dominant

The green grab for land

March 27, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Solar and wind farms are spreading rapidly around the world. Many economists believe that solar power has crossed the threshold where it is generally cheaper than other ways to make electricity and will become the dominant energy source in the next couple of decades. As a result, both solar and wind farms are gobbling up more and more land around the world. Estimates are that they will take up around 30,000 square miles by mid-century.

One concern is whether we are entering an era of trading food for energy. Land conflicts seem inevitable since solar power operates best in unshaded areas with gentle winds and moderate temperatures, which are the same conditions favored by many crops.

China is installing more solar farms than the rest of the world combined. Many of these are in the Gobi Desert, where there is no competing need for the land. But some are in eastern China, in densely populated grain-growing areas.

There are a number of strategies that reduce the impact of solar farms on land use. One approach is to put them on old industrial or brownfield sites that are otherwise unusable. Another is floatovoltaics: putting solar panels on the surface of lakes and reservoirs. And then there is agrivoltaics, where solar panels are installed above crop fields or where livestock graze between or even beneath solar arrays. China has more than 500 agrivoltaic projects that incorporate crops, livestock, aquafarming, greenhouses, and even tea plantations.

Green energy has both environmental and economic benefits to offer, but it must conserve nature and not excessively grab land needed for people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

***********

Web Links

‘Green Grab’: Solar and Wind Boom Sparks Conflicts on Land Use

Photo, posted May 25, 2011, courtesy of Michael Mees via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Where do states get their electricity?

September 3, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

How the United States produces its electricity has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Coal used to be the dominant source of power in this country, but natural gas surpassed it in 2016, and coal’s share has been shrinking ever since. Fossil fuel still generates the majority of America’s electricity, but renewable power is increasing its contribution all the time.

On a state-by-state basis, there are very large variations in the mix of power sources. Ten states still get their largest amount of power from coal, but this is down from 32 states in 2001. Four states have hydroelectric power as their largest source, including Vermont which gets more than half of its power that way.

Texas produces more electricity than any other state by a wide margin. It’s not just because it has a large population. It is because it uses huge amounts of power to refine petroleum products. Coal produces only 13% of Texas’ electricity and the state is by far the country’s largest producer of wind power.

New York gets nearly half of its power from natural gas, 21% from hydroelectric power, and 21% from nuclear power. Wind and solar power are still small, but both are growing in the state.

When people try to assess the climate impact of driving electric cars, based on the origins of the electricity they use to power the car, the results can vary dramatically based on what state they live in. Nationwide, electricity is getting cleaner and greener, but the process is by no means uniform across the country.

**********

Web Links

How Does Your State Make Electricity?

Photo, posted March 17, 2021, courtesy of Bureau of Reclamation via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

An Iron-Air Battery Plant | Earth Wise

February 9, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Lithium-ion batteries are the standard energy source for electric vehicles, and they are also the dominant technology for storing energy in the electric grid. However, they are not the only game in town. There are other battery technologies that have various potential advantages over lithium-ion and some of them are getting the chance to show what they can do.

One is the iron-air battery. Unlike lithium-ion batteries that require expensive and strategically challenging materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite, iron-air batteries make use of one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust.

Iron-air batteries operate on a principle known as “reversible rusting”. When discharging, the battery takes in oxygen from the air and converts iron into rust. While charging, electrical current converts rust back into iron and the battery releases oxygen. Batteries consist of a slab of iron, a water-based electrolyte, and a membrane that feeds a controlled stream of air into the battery.

A Massachusetts-based company called Form Energy is building a $760 million iron-air battery storage facility in the city of Weirton in West Virginia. Investment financing along with a $290 million government incentive package is paying for the facility.

The facility is designed to address the need for long-duration energy storage and will be capable of storing electricity for 100 hours at competitive prices. The battery modules will be about the size of a side-by-side washer/dryer and will contain a stack of 50 3-foot-tall cells. Such batteries are too big and heavy for use in cars but will be cheaper and higher-capacity than equivalent lithium-ion battery systems.

**********

Web Links

Form Energy selects West Virginia for its first iron-air battery plant

Photo credit: Form Energy

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Bringing Back Bison | Earth Wise

August 23, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Over the past few decades, research has identified the importance of large mammals like bison as ecosystem engineers. These animals shape and maintain various natural processes and, in the process, are responsible for the sequestering of large amounts of carbon. But large mammals – both herbivores and predators – have seen their numbers dwindle over time. At this point, nearly two-thirds of large carnivores are threatened with extinction. Overall, less than 6% of worldwide ecosystems have the extensive, intact large-mammal communities that were dominant 500 years ago.

Conservationists around the world have embarked on programs of “rewilding”- reintroducing large mammals into ecosystems. Some of the animals involved in these programs include brown bears, wild horses, jaguars, reindeer, Eurasian beavers, elk, moose, wolverines, tigers, hippos, and bison.

A group of bison raised in South Dakota have recently been transplanted to the Chihuhuan Desert at the US-Mexico border across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. There used to be huge bison herds in that region, but it has been largely bison-free for 150 years.

Perhaps more remarkably, wild bison are also being reintroduced into a forest near Canterbury, England. There haven’t been bison in the United Kingdom for thousands of years. But conservationists are introducing European bison into the British forest to knock down trees, trample shrubs, and create space for a greater diversity of flora and fauna.

Apart from the ecosystem goals of the British project, people in the UK, for the first time in over a thousand years, will be able to experience bison in the wild.

**********

Web Links

Gone for Thousands of Years, Wild Bison Return to the UK

Photo, posted December 31, 2018, courtesy of Marco Verch via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Too Many Bison | Earth Wise

May 8, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The population of large herbivores in Yellowstone National Park has undergone many dramatic changes over the course of time. The numbers of both the iconic Rocky Mountain elk and bison have gone up and down as a result of human interactions.

Bison, of course, once were a dominant species from east of the Appalachians to west of the Rocky Mountains, with most of an estimated 30 million living on the Great Plains. As the west was settled, bison populations plummeted and by the late 1800s, they were nearly extinct.

When Yellowstone was established, there were exactly 22 bison in the park. By 1925, there were more than 750 in the park and culling of the herd in the park’s Lamar Valley was practiced for the next four decades.

The elimination of predators like grey wolves and cougars in the early 1900s caused both elk and bison populations to mushroom and both underwent culling. When culling was ended in 1968, there were 4,000 elk and 100 bison. Within 20 years, those numbers were 20,000 and 1,000. Reintroducing wolves and cougars reduced the elk population to about 5,000, but bison numbers have continued to grow, now reaching about 4,000.

While the long-term recovery of the Yellowstone bison herd is a major conservation success story, the fact is that bison are powerful ecosystem engineers. Large numbers of them disrupt species distribution across scrub steppe and grasslands because of what they eat, trample, and rub their horns and bodies on. They have a tremendous capacity to limit the structure and composition of ecosystems.

Park administrators have complicated management decisions to make to take into account the often wide range of ecological effects that abundant large herbivores can have on ecosystems.

**********

Web Links

Bison in northern Yellowstone proving to be too much of a good thing

Photo, posted August 10, 2016, courtesy of Brian Gratwicke via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Booming Electric Car Sales

September 12, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Electric cars are becoming more and more commonplace over time. There is no place in the world where this is more evident than in Norway. This year, about half the new cars sold in Norway have been electric. This compares to only 25% just last year. In March alone, nearly 60% of vehicle purchases in Norway were plug-in cars, outselling gas and diesel cars for the first time ever.

Norway has encouraged the switch to electric transportation by making battery-powered cars tax exempt as well as offering various other incentives. This is all part of the country’s plan to end the sale of fossil fuel cars entirely by 2025.

Although Norway leads the world in electric car sales on a per capita basis, there are many other places seeing rapid growth. In Maryland, for example, so many electric cars were sold in the past year that the state’s tax credit program, which has a $3 million annual budget, ran out of money seven months before the end of the fiscal year. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of EVs registered in Maryland doubled to over 18,000.

New York has also seen robust growth in electric vehicles. There are now more than 40,000 plug-in cars registered in New York State. About a third of those are Tesla models, with the increasingly popular Tesla Model 3 rapidly becoming the dominant plug-in car in the state. In fact, this year the Tesla Model 3 has accounted for about 60% of all plug-in car sales in the United States.

Not only are electric car sales going up, so are the options for car buyers. Within the next year or two, there will be numerous new electric car choices available from multiple manufacturers appealing to the tastes of a growing range of car buyers.

**********

Web Links

EVs Make Up Half of New Car Sales in Norway So Far This Year

Photo, posted May 16, 2019, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The End Of British Coal

November 3, 2017 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In the 19th century, Britain produced 80% of the world’s coal. Britain was the dominant global power in the industrial revolution with its giant blast furnaces, steam locomotives and steam ships. And with advent of the electric age, coal once again was the power source of choice. Even as late as the 1970s, Britain got 80% of its electricity from burning coal.