If there’s one sector that’s the favourite whipping boy when it comes to CO2 emissions, it is the power generation sector, and for the right reason – because it is the single largest emitter sector of CO2! So, of the total 35 billion tons of human-activity based CO2 emissions, how much is emitted by the generation alone? Power generation accounts […]
If I tell you that there’s is a ticking carbon bomb which, if it explodes, could release twice the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as is currently cumulatively present, wouldn’t that shake you to the bone? It is true. There’s indeed such a ticking carbon bomb. And it is called Permafrost. It would be no surprise me if you had never […]
Climate models are mathematical representations of the interactions and events between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, ice – and the sun. As such modelling is clearly a very complex task, models are built to estimate trends rather than events. For example, a climate model can tell you it will be cold in winter, but it can’t tell you what the […]
The transport sector is one of the more obvious emitters of CO2 – obvious because you and I emit it, and you and I can see it being emitted! How much CO2 does the transport sector as a whole emit globally? According to estimates, in 2015 transport accounted for about 21% of total global greenhouse gas emissions of about 35 […]
What are the power plants doing about climate change and global warming? The world’s power plants emit a third of the total CO2 emitted by human activities – about 12 billion tons per annum. China’s power plants emit a massive 2.7 billion tons per annum. Power plants in the US alone emit about 1.8 billion tons of CO2 (about 35% of their […]
What is the economic cost of climate change? At the end of it all, everything boils downs to…money, doesn’t it? You would have heard that climate change and global warming could possibly result in a whole lot of environmental, social and health problems. Even if these alarming statistics do not move our politicians, policy makers and businessmen, what will certainly […]
Most batteries are capable of storing energy efficiently only for a few hours. But there are situations where energy needs to be stored for months together. Take a city in a cold region in Europe. The city might want to capture the heat from sunlight during the summer and use that for home or district heating in winter. But winter […]
While plants do an admirable job of converting sunlight and CO2 into food and fibers that we all use, what is the efficiency with which they convert sunlight into chemicals? Surprisingly, it is terribly low. For most plants, the photosynthetic efficiency is in the 1-2% range – that is, only about 1/50th of the total energy from sunlight falling on […]
Solar power plants use photovoltaic cells whose efficiencies are currently in the 20-23% range. In fact, there is even a theoretical upper limit of about 33.2% for the conventional “single-junction” solar cells – called the Shockley–Queisser limit. So how can some reputed research organizations claim that they have been able to reach efficiencies of much higher than 40%, even around […]
Is it possible to store heat in a salt? What a strange question! Even more strangely, the answer is: Yes. Sodium nitrate, for example, is used to store heat in what are called concentrated solar thermal applications, in which temperatures can reach above 400 degrees C. Why is a material like sodium nitrate used for storing heat? Because these fall […]
