renewable challenges

Both in the United States and in the European Union, buildings account for about 40 percent of total primary energy consumption

Heating and air conditioning account for half of residential consumption, which is why the single best thing we could do for the energy budget is to keep the heat

by shifting the split to 40, 50, and 10 percent, we could (thanks to grain feed saved by reducing inefficient beef production) produce easily 30 percent more chicken meat and 20 percent more pork, while more than halving beef’s environmental burden—and still supplying at least 10 percent more meat.

We need very large (multi-gigawatt-hour) storage for big cities and megacities, but so far the only viable option to serve them is pumped hydro storage (PHS): it uses cheaper nighttime electricity to pump water from a low-lying reservoir to high-lying storage, and its discharge provides instantly available generation.[76] With renewably generated e

In large, populous nations, the complete reliance on these renewables would require what we are still missing: either mass-scale, long-term (days to weeks) electricity storage that would back up intermittent electricity generation, or extensive grids of high-voltage lines to transmit electricity across time zones and from sunny and windy regions to

It would be a lot easier to expand our use of solar and wind energy if we had better ways to store the large quantities of electricity we’d need to cover gaps in the flow of that energy.

And while that conflict doesn’t make headlines, it’s displaced around 7.3 million people, making it one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises . It’s also spiked recently after a ceasefire with the ‘M23’ rebels collapsed.

In this instance, it’ll involve a mix of ingenuity around supply chains (like using blockchain to improve traceability) and materials science (like using alternatives such as niobium from Canada or Brazil).