Tag Archives: Environment

A Manhattan Project nuclear weapons site is being turned into a giant solar farm

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The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced plans to turn land that previously housed aspects of the Manhattan Project into a 1 GW solar farm. For the uninitiated, the Manhattan Project was a top-secret and successful effort to develop nuclear weapons during the 1940s.

This particular renovation is being conducted at the former home of the Hanford nuclear testing facility, otherwise known as Site W, which is in Washington state. This site housed the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. Plutonium made at this location was used in the very first atomic bomb and the Fat Man bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

The location certainly is intriguing, but so is the transformation project. This 580-square mile section of semi-arid desert could end up housing the largest solar project in the country, if built to the announced capacity. This record currently belongs to the Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage project in California, which generates 875 megawatts of solar power.

The DOE has teamed up with Hecate Energy to repurpose the 8,000-acre site. This is part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative that launched last year. This program is tasked with repurposing DOE-owned land for clean energy generation. This program has already added around 90 GW of solar capacity to the grid, which is enough to power 13 million homes.

This isn’t quite a done deal yet. The DOE and Hecate Energy still have to negotiate for a realty agreement and the government could cancel these negotiations at any time.

This is good news, but we still have some catching up to do with regard to Europe. The US produces around 5.6 percent of its energy via solar, but the EU recently shot up to 9.1 percent. However, trends are moving upward in both regions.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-manhattan-project-nuclear-weapons-site-is-being-turned-into-a-giant-solar-farm-173047830.html?src=rss

A Manhattan Project nuclear weapons site is being turned into a giant solar farm

Posted on by

The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced plans to turn land that previously housed aspects of the Manhattan Project into a 1 GW solar farm. For the uninitiated, the Manhattan Project was a top-secret and successful effort to develop nuclear weapons during the 1940s.

This particular renovation is being conducted at the former home of the Hanford nuclear testing facility, otherwise known as Site W, which is in Washington state. This site housed the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. Plutonium made at this location was used in the very first atomic bomb and the Fat Man bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

The location certainly is intriguing, but so is the transformation project. This 580-square mile section of semi-arid desert could end up housing the largest solar project in the country, if built to the announced capacity. This record currently belongs to the Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage project in California, which generates 875 megawatts of solar power.

The DOE has teamed up with Hecate Energy to repurpose the 8,000-acre site. This is part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative that launched last year. This program is tasked with repurposing DOE-owned land for clean energy generation. This program has already added around 90 GW of solar capacity to the grid, which is enough to power 13 million homes.

This isn’t quite a done deal yet. The DOE and Hecate Energy still have to negotiate for a realty agreement and the government could cancel these negotiations at any time.

This is good news, but we still have some catching up to do with regard to Europe. The US produces around 5.6 percent of its energy via solar, but the EU recently shot up to 9.1 percent. However, trends are moving upward in both regions.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-manhattan-project-nuclear-weapons-site-is-being-turned-into-a-giant-solar-farm-173047830.html?src=rss

Tesla warns against wet towel charging trick two months too late

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Tesla car culture is full of hacks and shortcuts, some more effective than others. One, known as the “wet towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging department — or whatever remains of it — to publicly tell customers to knock it off.

The “wet towel” trick involves wrapping a damp, cool cloth around a Supercharger cable handle as a way to presumably speed up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature monitors that keep it from overheating as it charges Tesla vehicles. Some Tesla owners believe that cooling down the charging handle will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their vehicles faster.

Here's the problem, at least in Tesla's telling: If the sensor in the charging handle believes that the temperature is lower than it actually is while it’s charging, the towel-wrapped charger can create a "risk of overheating or damage" according to the company.

This may sound like the biggest “duh” statement in tech news history but it’s taken more than two months for Tesla to warn its customers not to do the “wet towel” trick on their cars, even after it became a well known “hack” on other auto news websites and Reddit forums. The official Tesla Charging account on X posted a warning on Wednesday in response to an article from InsideEVs.com explaining the dangerous car charging trick.

This kind of epic communication breakdown is what happens when a major automaker doesn’t have a public relations department. Tesla dissolved its entire PR team in 2020 and Elon Musk publicly refused to hire one on his X account the following year saying he didn’t want to “spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion,” according to Electrek.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-warns-against-wet-towel-charging-trick-two-months-too-late-190237430.html?src=rss

Rivian opens its first Charging Outpost, a crunchy not-gas station near Yosemite

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Rivian just opened its first EV charging rest stop 24 miles outside of Yosemite National Park, complete with bathrooms, a lounge with a small library, a water refill station, free coffee and (not free) “make your own” trail mix. Only Rivian owners will be able to make use of the five DC fast chargers at the Rivian Yosemite Charging Outpost, but the other amenities are open to anyone.

The Charging Outpost is located in Groveland, California near the park’s west entrance and takes the place of an abandoned gas station. The shop area will be open from 7AM to 7PM, while the bathrooms and chargers will be available 24/7. It’s the first time Rivian has ventured into this kind of infrastructure, building on its growing network of regular charging sites — several of which are situated near Yosemite. The EV maker has 58 Waypoint charging sites, which support any electric vehicle that uses the standard J1772 plug, around the Yosemite Valley, and a Rivian-only Adventure charging site near the park’s east entrance.

Rivian says it has plans for more Charging Outposts “around national parks and other high-traffic areas across the country.” The first such building was designed with the intention of keeping waste to a minimum, and its retaining wall was made using materials from the old parking lot and sidewalk. It’s fitted with solar panels and has a passive cooling design that’s meant to reduce the need for AC or heating.

Beyond Charging Outposts, Rivian plans to eventually have over 3,500 of its Adventure Network DC fast chargers available in 600 sites across the US and Canada, on top of roughly 10,000 Level 2 chargers that will be open to the public.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rivian-opens-its-first-charging-outpost-a-crunchy-not-gas-station-near-yosemite-152039298.html?src=rss

Environmental groups accuse Amazon of ‘distorting the truth’ in latest clean-energy claim

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On Wednesday, Amazon claimed that it reached its goal of sourcing all its power from clean energy sources in the past year. If taken at face value, the announcement would mean it hit the milestone seven years ahead of schedule, which would be a monumental achievement. But environmental experts speaking to The New York Times, including a group of concerned Amazon employees, warn that the company is “misleading the public by distorting the truth.”

The company’s claim of achieving 100 percent clean electricity is based in part on billion-dollar investments in over 500 solar and wind initiatives. The company’s logic is that the energy these projects generate equals the electricity its data centers consume — ergo, even Steven.

But the renewable energy sources it uses for those calculations are fed into a general power grid, not exclusively into Amazon’s operations. Environmental experts caution that the company is using “accounting and marketing to make itself look good,” as The New York Times put it.

“Amazon wants us to think of its data centers as surrounded by wind and solar farms,” the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice wrote in a statement to The NYT. “[But] the reality is the company is heavily investing in data center expansions fueled by West Virginian coal, Saudi Arabian oil and Canadian fracked gas.”

Green plains filled with large windmills. Blue sky.
Amazon

Clean energy experts say Amazon’s inclusion of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in its calculations can be highly misleading. This is because if any power plants on a grid burn fossil fuels, businesses can’t know that the grid uses only clean energy. The Amazon employee group told The New York Times that, after subtracting the company’s use of RECs in its calculations, its clean-energy investment was “just a fraction of what was publicized.”

“Buying a bunch of RECs doesn’t help anything,” Leah Stokes, associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, told The NYT. “You just have to be investing in real projects.”

To be fair, any movement toward clean energy should be applauded. Amazon still received a “B” grade from the nonprofit CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), which was lower than Google and Microsoft’s “A” but still a passing grade. The problem comes when companies use the smoke and mirrors more often associated with marketing and PR to mislead the public into believing they’re doing more for the environment than they are.

“A company needs to actually outline, what are the sources that you are accounting for in that calculation?” Simon Fischweicher, a CDP director, told The NYT.

With the meteoric rise of AI and the financial pressures to compete in this new gold rush, companies are now reshuffling their decks and finding new ways to meet their climate goals. However, if that shakeup offers less tangible movement and more weasel words and sketchy logic, then that’s creating a new problem on top of their alleged solutions for a genuine crisis.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/environmental-groups-accuse-amazon-of-distorting-the-truth-in-latest-clean-energy-claim-170633705.html?src=rss

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50 percent in five years due to AI

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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years thanks to energy-guzzling data centers required to power artificial intelligence, according to the company’s 2024 Environmental Report released on Tuesday. The report, which Google releases annually, shows the company’s progress towards meeting its self-proclaimed objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, the report states, which was 48 percent higher than in 2019, and 13 percent higher than a year before. “This result is primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions,” said Google in the report. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”

Google’s report spotlights the environmental impact that the explosion of artificial intelligence has had on the planet. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple and other tech companies plan to pour billions of dollars into AI, but training AI models requires enormous amounts of energy. Using AI features uses significant amounts of energy too. In 2023, researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University found that generating a single image using artificial intelligence can use as much energy as charging a smartphone. Analysts at Bernstein said that AI would “double the rate of US electricity demand growth and total consumption could outstrip current supply in the next two years,” the Financial Times reported. Last month, Microsoft, which also pledged to go “carbon negative” by the end of this decade, reported that its greenhouse gas emissions had risen nearly 30 percent since 2020 due to the construction of data centers.

Google’s report said that the company’s data centers were using way more water than before to stay cool as a result of expanded AI workloads. Some of those workloads so far have involved Google Search suggesting that people eat rocks and put glue on their pizza to prevent the cheese from falling off, as well as Gemini, the company’s AI-powered chatbot, generating images of ethnically diverse Nazis.

In 2023, Google’s data centers consumed 17 percent more water than the year before. That’s 6.1 billion liters, enough to irrigate approximately 41 golf courses annually in the southwestern United States, according to the company’s strangely kooky measure.

“As our business and industry continue to evolve, we expect our total GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions to rise before dropping toward our absolute emissions reduction target,” Google’s report stated, without explaining what would precipitate the drop. “Predicting the future environmental impact of AI is complex and evolving, and our historical trends likely don’t fully capture AI’s future trajectory. As we deeply integrate AI across our product portfolio, the distinction between AI and other workloads will not be meaningful.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climbed-nearly-50-percent-in-five-years-due-to-ai-002646115.html?src=rss

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50 percent in five years due to AI

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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years thanks to energy-guzzling data centers required to power artificial intelligence, according to the company’s 2024 Environmental Report released on Tuesday. The report, which Google releases annually, shows the company’s progress towards meeting its self-proclaimed objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, the report states, which was 48 percent higher than in 2019, and 13 percent higher than a year before. “This result is primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions,” said Google in the report. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”

Google’s report spotlights the environmental impact that the explosion of artificial intelligence has had on the planet. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple and other tech companies plan to pour billions of dollars into AI, but training AI models requires enormous amounts of energy. Using AI features uses significant amounts of energy too. In 2023, researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University found that generating a single image using artificial intelligence can use as much energy as charging a smartphone. Analysts at Bernstein said that AI would “double the rate of US electricity demand growth and total consumption could outstrip current supply in the next two years,” the Financial Times reported. Last month, Microsoft, which also pledged to go “carbon negative” by the end of this decade, reported that its greenhouse gas emissions had risen nearly 30 percent since 2020 due to the construction of data centers.

Google’s report said that the company’s data centers were using way more water than before to stay cool as a result of expanded AI workloads. Some of those workloads so far have involved Google Search suggesting that people eat rocks and put glue on their pizza to prevent the cheese from falling off, as well as Gemini, the company’s AI-powered chatbot, generating images of ethnically diverse Nazis.

In 2023, Google’s data centers consumed 17 percent more water than the year before. That’s 6.1 billion liters, enough to irrigate approximately 41 golf courses annually in the southwestern United States, according to the company’s strangely kooky measure.

“As our business and industry continue to evolve, we expect our total GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions to rise before dropping toward our absolute emissions reduction target,” Google’s report stated, without explaining what would precipitate the drop. “Predicting the future environmental impact of AI is complex and evolving, and our historical trends likely don’t fully capture AI’s future trajectory. As we deeply integrate AI across our product portfolio, the distinction between AI and other workloads will not be meaningful.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climbed-nearly-50-percent-in-five-years-due-to-ai-002646115.html?src=rss

Google invests in Taiwanese solar company to boost green energy

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Google is investing in a Taiwanese solar company with plans to build a 1 gigawatt (GW) pipeline of sustainable energy in the region. The company is placing a stake in New Green Power (NGP), part of BlackRock’s investment portfolio, for the project. The move could help Google and Taiwan move closer to their climate goals while stabilizing green energy production in one of the most crucial semiconductor hubs of our new AI-infused world.

Google already has a significant presence in Taiwan, including a data center. According to Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, fossil fuels currently generate nearly 85 percent of Taiwan’s power grid. “To help overcome these obstacles, companies can play a pivotal role in finding new strategies to grow the supply of available renewable energy sources and promoting emerging technologies that enable the full decarbonization of regional electricity systems,” she wrote.

Google expects to use up to 300 megawatts of solar capacity to power its data centers in Taiwan. In addition, Peterson Corio says the company “may offer a portion of this clean energy capacity to [its] semiconductor suppliers and manufacturers in the region.” She said that would help its partners meet their green energy goals and reduce indirect (Scope 3) emissions from Google’s supply chain partners.

“A significant share of our Scope 3 footprint can be traced back to the electricity grids that power our suppliers and users, which is why broad decarbonization — and partnerships like this — continue to be core to our net-zero goal,” Peterson Corio wrote.

Regulators haven’t yet approved the deal. Google hasn’t said how much it’s investing in NGP.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-invests-in-taiwanese-solar-company-to-boost-green-energy-171231205.html?src=rss

China is plowing $11 billion into a solar, wind and coal energy project

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A Chinese state-owned power company is splashing out 80 billion yuan ($11 billion) on an energy base that will generate electricity from solar, wind and coal sources. China Three Gorges Renewables Group, a subsidiary of the country’s largest hydropower company, plans to build a plant with a 16-gigawatt capacity and a five-gigawatt storage facility, Bloomberg reports.

This is part of China’s aim to build 455 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects in the desert by 2030. This plant is being constructed in Inner Mongolia, which will get 135 gigawatts of the total planned output.

The China Three Gorges Corporation is looking to diversify its energy sources as building large hydro dams is becoming less feasible. According to Three Gorges, wind and solar generation from the plant will depend on grid accessibility. The coal plant is set to start operations in three years.

It’s somewhat disappointing that the new plant will have a coal power element, though it's not fully surprising given the way China has bristled at renewable energy commitments during climate summit talks with other countries. As Bloomberg notes, China has been struggling to put all of its clean energy into the power grid. It often relies on coal when renewable sources like solar and wind aren’t available.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/china-is-plowing-11-billion-into-a-solar-wind-and-coal-energy-project-120007712.html?src=rss

Amazon says it’s cut down on those plastic air pillows in packages

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You know those little plastic air bags in your more fragile Amazon purchases that make perfect popping noise makers when you crush them? Amazon says it's reduced its usage of them and plans to completely eliminate using them by the end of the year.

The ecommerce behemoth announced on its news blog that it has reduced the use of plastic air pillows by 95 percent and switched to crumbled paper filler instead. Amazon also says it plans to use paper filler for “nearly all” of its customer deliveries on Prime Day.

The company says its decision to phase out the use of plastic air cushions at its distribution centers aims to eliminate unnecessary waste and focus more on using recycled materials.

Plastic pollution has always been a concern when it comes to our environment but it has dramatically increased as a result of Amazon’s meteoric rise especially during the COVID pandemic. The nonprofit ocean conservation group Oceana released a study in 2021 showing that Amazon produced 599 million pounds of plastic waste in 2020. The group also estimated that the waste produced from plastic air pillows alone “would circle the Earth more than 600 times.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-says-its-cut-down-on-those-plastic-air-pillows-in-packages-222953642.html?src=rss