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YOUR WEEKLY UPDATE ON CLIMATE TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENERGY TRANSITION
Britain has cleaned its electricity grid and changed the arithmetic of decarbonisation in the process. A rooftop solar PV panel that once displaced coal emissions now displaces almost nothing, while the gas under the brewery vat burns at a carbon intensity fixed by chemistry.
This week CSN examines what that shift means for solar thermal, and reports on four technologies attacking the waste the grid never touched: wind blades engineered to come apart, nuclear-inspired cooling for AI data centres, droplet cleaning that cuts solar water use by four fifths, and shrimp shells turned into hydrogen.
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TECHNOLOGIES
Christian Albrecht of Naked Energy makes an argument that sounds backwards until the numbers land. Grid electricity decarbonises every year, so a solar PV panel saves less carbon each year it runs. Gas can’t decarbonise, because its emissions factor sits in the fuel rather than in policy. Naked Energy claims two to ten times the carbon savings of conventional solar, and the gap widens as the grid cleans up. Its largest installation, 950 collectors on the Grade I listed British Library, cuts an expected 55 tonnes of CO2 a year. The subsidy that paid for it has since expired with no replacement.
TECHNOLOGIES
Thermoset blade composites can’t be melted or reshaped once cured, which leaves shredding or landfill. NREL's plant-derived PECAN resin holds a blade together through service, then dissolves in a mild chemical bath in around six hours, leaving the structural fibres recoverable. The lab built nine-metre prototypes in December 2023 and August 2024, the second demonstrating manufacturability and chemical recyclability together. The conceptual shift matters more than the chemistry. Recycling becomes a design question answered before the blade is built. Commercial cost data does not yet exist publicly.
SECTORS
Cooling consumes roughly a third of data centre electricity, and AI is multiplying the estate. MIT spin-off Ferveret submerges servers in a dielectric fluid and applies subcooled boiling, a heat transfer technique borrowed from nuclear reactor engineering. Smaller bubbles detach faster and pull heat off the chip more quickly. Testing with UCLA showed a 15 per cent gain in computational power efficiency against leading liquid cooling, though those figures are Ferveret's own and remain independently unverified. The system uses no water, which opens sites where cooling supply, rather than power, is the binding constraint.
TECHNOLOGIES
Solar cleaning consumes more than 12 billion gallons of water a year, and the highest-yield sites sit where water is scarcest. A team at City University of Hong Kong, working with Imperial College London and the Institute of Process Engineering in Beijing, uses droplet impact physics instead of pressure. Spreading and recoil generate hydrodynamic forces that lift particles away. Published in Nature Sustainability, the method removes up to 99.9 per cent of contaminants on superhydrophobic coatings while cutting water use by over 80 per cent. Moderate impact energy beat maximum force. Laboratory conditions only, with field validation still to come.
TECHNOLOGIES
Li Hong and colleagues at Nanyang Technological University run a solar-powered electrochemical reaction on shrimp shell waste. It avoids the oxygen byproduct of conventional water splitting and demands less energy. One waste stream yields three saleable products: hydrogen, aquaculture protein, and biogenic calcium carbonate for cement and antacids. Hydrogen volumes stay modest, and researchers quoted in the reporting say efficiency must rise before it competes with established green hydrogen. Three products means three markets, three price structures, and three regulatory regimes.
⚡ EU sets an electrification target – The Commission unveils its Electrification Action Plan on 17 July, with a 2040 target still blank in the leaked draft. Faster electrification could replace two-thirds of EU gas demand and halve oil use, cutting the import bill by €200bn. The EU rate has sat at 23 per cent for a decade while China, Japan and South Korea passed 30 per cent. Reuters.
🚗 China puts NEVs at 30% of its fleet by 2030 – The State Council published its 15th Five-Year Plan carbon peaking action plan on 9 July. NEVs stood at 43.97 million units, or 12.01 per cent of the fleet, at the end of 2025, so the target requires more than doubling. The plan also targets a 17 per cent cut in CO2 per unit of GDP from 2025 levels. gov.cn.
⚖️ Ugandan farmers take EACOP to London's High Court – Four farmers filed on 7 July, asking English judges to enforce Ugandan environmental law against EACOP Ltd, registered in Canary Wharf. The 1,443km pipeline is about 80 per cent built with first exports expected in October. Leigh Day expects 12 months to a first hearing. Climate Home News.
🌡️ Western Europe records its hottest June – Roughly 3C above average, with the June heatwave linked to more than 2,700 deaths in France and over 5,000 excess deaths in Germany. Wildfires forced 10,000 evacuations in southern France. Carbon Brief.