As the world grapples with the urgent need to combat climate change and transition towards sustainable transportation, the spotlight shines brighter than ever on the transformative potential of Electric Vehicles (EVs). India aims to take this to a new height. Under the ambitious vision of the Government of India, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari recently announced plans to eliminate over 36 crore petrol and diesel vehicles in the country, heralding a green economy revolution. This is an ambitious goal and it has left even the staunchest advocates of green energy transition in awe of the sheer magnitude of the task and the transformative impact it promises to deliver. As countries set deadlines to phase out Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, the imminent surge in EV demand will present challenges in production and infrastructure. Ramping up manufacturing capacities, sourcing sustainable materials, and establishing robust supply chains to meet the burgeoning demand for EVs, while ensuring quality and affordability, is not going to be an ordinary challenge.

Rethinking green transportation: Converting ICE vehicles into electric ones

As the urgency of addressing climate change grows, it is increasingly apparent that we are not headed in the right direction. Despite our heightened consciousness and efforts, the stark reality is that global temperatures continue to rise. Worsening climate-related disasters and escalating greenhouse gas emissions all underscore the inadequacy of our current approaches. Rather than quick fixes or temporary solutions, there is a need to fundamentally re-evaluate our approach. This is particularly important considering technological advancements that are providing new opportunities to transcend the limitations imposed by traditional models.

Rethinking global clean energy transition: Empowering grassroots for a sustainable future

In the realm of renewable energy, the potential of low-value clean energy assets to spark economic and energy transformations at the grassroots level cannot be overstated. Assets such as solar-powered carts, e-rickshaws, or small-scale wind turbines are not only affordable but can also drive sustainable development, create jobs, improve energy access, and reduce carbon emissions in underserved communities. Take, for instance, carefully curated night markets featuring solar carts​for varied purposes like food vending, mobile bookshops, electronics stores, or even training services can not only stimulate economic activity but also breathe life into urban spaces while fostering environmental awareness. However, despite the clear benefits, obtaining financing for such assets presents a significant challenge that should be addressed to ensure a clean energy transition at the grassroots level. This article will delve into the complexities and hurdles that obstruct the financing of low-value energy assets, and suggest actionable solutions to unlock their true potential.

Opinion | Financing Low-Value Energy Assets: Navigating A Complex Landscape

Artificial intelligence’s next target is the electric vehicle battery. Chemix, an AI-powered EV battery developer, has completed a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Ibex Investors. The three-year-old startup will use the funding to scale its technology, which uses algorithms to design and optimize novel batteries for electric vehicle makers. As interest in AI surges, so too has scrutiny of the technology’s energy intensity and its corresponding burden on data centers and power grids. But alongside those challenges are also opportunities for AI to help speed decarbonization by accelerating the development of sustainable materials.

Artificial Intelligence Offers an Opportunity to Improve EV Batteries

We use energy in many different ways in our lives, be it for lighting up our houses, running electronic appliances or as fuel in our vehicles. There are mainly two types of energy: renewable energy and non-renewable energy. Non-renewable energy includes fossil fuels like natural gas, petroleum and coal. However, these energy sources come from nature itself; it is impossible to renew them quickly. This means that these resources will become entirely exhausted in the upcoming years.

How Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Are Transforming The Future Of Renewable Energy

At COP26, India announced its ambition to become a net-zero emitter by 2070—an important milestone in the fight against climate change. Despite low per-capita emissions (1.8 tons CO2), India is the third-largest emitter globally, emitting a net 2.9 gigatons of carbon-dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) every year as of 2019. The bulk of these emissions (about 70 percent) are driven by six sectors: power, steel, automotive, aviation, cement, and agriculture. In this report, we propose more than 100 decarbonisation levers across these key sectors and take a deeper look at four cross-cutting decarbonisation opportunities: green hydrogen; carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS); natural climate solutions; and material circularity. We modeled outcomes on India’s net-zero journey along two scenarios: first, the current line-of-sight (LoS) scenario with current (and announced) policies and foreseeable technology adoption; and second, the accelerated scenario with far-reaching polices like carbon pricing and accelerated technology adoption, including technologies like CCUS. Our analysis shows that the benefits of a well-planned, orderly, accelerated transition could outweigh the downsides, given India’s growth outlook.

Decarbonising India: Charting a pathway for sustainable growth

There is a vicious circle between economic growth, energy, and climate change. In this context, the south Asian region is in a dilemma on how to reconcile these three issues given its high vulnerability. In addition to that the region is moderately integrated despite sharing many common issues. The member countries face common challenges like the effects of climatic-induced disasters, pandemics, energy dependency, economic crises, etc. The Ukraine war in February 2022 has aggravated the energy supply scenario worldwide and especially for the smaller countries of South Asia recovering from the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The countries have realized that complete dependence on one source of energy could jeopardize the economic development and livelihood of their people. Since the countries located in the eastern south Asian region—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal—have different levels of potential to generate green energy and they currently exchange energy under the bilateral framework, a sub-regional approach to energy cooperation would facilitate rapid carbon-free economic growth. Therefore, the existing bilateral arrangements need to be upgraded into a sub-regional framework as a step forward toward regional integration.

TRILATERAL ELECTRICITY TRADE IN EASTERN SOUTH ASIA

For decades, climate change has largely been left on the backburner in diplomatic discussions among world leaders. The issue typically ranked near the bottom of a long list of priorities discussed at meetings and summits. So it may come as a surprise that as a war rages in Europe and tensions between China and the West simmer, the most highly anticipated item of discussion when European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington this Friday will be climate change.

How Climate Change Became Central to U.S.-Europe Relations

Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used.1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.

Science Direct: Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A systematic review of challenges and opportunities

As women take on more leadership roles in the United States advancing social and political change, analysis of women’s contributions to the transformation occurring within the energy sector is critically important. Grassroots movements focused on energy justice and energy democracy focus on: (1) resisting the power of large multinational fossil fuel energy companies that exacerbate inequities and disparities in energy, (2) reclaiming the energy sector with more community and public control to redisitrbute benefits and risks, and (3) restructuring the energy sector to prioritize equity and justice with community ownership and distributed governance. This research analyzes women’s leadership by focusing on how two women-led, non-profit organizations are advancing the renewable energy transition, operationalizing the concept of energy democracy and contributing to the energy justice movement. The two organizations are Grid Alternatives, a solar installation and workforce training organization, and Mothers Out Front, an advocacy organization focused on addressing climate change by promoting a transition to renewable energy. These organizations differ in their mission and approaches, yet both intentionally link climate and energy action with other forms of social justice activism, by expanding community engagement, strengthening participation, and fundamentally redistributing power to promote a transition to more equitable, resilient and sustainable energy systems. This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of gender in energy justice and energy democracy movements, and to the practical consideration of the role that women’s leadership is playing in accelerating energy system change and advancing the principles of energy justice and energy democracy.

Science Direct: Women’s leadership in renewable transformation, energy justice and energy democracy: Redistributing power

Nepal is blessed with extraordinary water endowments in the form of snow cover, rivers, springs, lakes, and groundwater. However, its most important water resources are the over 6,000 rivers and rivulets across the country. They not only provide a reliable source of water for different purposes but, together with the steep topography of the country, also offer significant opportunities for hydropower generation. The technical and economically feasible hydropower potential of Nepal has been estimated at 83,000 and 42,000 megawatts (MW), respectively. [1] Though hydropower development started in 1911, it progressed slowly. By 2005, Nepal had developed only 557 MW due to the absence of private-sector engagement, political considerations, and overwhelming dependency on external financing. [2] Around this time, Nepal went through an acute power crisis that lasted nearly a decade. Much of its hydropower capacity was reliant on run-of-river hydropower plants, and with fluctuating seasonal river discharges and increasing energy demand from rapid urbanization, the nation was forced to ration energy. This crisis made it evident that the construction and commissioning of hydropower projects was the call of the hour, and a more measured approach was needed to carefully plan and develop both projects and policy to benefit the Nepali citizens. Distribution was another key challenge. The last decade has witnessed rapid development under the stewardship of the private sector. The generation capacity has surpassed 2,000 MW and is expected to reach 7,300 MW by 2025. [3] Hydropower development is thus increasingly important. It presents an opportunity not only to provide a significant source of clean power for Nepal and neighboring countries but also to bridge domestic economic disparities. The next section will examine these disparities, followed by a discussion of how hydropower can address these and other challenges for Nepal.

Balanced Hydropower Development in Nepal

Date: August, 2022 
 Fundamental to crypto-economics remains the recognition of cryptocurrencies as Digital Assets. 
 DeFi protocols allow the lending or borrowing of cryptocurrencies for interest using digital assets as collaterals. LEVERAGE also remains a strong feature of such protocols. 
Using LEVERAGE, one can quickly grow their assets severalfold by performing multiple borrowings and trades on the underlying collateral. 
 In the favorable past, LEVERAGE was considered a great tool to create exponential wealth. A collateral of $100 with a collateral factor of 80%, in just 5 leveraged transactions could create an addition of $300+ within minutes. An amazing feat - not heard of, and not possible, in TradFi. 
 However, LEVERAGE is a DOUBLE-EDGED sword. When one LEVERAGES $100 to create an asset of over $300, little did the DeFi protocols warned them that LEVERAGE is subject to risk. In one’s pursuit of exponential WEALTH, one was also creating exponential LIABILITY. 
 Today, when things are not right, investors continue to lose not just their original $100, but they also remain burdened with the huge liabilities created out of LEVERAGE. 
 And, this should be avoided

Crypto-economics: Leverage is a Double-Edged Sword

Date: November, 2022 
 The FTX fallout has shifted the focus to Web3 regulations once again. Public emotions run high. Many have lost their life savings. 
 Web3 is a completely new frontier. It brings such value propositions as the decentralization of services and digital assets. It cannot be regulated in a similar manner as Web2, which is about data and information. Web3 is not an extension of Web2. The two are fundamentally different. 
 Web3 regulations demand a different approach, knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Developing a good regulation is always a multi-pronged and multi-stakeholder endeavor, that involves time. 
 Regulations should not be seen as a panacea to all the ills of Web3. In the existing context of emotional outpour, there remains a real risk of creating poor or over-regulations. And this will have a far-reaching effect on both technology and human progression. 
 Prudence is thus required in creating Web3 regulations. #technology #data #digital #blockchain #defi #web3

Regulating Web3 Responsibly

The annual un climate talks are sometimes compared to a circus, or a battleground. This year’s summit, held at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, and known in the jargon as cop27, was an appropriate mix of comedy and rancour. Problems with the catering left many delegates scrounging for sandwiches and bananas in between meetings and group calls. John Kerry, America’s chief negotiator, was stricken with covid-19 and was forced to negotiate from the isolation of his hotel room.

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