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Newsletter (copy 43)
South Australia doubles down on its clean energy future
Happy Tuesday, dear reader.
Some good news to kick things off:
Renewables will cover 50% of Europe’s electricity demand in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency’s projections.
The US added 142,000 clean energy jobs last year, according to the energy department.
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Thanks for reading.
Nick Hedley
Editor, The Progress Playbook
South Australia’s new climate bill will legally require the state to generate enough renewable energy to cover all of its annual electricity needs from 2027.
To get there, the state is investing deeper in wind, solar, and battery storage, and is constructing a 200MW green hydrogen-fuelled power plant.
- Read the full story here.
Despite achieving rapid economic growth, China has reduced air pollution by 41% since 2013 — the year before the country began its “war against pollution.”
If these improvements are sustained, the average Chinese citizen can expect to live two years longer, researchers say.
- Read the full story here.
The Oakland Unified School District has become the first major school district in the US to transition to an all-electric fleet of buses.
Aside from reducing local air pollution, the 74 zero-emission buses are equipped with vehicle-to-the-grid technology, meaning their batteries send energy back into the grid when not in use.
- Read the full story here.
The city of Baltimore’s Jones Falls river, which has been heavily polluted for decades, is now home to an artificial floating wetland that’s improving water quality, bringing back wildlife, and helping make it swimmable for people once again.
- Read the full story here.
Cody Chiverton has spent the past decade lighting fires. As a former firefighter with the US Forest Service, he participated in dozens of prescribed burns across the American West, in which fire-prevention teams would carry drip torches to ignite dry vegetation, leaving flames and smoke in their wake.
But in June, Chiverton did a prescribed burn with no flames and no smoke. Instead, a tank-like robot pulled by a remote-controlled tractor handled all of the igniting. As it slowly moved along a hiking trail near Palo Alto, California, the robot turned anything in its path — brush, dry grasses, leaf litter — into a dark trail of ash.
- Read the full article here.
On the eastern edge of Buenos Aires, residents of the Rodrigo Bueno neighbourhood take a break from pick-up soccer games and stretch out on grassy knolls. Further down the road, a kitchen buzzes with locals testing new recipes to feature at the neighbourhood food hall. New housing blocks, featuring solar heating, frame older homes and border the shared civic space. But the people who lived in Rodrigo Bueno did not always enjoy this gentle cadence of life.
- Read the full article here.
Other articles you might find interesting:
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