Introducing Community Solar+: the Next Generation of Community Solar, April 12, 2022. The first generation of community solar has truly enabled greater access to solar energy across the United States. Through innovative subscription programs and policies, community solar offers opportunities for many residential customers — including renters, people living in multifamily residential buildings, and those without a viable rooftop for hosting solar — to buy clean energy and reduce their energy burden. And momentum is building for community solar, with new and expanded programs from New Mexico to New York to Washington. But community solar has the potential to do far more. Further innovation, creativity, and holistic planning can allow states and local governments to leverage community solar to meet their ambitious climate action targets more strategically and equitably. In our new reportCommunity Solar+: How the Next Generation of Community Solar Can Unlock New Value Streams and Help Communities Pursue Holistic Decarbonization, RMI introduces our vision for Community Solar+ (CS+): community solar projects that are deliberately planned and strategically deployed to embrace added value streams and advance community-wide sustainability and equity goals.                                    Providing a Whole-Systems Approach to Community-Wide Sustainability,    In addition to clean energy access, community solar projects have the potential to provide even more benefits to communities. Our report highlights six value streams that, when designed and deployed in tandem with a community solar project, make it a CS+ project:

1. Accelerating investment in EV charging infrastructure
2. Increasing energy resilience for critical assets and vulnerable communities
3. Aligning evolving grid and customer needs for an electrified future
4. Creating a more equitable energy system
5. Providing covered parking and weather protection
6. Mitigating the urban heat island effect                                   https://rmi.org/introducing-community-solar-the-next-generation-of-community-solar/

 Let’s take a quick look at geothermal energy itself. The ARPA-E project AltaRock Energy estimates that “just 0.1% of the heat content of Earth could supply humanity’s total energy needs for 2 million years.” There’s enough energy in the Earth’s crust, just a few miles down, to power all of human civilization for generations to come. All we have to do is tap into it. Tapping into it, though, turns out to be pretty tricky. The easiest way to do so is to make direct use of the heat where it breaks the surface, in hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles (steam vents near volcanic activity).  Slightly more sophisticated is tapping into naturally occurring reservoirs of geothermal heat close to the surface to heat buildings. In the 1890s, the city of Boise, Idaho, tapped one to create the US’s first district heating system, whereby one central source of heat feeds into multiple commercial and residential buildings. (Boise’s downtown still uses it.) The technology for accessing deep geothermal is developing at a dizzying pace these days. Let’s take a look at its basic forms, from established to experimental.  Four basic types of geothermal energy technology.......Once it reaches the surface, geothermal energy is used for a wide variety of purposes, mainly because there are many different ways to use heat. Depending on how hot the resource is, it can be exploited by numerous industries. Virtually any level of heat can be used directly, to run fisheries or greenhouses, to dry cement, or (the really hot stuff) to make hydrogen.1) Conventional hydrothermal resources.......In a few select areas (think parts of Iceland, or California), water or steam heated by Earth’s core rises through relatively permeable rock, full of fissures and fractures, only to become trapped under an impermeable caprock. These giant reservoirs of pressurized hot water often reveal themselves on the surface through fumaroles or hot springs.  2) Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS).....Conventional geothermal systems are limited to specialized areas where heat, water, and porosity come together just so. But those areas are limited.There’s plenty of heat stored down in all that normal, solid, nonporous rock, though. What if geothermal developers could make their own reservoirs? What if they could drill down into solid rock, inject water at high pressure through one well, fracture the rock to let the water pass through, and then collect the heated water through another well? That, in a nutshell, is EGS: geothermal that makes its own reservoir.  3) Super-hot-rock geothermal.......At the far horizon of EGS is “super hot rock” geothermal, which seeks to tap into extremely deep, extremely hot rock. At extremely high heat, the performance of geothermal doesn’t just rise, it takes a leap. When water exceeds 373°C and 220 bars of pressure, it becomes “supercritical,” a new phase that is neither liquid nor gas. The science of supercritical water is funky (it’s like ... low-density water?) and I’m not going to attempt to explain it, but it is regularly used by industry, including in some advanced coal plants, so its properties are fairly well understood. 4) Advanced geothermal systems (AGS)......AGS refers to a new generation of “closed loop” systems, in which no fluids are introduced to or extracted from the Earth; there’s no fracking. Instead, fluids circulate underground in sealed pipes and boreholes, picking up heat by conduction and carrying it to the surface, where it can be used for a tunable mix of heat and electricity.Closed-loop geothermal systems have been around for decades, but a few startups have recently amped them up with technologies from the oil and gas industry. One such company, started by investors with experience in oil and gas, is the Alberta-based Eavor.     https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical   

Nuclear energy is key in the fight for climate ignore the myths about nuclear power – it is an essential source of clean energy. The letter on nuclear energy (25 August) sadly could not be more wrong – nuclear is one of the cleanest fuels we have, and has always been so. The carbon and material footprints of nuclear – for its entire lifetime, including mining and decommissioning – are lower than solar and on a par with wind, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Moreover, the nuclear industry manages its waste stream – that is more than can be said for the solar industry, which is set to produce millions of tons of toxic waste. Besides, spent nuclear fuel is not “waste” but a valuable source of low-carbon energy that can be recycled via reprocessing or proposed breeder reactors, thereby neutralising the vast majority of the radioactivity. At a time when we need every tool in the box to fight the climate crisis – and nuclear is one of the most effective – isn’t it time we started to look at the facts rather than repeat myths about nuclear waste?              https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/21/fight-climate-crisis-clean-energy-nuclear-power

Jeff Bezos and Cenovus Energy-backed General Fusion aims to create a star on earth with its nuclear fusion technology — straight out of a sci-fi novel. Burnaby-based General Fusion, a company backed by Jeff Bezos and Cenovus Energy Inc., harbours ambitions as big as they come: it wants to master nuclear fusion, essentially the same process that generates heat in the sun. But nuclear fusion is still an emerging technology that has yet to be commercialized. As the name suggests, it involves the fusion of two hydrogen atoms, which produces massive energy: one pound of fusion fuel is said to be equivalent 10 million pounds of coal. Unlike conventional nuclear power, which involves fission or splitting atoms, the emerging fusion technology promises clean energy where the only emission would be helium, and importantly, no radioactive waste. Now, after decades of largely government funded research, the industry is in the midst of a transition to the private realm with a couple dozen companies sprouting up around the world Investors say nuclear fusion would provide a baseload source of clean energy, that could be switched on or off, to complement renewable power, such as wind and solar.  Last week, Chris Mowry, chief executive of the Burnaby-based company signed paperwork with the United Kingdom government to build a US$400 million nuclear fusion test plant at Culham in Oxfordshire. If construction on the proposed plant, announced on June 16, begins as expected next summer, it may be the first public-private nuclear fusion demonstration plant in the world.“This is the commercialization of fusion,” Chris Mowry, chief executive of Burnaby-based General Fusion told the Financial Post as his triumphant week came to a close. “A great analogy is the commercialization of space over the past decade or two, which was historically just the focus of governments.” 

https://financialpost.com/commodities/the-last-energy-source-well-ever-tame-b-c-startups-400m-u-k-