Energy

Nice News - The U.S. added 142,000 clean energy jobs last year, meaning the sector is growing more than twice as fast as the rest of the energy industry.

NY Times - In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to BloombergNEF. While that figure can be hard for normie brains to process, it represents a staggering step forward: nearly an 80 percent year-on-year jump and more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. Although solar power still provides just under 6 percent of global electricity, its share has nearly quadrupled since 2018, an exponential curve that is expected to continue for some time.

“When it was a 10th of its current size 10 years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown,” The Economist noted in a recent cover story. “The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.” By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.

Even more remarkable than the scale is the cost. By one measure, the cost of solar power is less than one-thousandth of what it was when hippies and environmentalists first made a point of installing panels on their roofs in the 1960s. A decade ago, it was considered a moonshot goal to reduce the price of a solar module to a dollar per watt; now they are being manufactured for one-tenth as much. The price fell by nearly half in 2023 alone.

Politico - Every day at the Syded waste treatment plant in the Lot region of southwestern France, the company collects, sorts and treats up to 80 metric tons of household and business waste.And every day, its 266 employees have to look out for an electric toothbrush, a single-use vape or a broken toy that could set the whole place on fire. “Had you called me 4 or 5 years ago I would have said [fires occur] ‘from time to time’ but now the risk of fire defines my day-to-day,” said Hervé Coulaud, environment director at the Syded plant.

The problem, it turns out, is batteries — specifically, lithium-ion batteries. As the technology has advanced and the batteries have become smaller and more efficient, they've shown up in ever more household goods, from musical birthday cards to diapers that beep when they're too wet. But if these tiny power sources aren't removed and disposed of separately when an item is thrown away, they end up in mainstream waste plants and get crushed. And that's the moment they can ignite and send the whole place up in flames.

The number of reported fires connected to lithium batteries or electronic waste doubled between 2019 and 2023 at French waste management facilities, according to data from the French environment ministry’s bureau for industrial pollution and risk analysis, studied by POLITICO. Most of the increase was due to incidents involving a lithium battery mixed in with regular waste.