Carbon Emissions

Mining giant Rio Tinto has been on the back-foot since its destruction of 46,000-year-old sacred indigenous sites last year, costing one chief executive his job and one country a timeless piece of its cultural heritage. Along with the impacts of Covid-19 and stock price decline, the company is seeking to rebuild its brand with improved emissions reduction targets, which will see multi-gigawatt solar and wind installations.

An announcement by GCL-Poly to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday about the company’s hydrogen plans made no mention of any intent to deploy carbon capture tech to mitigate the emissions of what would otherwise be considered a ‘grey’, fossil fuel version of the energy storage medium.

Analyst BloombergNEF has gazed into its crystal ball and predicted three routes to a net zero world. The ‘green’ scenario fleshed out in its latest New Energy Outlook is bound to appeal far more to the solar industry than the alternative, nuclear or fossil-fuel-powered outcomes.

With Cape Town-based solar crowdfunder The Sun Exchange having generated $1.4 million for a 510 kW solar-plus-storage facility for Zimbabwean food company Nhimbe Fresh, pv magazine has spoken to the heads of both businesses–Sun Exchange CEO and founder Abraham Cambridge and Nhimbe executive chairman Edwin Moyo–about the fundraising exercise. First up is The Sun Exchange founder…

A report by McKinsey & Company reinforces the widely-held view renewables will supplant fossil fuels in the energy system but also joins the chorus of voices warning the world is on track to fall well short of limiting global temperature rises this century to 1.5C.

The private sector arm of the multilateral development bank has offered a $200 million credit line to Nedbank, the first commercial bank in South Africa to offer a green bond, which it did on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2019.

The solar and wind industries could benefit from a $6.4 trillion boom under the most ambitious of two scenarios described by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and $2.4 trillion even in the business-as-usual outlook.

The nation’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has reiterated that clean energy projects have not been affected by falling electricity demand as a billion citizens have been ordered to stay at home.

Analyst WoodMac has spelled out the urgent need to decarbonize the global hydrogen production industry. While the fuel can offer a sustainable grid balancing act for intermittent renewables, in its current fossil-fuel driven form it is pumping out more than 800 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

A report by Germany’s Energy Watch Group thinktank has said we would be better off sticking to coal and oil than switching to gas because emissions of methane, the most potent greenhouse gas, caused by gas extraction render any related carbon savings irrelevant.