Farming takes place in fields, greenhouses, and orchards, but photovoltaic (PV) cells require their own land to harness the sun's energy and generate electricity. The two weren't thought to live together well.

Two professors  from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,  Prof. Lioz Etgar of the Institute of Chemistry and Prof. Haim Rabinowitch of the Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment, have now worked together to create a prototype for a revolutionary PV cell. The new cell's performance has the potential to alter the laws of the solar energy and agricultural production game because its efficiency has been technologically shown.

The innovative solar cell is made to cover completely agricultural areas, such as greenhouses, orchards, fields, and water bodies, while generating green electricity and agricultural production simultaneously, without interfering with the natural habitats beneath the PV panels, without depleting natural resources, and without endangering the environment.

The team estimates this breakthrough will lower Israel's energy costs by 75%. In fact, they think that if Israel covered half of its greenhouses with these new cells, green electricity output would exceed Israel's national target for that year.

The new solar cells are built on crystals of perovskite, a mineral that was first found in 1839 and is a calcium titanium oxide that is reasonably simple to produce using inexpensive and readily available materials.

A chemical substitution makes the solar cells transparent to the most efficient area of the light spectrum that drives photosynthesis. A great part of the rest of the light energy is transformed into electricity.

“For years, it has been obvious that most light energy in agricultural greenhouses is wasted, as plants use only a fraction of the sunlight energy, while the rest is radiated back into the atmosphere,” Etgar explained. “In greenhouses, it becomes heat energy that growers need to get rid of during most months of the year. Our solution maximizes the production of solar electricity on agricultural land by up to 300%.”

Compared to silicon-based photovoltaic cells, the new cells are expected to have significantly reduced production costs. They will probably also significantly improve cultivation conditions in greenhouses by reducing heat, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and evapotranspiration, saving water, and protecting crops from weather damage.

All currently used methods for producing green energy on agricultural lands use silicon-based photovoltaic cells that are entirely or somewhat opaque to most visible light spectrums or are arranged in different arrays. Because of this, power generation is less efficient and agricultural production is consequently decreased.

Rabinowitch added, “This new development, which can be installed over any agricultural lands and any bodies of water, will make it possible to fully replace the roofs of most agricultural greenhouses, reduce heat levels and evapotranspiration in orchards and fields, and impairment of many fresh-water and coastal marine ecosystems on which rafts, or islands of solar cells are installed.”

Using these new cells will reduce agricultural costs and raise agricultural income and profitability, according to calculations based on existing data. The researchers declared that this was nothing short of a revolution.
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Israel has around 90,000 dunams [approximately 35 square miles] of greenhouses. Covering half of the greenhouse roofs with the new solar cells will provide a quantity of green electricity that enables Israel to exceed its 2050 national targets for green electricity production and carbon emission reduction. To put this development into perspective, the Mediterranean basin alone holds around two million dunams (770 sq. mi.) of greenhouses.

In the decarbonization era, solar power is, by far, the leading technology both in scale and in cost. Lunar energy is taking a lot longer. One only needs to walk into the surf on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, to understand the enormous power in the ocean. One of the biggest differences in wave technology is the harsh and punishing environment in which this new energy generation will have to operate.

Even though it’s a tough place to extract energy, several research start-ups have tried over the past decade to harness the immense lunar power of the oceans.

Wave Swell Energy's unusual UniWave 200 is an on-shore sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. In July, after a year of testing, the company reported excellent results. 

Sweden-based Eco Wave Power announced in February, that the first of 10 floats has been successfully installed on the sea wall at Jaffa Port in Israel, marking an important milestone for the company's second grid-connected wave energy harvesting project.

In late August, another startup has announced the results of a 10-year set of tests on wave energy generation. The company, Sea Wave Energy Ltd (SWEL), is making some amazing claims as to the cost and scaling of their invention—Waveline Magnet. 

In the simplest terms, the Waveline Magnet is a long, modular chain of plastic floats designed to sit on top of the water, lined up pointing directly into the waves.

These chains of floats move in a serpentine motion when waves pass through, following the movement of the water. The floats are connected by lever arms to inflexible, non-buoyant spine parts rather than directly to one another. The spine is relatively stationary while the floats move with the waves, and the lever arms move the electrical generators inside the spine units both upward and downward.

As a wave first hits the Waveline Magnet, the system gets a read on the size and speed of the wave, allowing it to fine-tune the power extraction at each generator as the wave moves down the line. SWEL says this machine can work in "all wave heights," and that "harsh wave conditions do not negatively affect the device's performance, but in contrast, enhance it, without survivability complications."

Over the past ten years, SWEL has built prototypes both in wave tanks (University of Plymouth and University of Cyprus) and also open ocean deployments. Now comes the company’s claim of energy generation volume and cost. Much of this information will have to be proven over the next year or two, but if they are right, we could be in for some revolutionary developments in the carbonless generation of energy.

The CEO of SWEL, Adam Zakheos, is quoted in a press release as saying "... we can show how a commercial-sized device using our technology will achieve a Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) less than 1c€(US$0.01)/kWh, crushing today's wave energy industry reference value of 85c€(US$0.84)/kWh." SWEL claims that "one single Waveline Magnet will be rated at over 100 MW in energetic environments." The company has produced a video to show how the Waveline Magnet works.

LCoE, of course, is a financial statistic that takes into account all initial capital and continuous operating costs throughout the project's duration. It would be utterly revolutionary if these devices had an LCoE of one penny per kWh (US$10/MWh). They would create power for less than half the price of solar and wind. If that LCoE is accurate, according to Lazard's statistics, it'd even outperform gas, coal, nuclear, geothermal, or pretty much any other known energy generation source.

If SWEL lives up to its promises, the world is in for nothing less than a clean energy revolution. However, there are plenty of bad-faith operators, wishful thinking, and unrealistic expectations in the market as investors line up to take part in green energy moonshots. And if the many tests conducted by SWEL had produced the kinds of results that could have predicted some of the cheapest and cleanest energy in the world, then, yeah, we'd expect to see some Gates-level investment coming in, and many more people working on projects of increasing scale.
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So, for now, we'll remain skeptical, hoping that this is the one that surprises us, and inviting SWEL to make us eat our words as soon, and as hard as possible. We’d love this to be one of the good news stories of the 21st century.

We’ve covered the four-day workweek in several issues: In the pre-pandemic issue 6-10, we made the case that a four-day workweek could be the norm by 2050. In issue 9-05, the cover article also said the four-day workweek may be coming and potentially much sooner than 2050 because of the pandemic. Neither of these articles, however, looked at the positive impact a four-day workweek could have on the planet and our ecosystem.

When the pandemic hit, the world as we knew it changed dramatically with everyone at home, transportation infrastructure stopped and heavy industrial production drastically curtailed. Emissions from driving, flying and industrial output were dramatically reduced. Air quality in cities around the world showed marked improvement, while global emissions plummeted.

In May 2021, environmental and social justice collective Platform London released a report detailing the ecological impact of a shorter work week. From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was apparent that fewer people commuting translated quickly to reduced pollution, clearer skies, and less congestion on the roads. The impact was global, with Americans reporting less smog in Los Angeles and Europeans famously spotting dolphins in the canals of Venice. While some of this may be exaggerated, the benefits of fewer rush hour commuters are not. Fewer people heading to the office also means a reduction in electricity consumption from fewer lights, air conditioners and elevators running.

Many estimates put the reduction in carbon footprint at around 30% simply by offering one full day off per week. A more modest 10% reduction in hours (roughly three to four hours a week for most full-time workers) still translates to a 14.6% decrease in carbon emissions.

“The one thing we do know from lots of years of data and various papers and so forth is that the countries with short hours of work tend to be the ones with low emissions, and work time reductions tend to be associated with emission reduction,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who researches work, consumption and climate change.

It’s what you might call a “potential triple-dividend policy, so something that can benefit the economy, society and also the environment,” said Joe O’Connor, chief executive of the nonprofit group 4-Day Week Global. “There are not many policy interventions that are available to us that could potentially have the kind of transformative impact that reduced work time could have.”

Part of the problem is that we can’t forecast what workers will do with that additional day. Many believe, and international studies like those recently done in Iceland prove, that people will eventually gravitate into more eco-friendly activities like hiking, camping and other outdoor activities. But, if people choose to spend their extra time off traveling, particularly if they use planes or automobiles, we may not see any material eco-related benefits.
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“When we talk about the four-day workweek and the environment, we focus on the tangible, but actually, in a way, the biggest potential benefit here is in the intangible,” O’Connor said. “It’s in the shift away from a focus on hard work to a focus on smart work. It’s the cultural change in how we work and the impact that could have on how we live, and I think that’s the piece that’s really revolutionary.”

Record heat all over the globe is now a potentially bigger threat to ongoing data center operations than cybercrime. In late July, Google Cloud’s data centers in London went offline for a day because of cooling failures. Oracle’s cloud-based data center, also in London, was hit and went offline, causing outages for US clients.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says there’s a 93% change that one year between 2022 and 2026 will be the hottest on record. “For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise,” says Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary general. “And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise, and our weather will become more extreme.”

A survey conducted by the Uptime Institute, a digital services standards agency, found that 45% of all US data centers have experienced an extreme weather event that threatened their ability to provide uninterrupted service.

The problem with both US-based and European centers is that their cooling systems were designed for a cooler planet than we have today. Newer data centers are now being constructed with a forecasted weather scenario to better plan for much higher temperatures.

Most data centers don’t operate at full capacity, but recent Cushman & Wakefield research shows that eight data center markets worldwide out of 55 they investigated operate at 95% or higher capacity. These centers are only strained by high temperatures a few days a year and they have been able to adjust loads to compensate for the heat. 

As climate change alters our temperatures permanently, data centers will have to improve their cooling systems so that continuous service can be assured.

“There are a deceptively large number of legacy data center sites built by banks and financial services companies needing to be refreshed and refitted,” says Simon Harris, head of critical infrastructure at data center consultancy Business Critical Solutions. As part of that rethink, Harris advises companies to look at design criteria that can cope with climate change, rather than solely minimizing its effects. “It’ll be bigger chiller machines, machines with bigger condensers, and looking more at machines that use evaporative cooling to achieve the performance criteria needed to ensure that for those days things are still in a good place,” he says.

Companies are trying novel approaches to dealing with the climate issues. Microsoft ran a three-year trial of a data center set 117 feet below the sea offshore of Scotland to insulate it from temperature fluctuations. Other companies are building centers in even more northern climates, but that probably won’t be a viable solution for those organizations who use edge computing and need their centers close to where data is consumed, often in hotter, urban areas.
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We all have to do everything we can to reduce the impact of climate change, but now is the time for all data center management personnel to better plan for the increased temperatures we will experience for the foreseeable future.