growing middle class and skyrocketing energy needs, how fast India can move away from coal and other fossil fuels, such as gasoline and oil, could have a large impact on global efforts to confront climate change.

GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.—About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farm’s shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.

The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes—known together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC—on their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desert’s unflinching sun and wind.

In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process.

Solar panel and battery installation company Sunrun has connected 75,000 home batteries together as a virtual power plant to help fortify California's electrical grid.

Over 56,000 Sunrun customers with solar and energy storage systems are now part of the solution in the face of growing power outages during heat waves and other extreme weather events, according to Electrek.

CalReady is the company's program that utilizes home energy storage systems as a backup power source that can provide up to 375 megawatts to the grid when the need arises.

Not only will this help residents keep cool during heat waves, but it will also lower electricity bills and put money into the pockets of residents who volunteer to be part of the collective program.

Participants can earn up to $150 per battery for sharing their stored solar energy for no more than 35 days per year between May and October.

Peak demand is usually between 4pm and 9pm, and CalReady's grid events last no more than two hours during that time.

Solar power has been leading the way in renewable energy capacity for several years, with both solar and battery storage accounting for 84% of total capacity additions, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Nearly 70 percent of China’s foreign power investments from 2022 to 2023 were in renewables like solar and wind, surpassing fossil fuels for the first time since Beijing started backing power projects overseas in the early 2000s, according to a new analysis from the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center at Boston University (BU).

The shift highlights China’s increasing dominance in green energy technologies and the supply chains of critical minerals and metals that support them, reported Inside Climate News.

Australia has notched up a “remarkable run” on big battery investment in the first quarter of 2025, with six projects worth $2.4 billion and a combined 1,510 megawatts (MW) of capacity and more than 5 gigawatt-hours of storage duration reaching financial close in just three months.

New quarterly data from the Clean Energy Council (CEC) details a flying start to what promises to be a big year for firming, as investment dollars flow to both stand-alone battery energy storage systems (BESS) and to hybrid projects with batteries included alongside big wind and solar.

“This is the second-best quarterly result on record in terms of energy output,” the report says, and the “best annual start for new storage projects on record,” and all with the uncertainty of a federal election thrown into the mix.

Researchers have uncovered a promising new direction for solar panel development. By using inorganic hole transport layers, the study's authors hope to provide a path to developing new, more efficient thin-film solar panels.

The American Solar Energy Society describes thin film as "the future of the solar industry" because it costs less to produce, requires less material, and is easy to manufacture. As the name suggests, thin-film solar panels are about 350 times thinner than mono or polycrystalline panels. They're not as efficient or long-lasting as their thicker cousins, but that could soon change.

Experiments on different materials have yielded promising results. Yet, as one of the study authors noted, writing in Tech Xplore, some of the existing version of thin-film materials' rarity and toxicity hold them back, while the alternative compounds offering promise do not have those drawbacks. Yet they also do not yet show sufficient efficiency to compete with conventional solar panels.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22919245

By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22916748

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