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One of the casualties of Australia’s energy market crisis, a retailer focusing on smart management of backyard swimming pools, has been bought.

The post Brookfield-backed metering firm buys assets of “smart pool” retailer sunk by energy crisis appeared first on RenewEconomy.

US government scientists say they’ve vaulted a critical nuclear power threshold, achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time.

The post US scientists claim fusion “breakthrough”, but it’s still early days appeared first on RenewEconomy.

While extinction threats, tipping points, and ecological collapse have dominated newsfeeds at the COP15 biodiversity negotiations in Montreal, a new IUCN tool allows viewers to track progress on targets to restore degraded landscapes, providing "glimmers of light" in an otherwise dark landscape.

California has awarded it first floating wind farm leases. Why and when do we need floating wind farms – and how do they work?

The post Explainer: How do floating wind turbines work? appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A new paper has outlined a series of integrity principles that could form part of a voluntary biodiversity crediting framework, likely to be key to scaling the nascent market and closing the current private finance gap.

Renewables will have produced 46 pct of German power consumption in 2022, a big rise from 2021 but off track for its ambitious 2030 targets.

The post Germany sets renewable power record in 2022, but is off-track for 2030 target appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Financial services company Manulife on Monday announced its partnership with the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees Initiative, with the pledge aiming to help scale the firm’s newly launched carbon offset-focused fund.

Researchers managed to release more energy than they put in: a positive gain known as ignition

Researchers have reportedly made a breakthrough in the quest to unlock a “near-limitless, safe, clean” source of energy: they have got more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than they put in.

Nuclear fusion involves smashing together light elements such as hydrogen to form heavier elements, releasing a huge burst of energy in the process. The approach, which gives rise to the heat and light of the sun and other stars, has been hailed as having huge potential as a sustainable, low-carbon energy source.

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A more ambitious climate target in Mexico’s updated Paris Agreement commitment is actually worse than its previous insufficient target due to higher baseline emissions and selective accounting, a watchdog group said Monday.

The path of Plibersek’s big agenda stretches far beyond the one-term political horizon – and it’s fraught with dangers. Peter Burnett, Honorary Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

If the proposed pumped hydro scheme at Onslow goes ahead and is managed well, it could be a major asset to diversify a low-carbon, self-resilient economy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Alan Brent, Professor and Chair in Sustainable Energy Systems, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Gregory Guyot, Associate researcher in Fluid Mechanics Energetics Process and Civil Engineering (PhD-Ing), Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Allowing farmers to continue dumping slurry is short-sighted. If ministers want nature to recover, they must regulate

England’s rivers are in a shocking, filthy state, with every single one failing the last set of quality tests carried out in 2019 under EU rules. This is bad for biodiversity, above all the fish, mammals such as otters, and other species that live in rivers. And it is bad for people, to whom the depletion of nature poses an increasingly grave global threat. There could be no good time for the UK government to announce that it is abandoning the principle of a legal target for river health, and postponing a deadline for agricultural run-off reduction by three years (from 2037 to 2040). It is difficult to imagine a worse moment for such an announcement than the final week of a crucial UN biodiversity conference (Cop15) in Montreal.

Yet this is the decision that is expected to be made by the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, in the next few days. And while some farmers may welcome the further license to pollute waterways that they are likely to be granted, others, along with civil society groups and naturalists, will oppose what amounts to environmental negligence. The Conservatives’ atrocious record in office over the past 12 years with regard to water has recently come under sharpened scrutiny. Any further weakening of regulation can only strengthen the sense that a vital natural resource has been catastrophically mismanaged – while the companies that control it have been enabled to enrich themselves, and their investors.

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Voluntary offsets tumbled last week, sinking to year lows Wednesday that coincided with reports of Vanguard, the world’s second largest asset manager, pulling out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (NZAM).

Just 12 of the 130 banks headquartered in the UK have endorsed the framework set out by the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), according to research published Monday, with another study finding that the top 25 European banks fail to implement ambitious climate policies across their business.

The board of the EU's Global Gateway came together for the first time on Sunday, assessing the first year of the bloc's response to China’s Belt and Road foreign investment initiative and seeking ways to involve the private sector.

EUAs rose to their highest in more than three months on Monday as traders continued to position ahead of Wednesday's options contract expiry, and watched for signals on the EU's intentions on funding the energy transition ahead of talks on the REPowerEU initiative, while energy prices weakened as gas reserves appeared ample despite the cold snap.

Another €100 billion in public funds will be needed by the EU to address a gas supply gap next winter, the IEA said on Monday in a report presented alongside European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen that further raises the potential for a fresh raid on EU ETS revenues.

Setting a price corridor would be the most effective way to control the price trajectory of EUAs and reduce the influence of speculators, while changes to the MSR would enable the market to overcome emerging supply challenges amid rising costs of hedging power generation, according to a report published Friday.

It used to be that we celebrated the first snowfall, but that’s been replaced by talk of how to survive the winter without going bankrupt

It’s pretty bracing, this snow, and I don’t mean literally. I’ve been consuming snow-related headlines and news coverage for decades: typically, they’d say, “Winter Wonderland”, followed by “travel chaos”; occasionally, “travel chaos leavened by magical snowy landscape”. Some years people would try to mix it up a bit – “Snowtravaganza” was a low point. You just felt bad for the poor sod who had to live with having written it.

All that has been replaced this year with quite detailed instructions on how to survive the cold without going bankrupt: there was a news segment on the radio about how to turn down the internal temperature of your radiators, if you have a combi boiler. This was not information that lent itself naturally to an aural medium. It was like trying to learn how to remove your own appendix by podcast. Nobody panic – there’s also a website! Except, at the same time, everybody panic: it’s great to take judicious steps to economise in energy-straitened times, but it’s not in any way normal to read experts weighing the relative benefits of wearing a hat indoors and putting mini USB heaters in your shoes.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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Most venomous creatures store their poison in a gland. Not the stingray, whose venom is in its very tissue

Where do you begin with an animal whose mouth looks like a face, whose face is split into two – half at the top, and half the bottom; who can breathe with either part – from spiracles behind the eyes, or gills behind the mouth; whose teeth are scales; whose scales are teeth-like (denticles)?

When stingrays hunt, they lose sight of their prey – their eyes are bad, and their prey is often underneath them. To find and feel clams, mussels, crabs and fish, the rays rely on electroreceptors in their skin, or, as National Geographic puts it, “special gel-filled pits”. They literally inhale their food, gulping down the electric signal. As they do this, they breathe through the spiracles behind their eyes, which work less efficiently than their gills. Do they get a little light-headed, breathing as if through a towel, feeling the electricity brighten, speed up, then die?

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