Wind and solar generate more than gas

 From Canary Media

It’s the first month [ever] [that] wind and solar [have] combined to produce more electricity than natural gas did, per new global data from energy think tank Ember.

Just five years ago, the gap between what those renewable resources and gas generated was huge. Even in the best month for renewables, gas plants churned out about twice as much power. Now, the picture is very different: Wind and solar generated about 532 terawatt-hours of electricity [+13.4% yoy] worldwide last month, while gas contributed just 477 TWh [-3.9%].  

This won’t be the first time wind and solar outcompete gas on the global stage.

Last year, the world met 75% of its new electricity demand with solar alone, and the remainder with other forms of carbon-free energy. The result? Fossil-fuel power generation declined — very slightly — even though the world consumed more electricity.

Meanwhile, the ongoing war in the Middle East bolsters the case for renewable energy. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and its retaliatory strikes on Qatar forced one-fifth of the global liquefied natural gas export capacity offline earlier this year, causing supply shortages and price spikes for the many countries that depend on imported, rather than domestic, natural gas.

Already, some nations appear to have increased their adoption of renewables to shore up their national energy security.

The caveats of the April milestone must be mentioned. It’s just one month — and occurred during the shoulder season, the best time of the year for renewables, as breezes pick up and days get sunnier [in the northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern.  The seasonal cycles obvious in the data are because the northern hemisphere has more land and more people than the southern]

Then there’s King Coal, which still produces far more electricity worldwide than wind and solar. But it’s clear where we’re headed. The share of coal-fired electricity actually fell by half a percentage point from 2024 to 2025, marking the first annual drop since Covid and the first time in history that the dirty fuel produced less than a third of the world’s power. [Just as important: wind plus solar plus other renewables (mostly hydro) provided more electricity in April (925 TWh) than coal (758 TWh).]

In other words, coal should watch its back: It’s only a matter of time before wind and solar come for its crown, too.

How much clean energy has been added since 2017?

A lot.

From Canary Media

Renewable energy is being deployed at a fast clip around the globe — especially solar and especially in China. That’s the story behind new capacity figures from IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency.

At the end of 2022, global renewable generation capacity amounted to 3,372 gigawatts — although it’s time we start calling it 3.4 terawatts and accept that we’re in the terawatt age.

While hydropower accounts for the largest share of the new global total, solar is the real star of the show. Solar energy from photovoltaic panels has led the world’s renewables capacity expansion, with 192 gigawatts added from 2021 to 2022, a gaudy 22 percent increase.

Global solar capacity now exceeds 1,000 gigawatts, compared to just 100 gigawatts in 2012 [a 25% per annum growth rate]. It’s an astounding leap and a testament to the power of learning curves on product price and quality. These same learning curves are now working their magic on lithium-ion batteries and might soon apply to electrolyzers for cleaner hydrogen production.

China is leading global solar expansion, followed distantly by the United States, India, Brazil, the Netherlands and Germany, in that order. China deployed nearly half of all renewable energy capacity added in 2022, a jaw-dropping 141 gigawatts of the 295 gigawatts installed globally.

Renewables continue to gain in overall share of total generation capacity, rising from 38.3 percent in 2021 to 40.2 percent in 2022.

The dire, just-released synthesis report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounds the tocsin for a radical acceleration in the deployment of renewable energy in order to keep the planet from overheating. The global solar and wind industries are demonstrating that this type of acceleration is not only possible but actually starting to happen.

Source: Canary Media

CO2 to jetfuel

Air Company's Chief Technology Officer Stafford Sheehan, pictured left, and CEO Gregory Constantine (Air Company)

From Canary Media

The startup Air Company first made a splash three years ago by distilling vodka using captured carbon dioxide. At a converted nightclub in Brooklyn, New York, the company built a maze of tubes and tanks to turn the greenhouse gas into spirits — no grains or potatoes required. Since then, Air Company has tweaked its technology to produce another coveted, crystal-clear liquid: sustainable aviation fuel.

On Thursday, during Climate Week NYC, the startup unveiled a second, larger chemical reactor in Brooklyn. Air Company is now making small batches of CO2-derived jet fuel, including a 5-gallon order for the U.S. Air Force, which recently used the fuel to fly a large drone in northern Florida.

Still, Air Company will need to scale its production exponentially if it’s going to fulfill its latest tall orders.

JetBlue, Virgin Atlantic and other aviation firms have agreed to buy 1 billion gallons of Air Company’s sustainable aviation fuel over the next decade, the companies said this week. The announcement follows a $30 million investment round in April led by Carbon Direct Capital Management and including JetBlue’s and Toyota’s venture capital arms, which brought Air Company’s total funding to $40 million.

“Our technology and the products that we make are really a stepping stone to get to massive commodities,” said Gregory Constantine, CEO of Air Company. Along with vodka, the startup makes perfume and hand sanitizer using carbon dioxide captured from beverage manufacturing plants, which produce waste gases during fermentation.

“From a decarbonization point of view, [aviation] is where we can have the most climate impact,” he told Canary Media.

The global aviation industry contributes more than 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions every year, a share that’s expected to soar as passenger air travel grows. Many aviation analysts agree that sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, will play a key role in reducing emissions from long-haul flights and larger aircraft. Batteries and hydrogen, meanwhile, are expected to power mainly short-haul and regional flights.

Airlines currently use minuscule amounts of sustainable aviation fuel: about 26 million gallons in 2021, or well below 1 percent of total jet fuel demand. Nearly all existing SAF production uses corn, soybean, animal fats or used cooking oil. As industry demand increases, experts warn that relying on such materials could displace food supplies, drive deforestation or perpetuate industrial animal farming.

The Biden administration aims to increase U.S. production of SAFs to 3 billion gallons per year by 2030 — an effort that recently received an important funding boost under the Inflation Reduction Act. While airlines and aviation experts applauded the law’s SAF provisions, some critics say the policy risks detracting from other, more immediate solutions to reducing emissions from flying, such as improving aircraft fuel efficiency and electrifying airport equipment.

“Rather than putting all our eggs in the basket of sustainable aviation fuels, we need to have a more comprehensive approach,” said John Fleming, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

On a quiet commercial block in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, Air Company’s leaders showcased the new reactor.

The startup’s technology begins with just two ingredients: carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The latter element is produced on-site using an electrolyzer, a boxy device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. A chemical reactor combines the CO2 and hydrogen using a metal catalyst to produce either ethanol (ethyl alcohol) for consumer products, or paraffins — colorless, oily liquids — for sustainable aviation fuel.
Air Company says its new CO2-based aviation fuel has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 97 percent compared to traditional jet fuel. Twelve says its E-Jet product has roughly 90 percent lower life-cycle emissions than conventional jet fuel — a figure that includes the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing solar panels or wind turbines used to power the electrolyzers.

[Another startup, Twelve] uses electricity and catalysts to split CO2 into carbon monoxide and also split H2O into hydrogen. This produces a synthetic gas. (Typically, ​“syngas” is made by burning coal, fossil gas or biomass.) In a second step, Twelve’s syngas is run through a series of chemical reactions known as the Fischer-Tropsch process to create liquid hydrocarbons.

Twelve began producing its first batches of E-Jet a year ago, as part of a pilot program with the U.S. Air Force. The startup is now working to build a much larger plant to produce fuel for its partnership with Alaska Airlines and Microsoft, according to CEO Flanders.

The miracle tree to feed the world & slash emissions

From Canary Media

Feeding the world without frying the world would be a miraculous achievement. Somehow, we’d need to grow far more food with far less environmental impact while using far less land. We’d also need to grow far more trees, so we could store more carbon on earth and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Well, a miracle has arrived.

It’s called pongamia, an ordinary-looking tropical tree with agricultural superpowers. It produces beans packed with protein and oil much like soybeans, except it has the potential to produce much more nutrition per acre than soybeans. It’s hardy enough to grow on just about any land, no matter how degraded, without any pesticides or irrigation. It not only removes carbon from the atmosphere, which combats climate change, but it also sucks nitrogen out of the air, so it usually doesn’t need fertilizer that accelerates climate change.


In other words, it’s a dream crop for a hot and hungry planet that’s running out of fertile farmland and fresh water while choking on pollution from agrochemicals. At a time when modern farming is under attack for poisoning and depleting soils, pongamia can stabilize and restore soils. At a time when the food system generates one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, growing pongamia cuts emissions, sequestering about 5 tons of carbon per acre per year.

Basically, pongamia is an answered prayer for the planet in vegetative form — a reforestation crop that can replace deforestation crops like soy and palm oil without diesel tractors or chemicals or even added water. It’s a self-sufficient, heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, jungle-tough badass of a tree that can produce monster yields on marginal land on a warming planet.

It may sound surprising that after growing wild for thousands of years throughout South Asia and Australia, pongamia is only now being domesticated and reinvented as a super-crop in the United States. But if we’re going to reduce agricultural emissions by 75 percent by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris accord, while increasing agricultural production by 50 percent to feed 10 billion people, we’re going to need some surprises.

You probably haven’t heard of pongamia before, which is probably a giveaway that it hasn’t yet transformed the global agricultural sector, and that this column won’t be uninterrupted good news. The world is currently mired in a food crisis, created by horrific droughts in Africa and elsewhere as well as the war in Ukraine, and pongamia obviously hasn’t saved the day.

But the crop itself really is as cool and miraculous as it sounds. It really could help feed and heal the world. And the story of Terviva, the Oakland-based company that’s trying to bring pongamia to the masses, is a cool and miraculous story.

So let’s do the good news first.

Pongamia is not a new tree or a rare tree. It was cited for its healing properties in ancient Ayurvedic texts, and while it’s still most common in India, it can now be found all over the world, including in a park near my Miami home. It’s got a broad canopy, an extensive root network, and pretty white and pink flowers that bloom in the spring, so it’s often planted in yards or parking lots as an ornamental, windbreak or shade tree. Its oil, also known as karanja, is used in India as a natural lubricant, varnish and lamp oil. Pongamia seeds also produce the active ingredient in the antifungal remedies you can buy at CVS.

But plant guides warn that pongamia’s seeds have a ​“bitter taste and disagreeable aroma,” with some guides suggesting they’re poisonous, which explains why they’ve never caught on as animal feed or human food. And that explains why pongamia was never cultivated as a crop before a University of California, Berkeley business student named Naveen Sikka visited central India in the spring of 2009, to see if the tree could produce sustainable biofuel.

At the time, the U.S. and European Union had ambitious new biofuel mandates, and investors were blasting money into the space; the oil giant BP had just made a massive investment in a bioenergy research center at Berkeley. Sikka knew biofuels had one serious downside: Using good farmland to grow energy instead of food leads to the clearing of natural carbon sinks to create more farmland to replace that food. But when he saw pongamia flourishing in rocky soils in India’s arid badlands, he saw a unique opportunity to grow renewable fuel on low-quality land so that it wouldn’t compete with the food supply or drive deforestation.

Sikka’s idea when he founded Terviva was to create a genetic library of pongamia traits, a kind of arboreal 23andMe, then breed the superstar trees that could create the most fuel on the worst land. The biofuels market tanked while he was still fundraising, and Terviva had several near-death experiences as it burned through cash, but miracles soon began to happen.

The first miracle was the de-bittering of pongamia. Sikka had hoped it could be made palatable, at least for cattle, though he feared that would require nasty chemical solvents unfit for human consumption. He was stunned when his team figured out a way to do it with a solvent already consumed by quite a few humans: alcohol.

That’s when Terviva began to pivot from fuel toward its current mission of ​“planting millions of trees to feed billions of people.” As a child, Sikka regularly visited relatives in India, and after college, he worked for the U.S. State Department in West Africa, so he had witnessed the developing world’s desperate need for protein and vegetable oil firsthand. Now he had a way to grow a lot without using any productive land.

The problem was finding someone to do the growing, because farmers are notoriously reluctant to gamble on untested crops, especially tree crops that take four years to yield their first harvest. Farmers are only willing to take a risk like that when they are, as Sikka puts it, ​“totally fucked,” which brings us to Terviva’s second miracle: A bacterial disease began wiping out Florida’s citrus trees, inspiring some totally fucked farmers to take a chance on pongamia on a few of their worst tracts of land.

So far, pongamia has lived up to its billing, producing yields comparable to Midwestern soybeans in much poorer soil with virtually no chemicals or added water. In test fields, some trees are producing yields four to 10 times higher than soybean fields. Pongamia is basically vertical soy, except it doesn’t need to be plowed or sprayed or irrigated. It simply converts sunlight, air and rain into protein and oil — plus an extract from the de-bittering process that Terviva has successfully patented as a bio-fungicide. And the field results should only improve with experience and advanced breeding of the superstars from the test fields.

Terviva has now raised more than $100 million, hired more than 100 employees, sequenced the entire pongamia genome, and built a solid reputation as an ag-tech startup. Ultimately, though, Sikka is building a food company, which is why he’s so excited about miracle number three: De-bittered pongamia oil turned out to be a golden-colored substitute for olive oil. A glowing analysis by the food consultancy Mattson found it produced an ​“indulgent mouthfeel” reminiscent of foods fried in butter. Pongamia also has enormous potential as a protein for plant-based milks and meats, as it contains all nine essential amino acids.

The food giant Danone is now partnering with Terviva to develop pongamia as a climate-friendly, climate-resilient, ​“regenerative,” non-GMO alternative to soy and palm oil, which are increasingly unpopular with consumers who care about sustainability. The first products featuring Terviva’s newly branded ​“Ponova oil” could hit the market early next year.

“The universe has smiled at us so often. We’ve had so many strokes of dumb luck to get where we are,” Sikka says.

“And we still haven’t made a dent.”

You knew the bad news was coming eventually. After 12 years of miracles, Terviva now has 1,500 acres of pongamia in the ground. But around the world, there are about 300 million acres of soy in the ground. Sikka had hoped farmers would rush to pongamia once the Florida experiment proved the concept, but that has not happened. The world finally has a high-yield, low-impact crop that can grow almost anywhere, and it’s still a rounding error, barely a blip on the global landscape.

“It just shows how hard it is to change agriculture,” Sikka says. ​“It takes forever, even when everything goes right.”

The thing is, agriculture does need to change for the earth to remain hospitable to humans, and forever is too long to wait.

Sikka continues to hope that more farmers will embrace pongamia. He also hopes that institutional investors with deeper pockets and greater risk tolerance than farmers will finance much larger projects to plant tens of thousands of acres of pongamia. But since hope is not a business plan, Sikka has figured out a way to generate revenue and start selling ingredients without reshaping the agricultural landscape. There are already over 1 million tons of pongamia seeds on trees growing wild in India, and Terviva is now paying impoverished villagers to pick them.

It’s a complex undertaking, requiring delicate negotiations with village elders, direct payments through mobile phones, and sophisticated geolocation technology to trace the seeds. But it’s already produced 5,000 tons of beans, enough to take Ponova oil to market, while injecting $2 million into impoverished rural areas. Sikka believes India can be an economic engine for Terviva, and vice versa. He also believes pongamia could inspire the Danones of the world to invest in other exotic tree crops indigenous to the global South, from ramon seeds to croton nuts to Bambara beans.

Again, though, Terviva’s 5,000 tons are a pittance compared to the world’s 350 million tons of soybeans, and $2 million barely counts as a drop in the $200 billion global cooking-oil bucket. Unfortunately, the problem of feeding the world without frying the world is an almost indescribably gigantic problem.

By 2050, the agricultural sector will have to produce a couple billion additional tons of food each year without clearing any additional forests. That will require dramatic changes on the demand side, like wasting less food, eating less beef and using less good land to grow biofuels. It will also require dramatic changes on the supply side, like higher crop and livestock yields, more resilience to a warmer world, fewer emissions from fertilizer and manure, and less chemical and mechanical degradation of soils.

Pongamia checks a bunch of those boxes, but not at a large enough scale to matter much yet. One lesson of its miracles is that it will take a lot more miracles to transform global agriculture.