Minister of Power Dullas Alahapperuma says the first power plant generating electricity using solid waste in Sri Lanka established in the Kerawalapitiya area in Hendala will be added to the national grid by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa on the 17th of this month.
The power plant is planned to generate 10 megawatts using 700 tons of garbage daily and will operate by collecting waste from the area.
The Minister said that the use of waste collected in this manner for the generation of electricity in the entire district is also environmentally beneficial.
In addition, the Ministry of Power plans to commence the first project to generate electricity from biogas using biodegradable waste in the Matara District.
Source: Business News LK
The project, which is being constructed in Kotawila in the Matara District, is planned to add 400 kilowatts to the national grid using 40 tons of garbage per day. The project is expected to be operationalized by October this year and added to the national grid.
President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s Vision of Prosperity policy framework marks the milestones of an innovative power generation process that goes beyond conventional power generation, and as the Minister in charge of the subject, he has been given the challenge of increasing the contribution of renewable energy to 70% of the national grid by the year 2023, Minister Alahapperuma said.
The Minister added that it was his responsibility to overcome the challenge and provide uninterrupted, quality, reliable and affordable electricity to the electricity consumers. Accordingly, steps will be taken in the future to implement the process of generating electricity from garbage as well as the process of generating electricity from biogas at the district level covering the entire island, said the Minister of Power, Dullas Alahapperuma.
C-Zero splits methane into hydrogen and solid carbon, eliminating much of the greenhouse-gas impact.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the fund helmed by Bill Gates, led a funding round to raise $11.5 million for California-based startup C-Zero Inc.
The company has developed technology to lower the greenhouse-gas emissions from using natural gas. Instead of burning the fuel to produce carbon dioxide and water, C-Zero passes the gas through a mixture of molten salts. Doing so splits methane — the main component of natural gas — into hydrogen gas and solid carbon. When the hydrogen burns, it produces water; the solid carbon goes to landfills.
The company’s tech appealed to the prominent clean-energy fund because the world will need access to gaseous fuels like hydrogen at large scales and low costs to meet climate targets. Developing the process “needed both cheap natural gas and the world to care about reducing CO₂ emissions,” said Zachary Jones, C-Zero’s chief executive officer. Both those conditions have been met only in recent years, with the fracking boom overlapping with the urgency to act on climate change.
Splitting methane, which is made up of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, into hydrogen and solid carbon is not difficult in terms of the chemistry. The main challenge now is lowering the cost when the technology is scaled up.Gas per day, followed by a commercial unit that is capable of producing more than 1,000 kg per day. Most clean-energy startups fail at the scaling stage.
Natural gas doesn’t just hurt the environment when its burned. Producing and transporting the fuel also adds to the greenhouse-gas burden. Leaky wells and pipes dump unburned methane into the atmosphere, where it traps as much as 86 times more heat than similar amounts of CO₂. “The benefit of our technology is that it can be a deployed on the well head,” said Jones, reducing some methane leaks.
Alongside BEV, the other investors in C-Zero include Eni Next, the venture arm of oil and gas giant Eni SpA, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is developing hydrogen turbines. Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP, is also a backer of BEV.
C-Zero isn’t the only one trying to deploy the tech. Nebraska-based Monolith Materials Inc. is also hoping to find a market for the solid carbon produced as a byproduct of turning methane into hydrogen. Australia-based Hazer Group Ltd turns natural gas into hydrogen and graphite, a form of carbon that can be used in lithium-ion batteries.
“I wish that our carbon had value. That’s a much better business model,” said Jones. If only 10% of the natural gas the world consumes today was converted to hydrogen through this process, Jones estimates that the global market for solid carbon would be saturated. “That’s the difference from our competitors. We’ve been 100% focused on making the lowest cost, cleanest hydrogen we can,” he added.
If not put to use, solid carbon has to be discarded as a waste. As yet, no one has done it at a scale for there to be studies on the environmental risks. But Jones is confident that it would be like dealing with the ash from burning coal, which the world produces in the hundreds of millions of tons each year and which often just sits in landfills.
Much of the world’s hydrogen today is produced from natural gas. The current method, however, produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, which are dumped in the air. Countries such as the U.K. and Germany are working on incentivizing the use of carbon capture technology, which will see CO₂ injected deep underground. Jones argues that it’s much better to deal with solid carbon than worrying about buried CO₂ gas.
There’s also the risk that the company may struggle to get enough climate-conscious investors to bet on a technology that helps prolong the use of fossil fuels. Jones said that, once scaled up, C-Zero’s tech can eventually be used on methane produced from biological sources, often referred to as renewable natural gas.
A project to build a giant island providing enough energy for three million households has been given the green light by Denmark’s politicians.
The world’s first energy island will be as big as 18 football pitches (120,000sq m), but there are hopes to make it three times that size.
It will serve as a hub for 200 giant offshore wind turbines.
It is the biggest construction project in Danish history, costing an estimated 210bn kroner (£24bn; €28bn: $34bn).
Situated 80km (50 miles) out to sea, the artificial island would be at least half-owned by the state but partly by the private sector.
It will not just supply electricity for Danes but for other, neighbouring countries’ electricity grids too. Although those countries have not yet been detailed, Prof Jacob Ostergaard of the Technical University of Denmark told the BBC that the UK could benefit, as well as Germany or the Netherlands. Green hydrogen would also be provided for use in shipping, aviation, industry and heavy transport.
Under Denmark’s Climate Act, the country has committed to an ambitious 70% reduction in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to becoming CO2 neutral by 2050. Last December it announced it was ending all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Energy Minister Dan Jorgensen said the country was simply “changing the map”.
“This is gigantic,” Prof Ostergaard told the BBC. “It’s the next big step for the Danish wind turbine industry. We were leading on land, then we took the step offshore and now we are taking the step with energy islands, so it’ll keep the Danish industry in a pioneering position.”
The plan is for the island to grow from an initial 120,000 sq m in size to 460,000 sq m Source: DANISH ENERGY AGENCY
Green group Dansk Energi said that while the “dream was on the way to becoming a reality” it doubted the North Sea island would be up and running by the planned 2033 start date.
But Danish politicians across the spectrum have given their backing to the plan. Former energy minister Rasmus Helveg Petersen of the Social Liberal party said energy islands had begun “as a radical vision” but there was now a broad agreement to turn it into a reality.
A smaller energy island is already being planned off Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, to the east of mainland Denmark. Agreements have already been signed for electricity to be provided from there to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Last November the European Union announced plans for a 25-fold increase in offshore wind capacity by 2050, with a five-fold increase by 2030. Renewable energy provides around a third of the bloc’s current electricity needs:
According to the EU, offshore wind supplies a current level of 12 gigawatts
Denmark supplies 1.7 gigawatts
The new island would supply an initial 3 gigawatts, rising to 10 over time
The smaller Bornholm energy island would provide 2 gigawatts
While there is some secrecy over where the new island will be built, it is known that it will be 80km into the North Sea. Danish TV said that a Danish Energy Agency study last year had marked two areas west of the Jutland coast and that both had a relatively shallow sea depth of 26-27m.
The trading of carbon credits can help companies—and the world—meet ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Here is what it would take to strengthen voluntary carbon markets so they can support climate action on a large scale.
More and more companies are pledging to help stop climate change by reducing their own greenhouse-gas emissions as much as they can. Yet many businesses find they cannot fully eliminate their emissions, or even lessen them as quickly as they might like. The challenge is especially tough for organizations that aim to achieve net-zero emissions, which means removing as much greenhouse gas from the air as they put into it. For many, it will be necessary to use carbon credits to offset emissions they can’t get rid of by other means. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), sponsored by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) with knowledge support from McKinsey, estimates that demand for carbon credits could increase by a factor of 15 or more by 2030 and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050. Overall, the market for carbon credits could be worth upward of $50 billion in 2030.
The market for carbon credits purchased voluntarily (rather than for compliance purposes) is important for other reasons, too. Voluntary carbon credits direct private financing to climate-action projects that would not otherwise get off the ground. These projects can have additional benefits such as biodiversity protection, pollution prevention, public-health improvements, and job creation. Carbon credits also support investment into the innovation required to lower the cost of emerging climate technologies. And scaled-up voluntary carbon markets would facilitate the mobilization of capital to the Global South, where there is the most potential for economical nature-based emissions-reduction projects.1
Given the demand for carbon credits that could ensue from global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s apparent that the world will need a voluntary carbon market that is large, transparent, verifiable, and environmentally robust. Today’s market, though, is fragmented and complex. Some credits have turned out to represent emissions reductions that were questionable at best. Limited pricing data make it challenging for buyers to know whether they are paying a fair price, and for suppliers to manage the risk they take on by financing and working on carbon-reduction projects without knowing how much buyers will ultimately pay for carbon credits. In this article, which is based on McKinsey’s research for a new report by the TSVCM, we look at these issues and how market participants, standard-setting organizations, financial institutions, market-infrastructure providers, and other constituencies might address them to scale up the voluntary carbon market.
Carbon credits can help companies to meet their climate-change goals
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries have endorsed the global goal of limiting the rise in average temperatures to 2.0 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and ideally 1.5 degrees. Reaching the 1.5-degree target would require that global greenhouse-gas emissions are cut by 50 percent of current levels by 2030 and reduced to net zero by 2050. More companies are aligning themselves with this agenda: in less than a year, the number of companies with net-zero pledges doubled, from 500 in 2019 to more than 1,000 in 2020.2
To meet the worldwide net-zero target, companies will need to reduce their own emissions as much as they can (while also measuring and reporting on their progress, to achieve the transparency and accountability that investors and other stakeholders increasingly want). For some companies, however, it’s prohibitively expensive to reduce emissions using today’s technologies, though the costs of those technologies might go down in time. And at some businesses, certain sources of emissions cannot be eliminated. For example, making cement at industrial scale typically involves a chemical reaction, calcination, which accounts for a large share of the cement sector’s carbon emissions. Because of these limitations, the emissions-reduction pathway to a 1.5-degree warming target effectively requires “negative emissions,” which are achieved by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Purchasing carbon credits is one way for a company to address emissions it is unable to eliminate. Carbon credits are certificates representing quantities of greenhouse gases that have been kept out of the air or removed from it. While carbon credits have been in use for decades, the voluntary market for carbon credits has grown significantly in recent years. McKinsey estimates that in 2020, buyers retired carbon credits for some 95 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), which would be more than twice as much as in 2017.
As efforts to decarbonize the global economy increase, demand for voluntary carbon credits could continue to rise. Based on stated demand for carbon credits, demand projections from experts surveyed by the TSVCM, and the volume of negative emissions needed to reduce emissions in line with the 1.5-degree warming goal, McKinsey estimates that annual global demand for carbon credits could reach up to 1.5 to 2.0 gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) by 2030 and up to 7 to 13 GtCO2 by 2050 (Exhibit 2). Depending on different price scenarios and their underlying drivers, the market size in 2030 could be between $5 billion and $30 billion at the low end and more than $50 billion at the high end.3
Exhibit 2
While the increase in demand for carbon credits is significant, analysis by McKinsey indicates that demand in 2030 could be matched by the potential annual supply of carbon credits: 8 to 12 GtCO2 per year. These carbon credits would come from four categories: avoided nature loss (including deforestation); nature-based sequestration, such as reforestation; avoidance or reduction of emissions such as methane from landfills; and technology-based removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, several factors could make it challenging to mobilize the entire potential supply and bring it to market. The development of projects would have to ramp up at an unprecedented rate. Most of the potential supply of avoided nature loss and of nature-based sequestration is concentrated in a small number of countries. All projects come with risks, and many types could struggle to attract financing because of the long lag times between the initial investment and the eventual sale of credits. Once these challenges are accounted for, the estimated supply of carbon credits drops to 1 to 5 GtCO2 per year by 2030 (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
These aren’t the only problems facing buyers and sellers of carbon credits, either. High-quality carbon credits are scarce because accounting and verification methodologies vary and because credits’ co-benefits (such as community economic development and biodiversity protection) are seldom well defined. When verifying the quality of new credits—an important step in maintaining the market’s integrity—suppliers endure long lead times. When selling those credits, suppliers face unpredictable demand and can seldom fetch economical prices. Overall, the market is characterized by low liquidity, scarce financing, inadequate risk-management services, and limited data availability.
These challenges are formidable but not insurmountable. Verification methodologies could be strengthened, and verification processes streamlined. Clearer demand signals would help give suppliers more confidence in their project plans and encourage investors and lenders to provide with financing. And all these requirements could be met through the careful development of an effective, large-scale voluntary carbon market.
Scaling up voluntary carbon markets requires a new blueprint for action
Building an effective voluntary carbon market will require concerted effort across a number of fronts. In its report, the TSVCM identified six areas, spanning the carbon-credit value chain, where action can support the scaling up of the voluntary carbon market.
Creating shared principles for defining and verifying carbon credits
Today’s voluntary carbon market lacks the liquidity necessary for efficient trading, in part because carbon credits are highly heterogeneous. Each credit has attributes associated with the underlying project, such as the type of project or the region where it was carried out. These attributes affect the price of the credit, because buyers value additional attributes differently. Overall, the inconsistency among credits means that matching an individual buyer with a corresponding supplier is a time-consuming, inefficient process transacted over the counter.
The matching of buyers and suppliers would be more efficient if all credits could be described through common features. The first set of features has to do with quality. Quality criteria, set out in “core carbon principles,” would provide a basis for verifying that carbon credits represent genuine emissions reductions. The second set of features would cover the additional attributes of the carbon credit. Standardizing those attributes in a common taxonomy would help sellers to market credits and buyers to find credits that meet their needs.
Developing contracts with standardized terms
In the voluntary carbon market, the heterogeneity of carbon credits means that credits of particular types are being traded in volumes too small to generate reliable daily price signals. Making carbon credits more uniform would consolidate trading activity around a few types of credits and also promote liquidity on exchanges.
After the establishment of the core carbon principles and standard attributes described above, exchanges could create “reference contracts” for carbon trading. Reference contracts would combine a core contract, based on the core carbon principles, with additional attributes that are defined according to a standard taxonomy and priced separately. Core contracts would make it easier for companies to do things such as purchasing large quantities of carbon credits at once: they could make bids for credits that meet certain criteria, and the market would aggregate smaller quantities of credits to match their bids.
Another benefit of reference contracts would be the development of a clear daily market price. Even after reference contracts are developed, many parties will continue to make trades over the counter (OTC). Prices for credits traded using reference contracts could establish a starting point for the negotiation of OTC trades, with other attributes priced separately.
Establishing trading and post-trade infrastructure
A resilient, flexible infrastructure would enable the voluntary carbon market to function effectively: to accommodate high-volume listing and trading of reference contracts, as well as contracts reflecting a limited, consistently defined set of additional attributes. This, in turn, would support the creation of structured finance products for project developers.
Post-trade infrastructure, comprising clearinghouses and meta-registries, is also necessary. Clearinghouses would support the development of a futures market and provide counterparty default protection. Meta-registries would provide custodian-like services for buyers and suppliers and enable the creation of standardized issuance numbers for individual projects (similar to the International Securities Identification Number, or ISIN, in capital markets).
In addition, an advanced data infrastructure would promote the transparency of reference and market data. Sophisticated and timely data are essential for all environmental and capital markets. Transparent reference and market data are not readily available now because access to data is limited and the OTC market is difficult to track. Buyers and suppliers would benefit from new reporting and analytics services that consolidate openly accessible reference data from multiple registries, through APIs.
Creating consensus about the proper use of carbon credits
A measure of skepticism attends the use of credits in decarbonization. Some observers question whether companies will extensively reduce their own emissions if they have the option to offset emissions instead. Companies would benefit from clear guidance on what would constitute an environmentally sound offsetting program as part of an overall push toward net-zero emissions. Principles for the use of carbon credits would help ensure that carbon offsetting does not preclude other efforts to mitigate emissions and does result in more carbon reductions than would take place otherwise.
Under such principles, a company would first establish its need for carbon credits by disclosing its greenhouse-gas emissions from all operations, along with its targets and plans for reducing emissions over time. To compensate for emissions from sources that it can eventually eliminate, the company might purchase and “retire” carbon credits (claiming the reductions as their own and taking the credits off the market, so that another organization can’t claim the same reductions). It could also use carbon credits to neutralize the so-called residual emissions that it wouldn’t be able to eliminate in the future.
Installing mechanisms to safeguard the market’s integrity
Concerns about the integrity of the voluntary carbon market impede its growth in several ways. First, the heterogeneous nature of credits creates potential for errors and fraud. The market’s lack of price transparency also creates the potential for money laundering.
One corrective measure would be establishing a digital process by which projects are registered and credits are verified and issued. Verification entities should be able to track a project’s impact at regular intervals, not just at the end. A digital process could lower issuance costs, shorten payment terms, accelerate credit issuance and cash flow for project developers, allow credits to be traced, and improve the credibility of corporate claims related to the use of offsets.
Other improvements would be the implementation of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer guidelines to stop fraud, and the creation of a governance body to ensure the eligibility of market participants, supervise their conduct, and oversee the market’s functioning.
Transmitting clear signals of demand
Finding effective ways for buyers of carbon credits to signal their future demand would help encourage project developers to increase the supply of carbon credits. Long-term demand signals might arrive in the form of commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions or as up-front agreements with project developers to buy carbon credits from future projects. Medium-term demand might be recorded in a registry of commitments to purchase carbon credits.
Other potential ways to promote demand signals include consistent, widely accepted guidelines for companies on accepted uses of carbon credits to offset emissions; more industry-wide collaboration, whereby consortiums of companies might align their emissions-reduction goals or set out shared goals; and better standards and infrastructure for the development and sale of consumer-oriented carbon credits.
Limiting the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius will require a rapid, drastic reduction in net greenhouse-gas emissions. While companies and other organizations can achieve much of the necessary reduction by adopting new technologies, energy sources, and operating practices, many will need to use carbon credits to supplement their own abatement efforts to achieve net-zero emissions. A robust, effective voluntary market for carbon credits would make it easier for companies to locate trustworthy sources of carbon credits and complete the transactions for them. Just as important, such a market would be able to transmit signals of buyers’ demand, which would in turn encourage sellers to increase supplies of credits. By enabling more carbon offsetting to take place, a voluntary carbon market would support progress toward a low-carbon future.
“THE fact that, as a startup, we’ve made it past 200 applicants worldwide and into the finals shows recognition on the importance and urgency of resolving the plastic waste problem worldwide,” says co-founder of Klean, Datuk Mohamad Arif Abdullah.
Klean, a Malaysian-based startup, was one of the six finalists for The Liveability Challenge which aims to close the financing gap between the ideas that will make cities better and the investments that will turn their solutions into reality.
Over 200 applications from 34 countries around the world were filed over two months and the six most promising ones selected, including Klean.
Good cause: Boden hopes to encourage the public to recycle with his Klean Reverse Vending Machines.
Klean, with the other five finalists, took the stage at The Liveability Challenge Finale and pitched their innovative solutions to secure up to S$1mil (RM2.96mil) in funding for the development of their projects.
The event was held on the sidelines of the World Cities Summit and CleanEnviro Singapore Summit on July 11 at Marina Bay Sands.
Klean, which in June won the first Asean edition of Pitch@Palace, plans to talk to Asean governments and government-linked companies on boosting the recycling rates.
In addition, they are also trying to talk to the UK government as the UK is expected to introduce the container deposit scheme towards the end of this year to curb plastic waste.
Both Mohamad Arif and Datuk Dr Nick Boden, as founders of Klean, will proceed to pitch in the finals at Pitch@Palace Global at St. James Palace in London this December.
Klean’s ecosystem utilises a unique Malaysian-made smart reverse vending machine (SRVM) with its own Klean operating system and an app that rewards people for recycling empty polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and aluminium cans with an innovative points scheme, which is redeemable for rewards such as prepaid air time and discounts for transportation rides, goods and services.
Their greatest achievement to date was to team up with HelloGold to tackle generational poverty.
By returning bottles and cans, users can build up a gold portfolio, allowing poor people to save money using readily available waste.
They can even use this gold as collateral to secure a loan, start a business and increase savings.
In Singapore, Klean has teamed up with a leading beverage company to start a proof of concept on a container deposit scheme in the island state.
“Available data shows that the container deposit scheme has been proven to resolve the PET plastic waste problem and increase the recycling rates of countries that adopt them.
“We are aiming to start a scheme here in Singapore and in Asean and turn the tide on the problem of plastic waste in this region,” Mohamad Arif said.
They are currently seeking to secure US$5mil (RM20.2mil) in funding to allow further research and development and to launch machines across Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of Asean. — Bernama.
In a country where over 80% of residents live in public housing, a government commitment to sustainable urban design could have huge implications. And when it’s a tropical country where convenience and air conditioning are a way of life, the impact could be greater still.
Promising 42,000 new homes across five residential districts, the eco-town of Tengah — the Malay word for “middle,” though it’s in the island’s western region — will be the 24th new settlement built by Singapore’s government since World War II. It is, however, the first with centralized cooling, automated trash collection and a car-free town center, which conservationists hope offers a roadmap for slashing carbon emissions in the Southeast Asian city-state.
The development is being dubbed a “forest town” by officials, due to its abundant greenery and public gardens. Once home to brickmaking factories, and later used for military training, the 700-hectare (2.7-square-mile) site has been reclaimed by an extensive secondary forest in recent years. A 328-foot-wide ecological “corridor” will be maintained through its center, providing safe passage to wildlife and connecting a water catchment area on one side to a nature reserve on the other.
Planners say the town has been designed with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. Credit: Courtesy The Housing & Development Board
The project has proven a tabula rasa for urban planners advocating green design principles and “smart” technology, according to Chong Fook Loong, group director for research and planning at Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB), the agency overseeing the country’s public housing.
“Tengah is a clean slate,” he said in a video interview, explaining that roads, parking and utilities are being pushed beneath the town center. “We’re going for the ideal concept of segregation of traffic, (with) everything underground and then the ground level totally freed up for pedestrians — for people. So, it’s a very safe environment for all.
“We want a town that allows walking and cycling in a very user-friendly manner,” he added, saying that cycling has “taken off” in Singapore in the “last three to five years especially.”
The master plan will see the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, while the streets are also being “futureproofed” to accommodate emerging technologies, Chong said.
“When we planned the road network, we envisaged a future where autonomous vehicles and self-driving vehicles will become a reality,” he said.
Cooler by design
Although comparatively small, with a population of under 6 million people, Singapore’s per-capita emissions are higher than those of the UK, China, and neighboring Malaysia, according to the country’s National Climate Change Secretariat.
That’s due, in part, to air conditioning, which accounts for more than a third of typical household energy consumption. Global warming will only exacerbate this dependence. The Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) has predicted that, by the end of this century, average daily temperatures in the city-state may be at least 34.1 degrees Celsius (93.4 degrees Fahrenheit) “almost every day” during the eight warmest months of the year.
An artist’s impression of the 2.7-square-mile site. Credit: Courtesy The Housing & Development Board
As such, keeping cool will, increasingly, be a necessity for residents. Rather than demonizing air conditioning, Tengah’s planners have instead sought to reimagine it. Cold water, chilled using solar power, will be piped though the district’s homes, meaning residents don’t need to install inefficient outdoor AC condensers (though they can still control the temperature in their own apartments).
According to the town’s energy provider, SP Group, this will generate carbon dioxide savings equivalent to taking 4,500 cars off the roads each year. The state-owned energy company reports that, of the apartments already sold in advance, 9 out of 10 future residents have signed up for centralized cooling.
Planners used computer modeling to simulate wind flow and heat gain across the town, helping to reduce the so-called urban heat island effect (whereby human activities and structures make urban areas notably warmer than the surrounding nature). Elsewhere, “smart” lights will switch off when public spaces are unoccupied, and trash will be stored centrally, with monitors detecting when garbage needs collecting.
“Instead of using a truck to collect garbage from every block, we will suck all the garbage through the pneumatic system to a chamber that serves several blocks,” Chong said. “From time to time, the (garbage) truck just needs to collect from the chamber.”
One of the town’s five residential districts, known as the Plantation District, will offer community farming. Credit: Courtesy The Housing & Development Board
Of the 42,000 homes being built at Tengah, more than 70% will be made available through the HDB on long-term leases. Prices for two-bedroom apartments currently begin at just 108,000 Singapore dollars ($82,000), with the first apartments set to complete in 2023.
All residents will have access to an app allowing them to monitor their energy and water usage. (“You empower them to take control of where they can cut down their energy consumption,” Chong said.) Digital displays in each block will meanwhile inform occupants of their collective environmental impact, which could even encourage competition between residential blocks, according to SP Group.
Regardless of whether the use of smart technology can significantly dent greenhouse gas emissions or not, engaging residents with their own consumption could instigate behavioral change, according to Perrine Hamel, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University’s Asian School of the Environment. This, she added, is a crucial part of Singapore’s goal of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and reducing them thereafter.
“Thinking about food consumption and thinking about the way people use air conditioning is all part of (achieving climate targets),” she said. “Changing behavior is going to be an integral part of it and, of course, urban design is the first way to affect and change behavior.”
Dubbing the project a “forest town,” planners aim to retain some of the site’s natural greenery. Credit: Courtesy The Housing & Development Board
Connecting with nature
For Hamel, the integration of nature and residential areas — which creates “more opportunities for people to interact with nature” — is where Tengah’s plan excels. In addition to the aforementioned forest corridor, the town’s residents will have access to community farming in the so-called Plantation District.
Beyond promoting and protecting biodiversity, conserving nature on the site can lead to further behavioral change, Hamel said.
“There are a lot of examples, from around the world, showing that changing our relationship with nature through everyday encounters does help people take environmental action,” she said. “On that front I think the biophilic design and (Tengah’s) master plan actually does a good job.”.
The Nature Society Singapore (NSS) has nonetheless criticized the plan for conserving too little — less than 10% — of the site’s existing forest. The environmental group has proposed two additional “core forest areas” at either end of the green corridor to promote biodiversity and protect migratory species.
The government said it is “refining” its plan based the NSS report, though Singapore’s Land Transport Authority has since disclosed that even more of the remaining forest — about 3% of the proposed corridor — will be felled to make way for viaducts connecting the town to a nearby expressway.
(In an email to CNN, the agency said it will later replant the trees in the cleared area and create “suitable temporary wildlife crossings … to provide a safe passage for animals during construction.”)
Yet, even Tengah’s critics have broadly welcomed the eco-town, with the NSS concluding its environmental critique by stating it is still “heartened by this bold plan.”
What these urban design initiatives mean for the rest of Singapore remains to be seen. When Tengah was first revealed in 2016, it was the first new town announced by Singapore’s government in two decades, meaning every other neighborhood was designed long before the era of autonomous vehicles and internet-enabled amenities. Chong readily admitted that “it’s not so easy” to retrofit underground road networks and pneumatic trash chutes in existing towns.
Nevertheless, he struck a positive note when asked what Tengah’s model offers future residential projects.
“We try to bring all the lessons forward — whenever we can and to the best of our ability,” he said. “You look at Tengah and, in a nutshell, you’re seeing the future of what the (government) is trying to build: the future of towns.”
The upcoming 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars will transform UK motoring on a scale never seen before. This story is part of a wider analysis of the challenges faced by consumers, government and the automotive industry, what needs to happen, and how such drastic changes can be achieved over the next decade.
There’s no reason to think not, because the energy we generate from renewables is increasing every year. National Grid data shows that in the first 11 months of 2020 (the most recent figures available), Britain emitted 181g of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour of electricity. In 2019 it was 215g and in 2013 it was 529g. So it’s clear that we’re heading in the right direction.
But what about the additional power we will need? Can that come just from wind? According to its 10 Point Plan, the UK government is aiming for 40GW of offshore wind by 2030, quadruple today’s figure. Happily, that increase corresponds with the amount needed to generate the necessary 100TWh. Fowler says: “I think this is a coincidence rather than some high-level strategy but, yes, you could power all your vehicles with renewables.”
Of course, wind isn’t the only renewable energy source. The government lists a total of 12 forms of installed renewable energy sources, ranging from shoreline wave and tidal to solar to large-scale hydro. Even our own waste comes into it: sewage sludge digestion contributes 247MW to the grid. Think of that when you switch on your smoothie machine.
One thing uniting most renewables, though, is how to store the electricity for later use. This is where hydrogen could come in: by using renewable energy to ‘crack’ seawater and turn it into the gas, it would be possible to store this for later use when the wind isn’t blowing. One happy bonus is that when you do end up burning the hydrogen, only water will be produced.
A company called GeoPura is already doing this. It has even designed what is effectively a miniature power station that can be positioned in a car park or similar and stores the hydrogen to generate electricity when it’s needed. This is an off-grid solution, so car park or business owners could transform their spaces by offering multiple charging points without the cost of going through the local network.
Something to bear in mind, though, is that even renewables need raw materials. In Guillaume Pitron’s book The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies, the Frenchman says the world will need 3200 million tonnes of steel, 310 million tonnes of aluminium and 40 million tonnes of copper to keep up with global demand for wind turbines. In a headline-grabbing statement, Pitron thinks “our 7.5 billion contemporaries will absorb more mineral resources than the 108 billion humans who have walked the earth to date”.
Those sound like big numbers but, from a grid point of view, the experts are less concerned. Randolph Brazier, director of innovation and electrical systems at the Energy Networks Association, isn’t aware of any pinch points in the supply of raw materials: “Grids aren’t always copper – you can use aluminium, depending on the voltage – but we don’t foresee any issue with a lack of resources with building networks.”
Until recently, rooftop solar panels were a clean energy technology that only wealthy Americans could afford. But prices have dropped, thanks mostly to falling costs for hardware, as well as price declines for installation and other “soft” costs.
Today hundreds of thousands of middle-class households across the U.S. are turning to solar power. But households with incomes below the median for their areas remain less likely to go solar. These low- and moderate-income households face several roadblocks to solar adoption, including cash constraints, low rates of home ownership and language barriers.
We found that three scenarios did: offering financial incentives to low- and moderate-income households; leasing solar panels to homeowners; and lending money to buy panels, with the loan repaid on property tax bills. All of these approaches resulted in people at a wider range of income levels trying solar energy.
Solar Power for Everyone
For over a decade our team at the Berkeley lab’s Electricity Markets and Policy group has kept tabs on trends in the rooftop solar market through our annual report, “Tracking the Sun.” It documents how prices have fallen, and the number of installations has risen in U.S. solar markets.
Over the past decade rooftop solar power has grown significantly in the U.S., spreading beyond initial hot spots in California and Hawaii to states such as North Carolina, Florida and New Jersey. The industry projects that rapid growth will continue for the foreseeable future.
Chart: The Conversation, CC BY-ND. Source: Barbose et al., 2020. Get the data
More recently our researchers have combined this tracking report with data on household-level demographics and income of solar adopters, covering more than 70% of the U.S. residential solar market. Among the research products we’ve created is an online interactive tool that shows the demographic characteristics of solar adoption down to the county level.
Thanks to these price and growth trends, an increasing number of state and local governments, utilities and businesses want to help lower-income customers go solar. They believe solar will cut energy bills, reduce money spent on bill payment programs, avoid pollution and create green jobs.
So far, 20 states are offering 38 programs to help lower-income customers go solar. California, the largest, has budgeted over US$1 billion for such programs. A number of utilities and solar developers, like Posigen and GRID Alternatives, are also developing business models that work for all customers. These initiatives leverage state and federal incentives to deliver free or very low-cost solar to eligible households.
Donnel Baird's company makes energy-saving updates to buildings almost exclusively in low-income areas. Cutting the carbon footprint saves money — and fights climate change.
"Solar panels aren't just for rich people," he says. "They're for everybody." https://t.co/5pswwuMSTc
In our study we evaluated five policies and business models to see which ones helped low- and moderate-income households go solar:
Financial incentives targeted at low- and moderate-income households, usually rebates or other incentives to reduce upfront costs.
Leasing rooftop solar systems, which reduces upfront costs.
Property Assessed Clean Energy financing, or PACE, which allows customers to finance energy improvements through their property tax payments. Currently, residential PACE is available only in California, Florida and Missouri.
Financial incentives such as rebates offered to customers of any income level.
“Solarize” campaigns, in which customers band together in a group purchase to get a good price.
The study includes data on more than 1 million residential rooftop photovoltaic systems installed on single-family homes in 18 states from 2010 to 2018. We compared modeled household-level income estimates for solar adopters with area median household incomes from U.S. Census data.
We found that three of the interventions – targeted incentives, leasing and PACE – effectively increased adoption equity. These approaches are boosting sales to low-income customers in existing markets and helping solar companies move into new markets, such as low-income areas where solar sales have been weak or absent.
Policies that don’t address the needs and constraints of low-income households, like the federal income tax credit, have not had much effect on equity. And solarize campaigns are rarely pitched to low-income buyers.
An Untapped Customer Base
When solar expands into new markets and neighborhoods, it can have a spillover impact. If a system is installed in a neighborhood that had no solar before, neighbors who see it will be more likely to adopt it themselves. Moving into new markets may have greater potential effects on low-income adoption rates than reaching lower-income households in existing markets.
Expanding sales to low- and moderate-income households can also tap a larger base of potential customers. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) found in a study that 42% of rooftops where solar power could work are on low- and moderate-income housing.
A 2018 study estimates that installing rooftop solar systems on low- and moderate-income housing could provide up to 42% of all rooftop technical potential in the residential sector and improve energy affordability in low-income communities. NREL
As the solar market grows, decisions to install solar systems are increasingly driven by the prospect of saving money, rather than strictly by green values or buyers’ interest in new technologies. A survey led by NREL found that roughly half of people who decided to install solar in California, New Jersey, New York and Arizona in 2014 to 2016 identified cost savings as a primary factor in their decision to adopt solar.
For low- and moderate-income households, the financial benefits of solar power can make a big difference. Many lower-income households carry a large energy burden, meaning that energy and utility costs consume a large share of their income. Across the U.S., low-income households spend about three times more of their income on energy costs than other households. Solar power can reduce those energy burdens by providing on-site power at a lower cost than grid electricity.
Making homes more energy efficient is an established strategy for cutting energy bills, but there’s growing interest in having solar play a role. Deploying solar power for low- and moderate-income households can be a way to fulfill policy and social goals like creating jobs and improving the environment.
The study described in this article was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.
Galen Barbose is a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Eric O’Shaughnessy is a research consultant at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Ryan Wiser is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Disclosure statements: Eric O’Shaughnessy is a renewable energy research analyst at Clean Kilowatts, LLC. Ryan Wiser is a board member of the Clean Energy States Alliance. Galen Barbose does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Actor Robert Downey Jr.’s new investment fund is tackling issues like deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and microplastics.
The Iron Man star announced his two new venture capital funds at the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos meeting on Wednesday. They will be an extension of a broader environmental initiative he set up in 2019.
The FootPrint Coalition is a group of “investors, donors and storytellers” who are committed to backing the technology needed to restore our planet. The fund puts money into sustainability-focused companies, creates educational environmental content and makes charitable donations to non-profits.
FootPrint Coalition’s new venture capital funds will invest in a range of different solutions from energy and transport to education, media and high tech sustainable innovation.
The Marvel actor hopes that his new project will democratise investment in companies creating tech solutions to the climate crisis.
“We realised that part of what we do is we generate content that builds a community and grows an audience and then we can leverage that into getting eyes on deal flows that normally would be very exclusive,” he told CNBC.
WHAT IS A VENTURE CAPITAL FUND?
In order to succeed, small, startup companies need investment. To help them grow, investors put money into these companies with the hope that they will take off and provide them with returns. This is called venture capital and it fills a gap in the process of innovation where people have a good idea but not the money to make it happen.
But this kind of investment is risky as there is no guarantee that the startup will succeed. That’s where venture capital funds come in. They manage large amounts of money, put it into these developing companies and then monitor them in order to protect that investment. They usually participate on the board of the company, working with the CEO, to ensure that it is making good business decisions.
Just did a slew of interviews for the @wef (Davos) about the launch of Footprint Coalition Ventures. This is something very important to my team and you.🌎🙏
For sustainable startups, FootPrint Coalition is “picking the best among them, and doing [its] part to help them succeed”. It also wants to help tell their stories and get them in the public eye so that a global audience can get behind these groundbreaking innovations.
“What drives me above all, is to make a lasting and meaningful positive impact on humanity, and on the planet,” says Downey Jr.
“I am a technophile and an optimist, who is deeply concerned about restoring the mess we are leaving behind.”
In the small Canadian city of Saint-Jérôme, Québec, electric bus and truck manufacturer Lion Electric is preparing to expand south of the border, aiming to open a plant in the United States by 2023, with the capacity to produce 20,000 vehicles a year.
After signing deals with online retailer Amazon and school districts across North America, the company expects the new factory will hire 1,500 people, from electrical engineers to assembly-line workers, and create another 9,500 jobs in its US supply chain.
“There’s a lot of people involved in building a 100-per cent electric vehicle,” said vice-president Patrick Gervais.
The expansion by Lion Electric – which is set to go public on the New York Stock Exchange in March, through a merger with a US acquisitions firm – seems well-timed.
US President Joe Biden, who took over from climate-change sceptic Donald Trump on Jan. 20, plans to invest US$2 trillion in green infrastructure over the next four years.
Besides combating climate change, the administration says the plan could create more than 10 million jobs.
“When I think of climate change and the answers to it, I think of jobs,” Biden said in a speech Wednesday, on a day he signed a second round of executive actions to help curb climate warming and protect people and the economy from its impacts.
“We can put millions of Americans to work modernising our water systems, transportation (and) our energy infrastructure to withstand the impacts of extreme climate,” Biden said.
A government-backed study out this week said reaching net-zero carbon emissions from US energy and industry by 2050 – as Biden aims to do—could be achieved by rebuilding energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewables, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day.
The transition would involve increasing energy efficiency, switching to electric technologies, using predominantly clean electricity—especially wind and solar power – and deploying a small amount of carbon capture technology, the researchers found.
Study co-author Margaret Torn, a senior scientist with the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said building clean infrastructure equates to jobs, including in the United States, “as opposed to sending money overseas to buy oil from other countries”.
“There’s no question that there will need to be a well-thought-out economic transition strategy for fossil fuel-based industries and communities,” she said in a statement.
“But there’s also no question that there are a lot of jobs in building a low-carbon economy.”
A wind farm shares space with corn fields the day before the Iowa caucuses, where agriculture and clean energy are key issues, in Latimer, Iowa, US. Image: Jonathan Ernst, via Reuters.
Fossil-fuel unemployment
Opponents of Biden’s plans to jumpstart climate action have raised concerns about the loss of jobs in traditional fossil fuel industries—oil, gas and coal.
Republican lawmakers have pointed to the executive order Biden signed within a few hours of taking office, cancelling construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Work on the pipeline—intended to carry more oil extracted from tar sands in Canada to the United States—would have sustained 11,000 US jobs in 2021, they maintain.
However, researchers and environmental advocates argue that clean energy offers far higher levels of employment compared to fossil fuels.
A 2019 study by University College London found that the broadly defined “green economy” in the United States—including renewable energy, environmental protection and low-carbon goods and services—provided nearly 9.5 million jobs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US jobs in the coal mining industry, comparatively, halved between 2012 and 2020, employing some 44,600 people in October last year.
Under Biden’s green transition, the greatest job-growth potential could be in retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient, said Adam Zurofsky, executive director of advocacy group Rewiring America, which is pushing for US homes to switch rapidly to electric heating and cooking.
This is due to the huge number of buildings across the country that need updating and the array of skills involved, from carpentry to electric installation, he said.
Such jobs are intrinsically American jobs, he added.
“You can’t retrofit a building or install solar panels (remotely) from China or India,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Zurofsky previously oversaw energy policy for New York state, and worked on shutting down the last remaining coal-fired power plants there.
Often communities would not object on environmental grounds, he said, “but that plant paid a lot of property taxes for the local school district… (and it) employed people in the town.”
The transition away from fossil fuels needs to be carefully planned and managed, including allowing a period of time to help people adjust, he emphasised.
A worker descends from the top deck of a car carrier trailer carrying Tesla electric vehicles at Tesla’s primary vehicle factory after CEO Elon Musk announced he was defying local officials’ coronavirus disease (Covid-19) restrictions by reopening the plant in Fremont, California, US. Image: Stephen Lam, via Reuters.
Decent work?
Another concern is the quality of jobs that might be created by Biden’s green infrastructure plan.
“It’s also about dealing with inequality and making sure the jobs created in the green economy are well-paid and have labour standards attached to them,” said Mike Fishman, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Jobs National Resource Center.
“Most of the jobs in solar installation (and) retrofitting tend to be both non-union and low-paid,” he added.
This week, Biden promised that his plan to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic through green economic stimulus would create “good-paying union jobs” at the “prevailing wage and benefits”.
But it could face significant resistance from Republicans in the Senate, particularly when it comes to inclusion of labour standards like fair wages and making it easier for workers to unionise, said Fishman.
“That will be a fight,” he added.
If successful, Biden aims to use the federal government’s procurement spending to ensure that companies given contracts have to abide by those labour conditions, which would also guarantee rights like paid leave and overtime.
The government spending, if approved, could include deploying more than half a million new electric-vehicle charging outlets across the country by 2030 and—critically, for firms like Lion Electric—converting all 500,000 US school buses to zero emissions.
“The green economy is the future—it’s the new economy,” said Gervais. “You do it for the environment but it’s also a viable business model.”
“We’re creating jobs that did not exist before,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”
This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate.
