Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Social media is a sinkhole, a vast wasteland of misinformation, disinformation, and assorted dreck that will rot your mind if you let it. People see something on a screen and automatically assume it is true. Then they share it with their friends who share it with their friends until every person on earth with a computer or a smartphone knows about it. In 99.72% of cases, the end result of all this sharing is a distorted picture of reality. Case in point, the now well documented case of a Tesla Cybertruck that was unable to claw its way up a driveway with a slight incline covered by 4 to 6 inches of snow. If you are one of the three people who hasn’t seen it yet, here it is.

Cybertruck And Snow

There are several things going on here. First of all, there is a healthy dollop of schadenfreud among some people. We have been hearing for years about how the Cybertruck is more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Elon has made all sorts of wild pronouncements about its rampant awesomeness.

It will go faster, climb higher, and tow more weight than any pickup truck in the history of the world. Not only that, it is bulletproof and able to float much like the famous Lotus submersible car that appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me movie. Elon paid nearly $1 million dollars for one of the cars used in that movie in 2013, part of his fixation on cult movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Spinal Tap, and Space Balls.

People love to see others fall flat on their face. It’s one of the less appealing traits baked into human DNA. After all Elon’s boasts about the Cybertruck, who wouldn’t feel a little tickle of glee to see his creation humbled by a bit of snow? As for watching it on Instagram, Elon has built the Tesla empire almost exclusively on social media. Live by the sword; die by the sword.

Traction And Tires

Now let’s stop the guffawing and take a look at what is really going on here. The two main factors for driving successfully in low traction situations are tires and driver skill. In this instance, the Cybertruck presumably is fitted with the original tires, which we believe to be 285/65/R20. One of my intrepid colleagues reports those tires are 34.6 inches high and 11.2 inches wide. That means they have a mighty big footprint on the ground beneath them.

People who live in snowy climes know that tires with a long, narrow footprint give better traction in the snow than tires with a short, wide footprint. Way back when, I had a 1973 Honda Civic with tiny little 12 inch tires. It handled snow like a mountain goat. Later, I owned a Cadillac Eldorado that slewed all over the place if there was a flake of snow on the road. One car was light and agile with skinny tires. The other was big and heavy with wide tires. Enough said.

They also know snow tires need big, deep blocks of tread with lots of space between them to get a grip in deep snow. The Cybertruck tires we have seen in spy shots posted online look to have fairly little tread depth and not much space between the blocks. That is probably because they are supposed to perform well in a wide range of driving conditions — acceleration, stopping, rock climbing, dirt roads, sand, and high speed operation. Any tire engineer will tell you no tire can do all those things well. The tires Tesla chose for the Cybertruck are a compromise. It appears that superior traction in snow is not one of their strengths, even though they are mud and snow rated.

Then there is ice. Frankly, people, if there is a layer of ice under that snow in the driveway, that is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. People who drive in wintry places know ice is treacherous no matter what you are driving. Many years ago, a well known editor for Car and Driver magazine was given an Audi Quattro to drive — one of the first all wheel drive sedans to go into production. He was amazed and astonished at how well the car performed while driving in snow.

Then he crested a rise and discovered black ice on the other side. He crashed heavily and his wife was seriously injured. Afterward, he wrote a thoughtful piece about how no vehicle is safe when the roads are icy. If the driver of that Cybertruck was attempting to climb an icy driveway, that would go a long way toward explaining the difficulties he encountered.

Driver Skill

I do not know the driver of that Cybertruck or anything about his skill behind the wheel, but I learned to drive in New England where the proper technique when the going gets slippery is fingertips on the steering wheel and very gentle pressure on the throttle. Any abrupt move is to be avoided. What is needed is a very keen sense of what is going on down there where the rubber meets the road by feeling what the car is doing. It takes heightened awareness that frankly can be mentally draining on a long drive in slippery conditions. Spinning wheels — which is what we are seeing in that video — are a sign the driver has lost control of the situation.

That being said, it is legitimate to ask why the Cybertruck, with all its sophisticated computer software, is not able to simulate a skilled driver under these circumstances. The vehicle has enough torque to tow freight cars but torque is not your friend when traction is limited. We are curious whether the Cybertruck might not need a bit of tweaking to its traction control algorithm.

The Cybertruck is a polarizing vehicle. People either love it or they hate it. Either way, one video on social media should not determine whether it is worthy. A few years ago, Consumer Reports declined to give the Tesla Model 3 a satisfactory rating because the brakes did not perform as well as expected. An over the air software update solved the problem. We have no doubt that Elon and his band of merry pranksters will figure out how a snowy driveway. Oh, and one more thing. If we were confronted with a snow covered driveway, we probably wouldn’t choose to go up it backwards. Just saying.

Food and agriculture companies have gotten eerily quiet regarding their efforts to eliminate deforestation and other land conversion. While this topic has dominated much of the sustainability conversation in the 2010s, it has slipped into the background over the past few years. 

For example, since the first quarter of 2022, I haven’t had enough fodder to include a deforestation section in my quarterly roundups of large companies’ sustainability efforts. And it’s become increasingly rare for businesses to submit deforestation-focused sessions for GreenBiz events.  

That’s not really surprising. Limiting land conversion is a notoriously difficult challenge that requires alignment between companies, governments, farmers and other stakeholders, as well as investments in sophisticated technology to trace supply chains and monitor landscapes. Such investments are often hard to justify internally. And when one company stops purchasing from a risky area, its competitors can take advantage and sweep these often cheaper products off the market. 

But agriculture-driven land use change is a primary driver of greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Failing to stop it will bring about a grim future for all of us. That’s why 2024 should be the year for food companies to dust off their commitments and get serious about the work. 

Game-changing legislation in Europe 

A few encouraging signs already point in the right direction. 

The European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR) is one of the most significant pieces of legislation for forest protection and will come into full effect by the end of the year. If companies want to continue selling products in the EU with high deforestation risks, such as beef, chocolate and coffee, they will need to adopt unprecedented levels of risk management and disclosures to avoid hefty fines.

Agriculture-driven land use change is a primary driver of greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Failing to stop it will bring about a grim future for all of us.

On the private-sector side, major soy traders announced strengthened deforestation commitments in December. Most notably, Cargill has revised its zero-deforestation target date for soy, corn, wheat and cotton from 2030 to 2025 for its most important sourcing areas in South America. 

While these are significant improvements, they still fall short of scientific recommendations. And deforestation commitments have too often dissipated into hot air in the past. 

Four criteria underpin a credible policy 

So, what should companies put into place to set the right intention and put it into action? In November, the sustainability advocacy nonprofit Ceres published a corporate deforestation scorecard that assessed the policies of 53 major companies from 15 sectors. 

The scorecard used four main criteria for credible zero-deforestation policies, in line with recommendations of the Accountability Framework Initiative: 

1. Cover all relevant commodities (such as soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa, coffee, rubber or derived products) that the company sources. 
2. Apply to all segments of the supply chain across all sourcing geographies.
3. Include a time-bound, quantifiable commitment to achieve deforestation-free supply chains by 2025. 
4. Specify cutoff targets of 2020 or earlier for ending deforestation events in a sourcing area. 

Of the 53 companies Ceres analyzed, only Amaggi and Kering have policies that comply with all four criteria. All others are lagging in one area or another, highlighting the challenges of addressing this issue comprehensively. And yet, change is possible, as the case of palm oil demonstrates.  

Learning from palm oil’s success

The story of palm oil in Southeast Asia is a valuable example of how an industry can reduce its land footprint. 

A decade ago, palm oil producers cut down hundreds of thousands of forest hectares in Indonesia and surrounding countries. Aggressive campaigns, corporate action, multi-stakeholder collaboration and smart technology use have reduced forest loss by 90 percent over the past 10 years. Key to this outcome was an effective series of incentives that traveled down the supply chain. 

Advocacy organizations such as Mighty Earth and Greenpeace detected and alerted companies to deforestation threats in their supply chains. Company executives have reacted to this public pressure by requiring action from their suppliers, who then changed their operations to secure contracts. Over time, this system led to sufficient commercial, financial and reputational pressures to change the industry’s default practices. 

This success story offers valuable lessons for other commodities. Above all, it shows that companies can play an outsized role in effecting change when the right incentives are present, even in regions with weak governance. Protecting forests is a question of corporate will, not ability. 

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Power plants catch a lot of grief over global warming emissions, but cement-making is another culprit desperately in need of a green makeover before the planet cooks to a crisp. Well, here comes one. In a sustainability twofer, scientists have figured out how to process captured carbon dioxide and water into green hydrogen and carbon nanofibers, which can be used as an additive for cement and other long-lived carbon-sequestering products.

Carbon Capture Needs to Clean Up Its Act

Carbon capture means different things to different people. To fossil energy stakeholders, for example, capturing excess carbon from the air offers an opportunity to dig up more oil, gas, and coal from underthe ground, while claiming to neutralize the greenhouse gas emissions that result. In addition to those offset opportunities, captured carbon is also commonly injected into wilting oilfields as an oil recovery booster.

Putting that aside for now, carbon capture also takes different forms. In Direct Air Capture, carbon is sucked out of ambient air. Alternatively, carbon-capturing equipment can be attached to individual power plants and other industrial systems.

Either way, the captured carbon has to go somewhere once it’s captured, and that typically involves pipelines and underground sequestration facilities.

The idea of piping captured carbon to underground storage sites didn’t gain much traction here in the US after 2015, when the plug was pulled on the decade-long, billion-dollar FutureGen project, first announced in 2003 as a showcase for “clean coal” technology.

Another capture-and-sequestration try was launched at the San Juan coal power plant in New Mexico in 2019, only to flop in 2022.

In an interesting twist, 30 biofuel facilities across five Midwest states have been hoping for a carbon sequestration site in North Dakota to store their greenhouse gas emissions. Hopes were dashed last fall when the pipeline developer faced opposition from, well, everyone.

Carbon Capture And Recycling

Hope springs eternal, though. Work is currently under way on a gigantic Direct Air Capture and underground sequestration project in Texas under the umbrella of Occidental Petroleum, so we’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime, the idea of putting captured carbon to use — other than to extract more oil — has gained traction. The fast-growing electrofuels industry, for example, is banking on captured carbon and green hydrogen to produce transportation fuels without using virgin petroleum. Other firms, such as the  microbe-driven startup LanzaTech, have been replacing virgin petrochemicals with captured carbon in transportation fuels and consumer products, too. Shampoo, household cleansers, vodka, perfumes, fabric, and PET plastic are among the synthetic materials being made with captured carbon.

To the extent that all this activity helps to tamp down the pace of oil extraction, that’s a step in the right direction. An even bigger step would be to hold carbon emissions out of the air for longer periods of time, and that’s where cement comes in.

Cement is already beginning to claw space for itself in the carbon capture area, and it’s about time. Cement is the limestone-and-clay binder that holds concrete together. Cement-making accounts for about 26% of industrial emissions and  8-9% of total global warming emissions all by itself. That’s not nearly as much as power plant emissions, but it far outruns aviation emissions, which currently account for only about 2%.

Alternative fuels and energy efficiency are one pathway to reducing emissions from cement making. Another way is to attack the cement itself. Last fall, CleanTechnica took note of a new carbon-sucking cement developed by the startup C-Crete Technologies. The pour-able mixture captures and mineralizes airborne carbon as it sets. “Think of C-Crete as a tree in the form of concrete, and you’re on the right track,” we wrote.

Another approach is to take Portland cement out of the concrete mix. The Saudi Arabian climate technology company Partanna Arabia, for example, has just launched a partnership to produce cement-free concrete pavers that absorb carbon dioxide over time.

Carbon Capture With A Green Hydrogen Twist

Another new twist on carbon-capturing cement comes from a research team based at the Energy Department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Columbia University.

The team has developed a method for pulling carbon nanofibers from captured carbon. Among other uses, the carbon nanofibers could be deployed as a lifespan-enhancing additive for cement.

“You can put the carbon nanofibers into cement to strengthen the cement, That would lock the carbon away in concrete for at least 50 years, potentially longer, explains research team leader Jingguang Chen, a Columbia University chemical engineering professor who also holds a joint appointment at Brookhaven.

“The idea of capturing CO2 or converting it to other materials to combat climate change is not new. But simply storing CO2 gas can lead to leaks. And many CO2 conversions produce carbon-based chemicals or fuels that are used right away, which releases CO2 right back into the atmosphere,” the lab adds.

Who’s Gonna Pay For All This?

The big question is cost, and that was front and center in the mind of the research team.

They came up with a two-part process begins with an electrolysis step. The point of the electrolysis step is to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which is known to be a more efficient starting point for making carbon nanofibers.

The electrolysis step also which produces green hydrogen as a bonus byproduct, providing an additional potential revenue stream for the system.

The second part of the process is a heat-driven process that deploys a thermochemical reaction. For carbon nanofiber systems, that typically requires high heat of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius. The Brookhaven team brought that down to a more practical, scalable level in the range of 400 degrees Celsius.

The team also searched for a more efficient catalyst to drive the thermochemical reaction. They settled on an iron-cobalt alloy, which they tweaked a bit with extra cobalt to improve the formation of carbon nanofibers.

“According to our study, the cobalt-iron sites in the alloy help to break the C-O bonds of carbon monoxide,” explains the co-author of the study, Ping Liu of the Chemistry Division at Brookhaven.

“That makes atomic carbon available to serve as the source for building carbon nanofibers. Then the extra cobalt is there to facilitate the formation of the C-C bonds that link up the carbon atoms,” she adds.

That thing about cobalt raises some supply chain red flags, but the research team demonstrated that their catalyst gets booted off from the surface of the nanofibers as they grow, making it relatively easy to recycle the cobalt.

“This ease of catalyst recycling, commercial availability of the catalysts, and relatively mild reaction conditions for the second reaction all contribute to a favorable assessment of the energy and other costs associated with the process,” the lab explains.

Burying the lede somewhat, Brookhaven concluded its press release by noting that if renewable energy is used to power the process, the results would be “truly carbon-negative.”

Why didn’t they say so in the first place!

Check out the study under the title, “CO2 fixation into carbon nanofibers using electrochemical-thermochemical tandem catalysis” in the journal Nature Catalysis.

Follow me @tinamcasey on Bluesky, Threads, Post, and LinkedIn.

Image credit: “The process uses tandem electrocatalytic (blue ring) and thermocatalytic (orange ring) reactions to convert the CO2 (teal and silver molecules) plus water (purple and teal) into “fixed” carbon nanofibers (silver), producing hydrogen gas (H2, purple) as a beneficial byproduct,” (by Zhenhua Xie/Brookhaven National Laboratory and Columbia University and Erwei Huang/Brookhaven National Laboratory, courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory).

The State of Decarbonization: Progress in US Commercial Building 2023 report is a first-of-its-kind update on the U.S. commercial building industry’s progress on decarbonization. Released at COP28 by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) in partnership with ARUP, the landmark report’s analysis provides a national look at where the U.S. is relative to the greenhouse gas reduction goals set by the Paris Agreement.

The good news? U.S. buildings are on average 26 percent more energy efficient than they were in 1990, using 37 percent less carbon per square foot. 

The bad news? The progress in energy efficiency is entirely canceled out by the development of new buildings and their additional carbon emissions. 

The overarching call for action is clear: All new buildings need to be near carbon-neutral and existing buildings need deep-energy retrofits across all building types and regions. 

Success to scale: Heat pump installations

2022 was the first year that heat pumps outsold gas furnaces, and new research in 2023 showed that replacing a gas furnace with a heat pump could reduce climate pollution by up to 93 percent in each of the 48 continental states. Heat pumps are a proven success at lowering carbon emissions, but they are not yet adopted at scale. Over two-thirds of buildings still use fossil fuels for heating. 

The opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by scaling the adoption of heat pumps is huge. According to the USGBC report, upgrading heating and cooling systems in existing buildings rather than building new “will save both 94 percent embodied emissions and 31 percent operational emissions due to increased system efficiency for a total of 61 percent reduction in emissions.” 

Opportunity to leverage: IRA utilization

Funding and resources contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “are projected to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below a non-IRA scenario by 2035,” the USGBC report found. However this projection only becomes a reality if the building industry uses the funding programs; in fact, with high participation “the law could enable the building sector to meet its proportional share of the U.S. Paris target early, by 2029,” the report found. 

But currently money is being left on the table for building owners and developers to receive if they apply (even retroactively for completed projects), said Linda Toth, one of the main authors for the USGBC report.

For example, the 179D Commercial Buildings Energy-Efficiency Tax Deduction has almost tripled under the IRA, going from $1.80 to $5 per square foot. 179D alone could provide tax savings of $66 billion for energy efficiency retrofits to existing buildings. That is equivalent to about 35 percent of the money spent on building renovations in 2022. 

Two other large pots of money that will become available in 2024 are the EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grants and EPA Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund which together total $25 billion in funding. 

Problem to solve: Empty offices

Over $1.5 trillion in U.S. commercial real estate debt is expected to mature in 2025. With high interest rates and 20 percent of offices in the U.S. sitting empty, this raises the specter of a potential banking collapse. Decarbonizing these offices while renovating them to meet today’s tenant demands presents a huge opportunity. 

Renovation spending is projected to increase up to 11 percent each year by 2027. This investment could create jobs, revitalize neighborhoods and mitigate climate change. In New York City, spurred on by zoning reforms and tax incentives, developers have converted 20 million square feet of office space into residential housing, thereby doubling the local residential population. The White House reports that “15 percent of commercial district office buildings in the 105 largest U.S. cities are suitable for residential conversion, offering the potential to add 171,470 units, or almost one half of 2022’s yield of units in multifamily buildings.” 

Our collective response to a global call to action 

The Building Breakthrough, launched at COP28 by 28 countries including the U.S., set a new industry specific goal: “Near-zero emission and resilient buildings are the new normal by 2030.”

To reach this ambitious goal we need a heightened sense of urgency and resolve throughout the building sector, from project kick-offs and design charrettes to jobsite trailers and board rooms.

We are here to help. Please reach out to me to share how I can support your building decarbonization efforts. You can reach me at [email protected].

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Annual Suite of Electricity System Scenarios Shows There Could Be Fewer Emissions, More Renewables, and Clean Energy Tax Credits Continued Through 2050

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) just released its 2023 Standard Scenarios, which shows how the U.S. electricity sector might change through 2050. The scenarios can guide power system planning and enable dialogue using a common set of assumptions.

The Standard Scenarios is one of several annually updated NREL products designed to support decision makers in the U.S. electricity sector. Every year, NREL uses its Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model to create the new scenarios, taking into account the latest projections for technology costs and performance from NREL’s Annual Technology Baseline. Now in its ninth installment, the Standard Scenarios includes 53 possible futures that are available to view or download from NREL’s Scenario Viewer.

“The goal of the Standard Scenarios is to give an annually updated picture of where the U.S. electric grid may be headed,” said Pieter Gagnon, NREL grid researcher and lead author of the Standard Scenarios. “The report and accompanying data sets give users an understanding of what might get built, what associated greenhouse gas emissions may be, and how much it might all cost—across a wide range of possible futures.”

Key Takeaways From the Scenarios

Every year, the Standard Scenarios includes a scenario called the Mid-case that serves as a baseline or middle-ground scenario to reflect what might happen if current trends and conditions continue. The Mid-case has central values for model inputs like technology and fuel costs and how much electricity people use. In addition, the Mid-case represents currently enacted electric sector policies. Like the 2022 scenarios, this year’s Standard Scenarios includes provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

This year’s Mid-case shows that by 2050 wind and solar power could grow significantly. By 2050, wind and solar make up a significant portion of new electricity generation, with wind reaching 750 gigawatts (GW) and solar 1,100 GW. That is a five-time and 10-time increase from current levels, respectively. Natural gas capacity also continues to expand. In the Mid-case, natural gas capacity increases by 200 GW under current policies and 130 GW under the 95% power sector emissions reduction scenario, which largely driven more by the need for firm capacity than generation.

The Mid-case also includes currently nascent technologies like natural gas with carbon capture, coal with carbon capture, hydrogen combustion turbines, and small nuclear reactors. These technologies play a limited role under current policies, contributing less than 1% of total electricity generation in the Mid-case scenario. However, currently nascent technologies play a bigger role in decarbonized futures with breakthrough cost and performance improvements or national electric sector carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions constraints.

Across all scenarios the U.S. electricity sector emissions decrease significantly through the mid-2030s. The annual U.S. electricity-sector CO₂ emissions in 2035 decrease by 81% in the Mid-case and 71%–86% across all scenarios with current policies (relative to emissions in 2005). While significant, these emissions reductions are not sufficient to phase out the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits. Those credits in IRA are scheduled to phase out at the end of 2032 or when national electric sector greenhouse gas emissions drop below 25% of the level in 2022—whichever occurs later. In 13 of 17 scenarios with current policies and no additional decarbonization policies, the emissions threshold is never passed, and the clean energy tax credits therefore persist through 2050. In the Mid-case, 95% net decarbonization by 2050 is achieved with only a 0.5% increase in present-value bulk electric sector costs. One-hundred percent net decarbonization by 2035 increases costs by 14%.

Learn More About the 2023 Standard Scenarios

If you want to learn more, join a free NREL webinar at 11 a.m. MT on Jan. 24, 2024. Please register to attend. You can also read the Standard Scenarios technical report and view or download the scenarios on the NREL Scenario Viewer.

The Standard Scenarios is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and is part of a larger NREL effort to ensure energy analyses incorporate transparent, realistic, and timely assumptions and consider diverse potential futures. The Standard Scenarios is modeled using the latest technology cost and performance data from NREL’s Annual Technology Baseline.

Learn more about NREL’s energy analysis research, and sign up for NREL’s energy analysis newsletter.

News item from NREL. By Madeline Geocaris.

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Why U.S. and Norway Experts Are Partnering Up To Explore How This Renewable Could Help the World Transition to Clean Energy

When Dany Tome first arrived at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) campus in Golden, Colorado, he did not notice the golden grasses waving from the hillsides or the solar panels set in neat, geometric rows atop parking structures and gullies.

“The first impression I got was snakes,” said Tome, a graduate student at the University of South-Eastern Norway. “That there are snakes here.”

But Tome was not visiting Colorado for the reptiles. He spent five weeks at NREL as part of a larger partnership between Norway and the United States. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, the knowledge exchange program supports collaboration across national laboratories, universities, and oceans—all to advance hydropower.

Hydropower is still the biggest source of renewable energy worldwide, generating more electricity than all other renewables combined, according to the International Energy Agency. And pumped storage hydropower, which can store up to thousands of hours’ worth of energy in reservoirs, accounts for 94% of global energy storage. But as countries add more affordable, efficient solar and wind energy technologies to their power grids, countries need to know: What is hydropower’s role in this renewable future?

Why Hydropower’s Role Should—and Will—Evolve

Norway is famous for its fjords. But it should also be famous for its renewable energy. The country gets about 98% of its energy from renewable resources, most of that (92%) is from hydropower.

Although the United States only gets about 6% of its electricity from hydropower, both countries have significant potential to get more electricity—or other benefits—from hydropower. Some hydropower plants, for example, can generate energy on demand, making hydropower a dependable partner for other renewable sources. When the sun sets or wind slows, hydropower can fill gaps to ensure the grid remains reliable and resilient.

Both countries also rely on similar types of hydropower: primarily large, reservoir-based plants (as opposed to smaller ones positioned alongside flowing rivers). To fill those reservoirs, hydropower plants depend on snow cap or glacier melt and rainwater—all of which could shrink as the world heats up.

But the two countries—and the world—share something else, too: climate change.

“These things are not tied to countries. Worldwide, it’s a similar effect,” said Mayank Panwar, referring to climate change impacts. Panwar, a senior research engineer at NREL, hosted Tome and several other hydropower researchers from the University of South-Eastern Norway starting in the summer of 2023.

Every country is grappling with its own climate change crises, like lethal flooding in wet regions and crop devastation in dry ones; to staunch those crises, many are chasing ambitious clean energy goals.

“So, where does hydropower fit into that?” Panwar asked.

Why the Future Grid Needs Modern Hydropower

Although wind and solar will likely overtake the giant in years to come, hydropower will continue to play a key role backing up clean energy power grids worldwide.

Yet many countries, including Norway and the United States, are exploring exactly how modern versions of this renewable heavyweight might integrate into future clean energy grids.

Hydropower technologies are not without flaws: For example, facilities can, depending on where and how they are built, affect fish migration. Today’s hydropower technologies are already more environmentally friendly than their predecessors. And both Norway and the United States are studying how to mitigate hydropower’s environmental, ecosystem, and community impacts through, for example, safe fish passage technologies.

Existing hydropower facilities could become more efficient with modern upgrades, repairs, and even some digital improvements. If the two countries can digitize their analog plants, operators could better control how much energy they generate (and when) and adapt to changing grid needs.

But many of these new hydropower technologies are still being developed. Before countries invest in what could be expensive, time-consuming upgrades to today’s facilities, they need to know which come with the greatest benefits and how these changes could impact a future clean energy grid.

Together, Panwar and Tome, along with their NREL and Norway colleagues, hope to answer these big hydropower questions. Panwar, for example, recently built a platform that can emulate new hydropower technologies and simulate how they might function once connected to a real power grid.

But while Panwar explores broad, grid-wide questions, Tome is focused on the most nitty-gritty, fundamental part of a hydropower plant: the generator.

Mastering the Machine

Tome first fell in love with machines during one of his undergraduate degrees. (He has one in physics and another in electrical engineering.) Back in his home country of Honduras, Tome remembers a professor coming up to him in the lab and saying, “Let’s build a six-phase machine.” He might as well have said, “Let’s build a unicorn.” Electrical systems, like generators and power grids, typically only have three phases (phases indicate how much power the system delivers at a time). Tome did not think it was possible to add more. Now, he cannot get the unicorn out of his head.

After college, Tome earned double master’s degrees in wind energy and electrical engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Delft University of Technology, respectively. In his graduate work, he designed a 13-phase generator for wind turbines, which could increase the amount of electricity one turbine could generate. But after his master’s, Tome switched to hydropower.

“In Honduras, we have a lot of hydropower resources,” Tome said. “And I was like, ‘OK, this may be suitable. I can help my country with this.’”

But Tome is torn between helping his country develop new hydropower and helping solve complex, global scientific mysteries as a researcher. “Maybe I’m too ambitious,” he said.

While at NREL, Tome found one potential solution that could serve both goals. Working with Panwar, he studied how hot hydropower generators can get before they reach destructive temperatures. And he discovered the traditional thermal threshold—the temperature when today’s hydropower plants would shut down, staunching electricity production—may be far higher than originally thought. That threshold could be even higher if generators are better insulated and kept cooler for longer.

That finding could help both the United States and Norway ramp up clean energy production—without building any new plants. If existing hydropower plants can safely run generators for longer, both countries could produce more clean energy with their existing fleets. In short, they can do more with less.

“In some ways, it actually opens Pandora’s box,” Tome said of his discovery, “because now we need to think differently about how to operate these machines and how they are going to affect the grid.”

“These machines” extends beyond hydropower plants, too. If these plants can benefit from more efficient, longer-lasting engines, then so can electric vehicles and wind turbines or even tractors and trucks.

“My goal is to design machines,” Tome said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of machine.”

For now, though, Tome will focus on hydropower. Although he headed back to Norway in November, he plans to return to NREL to continue working with Panwar. The duo plan to simulate exactly how hot their hot new engines could get and whether these generator-level changes might impact the grid.

“We’re living in this green energy transition, right?” Tome said. “We need more wind and solar energy. But we have these older technologies also, like hydropower.”

Even if hydropower is almost as old as Norway’s fjords, it will remain our old standby—especially if Tome, Panwar, and their U.S. and Norwegian colleagues can help modernize this renewable giant.

Learn more about how NREL is exploring the future of hydropower. And subscribe to the NREL water power newsletter, The Current, to make sure you do not miss a water power update.

Article from NREL. By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy.

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

EVgo and Toyota recently announced that they’ve extended their charging partnership. As part of this agreement, drivers who purchase or lease a new 2024 bZ4x will get one year of complimentary fast charging on EVgo’s national charging network, just like the 2022 and 2023 models. Originally announced in February 2022, the ongoing collaboration between EVgo and Toyota aims to enhance range confidence for new Toyota owners while getting more people familiar with the EVgo network.

“The expansion of our agreement is a testament to the convenience and accessibility of the EVgo network, as well as to our ongoing commitment to automaker collaborations that help spur the mass adoption of EVs throughout the country,” said Maggie Tallman, Senior Vice President, Business Development at EVgo. “Our collaboration with Toyota gives even more EV drivers access to our industry-leading charging network and the ability to plug in across the U.S.”

For first-time EV drivers purchasing or leasing the bZ4X, another benefit will be access to EVgo’s customer support team, the “EVgo Charging Crew”. The dedicated team is available 24/7 to assist with account setup and address frequently asked questions related to charging, which should give new owners more confidence getting started.

“Charging is an essential part of owning an EV, and we’re pleased to offer our customers who purchase or lease our bZ4X vehicles the convenience and accessibility made available by EVgo,” said James George, General Manager of EV Charging Solutions at Toyota Motor North America. “Our ongoing collaboration with one of the nation’s largest public fast charging companies enables us to grant bZ4X drivers access to EVgo’s extensive nationwide network.”

Upsides and Downsides To Renewed EVgo and Toyota Deal

The obvious upside to this is that Toyota will be able to get more EVs sold. Given how behind the company is on EVs, partnerships like this can really help them. Most big EV fans who are already interested in them probably wouldn’t go for a Toyota EV (more on that in a bit), so giving the customers a place to start with charging helps them. This is also good for EVgo, because this gives them some new customers who will probably be loyal going forward.

On the other hand, there are some downsides, but mostly for other people.

The biggest one is that the bZ4X charges slowly, especially in the cold. Giving out free charging for a year means that owners will charge more often, spend more time charging, and clog stations up. We’ve seen this happen at Electrify America stations with Volkswagen ID.4 vehicles, and I’ve personally abused the privilege in a Nissan LEAF a few times (or, more than a few). Free charging means people charge more instead of looking for other options, or just drive more.

This might not be a problem if Toyota doesn’t sell too many EVs (a serious possibility), but if the company comes up with the chops to sell more of them this year and surprises us, the clogging problem could be an issue.

Hopefully it helps Toyota a bit without causing problems for everyone else!

Do you appreciate my articles at CleanTechnica? I’ve got a plan to give my articles here a serious quality boost, but I need your help. If you have a few extra bucks, consider donating for an equipment upgrade here.

Featured image by EVgo and Toyota.

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Some recent Reddit posts show us that there are some problems at used and new auto dealers. Not only are many of them not participating in the transferrable tax credit program that gives people $7500 off the cars, but some of them may miss a key deadline for people who bought an EV in 2023 to get their credits without hassles.

Customers Are Having A Tough Time Finding A Properly Discounted Bolt or Used EV

According to Reddit posts like this one, people are having a tough time finding dealers who are ready to accept tax credit transfers, which should give EV buyers $3750 or $7500 off eligible vehicles. These vehicles are:

• Chevy Bolt EV
• Chevy Bolt EUV
• F-150 Lighting Standard Range
• F-150 Lightning Extended Range
• Several flavors of the Tesla Model 3, Model X, and Model Y
• Chrysler Pacifica PHEV

Several EVs and PHEVs don’t qualify for the full credit, but still qualify for half under current rules/laws:

• Ford Escape PHEV
• Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler 4xe models
• Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring
• Rivian Vehicles (R1S and R1T)

But, to get that amount take off the price of the vehicle at the dealer, the dealer must participate in the program and agree to accept your tax credit as their own. Then, the dealer needs to give you that money off the price of the car and not jack the price up with other games.

If a dealer doesn’t participate, you can’t get the money back until the next tax season, and it’s only a discount on taxes (assuming you even owe that much) and not money in your pocket. This means paying more up front, having a higher payment, etc.

This is a pretty big disappointment for Chevy Bolt EV and EUV buyers. Bolts went out of production during the last days of 2023, so people who want one need to get down to a dealer and find one that’s left before they run out for good. The vehicle is supposed to come back in a couple of years with some improvements, but probably won’t be available for as cheap as it is today.

With prices starting at around $26k and the full $7500 off, this puts new Bolts below $20,000 and new EUVs at just over $20,000, which is a screaming deal for a new EV, even if there are some downsides.

Fortunately some buyers are saying that GM dealers are ahead of most others because the corporate headquarters hounded them at the tail end of 2023 and got most of them to sign up for the tax credit transfer program. But, not all did.

The bigger hassle at this point seems to be qualifying for the $4000 used EV rebate, which can make for some pretty compelling deals, too. Some people are able to use the program to do straight-up trades from a paid-off gas vehicle to an EV without paying a dime, while others end up paying little or having only a tiny payment.

A Key Deadline Looms, & Some Dealers Might Miss It

Another Reddit post shows us that dealers may be struggling to meet a January 31 deadline to report 2023 EV sales, and this could make it hard for some car buyers to get their tax credit.

From IRS instructions for dealers:

Q13. Dealers/sellers must provide information about 2023 sales to the IRS by January 15, 2024. Should dealers/sellers submit time-of-sale reports for 2023 sales through IRS Energy Credits Online? (updated January 9, 2024)

A. No. Revenue Procedure 2022-42PDF, Section 6.03 provides that sellers must file reports within fifteen days after the end of the calendar year (i.e., January 15, 2024). The IRS is extending the due date sellers have to provide these reports until January 31, 2024. As a result, for vehicles placed in service in calendar year 2023, you must submit required information about a qualifying clean vehicle sale to the IRS by January 31, 2024.

Submit copies of your seller reports provided to eligible buyers via email to the following email address: irs.clean.vehicles.seller.reporting@irs.gov

The IRS preferred format for these submissions is an excel spreadsheet containing all required data from all seller reports a seller or dealer prepared in calendar year 2023.

Sellers or dealers may also submit individual seller report copies of the Form 15400 or equivalent forms containing all required data the seller/dealer used in calendar year 2023. Sellers and dealers that used reasonable alternatives to Form 15400 in providing the required seller reports to buyers do not need to prepare the information in the Form 15400 format.

If that sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, it is, and it’s confusing dealers. There also seems to be some concern over e-mailing a bunch of social security numbers in a spreadsheet, what format it should be in for the IRS to digest it, and whether that’s a good idea. Some dealers are telling customers that they need a special form, while others are saying you can’t claim the tax credit without a new form.

So, many people are rightfully worried that they’ll be up the creek for that tax credit if the dealer gets something wrong. Or, worse, people fear an audit that doesn’t go well. Nobody wants any of that mess.

This Should Get Better

For people who aren’t in a rush to buy a car, this isn’t a big deal dealers will eventually see the value in these programs and figure out how to work all of the kinks out. Those that don’t will end up losing sales to other dealers that do. So, if you’re buying a car that’s going to be available all year, patience is definitely a virtue.

But, if you’re trying to get a screaming deal on the remaining Bolt inventory or Bolts in transit, this is going to present a challenge. That deal is going to be gone within weeks as people get down there and grab the last of them (assuming it’s the right car for them, of course). In that case, you might need to call around and hound dealers a bit to make sure they get this right ASAP.

Either way, don’t let the rush to buy get you into a bad situation with dealers.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

People who own electric vehicles (EVs) are more likely to go a step further and add solar panels to their home, according to an analysis of a behavioral study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Conversely, the impact of owning solar panels also has a bearing on whether a homeowner buys an electric vehicle but not as strongly.

The study relied on a survey of 869 households in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NREL’s Shivam Sharda, lead author of the newly published research paper that analyzes the survey results, said the owners of EVs may be more inclined to invest in photovoltaics (PVs) because the addition of solar panels might offset the residential portion of the energy bill needed to charge them at home.

“Both EVs and PVs have a complementary nature, which might play a pivotal role in energy systems resiliency, addressing concerns regarding grid stability and power management strategies,” said Sharda, a computational research scientist in NREL’s Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences.

The paper, “The Electric Vehicles-Solar Photovoltaics Nexus: Driving Cross-Sectoral Adoption of Sustainable Technologies,” appears in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The study is co-authored by an interdisciplinary team of researchers including Venu M. Garikapati, Janet L. Reyna, and Bingrong Sun, all from NREL, and researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The survey was conducted in 2018 as part of the WholeTraveler Transportation Behavior Study. The researchers noted a lot might have transpired from the year when the survey was conducted. They revisited the topic with the newly released 2022 Residential Energy Consumption survey and observed that EV-PV relationship might still hold true. In the 2018 survey, more of the participants owned or previously owned rooftop solar panels than an electric vehicle (9.1% vs. 6.5%). The researchers noted PV technology has been around longer compared to EVs, and the cost of having solar panels is less than that of most EVs.

They found a correlation between the two technologies. Of EV owners, 25% also owned a PV system, while only 8% of the non-EV owners owned PVs. The behavioral survey highlighted two areas that might have prompted someone to adopt one or both technologies: being cognizant of them and being social enough to ask about them.

“If you have a friend or a family member who owns a rooftop solar panel or an EV, you become more educated about the technology, so you know the pros and cons by talking to them,” Sharda said. “That has a significant influence on your owning EVs or PVs.”

While governments offer incentives to adopt both EVs and PVs, the researchers suggested considering policies that jointly accelerate the acceptance of the two technologies. Because EV owners are inclined to use PV anyway, such incentives might provide a push for EV owners to adopt solar technology much earlier than what is currently observed. How soon a household adopts cross-sectoral sustainable technologies will play an important role in achieving decarbonization goals.

The researchers said while the survey provided valuable insights on EV-PV interconnection, more holistic surveys are needed to unpack the evolving transportation and residential energy use nexus to identify pathways to decarbonize energy use across sectors.

The Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office funded the research.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.

News item from NREL.

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

BYD has now released to the US press and world the news that it sold more than 3 million plugin vehicles in 2023 — the first company to achieve that. In that sales update, BYD included several other stats that jumped out as well. Let’s take a look.

First of all, exports grew 334.2% to 242,765 units. Looking at the total, 243,000 is a figure that almost any other automaker would love to claim. NIO had 160,038 sales in 2023. XPeng ended the year with 141,601 sales. Ford reached nearly 73,000 sales, and GM had 76,000. BYD scored far more than any of them just from its export vehicles. (Note, though, that BYD’s figure is all plugin vehicles, not just BEVs. However, even the PHEVs have rather large batteries and must be driven one electricity most of the time.)

BYD plugin vehicles are now sold in more than 70 countries on 6 continents. We have covered BYD’s expansion into several markets in South America, Africa, and Asia, but I had no idea BYD was already selling its plugin vehicles in 70 different countries! The company’s geographic breadth is staggering.

We have to highlight the actual total once more — 3,024,417 sales in 2023. That’s quite a feat, and a bit unbelievable. More than 3 million plugin vehicle sales in a year — who would have guessed that even just a few years ago.

That 2023 figure is a 62% increase in sales in 2023 compared to 2022.

BYD scored 341,043 sales in December alone (+45% compared to December 2022). Again, most companies would love to tout their numbers and cheer themselves if they got in all of 2023 close to the total BYD scored in December alone.

Overall, thanks to all of these achievements, BYD indicates that it became one of the 10 largest automakers in the world in 2023. It did not provide figures or the full ranking, but we should get those eventually to confirm. In the meantime, there’s no reason to think BYD would have this wrong. And it is quite the achievement to break into the top 10 of automakers around the world! Furthermore, BYD has done this selling only plugin vehicles!!!