Open access notables
Among five items in this week s government/NGO section is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory s annual report Utility-Scale Solar, 2023 Edition, chock-a-block with statistics and graphs quantifying an explosion of installed permanent energy sources. Photovoltaic deployment is accelerating and now outpacing wind as costs have rapidly plunged. Given the natural properties of wind and solar energy supplies, reserve power storage is very much in frame. Current battery storage capacity is about 22GWh, what a sizeable nuclear plant could deliver over the course of 10 hours or so. There s of course much more to be done but it s also true that we re only now beginning to seriously tackle the job of energy modernization.
Open access notables
At our roots Skeptical Science is about cognition of the results of climate science research in the minds of the entire human population. Ideally we d be perfectly communicating understanding of Earth s climate, and perfectly understood. We can only approximate that, but hopefully converging closer to perfection. With the passage of time and a lot of effort on the part of researchers working on how our species thinks, we can inch forward— if we pay attention. With that in mind, two papers in this week s trawl land very close to our home. Each sports results important to climate science communicators but differing in paths and challenges to practical applicability.