Mercury

Heat remains the sleeping giant of energy policy despite massive potential for energy savings and emissions reductions Source: IEA: More policy attention is needed for renewable heat As you know, my project is focused on the power sector, which is the main responsible for carbon dioxide emissions within the overall energy sector. However, one should keep in mind that there are other sectors – especially transport and heat – which not only are characterized by high levels of energy consumption…

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New IRENA report finds all renewable technologies to be competitive by 2020. Source: Onshore Wind Power Now as Affordable as Any Other Source, Solar to Halve by 2020 I guess that the title and the caption perfectly summarize the concept! This is surely good news on the way towards the decarbonization of the power sector. The webpage also links to the full report which provides plenty of useful and interesting data.

Explore key findings from the IEA’s market report on coal Source: Coal 2017: Key Findings In the past months I had dedicated a post to the energy trends in 2016 as depicted by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which was summarized with the following words: “Coal falls as gas rises”. Few days before Christmas, the IEA released a full and more detailed report dedicated to the status and the prospects of coal. After decades of constant and dramatic growth, coal…

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Source: Macron takes lead in climate change battle The President of the United States, Donald Trump, may have decided to withdraw his country from the Paris Agreement, but the world has not stopped, and indeed the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has taken the lead. … And there is some irony as well: make our planet great again! 🙂

The digital currency is slowing our effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Source: Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future Bitcoin is probably one of the most topical issues in these weeks. We are all impressed with the astonishing growth in its value that every day achieves a new record high. What many might not know, though, is that the generation (technically, the “mining”) and the exchange of this currency entails a huge energy consumption: in…

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As I discussed in my relevant post a couple of weeks ago, the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) took place from November 7 to 17 in Bonn, Germany. Indeed the last negotiations took the whole night of Friday 17, and the final agreement was found only at the sunrise of Saturday 18. This COP was not expected to be revolutionary: the objective was essentially to make a step ahead towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which is what has…

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Source: WEO 2017: Key Findings As I had anticipated in this post, the 2017 issue of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) was released yesterday by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Every year, the WEO provides a full overview on the current status and prospects of the energy sector and it is considered the main publication in this field. The webpage linked above provides a great overview on the main insights of this year’s issue: as you can see, bright prospects…

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The 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) – the yearly session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – was inaugurated yesterday in Bonn, Germany. It will last until November 17. As we can read on the conference website, COP23 has “one clear objective: making progress for a successful, inclusive and ambitious implementation of the Paris Agreement. This includes negotiations on the implementation guidelines for transparent climate action under the Paris Agreement, as well as showcasing cooperative climate…

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Campus retains its high standing in the publication’s 2017 global rankings Source: UC Berkeley rated world’s top public and fourth-best overall by U.S. News | Berkeley News This is not news related to climate change, but… I am very happy to share it: I am really proud of being part of this community! Go Bears! 🙂

Source: After spending €587 million, EU has zero CO2 storage plants This article – or even just the title! – clearly explains why I decided to explore the prospects of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) in my MERCURY project. Most models do project that CCS will play an important role in the future decarbonization of the energy sector, but the reality is that the actual application of this technology, despite years of efforts, is still to come. This very interesting…

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