To raise awareness of the massacres taking place in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, WCRE is calling for #24hrsforTigray! On 9 March at 12:00 GMT until 10 March at 12:00 GMT, there will be a 24-hour programme of speakers from around the world speaking in global unity to highlight the deepening humanitarian crisis in Tigray, Ethiopia.
Aljazeera reports: With high population and little space, Kerala, a southern Indian state, is building countless solar panels on rooftops in a new programme, enabling cheap, citizen-owned energy for residents. 75,000 houses are to get panels. By 2022, a quarter of the state's electricity needs could be covered by solar energy.
While jobs in the fossil industry are decreasing, the job market in renewables is booming. THE energy segment for new jobs will be the offshore wind energy sector. By 2030, there will be three times as many jobs as in 2020, according to a Rystad Energy analysis. The article by Sarah Smith describes the extent to which job potential will increase with rising offshore wind demand.
The fossil fuel industry is trying to blame the widespread blackout in Texas on renewable energy. Foremost among them Fox News and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is closely tied to oil and gas companies. But wind makes up only about 7% of Texas' energy mix. So frozen wind turbine blades were not to blame for the widespread blackout. Rather, it was the frozen natural gas pipelines, and thus just the unprepared fossil fuel industry, that caused the drama. Read the full article by Dionne Searcey in The New York Times.
February 17, 2021. On Tuesday, large parts of the central and southern United States were without power. Texas was the worst hit, with over 4 million people affected. The blackouts were the result of a power grid not designed for the cold, unprepared grid operators and a lack of backup capacity. How climate change could continue to cripple the U.S. power grid in the future is described by Brad Plumer in the New York Times.