Turning Solar Energy into Money: 10 Ways to Profit from Sunlight

The sun is an incredibly powerful and abundant source of energy, and there are many ways to turn sunlight into money. In this article, we will explore some of the most effective ways to do so. Install Solar Panels on Your Property One of the most direct ways to turn sunlight into money is by installing solar panels on your property. Solar panels are made up of photovoltaic (PV) cells that…

View On WordPress

Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.

The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve. This sounds like great news for the EU, which recently pledged to triple its solar power capacity to 672 gigawatts by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.

In reality, though, it has caused a crisis. Under the EU’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan”, 40pc of the panels to be spread across European fields and roofs were meant to be made by European manufacturers.

However, the influx of cheap Chinese alternatives means that instead of tooling up, manufacturers are pulling out of the market or becoming insolvent. Last year 97pc of the solar panels installed across Europe came from China.[...]

The best estimates suggest that about 90 gigawatts worth of solar panels are stashed around Europe. That solar power capacity roughly equates to 25 large nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.[...]

The sheer scale of the problem was revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It warned that although the world was installing at record rates of around 400 gigawatts a year, manufacturing capacity was growing far faster.

By the end of this year solar panel factories, mostly in China, will be capable of churning out 1,100 gigawatts a year – nearly three times more than the world is ready [sic] for. For comparison, that’s about 11 times [!!!!] the UK’s entire generating capacity.

For some solar power installers, it’s a dream come true. Sagar Adani is building solar farms across India’s deserts, with 54 in operation and another 12 being built.

His company, Adani Green Energy, is constructing one solar farm so large that it will cover an area five times the size of Paris and have a capacity of 30 gigawatts – equal to a third of the UK’s entire generating capacity.

“I am installing tens of millions of solar panels across these projects,” says Adani. “Almost all of them will have been imported from China. There is nowhere else that can supply them in such numbers or at such prices.

“China saw the opportunity before others, it looked forward to what the world is going to set up 10 years on. And because they scaled up in the way they did, they were able to reduce costs substantially as well.”

That scaling up meant the capital cost of installing solar power fell from around £1.25m per megawatt of generating capacity in 2015 to around £600,000 today – a decrease of more than 50pc – making it cheaper than almost any other form of generation, including wind.[...]

“Up to 2012 there was a healthy looking European solar panel industry but it was actually very reliant on subsidies and preferential treatment.

“But then European governments and other customers started buying from China because their products were so much cheaper. And China still has cheap labour and cheap energy plus a massive domestic market. It’s hard to see Europe recovering from those disadvantages.”

Trying sososo hard to make this sound like a bad thing [23 Mar 24]

"Heat stored underground in caverns can be set aside in Finland’s summer months to be re-used during frigid winters thanks to a state-of-the-art ‘seasonal energy’ storage facility.

Slated for construction this summer near Helsinki, it will be the largest in the world by all standards and contain enough thermal energy to heat a medium-sized city all winter.

Thermal exchange heating systems, like those built underground, or domestic heat pumps, are seen as the most effective way available of reducing the climate-impact of home heating and cooling.

Their function relies on natural forces or energy recycling to cool down or heat up water and then using it to radiate hot or cold energy into a dwelling.

In Vantaa, Finland’s fourth largest city neighboring the capital of Helsinki, the ambitious Varanto seasonal energy storage project plans to store cheap and environmental friendly waste heat from datacenters, cooling processes, and waste-to-energy assets in underground caverns where it can be used to heat buildings via the district heating network whenever it is needed.

In Finland and other Nordic countries, the heat consumption varies significantly between seasons. Heat consumption in the summertime is only about one-tenth of the peak load consumption during the cold winter months.

Varanto will utilize underground caverns equal in space to two Maddison Square Gardens—over a million cubic meters—filled with water heated by this waste heat and pressure that will allow the water to reach temperatures of up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit without the water boiling or evaporating.

“The world is undergoing a huge energy transition. Wind and solar power have become vital technologies in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy,” says Vantaa Energy CEO Jukka Toivonen.

“The biggest challenge of the energy transition so far has been the inability to store these intermittent forms of energy for later use. Unfortunately, small-scale storage solutions, such as batteries or accumulators, are not sufficient; large, industrial-scale storage solutions are needed. Varanto is an excellent example of this, and we are happy to set an example for the rest of the world.” ...

“Two 60-MW electric boilers will be built in conjunction with Varanto,” adds Toivonen. “These boilers will be used to produce heat from renewable electricity when electricity is abundant and cheap. Our heat-producing system will work like a hybrid car: alternating between electricity and other forms of production, depending on what is most advantageous and efficient at the time.”

... Construction of the storage facility’s entrance is expected to start in summer 2024, while it could be operational as early as 2028."

-via Good News Network, April 12, 2024. Video via VantaanEnergia, March 10, 2024

Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. Trumpeting 2023’s 50 percent growth in annual global capacity installations as a global achievement is wrongheaded, given that China by itself delivered nearly 80 percent of the increment. And the IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent. While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck. This raises a crucial question. What is different about the development of solar and wind resources in China from the rest of the world? The main answer is that in China, such development is capitalist in only a very limited sense. Certainly, the entities centrally involved in building out new solar and wind farms in China are companies. But almost all are state-owned. Take wind. Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market. Moreover, the state is far from being a passive shareholder in these companies. The companies are best seen as instruments wielded by the state in the service of achieving its industrial, geopolitical, and – increasingly – environmental objectives. The best example of this concerns the gargantuan ‘clean energy bases’ first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2021. To be built mainly in the Gobi and other desert areas by 2030, these new bases will have a combined capacity of in excess of 550 GW – more than Europe’s total solar and wind capacity at the time of this writing. Such development is as far from ‘capitalist’ as is imaginable. This is the state, in its most centralized and authoritative form mustering whatever resources it needs at its disposal to ensure that it delivers what it has said it will deliver. Add to this the fact that the banks financing all the new renewables development in China are generally also state-owned and directed, and a stark reality comes into focus. This is essentially central planning in action. Does the profit motive figure? To be sure, it does. But usually only marginally, and it is ridden roughshod over whenever Beijing deems fit.

Solar energy requires the erection of massive solar industry complexes, which lay bare the land by clearing out human populations and the migration routes of animals and people for giant solar fields, substations, and access ways. All of these require unusually high-carbon concrete. Wind and solar energy as well as the production of bio-fuels all require 100-1000 times the land area as the production of fossil fuels. Fuck the Chinese subsistence farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories. They’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And forget the Ghanaians who complain when worn-out solar panels are piled into mountains in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech. They are just impeding ecological progress. Whether oil wells, coal power plants, or megalithic “green” projects – all are rooted in an unprecedented destruction of habitats for human and other beings. Therefore it cannot be the goal to replace one destructive technology with another. The goal should be a massive and radical reduction in energy consumption. Anarchists who only struggle to free industry from capitalism must finally face the brutal reality. Down with industry, down with work. To use the words of the Indigenous Anarchist ziq: Seize the Means of Destruction! And fucking burn it to the ground… What comes next depends on what we do. The necessity of getting active has never been so great as today

SWARREN

Inhabitants: predominantly glare hybrids

Major biomes: man-made

History:

Once space travel was realized, a lot of its energy was forced into finding habitable planets to build and live on, due to the ever-growing population of Spawn and The Nether. Finding a completely perfect planet with the right elements, biomes, and climate to hold life, turned out to be a lot harder than first thought. However, a self-acclaimed scientist, by the name of Doc, decided to take an almost perfect planet and build an industry upon it. Building an industry also provided the option for people to travel and work on this planet. More housing, structures and communities started to be built upon man-made land. The success of Docs industry provided constant and sustainable energy. Swarren grew to a size where its population and influence rivals that of Spawn's.

Due to the nature of the planet that Swarren is located on, its day cycle is long. The sun (Grien) within this solar system also does not give off as much light compared to (Torch). This means that most of the population of Swarren is Glare Hybrids.

Reign / Ruler: Democracy (figurehead doc)

Capital: Gouge

Climate: dim

Major trades: Doc industry

Major city(s):

PERIMETER (click for more info)

GOUGE (click for more info)

<<Return to universe map

Uranus Awakens: How the Rebellious Bull Shakes Up Business and Finance in 2024

Prepare for disruption, fellow stargazers! As the revolutionary planet Uranus stations direct in the grounded sign of Taurus on January 27, 2024, a cosmic earthquake ripples through the world of business and finance. Get ready for unexpected twists, innovative breakthroughs, and a complete reshaping of the economic landscape. Buckle up, entrepreneurs, investors, and everyone in between — Uranus is here to shake things up!

The Cosmic Cocktail:

Imagine the stoic, earth-loving Taurus as a well-established bank, steeped in tradition and conservative practices. Now, picture the rebellious Uranus, bursting in with a briefcase full of digital currency and blockchain ideas. That’s the essence of this transit — a clash between old and new, stability and revolution, practicality and radical transformation.

Impacts to Expect:

Technological Disruption: Brace yourself for a wave of innovation in finance and business. Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralized finance (DeFi) will take center stage, challenging traditional banking systems and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Prepare for a digital gold rush as Uranus throws open the vault of financial innovation! Cryptocurrency will erupt into mainstream commerce, blockchain will become the new ledger, and DeFi will democratize finance like never before. Traditional banks better dust off their abacus and learn to code, because digital cowboys are charging onto the financial frontier, redefining how we value, exchange, and invest. From peer-to-peer microloans to fractionalized real estate ownership, the possibilities are as limitless as your imagination. Buckle up, because the tectonic plates of finance are shifting, and the digital revolution is rewriting the rules of the game!

Shifting Market Dynamics: Expect volatility and unexpected shifts in established industries. Old guard companies might scramble to adapt, while nimble startups with innovative ideas flourish. Think green energy disrupting fossil fuels, or AI revolutionizing the service industry.

Be prepared for market earthquakes! Uranus, the cosmic trickster, will send shockwaves through established industries, causing titans to tremble and upstarts to dance. Picture fossil fuels choking on the dust of solar panels, brick-and-mortar stores gasping as virtual bazaars boom, and customer service bots replacing flustered clerks. AI will infiltrate every corner, from crafting personalized shopping experiences to streamlining logistics, while sustainable solutions crack open resource-hungry giants. It’s a Darwinian playground for businesses — adapt or face extinction. This isn’t just a market shuffle, it’s a complete reshuffle of the deck, and the cards are dealt anew. Get ready for the thrill of the unexpected, because the only constant in this dynamic landscape is change itself!

Evolving Values: Sustainability, ethical practices, and social responsibility will become increasingly important for consumers and investors alike. Businesses that prioritize these values will thrive, while those stuck in outdated models might struggle.

Get ready for a values revolution! Consumers and investors will turn from price tags to purpose tags, demanding businesses that go beyond profit and prioritize sustainability, ethical sourcing, and social responsibility. Imagine carbon-neutral factories replacing smog-belching behemoths, fair-trade coffee beans eclipsing exploitative practices, and employee well-being becoming a non-negotiable bottom line. Businesses that cling to outdated models will find themselves gasping for air as ethical alternatives steal the oxygen. It’s not just a trend, it’s a tidal wave of conscious consumerism sweeping away the tide of greed. So, businesses, listen up: embrace responsible practices, champion inclusivity, and weave sustainability into your very fabric, or risk being swept away by the rising tide of conscious capitalism. The future belongs to those who do good, not just those who do well!

Collaborative Entrepreneurship: Collaboration and community-driven ventures will rise in prominence. Shared workspaces, cooperatives, and peer-to-peer platforms will gain traction, challenging the traditional top-down corporate structure.

Picture the corporate pyramid crumbling as the cosmic crane hoists the collaborative flag! Uranus, the revolutionary, encourages a seismic shift: from isolated silos to thriving beehives. Shared workspaces buzz with creative collisions, cooperatives blossom out of shared passions, and peer-to-peer platforms become the new marketplace, fueled by trust and mutual aid. The top-down hierarchy shivers as horizontal networks rise, blurring the lines between boss and worker, replacing command with consensus. Collaboration takes center stage, not competition, as communities band together to tackle challenges and build innovative solutions. So, entrepreneurs, shed your solopreneur capes and embrace the power of the collective! In this new social business ecosystem, where synergy triumphs over supremacy, the future belongs to those who share, empower, and co-create a brighter tomorrow. Let the collaborative revolution begin!

Focus on Personal Values: Individuals will increasingly prioritize work that aligns with their personal values and passions. Entrepreneurship fueled by purpose and authenticity will flourish, shaping a more diverse and fulfilling business landscape.

Prepare for a workplace metamorphosis! Uranus, the cosmic butterfly, flutters wings of purpose, urging individuals to shed the career chrysalis and soar towards fulfilling their true potential. Gone are the days of soul-sucking jobs; now, personal values take center stage as the compass guiding career choices. Imagine passionate bakers opening community cafes, eco-conscious designers launching upcycled fashion lines, and tech whizzes crafting apps that tackle social issues. Authenticity becomes the new currency, with entrepreneurs weaving their passions into the fabric of their ventures, creating a mosaic of purpose-driven businesses that cater to every corner of the human experience. This isn’t just a career shift, it’s a heart shift, transforming the business landscape into a vibrant tapestry of diverse talents and fulfilled souls. So, listen to your inner compass, embrace your unique spark, and let your passion ignite the world — the future of work belongs to those who dare to be true to themselves!

Tips for Navigating the Cosmic Chaos:

Embrace innovation: Don’t cling to the old ways. Stay open to new technologies, trends, and business models. Be curious, explore, and experiment.

Adapt and evolve: Be prepared to change course quickly. Agility and responsiveness will be key to success in this dynamic environment.

Prioritize sustainability and ethics: Integrate environmental and social responsibility into your business practices. Consumers and investors are increasingly drawn to values-driven companies.

Collaborate and connect: Build partnerships, join communities, and leverage the power of collective action. Collaboration will be crucial for navigating the changing landscape.

Follow your passion: Don’t be afraid to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams. Uranus encourages authenticity and purpose-driven ventures.

Remember, Uranus isn’t about chaos for chaos’ sake. It’s about dismantling outdated structures and paving the way for a more progressive, sustainable, and fulfilling economic future. By embracing the change, staying adaptable, and aligning your business with your values, you can not only survive this cosmic revolution but thrive in the exciting new world it creates. So, let your inner rebel loose, embrace the disruption, and ride the wave of innovation — the economic future is bright for those who dare to dream big!

Chapter 4. Environment

The only way to save the planet

When it comes to protecting the environment, nearly any social system would be better than the one we have now. Capitalism is the first social arrangement in human history to endanger the survival of our species and life on earth in general. Capitalism provides incentives to exploit and destroy nature, and creates an atomized society that is incapable of protecting the environment. Under capitalism, ecocide is literally a right. Environmental protections are “trade barriers”; preventing a corporation from clear-cutting land it has purchased is a violation of private property and free enterprise. Companies are allowed to make millions of tons of plastic, most of it for throwaway packaging, despite the fact that they have no plan for disposing of it and not even any idea what will happen with it all; plastic does not decompose, so plastic trash is filling up the ocean and appearing in the bodies of marine creatures, and it may last millions of years. To save endangered rhinoceros from poachers, game wardens have started sawing off their valuable horns; but the poachers are killing them anyway because once they are extinct, the value of the few remaining bits of rhinoceros ivory will go through the roof.

And despite all this, universities have the audacity to indoctrinate students to believe that a communal society would be incapable of protecting the environment because of the so-called tragedy of the commons. This myth is often explained thus: imagine a society of sheepherders owns the grazing land in common. They benefit collectively if each grazes a smaller number of sheep, because the pasture stays fertile, but any one of them benefits individually if he overgrazes, because he will receive a greater share of the product — thus collective ownership supposedly leads to depletion of resources. The historical examples intended to corroborate this theory are generally drawn from colonial and postcolonial situations in which oppressed people, whose traditional forms of organization and stewardship have been undermined, are crowded onto marginal land, with predictable results. The sheepherding scenario assumes a situation that is extremely rare in human history: a collective comprised of atomized, competitive individuals who value personal wealth over social bonds and ecological health, and lack social arrangements or traditions that can guarantee sustainable, shared use.

Capitalism has already caused the biggest wave of extinctions to hit the planet since an asteroid collision killed off the dinosaurs. To prevent global climate change from bringing about total ecological collapse, and stop pollution and overpopulation from killing off most of the planet’s mammals, birds, amphibians, and marine life, we have to abolish capitalism, hopefully within the next few decades. Human-caused extinctions have been apparent for at least a hundred years now. The greenhouse effect has been widely acknowledged for nearly two decades. The best that the reputed ingenuity of free enterprise has come up with is carbon trading, a ridiculous farce. Likewise, we cannot trust some world government to save the planet. A government’s first concern is always its own power, and it builds the base of this power upon economic relationships. The governing elite must maintain a privileged position, and that privilege depends on the exploitation of other people and of the environment.

Localized, egalitarian societies linked by global communication and awareness are the best chance for saving the environment. Self-sufficient, self-contained economies leave almost no carbon footprint. They don’t need petroleum to ship goods in and waste out, or huge amounts of electricity to power industrial complexes to produce goods for export. They must produce most of their energy themselves via solar, wind, biofuel, and similar technologies, and rely more on what can be done manually than on electrical appliances. Such societies pollute less because they have fewer incentives to mass production and lack the means to dump their byproducts on others’ land. In place of busy airports, traffic-clogged highways, and long commutes to work, we can imagine bicycles, buses, interregional trains, and sailboats. Likewise, populations will not spiral out of control, because women will be empowered to manage their fertility and the localized economy will make apparent the limited availability of resources.

An ecologically sustainable world would have to be anti-authoritarian, so no society could encroach on its neighbors to expand its resource base; and cooperative, so societies could band together in self-defense against a group developing imperialist tendencies. Most importantly, it would demand a common ecological ethos, so people would respect the environment rather than regarding it simply as raw material to exploit. We can begin building such a world now, by learning from ecologically sustainable indigenous societies, sabotaging and shaming polluters, spreading a love for nature and an awareness of our bioregions, and establishing projects that allow us to meet our needs for food, water, and energy locally.

“On a technological as well as a policy level, the instruments for reducing global warming are a part of the problem, rather than the solution. Because emissions reductions are designed to enable the continuous economic growth on which capitalism is predicated, “going green” means, more than anything else, a shift from fossil fuel energy to renewable energy on a massive, industrialized scale. But renewable energies on an industrial scale are also extremely destructive.

Hydroelectric power is currently the foremost renewable energy source. Hydroelectric dams are extremely destructive to build. They require a huge amount of concrete, production of which is one of the main greenhouse gas emitters, they cause the loss of huge amounts of forest and farmland, they kill off riverine species such as salmon, they disrupt natural flooding cycles necessary to many ecosystems, and their reservoirs emit large quantities of methane.

Photovoltaic cells capturing solar energy—solar panels—frequently use toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, gallium, and lead in their construction. On a localized scale, houses in most climates could be heated, cooled, and provided with warm water through efficient design capturing solar energy. And if people were willing (and able) to alter their daily habits and limit their electricity usage, photovoltaics free of heavy metals could play a role in this. Many of the problems arise when we take the current energy economy and assume we can keep on operating in the same way, but with different inputs. To meet current energy usage, huge swathes of land would need to be appropriated, denuded, and fenced off for solar farms. And since photovoltaics are only productive during sunlight hours, we would have to construct an enormous infrastructure for energy storage and global high-voltage direct current power lines, meaning more toxic mining, more land grabbing, more energy expenditures, and more cancer and other illnesses. Solar panels also present a waste problem, as the typical panel only lasts 25 years. At current growth rates, by 2050 we could have 78 million metric tons of junk panels, and there is currently no good way to recycle them at an industrial scale.25 Andrea Brock and other researchers argue that, far from a “paradigmatic break,” solar energy “is merely the latest iteration of an industrial growth model” characterized by “undemocratic and unsustainable industrial processes, the concentration of corporate power and profits, and externalized waste and pollution.”26

Geothermal energy, aside from having a low efficiency, requires extensive drilling that can contaminate groundwater. The technology uses pentane, a highly toxic, flammable liquid. Geothermal plants release small amounts of methane and the toxic gas hydrogen sulfide, which causes acid rain. In accidents, geothermal plants can release large amounts, such as occurred at a single Hawai’i geothermal plant during a drilling blowout in 1991, in 2013 after an equipment malfunction, and later in 2018 when the plant was damaged by a volcanic eruption.27

Nuclear power is not a renewable energy, given that it expends its fuel source, uranium, though there is a huge lobby seeking to promote it. Countries began adopting nuclear energy in the first place not for its energy benefits, but because it advanced their nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear plants come with a constant risk of meltdown, releasing large amounts of deadly radiation into the atmosphere and potentially making the territory uninhabitable for millennia. In the West, pop cultural representations of the Chernobyl meltdown ascribe the disaster to Soviet incompetence, but meltdowns and near meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, Three Mile Island, United States, and Loir-et-Cher, France, shine a light on Cold War propaganda and show that no regime is immune to disaster.

In fact, over one hundred nuclear accidents have occurred since 1952, the largest share of them in the US. But the daily, effective operation of a nuclear power plant may be even worse than a meltdown. In 2011, 75 percent of US nuclear power sites were found to be leaking radioactive tritium.28 Depleted plutonium rods have a half-life of 24,000 years, which, for reference, is far longer than agriculture or wheels have existed, more than 40 times longer than the longest lasting state survived, and roughly 500 to 1000 times longer than your typical nuclear storage site goes without experiencing a major leak. Nuclear proponents argue that the rods constitute a small volume of toxic material compared to mine tailing from coal production, for example. They tend to leave out the millions of tons of radioactive uranium mine tailings (11 million tons from a single site in Utah) and the 1.2 million metric tons of depleted uranium produced by uranium enrichment.29 This radioactive byproduct has a half-life of 4,400 million years (or, roughly the current age of the Earth). Inexcusably, those who developed nuclear technology invented no way to safely store all that waste for the amount of time it will pose a lethal danger to all life, and no such storage technology is even on the horizon. Many nuclear waste storage facilities have been found to leak radioactive compounds into the environment.“

- Peter Gelderloos, “ The Solutions are Already Here”

Nothing appears remarkable about a dish of fresh ravioli made with solein. It looks and tastes the same as normal pasta.

But the origins of the proteins which give it its full-bodied flavour are extraordinary: they come from Europe’s first factory dedicated to making human food from electricity and air.

The factory’s owner, Solar Foods, has started production at a site in Vantaa, near the Finnish capital of Helsinki, that will be able to produce 160 tonnes of food a year. It follows several years of experimenting at lab scale.

Solar Foods has already gained novel food approval for solein in Singapore, and is seeking to introduce its products in the US this autumn, followed by the EU by the end of 2025 – and the UK too, if the regulator can get through the deluge of cannabis-related products.

The factory’s output may be small in terms of the global food industry, but Pasi Vainikka, the Solar Foods co-founder and chief executive, hopes that proving its technology works will be a crucial step in revolutionising what humans eat.

Food and agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of all planet-heating carbon emissions. Its share of pollution is likely to grow as other industries shift to using green electricity, and ever-expanding middle-classes demand more meat for their tables. Up to now the focus for some climate campaigners has been to try to persuade people to eat less meat and more plants. Non-farmed proteins such as solein might make that approach more appealing.

Solein comes in the form of a yellowish powder made up of single-cell organisms, similar to yeast used in baking or beer-making. The company is hoping for those proteins to be used in meat alternatives, cheese and milkshakes, and as an egg replacement ingredient in noodles, pasta and mayonnaise.

The ravioli it served up this week was made with solein replacing egg, with a solein version of cream cheese. The Finnish confectioner Fazer has already sold chocolate bars in Singapore with added solein (which is also a handy source of iron for vegans). A Singaporean restaurant last year created a solein chocolate gelato, replacing dairy milk.

Vainikka was researching renewable energy systems at a Finnish research institute in 2014 when he met his co-founder, Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, a bioprocesses scientist. Pitkänen told him of soil-dwelling microbes that release the energy they need to live from oxidising hydrogen (rather than the glucose used by humans, for instance).

Together they built a 200-litre fermenter in a garage near Helsinki, to prove the technology could be used for food, but then went into the wild “finding new potatoes to grow”. All Vainikka will say on solein’s origins is that they found it somewhere “close to shore” in the Baltic Sea.

Almost all food consumed by humans at the moment ultimately comes from plants, which use energy from the sun for photosynthesis. That process converts carbon dioxide and water into the molecules they need to grow. Solar Foods instead uses the same renewable electricity from the sun to split water apart. It then feeds the hydrogen and oxygen to the microbes in a brewing vessel, plus carbon dioxide captured from the air from the company’s office ventilation system.

The claim that the proteins are made out of thin air is “never more than 95% true”, says Vainnika: 5% of the mixture in the brewing vessel is a solution containing other minerals needed by cells, such as iron, magnesium, calcium and phosphorus. The microbes are then pasteurised (killing them), then dried in a centrifuge and with hot air. That leaves a powder that can be used in food.

The process could also use CO2 from, for instance, burning fuels – although the molecule would end up back in the atmosphere once humans eat the solein and breathe out the carbon again. The real climate benefits from solein come from cutting the vast tracts of land used – and abused through deforestation on an epic scale – for animal feed and pasture. Instead, renewed forests could trap carbon.

Efficient US farmers get 3.3 tonnes of soya beans from each harvest of a hectare, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. By contrast, Solar Foods’ pilot factory takes up a fifth of a hectare to produce 160 tonnes a year.

“As we can relieve pressures on agricultural land, they can rewild and return to being climate sinks,” Vainikka says.

Other companies are pursuing the same dream. Dozens are using microbes to create animal feed, although they often require sugars or fossil fuel feedstocks. One US rival, Air Protein, has opened a factory in California using similar “hydrogenotrophs” – hydrogen eaters. It has the backing of the food multinational Archer-Daniels-Midland, the British bank Barclays and GV (formerly Google Ventures).

The Dutch company Deep Branch, which is making fish food, claims its Proton protein will be 60% less carbon-intensive than conventional proteins. Deep Branch is looking at taking the CO2 produced by the UK biomass power generator Drax.

The companies have produced their test products. Now they face the challenge of proving their technology works at scale.

Vainikka says that is the key problem for cultured meat, or lab-grown meat. The market value of newly listed companies such as Beyond Meat soared during the coronavirus pandemic bubble, only to come crashing down as sales slumped. The opening of Solar Foods’ first factory will be crucial in persuading investors that the company will not suffer the same fate.

With meat protein, which is much more expensive than plants or cellular agriculture, there is simply no competition on price for each kilo. But Solar Foods and rivals could face other problems. Conservative politicians particularly in the US and Italy have identified lab-grown food as a threat to their ranching and farming cultures.

Vainikka argues that these fears are misplaced. He wants “coexistence of new and old”, with artisanal, high-quality farms remaining alongside cell farming that can deliver cheap, bulk foods. He argues it is “the opportunity of the century for the meat industry” to focus on quality rather than churning out as much cheap (and heavily subsidised) meat as possible. And plant agriculture will also remain, he argues.

“The future is not powder: the main body of food will still come through plants,” he says. The occasional “salami with the cultural heritage, that can remain. The meat in your lasagne during lunch will be done by cellular agriculture.”

At the start of February, Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, announced a major scaling back of its operations, exiting wind markets in Portugal, Spain and Norway and cutting both its dividend and its 2030 target for the number of new installations. The announcement followed the firm’s shock decision last November to back out of two major wind projects in New Jersey. Last week, it agreed to sell stakes in four US onshore wind farms for around $300m.

But Ørsted’s troubles are hardly unique. In September 2023, the UK government’s offshore wind auction failed to secure a single project from developers, who argued that the government-guaranteed prices on offer were too low in the face of rising costs. Two months before that, Vattenfall pulled out of a major wind UK development for the same reason. And in February, the German energy giant RWE – which provides 15 per cent of the UK’s power – warned that without more money on offer, the UK’s next auction, opening this month, might just fail again.

These cases are only a handful among many and have come as jarring setbacks for an industry grown accustomed to triumphalism: headlines over recent years have routinely celebrated the plunging cost of renewables and the seemingly unrelenting transition to clean energy advancing around the world. A quick Google of “renewable energy deployment” yields no shortage of charts with impressive upward slopes.

Much of this enthusiasm has centred on a metric called the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), which represents the average cost per unit of electricity generated over the lifetime of a generator, be it a wind farm or a gas power station. The LCOE has something of a cult status among industry analysts, journalists and even the International Energy Agency as the definitive marker of the transition to clean energy. When the LCOE of renewables falls below that of traditional fossil fuel sources, the logic goes, the transition to clean energy will be unstoppable. If only it was that simple, argues the economic geographer Brett Christophers in his latest book The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.

As Christophers writes: “Everyone, seemingly, has gravitated to the view that, now they are cheaper/cheapest, renewables are primed for an unprecedented golden growth era” that will see them supplant fossil fuels. Doing so will be no mean feat. Despite the vertiginous growth of new renewable capacity in recent years, renewables have scarcely made a dent in the proportion of global power that comes from fossil fuels. The overall share of fossil fuel power in the energy mix has remained broadly stagnant for an astonishing four decades, from 64 per cent in 1985 to 61 per cent in 2022. Critically, the absolute amount of fossil fuel power generated each year – the figure that ultimately matters for the climate – has continued to rise.

In large part, this stems from overall growth in electricity consumption, which will continue apace in the coming decades as millions around the world gain access to electricity and as we race to electrify the economy. Thus, for all their upward momentum, global electricity consumption is still growing faster than solar and wind power is coming online, meaning the gap is widening. To close it, by the IEA’s estimates, the world needs to install 600 GW (gigawatts) of solar and 340 GW of wind capacity every year between 2030 and 2050. By comparison, the UK’s current total installed wind capacity is approximately 30GW, the sixth largest in the world, while Germany’s domestic transition plan implies installing the equivalent of 43 football pitches of solar panels every day to 2050. In short: the task is immense – almost unimaginably so. It is similarly urgent.

Where will the momentum needed to build this clean energy future come from? As Christophers documents in detail, the industry has thus far relied on an array of subsidy and support around the world. Extensive state support is hardly unique to clean energy, much as detractors and climate deniers may like to highlight it: the fossil fuel industry benefited from tax breaks and direct subsidy to the tune of £5.5trn in 2022 according to the IMF. The declining LCOE of renewable energy has been increasingly viewed as an argument for unwinding this government-backed support. As Christophers shows, however, in practice this has proven a near-impossibility. The question he therefore asks is why, in the face of declining costs, subsidies continue to be necessary, and what this tells us about whether the current approach to decarbonisation is fit for purpose.

The answer, Christophers argues, is that we’ve got it all upside down. When it comes to investment in renewable energy, as in anything else, it’s not cheapness that matters. Just take it from the investors themselves, he notes, citing one former JPMorgan investor who described the LCOE as a “practical irrelevance”. What matters instead is profit, and expectations of it.

Despite its simplicity, Christophers’s account is a quietly radical one that contravenes the received wisdom of not only the technocrats, mainstream economists and free marketeers who tout the wonders of the market, but also many on the left, for whom the problem with profits is typically their being far too high. Instead, as he demonstrates, the trouble is that renewable energy is nowhere near profitable enough, and certainly not reliably so, for the market to deliver it with anything like the pace, scale or certainty that is needed.

If the costs of renewables are indeed so low, one might ask, and profits are equal to revenues minus costs, then surely plunging costs should mean higher profits. But Christophers shows that low and unreliable profits are the definitive obstacle to the decarbonisation of the electricity system and, by extension, the wider economy.

The precise answer as to why low costs don’t necessarily translate into high and steady profits in this sector is technically complex and multifaceted, deftly handled by Christophers, a reformed management consultant, over nearly 400 pages of fine detail drawn from company documents, interviews and dense sectoral reports from global energy agencies. Put simply, the core of the problem is that the very features of markets so celebrated by mainstream economics – mediation via the price signal, increasing competition and private investment – are the undoing of a private-sector led transition to clean energy.

For Christophers, the commitment to marketisation in electricity systems is increasingly self-defeating. At the heart of this problem is the so-called “wholesale market” that prevails in many parts of the US and Europe, including the UK. Under this system, generators are paid a single price per unit of electricity for a given period, regardless of whether it is derived from a wind turbine or a coal plant. This price is based on what’s called a “merit order”, with the cheapest sources – generally renewables – being deployed first, followed by as many sources as are needed in order of escalating price. The wholesale is set by the last unit of energy needed to meet demand. In the UK, this is typically gas.

The defining feature of this wholesale pricing system, cast in sharp relief over the period of sky-high energy prices in 2021-2022, is volatility. With a host of factors potentially feeding into the price – from the balance of supply and demand through to global gas prices and geographic location – the swings can be enormous, regularly spiking from double to triple digit prices and back again within a matter of hours. In times of crisis, the figures can become outlandish, with the price of electricity in Texas during the state’s 2021 shock winter storms reaching $9,000 per MWh.

For Christophers, this volatility is nothing short of “an existential threat” to the “bankability” of a renewable project – that is, its ability to secure financing – because it makes profitability so uncertain. Worse still, within a competitive wholesale market, as the proportion of renewable generation in the market grows, and by extension the proportion of time in which renewables drive the wholesale price, the more frequently and strongly prices swing to the lower extreme, a phenomenon known as “price cannibalisation”.

The energy industry and governments rely on an impressive array of methods to circumvent these problems, from financial hedging to feed-in-tariffs, and from mega corporate Power Purchase Agreements with the likes of Amazon and Google to the UK’s “contracts-for-difference”. As Christophers writes: the reality of “liberalised electricity systems such as Europe’s is that, to secure financing, renewables developers ordinarily do everything they can… to avoid selling their output at the market price.”

Thus, despite ultra-high wholesale prices over 2021-2022, many renewables generators failed to enjoy correspondingly high profits, because they had traded the possibility of these certainties in the face of intolerable market volatility. For Christophers, this is the “signal feature” of the liberalised electricity market: that “the hallowed market price… is the one price that renewables operators endeavour not to sell at.”

It is in explaining this apparent contradiction that the book offers its most radical suggestion. Borrowing Karl Polanyi’s concept of a “fictitious commodity”, Christophers ultimately contends that electricity – like land, labour and money, Polanyi’s original trio – is not a commodity in the conventional sense of having been created for sale, and is therefore ill-suited to market exchange and coordination. This incompatibility sits at the root of the spiralling complexity of interventions that policymakers are obligated to make in the name of upholding the freedom of the “market”. The result, in the words of the energy expert Meredith Angwin, is that today’s electricity markets are less market and more “bureaucratic thicket”.

Thankfully, if the forces of capitalism, defined in terms of private ownership and the profit imperative, are fundamentally ill-equipped for this task, then we are not for want of alternatives. Public ownership and financing of energy, if freed from a faux market and the straitjacket of the profit motive, seems an obvious one. Christophers writes that the state is the only actor with “both the financial wherewithal and the logistical and administrative capacity” to take on the challenge of decarbonisation. The trouble though, when all you have is a hammer, is that everything looks like a nail. Thus, in the face of irreconcilable market failures, most policymakers seem only to offer more market-based fudges.

In this context, the tremors in renewable energy investment that we have seen with increasing frequency over the past several months are more than just a blip. They represent a potentially fatal flaw in the prevailing approach to the task of decarbonisation. From the perspective of the climate, every tonne of carbon matters, and every delay is significant. To continue to leave the future of electricity, and by extension global decarbonisation, to the whims of profit-motivated firms, is an intolerable risk. Rome is already burning, and there’s no time left to fiddle.

As the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein recognized, capitalism fuels economic growth through shifting the cost of that development onto the Global South. So long as this externalization of costs runs smoothly, those of us living in the Global North can enjoy a rich lifestyle and avoid suffering the consequences of environmental crises. This is how we’ve been able to avoid thinking seriously about the true cost of our expansive lifestyles for so long.

[...]

The dilemma is this: As the economy grows, the range of human economic activity grows too, which means that the volume of resource and energy consumption will also grow, making it difficult to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is a historical tendency. In other words, even green economic growth may cause increases in carbon emissions and resource use in direct proportion to its success because economic growth is historically accompanied by more frequent consumption of bigger commodities, including ones in wasteful and carbon-intensive industries. This in turn will necessitate more and more dramatic increases in efficiency, but there is an insurmountable physical limit to the improvement of technological efficiency. This is the Growth Trap, a major pitfall awaiting capitalism as it attempts to establish a zero-carbon economy. The question is, can this trap be avoided? Unfortunately, escaping this trap is unlikely. Sustaining a growth rate of 2–3 percent for the GDP would necessitate the immediate reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent every year to hit the 1.5° C target. If we leave it to the market, the likelihood of achieving a yearly reduction rate as dramatic as 10 percent or more is very low.

[...]

Make no mistake: Green New Deal–style governmental platforms enabling large-scale investment into remaking nations at a fundamental level are indispensable in the struggle to combat climate change. It’s undeniable that we must make the transition to solar energy, electric vehicles, and the like. Public transportation systems must be expanded and made free to all, bicycle lanes must be built, public housing fitted with solar panels must be created—these sorts of works projects, driven by public spending, are all vital. But these things are not enough. It might sound counterintuitive, but the goal of any Green New Deal should not be economic growth but rather the slowing down of the economy. Measures to stop climate change cannot double as ways to further economic growth. Indeed, the less such measures aim to grow the economy, the higher the possibility they’ll work.

"The fossil fuel industry is really winding up the scare campaign in the face of increasingly urgent calls to accelerate the switch from coal, gas and oil to a clean energy future based around wind, solar, storage, electric vehicles and electrification across the economy.

The Australian gas industry is telling lies and warning of multiple “major blackouts” in coming years and having to “save the Aussie BBQ”, and their claims are amplified daily by the right wing media owned by Murdoch and Nine.

Now oil giant Shell has topped the lot, providing – in the same week as the latest dire warnings on global warming by the IPCC – a dystopian view of what a clean energy transition might look like. Yes, we can do it, says the company that brought in $US40 billion of profits last year, but it will be costly and awful."

#jail climate criminals #we want climate action now #climate change #cambio climático #climate crisis #prepare for climate change  #greenwashing #big oil  #fossil fuel industry #plastic #climate washing #floods #climate activism  #calentamiento global  #medio ambiente  #IPPC  #prepare for climate change  #climate hope #sea level rise #late stage capitalism #victims of capitalism  #klimakatastrophe #klimawandel #changement climatique #qihou bianhua #izmeneniye klimata #cambiamento climatico #気候変動 #जलवायु परिवर्तन #jalavaayu parivartan #das Alterações Climáticas

I will take the chance that you people be so interested in titanic related issue to share what is going on in Argentina with indigenous community and teachers 

Movie director James Cameron says he feels he “walked into an ambush” this week during a visit to Argentina in which he believes there was an attempt to use his image as an environmentalist to give a positive spin to lithium mining operations despite Indigenous opposition.

Cameron, the director of “Avatar” and “Titanic,” said Friday he would now devote attention and money from his Avatar Alliance Foundation to support Indigenous communities opposing lithium operations in South America.

“Ironically, the outcome of this is that I am now aware of the problem and we will now assist through my foundation with the issue of Indigenous rights with respect to lithium extraction,” Cameron told a group of journalists gathered in his hotel room in the capital of Buenos Aires Friday evening.

Cameron came to Argentina this week to speak at a sustainability conference in Buenos Aires on Friday.

“I believed that I was coming here to make a kind of motivational speech about environmental causes,” Cameron said.

As part of the visit, Cameron traveled to northern Jujuy province Thursday to visit a large solar power plant with Gov. Gerardo Morales and says he was never told lithium would be part of the discussion.

After Cameron’s visit, Morales wrote a message on social media thanking Cameron for the visit, writing that the province was looking to “transform the energy matrix” through projects such as the solar power plant and “lithium extraction.”

The director received a letter that a group of 33 Indigenous communities from the area had written to him a few days earlier asking him to either cancel his trip or meet with them so they could explain their long-held opposition to lithium mining projects they say affect their land rights and negatively impact the environment.

“I feel like I walked into an ambush,” Cameron told journalists after meeting with local environmentalists, saying he was unaware of controversy involving lithium projects. “I feel like I was put into an optic that had meaning that I wasn’t aware of.”

read more

Context

Gerardo Morales is facing the protest of teachers that gain almost a third of a minimum wage for their work. During this protest he used his majority in the legislature to push a reform of the Constitution of the province of Jujuy where he is the governor, that bans protest (that is constitutional right in argentinian National Constitution). 

The reform include modification of article 36, "right to private property", leaves registered owners who dispute land with indigenous communities in better conditions, since it incorporates "fast and expeditious mechanisms and routes that protect private property and restore any alteration in possession , use and enjoyment of the goods in favor of its owner". And it affirms that non-consensual occupation will be considered a "serious violation of the right to property", and also encourages the enactment of a law that determines "the conditions for eviction".

It also eliminates midterm elections and establishes that "the party that obtains the majority of votes in the elections for Governor (will obtain) half plus one of the seats in the Legislature."

It established the "Right to Social Peace and Peaceful Democratic Coexistence", which proposes to incorporate into the new Constitution "the express prohibition of total blockades of streets and roadblocks, as well as any other disturbance to the right to free movement of the inhabitants of the province and its legal consequences". That will criminalize the protest. 

source

The national deputy of the Frente de Todos (FdT) for Jujuy Carolina Moisés said this Saturday that "the background of the provincial constitutional reform" goes through "the management of the lithium industry", and accused the district governor, Gerardo Morales, of deal with the logic of "extortion". 

"It is a screen and a smokescreen to download these two articles. The communities have already rejected it because the problem is not article 50, where it names the communities, but the chapter in which it refers to the use of natural resources. This is something that the communities must approve because the lands correspond to them”, observed Moisés.

In this sense, the deputy indicated that "the fiscal land regime proposed by Morales authorizes the Executive to decide on all the undertakings that it wants to carry out in the province", as well as "arrogates the right to authorize the legal status of communities, in the chapter related to social peace," she clarified.

source

In this context, teachers, unions, social movements and independent citizens have been protesting against the reform and suffered violence from the police. 

The UN Human Rights Office in Argentina expressed concern over reports of violations of rights and violent actions that occurred during protests taking place in the province of Jujuy, in the north of the country, in response to a reform of the provincial Constitution. approved yesterday Tuesday June 20 by the local legislature.

The UN information reports the improper use of force by police officers, which has left dozens of people injured, including a teenager with severe eye trauma and another person with serious head injuries.

read more

The Landian Method

Reading gravity as Body is precisely the philosophical gesture that moves away from the pragmatic entanglement of escaping the gravitational force to the philosophical Gravity (with a capital G). This is not as unfounded as it may seem, for Land himself had already gestured at this when speaking of the effect of Geotrauma via Spinal Catastrophism.

Land suggests in Spinal Catastrophism that the human spine induces a kind of arche trauma: a memory of losing the mobility it once had as a sea creature, now relegated to the constraints of spinal curtailing by the effects and pressures of gravity.

Human desire in the last instance is exposed as turning the flesh into a pure radiating matrix of quantum information riding an eternal electromagnetic pulse into the accelerating edge of the expanding universe, unhindered by the forces of gravity or that celestial state apparatus known as the sun, known for its massive wastage in electromagnetic energy and forcible attacks on the surface of terrestrial bodies. It is the sun that is the ultimate gravitational influencer of our local condition. Just take a look at Land lifting the Batallian absurdity itself:

“Lift-off, then, is merely a precursor to the first serious plateau of anti-gravity technology, which is oriented towards the more profoundly productive task of pulling things apart, in order to convert comparatively inert mass-spheres into volatile clouds of cultural substance. Assuming a fusion-phase energy infrastructure, this initial stage of off-world development culminates in the dismantling of the sun, terminating the absurdly wasteful main-sequence nuclear process, salvaging its fuel reserves, and thus making the awakened solar-system’s contribution to the techno-industrial darkening of the galaxy. (Quit squandering hydrogen, and the lights dim.)”

To call the Landian point an absurdity is not meant as a derision, rather exactly the opposite: it is a fantastic (and fantastical) conclusion whose textual lead up does not deserve it, and probably could have been written without it. One can imagine that if Land was a Heideggerean he would be arguing for Being and Gravity, invoking the need to let go of all ontic conditions from which Gravity is understood in order to argue from a kind of philosophical first principles about the effect of a philosophical concept that itself subsumes Time. That he does not do that but in fact argues from a particular onticity of the American present, is key to understanding the difference between German and Anglophone protestantism itself, and is beyond the scope of this article. All that we need to mention is that the CCRU in general does not distract itself with an argument on how to begin. It accelerates past all these stepping stones, understanding that where it will land is something beyond them. How any reader could have missed the grand theatrics for a “down-to-earth” practical politics is beyond me.

https://www.deepchimera.com/the-nl-method/

Thinking about medical waste in my setting.

The systems that go into it are:

The world consists of Energy (spelled with a capital E to separate it from physical energy), which is a substance that can either calculate information or perform an affect according to an inputted calculation.

When large masses of this Energy are in an area, they tend to combine and start sharing total information, resulting in a soul. The planets are essentially giant souls which define the laws of physics in an area around them.

A couple of these planets decided to split their already well formed souls into small pieces, which became the moons for other planets, and in the same way a moon split itself and became dragons, and a dragon split itself and became humans and other small grade spirits.

Each human's soul is connected to their body as an anchor that keeps the soul hovering in the upper atmosphere, where it is easier to replenish with Energy from solar winds, and this Energy is free to move to the body on the surface, fueling a healing factor which almost all humans have.

Back to the other spirits, especially small ones are essentially capable of converting small amounts of free Energy into models of themselves, with this class of spirits generally referred to as viral. There are two types of viral spirits, Flame and Chaos.

Flame spirits work by converting free Energy into copies of itself, which glow and appear as colored flame for the most part.

Chaos spirits are generally heavily focused on individual types of Energy use, such as gravitational manipulation, or in this case healing, when exposed to the specific type of Energy use they are associated with, they interfere with it by taking Energy and forming copies of themselves, eventually overpowering the effect.

The final important things to talk about is materials, of which water is the most important, generally energy will be stored in ordered materials, like gems, or materials which move visible light around in certain ways, such as opals and glass. The major exception is water, which can hold energy in such a way that it keeps little structure.

================================================

Energy can be used in healing spells, which is extremely important for hospitals who tend to use large amounts of them, however doing so naturally draws in Chaos spirits, who can disrupt treatment and cause detrimental health effects if left in the patients body.

To prevent this, a method of washing equipment, personnel and on occasion patients is used. It involves lightly flowing water semi-saturated with energy, drawing both types of viral spirits off of the person or thing, this water saturated with viral spirits is difficult to dispose of, as it can essentially be likened to industrial runoff so storage is preferred until it can be either refined through lead filters or used as an energy source.

In the meantime the most effective materials for storing the medical waste is clay pots, which is notably impermeable to both Energy and spirits, along with alloys and mixtures of gold, which are generally more structurally sound and less prone to breaking.

This property of gold is one of its main sources of value.

Also as a bonus note, an underground storage vault of this stuff that had been hit by an earthquake and has to be contained is the closest thing my setting has to a poison swamp from dark souls.