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Spain-headquartered renewable energy generator Iberdrola has committed to ensuring all its global facilities will have a net positive impact on nature by 2030.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

UK-based renewables giant updates progress on plans to develop major wind, solar and battery storage facility in western Victoria.

The post RES edges ahead with plans for huge wind, solar and battery storage hub in Victoria appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Two Australian resources players have extended their cooperating agreement to explore the possibility of developing some 1.4 million hectares of rainforest in Papua New Guinea into a series of carbon offset projects.

Australian researchers say high frequency vibrations used to “divide and conquer” individual water molecules during electrolysis can boost production of green hydrogen 14-fold.

The post Australian researchers making sound waves to produce cheaper green hydrogen appeared first on RenewEconomy.

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.