Big Success From A Big Battery
In the fall of 2017, Tesla took on the challenge of installing a 100-megawatt battery storage system in South Australia in under 100 days, promising that the system would be free if it was not built in time. The project was actually completed in 54 days.
The system is located at the Hornsdale Wind Farm, which consists of 99 wind turbines with a generation capacity of 315 MW. The Hornsdale Power Reserve installation is the world’s largest lithium-ion battery system and, after a year of operation,has proven to be a smashing success. Estimates are that the project has reduced costs associated with stabilizing the energy grid by about $29 million. The cost of the system was about $87 million, so it is paying for itself quite rapidly. The wind farm and battery systems are owned and operated by a French renewable energy company.
The battery storage system provides a variety of different services to the electric grid. The primary motivation for it was to achieve system security and reduce the risk of blackouts and load shedding. Having the battery system in place protects the regional interconnection from tripping,which reduces the risk of separation of South Australia from the National Electricity market. The system also provides so-called ancillary services such as frequency control and other forms of electricity supply regulation.
The most significant contribution of the Hornsdale Power Reserve is that it has raised the profile of energy storage technology and demonstrated its unique capabilities. Based on the success of the system, there are now about 2,500 MWh of new storage projects announced by the public and private sectors in Australia.
**********
Web Links
Tesla’s Battery Has Already Saved South Australia a Huge Amount of Money
Photo courtesy of Hornsdale Power Reserve.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
Australian Plastic Bag Ban
Last summer, the two largest supermarket chains in Australia – Coles and Woolworth’s – decided to stop offering single-use disposable plastic bags to customers. The initial public reaction was decidedly negative. However, within just three months after the radical change, the country’s National Retail Association reported an 80% drop in the consumption of plastic bags nationwide.
In that three-month period, it is estimated that 1.5 billion bags have been prevented from use. Some retailers are reporting reduction rates as high as 90% in the use of the bags. The move by the big supermarkets has paved the way for smaller businesses to follow suit. The smaller businesses typically can’t afford to risk the wrath of their customers with a major change like this. Customers have to learn to bring their own bags or buy reusable bags at the store.
In much of Australia, the phase-out of plastic bags has been legislated, but the state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, the country’s largest city, has not enacted such legislation. So, supermarkets themselves are doing the work of getting rid of the bags.
The change has not been without hiccups. For the first couple of months after the plastic bag ban was put in place, Woolworth’s saw poor sales in its stores. However, customers eventually got used to the new way of doing things and sales levels returned.
Disposable plastic bags often find their way into the oceans where they break down into microparticles. Studies have shown that these plastic bits are ingested by a wide variety of marine life. For example, a UK study found that 100% of sea turtles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea had plastic in their digestive systems.
**********
Web Links
Australia-wide ban leads to ’80 per cent drop’ in plastic bag consumption
Photo, posted September 18, 2018, courtesy of Matthew Paul Argall via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
Electricity From A Bionic Mushroom
In an engineering feat straight out of a weird science-fiction story, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey have taken an ordinary white button mushroom and used 3D printing technology to coat it with graphene microribbons and cyanobacteria to produce a device that generates electricity.
Agroforestry
It has become increasingly evident that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not happening quickly enough to prevent runaway climate change and that negative emission techniques will need to be utilized as well. Negative emissions means removing carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere.
New Ocean Energy Technologies
The ocean energy sector is still at an early stage of development. Despite the fact that the ocean is permanently in motion, extracting energy from that motion on a major scale continues to be a challenge. But the potential benefits of ocean technologies are compelling enough that many approaches continue to be pursued.
A Breakthrough In Animal Identification
Researchers from the University of Wyoming have developed a computer model that can identify wild animals in camera-trap photographs with remarkable accuracy and efficiency.
This breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), detailed in a paper recently published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, represents a significant advancement in the study and conservation of wildlife. According to the paper’s authors, “the ability to rapidly identify millions of images from camera traps can fundamentally change the way ecologists design and implement wildlife studies.”
This study builds on previous research from the university in which a computer model analyzed 3.2 million images captured by camera traps in Africa. The A-I technique called deep learning categorized animal images at a 96.6% accuracy rate. This was the same accuracy rate as teams of human volunteers achieved, but the computer model worked at a much more rapid pace.
In the latest study, UW researchers trained a deep neural network on a powerful computer cluster to classify wildlife species using 3.37 million camera-trap images of 27 different animal species. The model was tested on nearly 375,000 images at a rate of about 2,000 images per minute. It achieved a 97.6% accuracy rate, which is likely the highest accuracy to date in using machine learning for wildlife image classification.
Artificial intelligence has been used in environmental science in other ways as well. For example, AI has been used to increase agricultural yields in farm fields and to help predict extreme weather.
Maybe artificial intelligence can prove to be a game changer for the environment.
**********
Web Links
Researchers Successfully Train Computers to Identify Animals in Photos
Photo, posted January 8, 2012, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
Falling Behind On Climate Goals
A series of reports from both the US Government and from the United Nations has underlined the dangers presented by the increasing effects of climate change. To date, national commitments to reduce emissions have come up short.
Llamas And The Flu
Last year’s flu season was the worst in 40 years. More than 80,000 people died in the U.S. last year from the flu and its complications. Flu vaccines are the best preventative we have, but there are still high mortality rates around the world. Some individuals respond poorly to vaccination, and variations in viruses makes targeting with the optimal antigen very difficult. The World Health Organization estimates that between 290,000 and 650,000 people die from seasonal flu worldwide each year.
Fighting Hunger With A Shrub
A recent study has revealed that a tough, woody shrub that grows throughout Western Africa can actually share its water with adjacent cultivated plants and boost grain production.
Deforestation In The Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon rainforest is the biggest in the world. In fact, it’s larger than the next two rainforests combined. The Amazon rainforest covers more than three million square miles, roughly the size of the lower 48 states. It functions as a critical sink for carbon in the atmosphere, and is home to 10% of all known species in the world. The region’s biodiversity is so rich that scientists are still discovering new plant and animal species today.
Cleaning And Splitting Water
Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have developed a photocatalytic system that can be used to degrade pollutants present in water while simultaneously producing hydrogen that can be captured and put to use.
Extreme Botany
The threat of extinction of many animal species is something that makes headlines. But there are also thousands of critically endangered plants in the world and that situation has not generated nearly the same sense of urgency. Some biologists have used the term “plant blindness” to describe humanity’s inability to appreciate the ecological and economic importance of plants.
The Cockroaches Of The Ocean
The coast of Northern California is home to underwater forests – huge, sprawling tangles of brown seaweed. Kelp forests play a similar role in the oceans as the one that ordinary tree forests play on land. Like trees, kelp absorbs carbon emissions and provides critical habitat and food for a wide range of species.
A Supermaterial From Plastic Waste
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have created a way to convert plastic bottle waste into an ultralight aerogel material that has multiple potential applications.
A Plane With No Moving Parts
Airplanes have been with us for more than a century and they fly with the help of propellers, turbine blades or fans that noisily move them through the air. Recently, MIT engineers have built and flown a plane with no moving parts.
A Prize For Water From The Air
The XPrize competitions provide monetary incentives to crowdsource solutions to the world’s grand challenges. Originally started in 1994 to spur the development of private spaceflight, the XPrize program now offers prizes for diverse fields including Oceans, Learning, Health, Energy, Environment, Transportation, Safety and Robotics.
The Global Vertebrate Population Is Struggling
According to a new report by the World Wildlife Fund, the planet’s populations of vertebrates have dropped an average of 60% since 1970.
[Read more…] about The Global Vertebrate Population Is Struggling
