U.S. solar is weighed down by soft costs and policy inefficiencies: fragmented permitting, slow approvals, duplicative inspections, and high fees. Customer acquisition remains bloated by opaque pricing, long sales cycles, and high-commission models. Hardware is more expensive due to tariffs and policies that favor costly technologies. Together, these inefficiencies add more than $2/W – keeping …
David Reilly and his University of Sidney team developed a silicon chip that can control spin qubits at milli-kelvin temperatures. That’s just slightly above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius), the temperature at which – theoretically – matter ceases moving. Experts think that spin qubits (where information is encoded onto the magnetic direction of single electrons) …
At the end of October 2023, China’s NEA (National Energy Administration) reported China’s installed renewable energy capacity had exceeded 1.4 Terawatts. This capacity includes 420 GW of hydropower, 404 GW of wind power, 536 GW of solar, and 44 GW of biomass. China added 216.9 GW of solar capacity in 2023, marking a 148 % …
There are reports that Tesla is filing to become an Australian Energy Retailer (an Australian electrical utility). The Brattle group has a Virtual Power Plant study. Buying peaking capacity from a VPP is 40% cheaper than a utility-scale battery and 60% lower than from a gas peaker plant. A 60 GW VPP deployment could beat …
Telstra has signed an agreement to become the first telco in the world to use Starlink low-earth-orbit Satellites for voice-only services while at the same time offering Starlink Broadband to regional and remote Australia. In areas where copper lines for phones are degraded, out of reach or impossible to install, Telstra will now put a …
Star Scientific has raised over $100 million over two decades. Early on they were working on muon catalyzed fusion but they seem to have transitioned to non-combustion heat generation from hydrogen. The are using some thin-film catalyst that generates heat when exposed to hydrogen and oxygen. The Hydrogen Energy Release Optimiser (HERO) converts hydrogen into …
The United States is the largest market for stationary (battery) storage in the world. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that annual demand for lithium-ion batteries will surpass 2.7 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030. 800 Gigawatts of battery storage at current prices is about $1.5 trillion. Prices will be high for the next two to three years …
The Australian Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre has installed a room-temperature diamond-based quantum computer developed by Quantum Brilliance. They use synthetic diamonds to run at room temperature. It is a nitrogen-vacancy center based qubit, an imperfection within diamonds, which can be manipulated at room temperature. The system has been paired with Setonix, Pawsey’s HPE Cray EX …
Fires have destroyed 80% of the Koalas Habitats in Australia but there are still over 40,000 Koalas. Austrialian Koala Foundation Exaggerated Claim of Functional Extinction On May 10, 2019, the Australian Koala Foundation issued a press release that opened with the sentence “The Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) believes Koalas may be functionally extinct in the …
Boeing will create a jet fighter companion drone for Australia’s airforce. The Boeing Airpower Teaming System will provide a disruptive advantage for allied forces’ manned/unmanned missions. Jet fighter drones will eventually provide force multiplier benefits for Air Force pilots. In 2020, the first prototype drone with fighter-like performance will be flying. It will be 38 …
Trees can help with climate change and CO2 emissions but we would need about 150 Brazilian rain forests to offset current global emissions. This would be about 50 trillion trees. A more powerful biological offset would be to use kelp forests. Kelp can grow thirty times faster than trees. 40% of the world’s land is …