"The Fusion Industry Association reports that at least 25 companies 'think the first fusion plant will deliver electricity to the grid before 2035.' It notes: 'Companies are increasingly confident of meeting their ambitious goals. That will require focus on mid-term milestones, embracing risk and parallel pathways, new partnerships, and (crucially) more resources.' So far, at least one company, Type One Energy Group, has announced a potential site for its stellarator fusion prototype at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bull Run Fossil Plant in Clinton, Tennessee, a shuttered coal plant."
Articles from Around the Web
US electricity prices outpace annual inflation
"The BLS inflation data released yesterday is 'especially damning,' said Paul Cicio, chair of the Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition. While electricity generation costs have fallen due to low natural gas prices, 'transmission costs continue to accelerate,' he said."
This AI Architect Will Design Your Climate-Friendly Dream Home
"Icon has spent 18 months developing its artificial intelligence program — named Vitruvius after an ancient Roman architect — which uses a chatbot to converse with would-be homeowners about their dream projects. After the user responds to a series of prompts, Vitruvius offers several versions of a house, complete with exterior and interior renderings and floor plans."
Irrigation tech startup led by farming experts blossoms with revenue growth and new cash
"Smaller farms have historically irrigated using labor-intensive, manually operated systems. The systems could malfunction, flood crops, and operated inefficiently, requiring farmers to regularly go into the fields to check sprinklers and turn them on and off."
How African companies are solving the continent’s solar finance problem
"For African countries, the biggest obstacle to building out the solar industry is that the financing tricks used in China, Europe, and the U.S. to clear the way for widespread solar adoption — government subsidies and utility payments to solar-equipped customers — can’t work in places where states, utilities, and households are all chronically strapped for cash. At the same time, supply chain problems and the widespread perception by financial institutions that investments in Africa are high-risk mean that the cost of solar is far higher than in other places — the same solar system costs twice as much in Ghana as in the U.S. Bringing down the cost of capital requires a stronger track record of profitable investments than what the industry has been able to show so far. That means new business models are needed to make solar affordable for a broader base of customers."
Frackers Are Now Drilling for Clean Power
"Technological advances in well drilling, modeling and sensor technology are expected to change that: The Energy Department estimates geothermal energy could power the equivalent of more than 65 million U.S. homes by 2050."
A Republican Climate Caucus? Yes, It Exists and Is Growing
"Despite the low marks in the eyes of many environmentalists, the caucus represents an evolution for many Republicans on climate change. The group—one of a growing number of conservative organizations weighing in on climate issues—says it believes that the climate is changing and that the global industrial era is contributing to it."
How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet
"In those simulations, the researchers found that reducing the warming effect of contrails by 73% increased fuel costs by just 0.11% and overall costs by 0.08%, when averaged across those tens of thousands of flights. (Only about 14% of the flights needed to be adjusted to avoid forming warming contrails in the simulations.)"
The Ideology and Reality of Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage
"In the future, we will see plane tickets that are carbon neutral thanks to carbon dioxide removal, and natural gas power plants that have no pollution at all. These are opportunities to be welcomed, rather than solutions to be shunned for the unforgivable sin of not being an environmental activists’ preferred climate solution."
Atomic Canyon Emerges from Stealth with Neutron, an AI-powered Search Platform Designed to Energize the Nuclear Sector
"Neutron uses AI-powered search, trained on all 52 million pages from the NRC's Agency-wide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) database. Despite ADAMS offering access to millions of publicly available documents for nuclear facilities, the process of addressing NRC requests and obtaining regulatory approvals is currently cumbersome. Cutting search time by orders of magnitude, Neutron identifies and streamlines patterns and processes, leading to renewed growth in the nuclear sector."









