Lifeboat Foundation

😃 Well, at least fossil-fuel emissions went down.

Global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel and industry are expected to drop by 7% in 2020, new analysis shows, as economies around the world feel the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns.

The latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP) suggest that these emissions will clock in at 34bn tonnes of CO₂ (GtCO2) this year – a fall of 2.4GtCO2 compared to 2019.

Continue reading “Coronavirus causes ‘record fall’ in fossil-fuel emissions in 2020” »

Recording artist Akon has big plans for his upcoming smart city in Senegal. The new $6 billion development is called Akon City and will fulfill the star’s wish to provide a refuge for members of the African Diaspora both near and far. In addition to the 2000-acre resort, condos, and stadium, the metropolis is also planned to run on renewable energy and mainly use Akoin—the singer’s own cryptocurrency. After two years of planning and development, Akon has announced that they are breaking ground in 2021.

Akon believes that Africa, and his home of Senegal especially, is long overdue for economic investment. He is calling the forthcoming locale a “real-life Wakanda” and plans for it include a tech hub and “Senewood” to develop the film industry. Imagery by Bakri & Associates visualizes the unusual and futuristic forms that define the development and complement Akon’s forward-thinking choices.

This massive construction undertaking is geared towards stimulating the local economy and creating jobs for local workers. Many have praised this and are excited for the prospect of Akon City. But there are also some skeptics. Papa Massama Thiaw, a councilor and president of the youth commission for Ngueniene, shared that though many community members are optimistic, there is a lot of uncertainty. “The studies that were done were not in collaboration with the commune of Ngueniene,” he says. He also fears that jobs won’t be equally distributed. “I don’t want us to be just day laborers. We have to be among the managers.”

Google and its American internet peers are steadily amping up their investment in India, latching onto the only other country with a billion-plus population after getting shut out of China. From Amazon.com Inc. to Facebook Inc., they’re hoping to get in on the ground floor of what they envision as a smartphone and online commerce boom that could eventually create a market to rival the world’s No. 2 economy.

Google investments helped create India’s two youngest technology unicorns: a pair of startups that feed personalized news and entertainment to the world’s fastest-growing smartphone population.

One of the ongoing questions these past few months has been why so many tech products have been so hard to buy. We’ve made repeated reference to known potential factors like COVID-19, economic disruptions, yield issues, and the impact of scalping bots, but there’s a new argument for what’s causing such general problems across so many markets: Insufficient investment in 200mm wafers.

Today, leading-edge silicon is invariably manufactured on 300mm wafers. Over the past few decades, manufacturers have introduced larger wafer sizes: 100mm, 150mm, 200mm, and 300mm have all been common standards at one time or another. In the PC enthusiast space, 300mm wafers have long been considered superior to 200mm wafers, because the larger wafer size reduces waste and typically improves the foundry’s output in terms of chips manufactured per day.

There aren’t that many commercial foundries still dedicated to 150mm or smaller wafer sizes, but a number of foundries still run 200mm fab lines. TSMC and Samsung both offer the node, as well as a number of second-tier foundries. GlobalFoundries has 200mm facilities, as do SMIC, UMC, TowerJazz, and SkyWater. A great many IoT and 5G chips are built on 200mm, as are some analog processors, MEMS devices, and RF solutions.

Hydrogen is a sustainable source of clean energy that avoids toxic emissions and can add value to multiple sectors in the economy including transportation, power generation, metals manufacturing, among others. Technologies for storing and transporting hydrogen bridge the gap between sustainable energy production and fuel use, and therefore are an essential component of a viable hydrogen economy. But traditional means of storage and transportation are expensive and susceptible to contamination. As a result, researchers are searching for alternative techniques that are reliable, low-cost and simple. More-efficient hydrogen delivery systems would benefit many applications such as stationary power, portable power, and mobile vehicle industries.

Now, as reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have designed and synthesized an effective material for speeding up one of the limiting steps in extracting hydrogen from alcohols. The material, a catalyst, is made from tiny clusters of nickel metal anchored on a 2-D substrate. The team led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Molecular Foundry found that the catalyst could cleanly and efficiently accelerate the reaction that removes hydrogen atoms from a liquid chemical carrier. The material is robust and made from earth-abundant metals rather than existing options made from precious metals, and will help make hydrogen a viable energy source for a wide range of applications.

“We present here not merely a catalyst with higher activity than other nickel catalysts that we tested, for an important renewable energy fuel, but also a broader strategy toward using affordable metals in a broad range of reactions,” said Jeff Urban, the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility director at the Molecular Foundry who led the work. The research is part of the Hydrogen Materials Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC), a consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (EERE). Through this effort, five national laboratories work towards the goal to address the scientific gaps blocking the advancement of solid hydrogen storage materials. Outputs from this work will directly feed into EERE’s H2@Scale vision for affordable hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization across multiple sectors in the economy.

“I think we are now in in a two-dimensional transport society and both of these companies have figured out how to make this technology more practical so anyone can fly and land from anywhere,” Draper told CNBC. “These are exciting and fun to ride.”

The Canadian government has launched a strategy that sees low-carbon and zero-emission hydrogen fuel technology as a key part of the nation’s path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The strategy is underpinned by a federal investment of CAD1.5 billion (USD1.2 billion) in a Low-carbon and Zero-emissions Fuels Fund to increase the production and use of low-carbon fuels, including hydrogen.

“Hydrogen’s moment has come. The economic and environmental opportunities for our workers and communities are real. There is global momentum, and Canada is harnessing it,” Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan said as he a launched the strategy on 16 December.

Hydrogen Strategy for Canada is designed to spur investment and partnerships to establish Canada as a global supplier of hydrogen and to increase domestic production. This will transform the Canadian energy sector, NRCan — the federal department of natural resources — said.

THE FINANCE industry has had a long and profitable relationship with computing. It was an early adopter of everything from mainframe computers to artificial intelligence (see timeline). For most of the past decade more trades have been done at high frequency by complex algorithms than by humans. Now big banks have their eyes on quantum computing, another cutting-edge technology.

A fundamentally new kind of computing will shake up finance—the question is when.

Finance & economics Dec 19th 2020 edition.

Continue reading “Wall Street’s latest shiny new thing: quantum computing” »

Hydropower has been around for more than a century, and is currently the nation’s largest source of clean, domestic, renewable electricity. What could its role look like in the year 2050?

Providing about 7 percent of the nation’s electricity, hydropower supports more than 143, 000 jobs in engineering, manufacturing, construction and utility operations and maintenance — all while improving the environment and strengthening our economy. Additionally, pumped-storage hydropower represents 97 percent of all energy storage in the United States, offering the flexibility and reliability the electricity grid needs to deliver affordable clean energy to American homes and businesses.

So what does the future of hydropower look like? To answer that question, over the past two years the Energy Department has collaborated with more than 300 experts from more than 150 hydropower industry companies, environmental organizations, state and federal governmental agencies, academic institutions, electric power system operators, research institutions and other stakeholders to explore how it could evolve in the coming decades.