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New Zealand and Australia are at two very different stages in the energy transition.
I’ll drop any notion of journalistic objectivity for a moment: I would really, really like to see the United States win the Women’s World Cup.
Abby Wambach’s miracle goal in 2011, Carli Lloyd’s 2015 hat trick in the final, and Megan Rapinoe’s dominant 2019 tournament are all ineffable memories in my journey of soccer fandom. This year, as Alyssa Thompson, Sophia Smith, and Trinity Rodman take the baton for a new generation, I’ll be watching the tournament intently as it takes place in New Zealand and Australia.
But it’s also not lost on me that major sporting events like this are also often major emitting events. While all 10 host stadiums are LEED or Green Star certified (no new stadiums were purpose-built for the tournament), these tournaments are a test of every piece of a country’s infrastructure — and a barometer for nearly every element of their respective energy transition. Stadiums need electricity to keep floodlights on and beer refrigerators cold; fans fly from around the world for the tournament; cities construct new stadiums or retrofit old ones; countless tchotchkes are produced; and public transit systems snap into high gear.
Hosting the World Cup completely sustainably is probably impossible right now, in spite of what FIFA falsely claimed about its tournament in Qatar last fall, according to Swiss regulators. What this World Cup does offer, though, is a case study in two very different stages of paths towards decarbonization.
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Earlier this month, my colleague Robinson Meyer made a point about the diminishing marginal returns towards the end of the energy transition. As challenging as it is to get shovels in the ground, incentivizing new solar arrays and wind farms is in some ways easier than solving wicked problems: Cross-country travel, transitioning heavy duty vehicles away from fossil fuels, catalyzing a clean steel industry.
New Zealand is in the enviable — and somewhat unusual — position of starting its work on decarbonization in the world of wicked problems.
World Cups have had sustainably powered hosts before — France (Women’s World Cup 2019) boasts a nearly decarbonized grid in large part due to nuclear, and Canada’s electricity is primarily powered by hydropower and nuclear. Other hosts have had more mixed climate impacts. The 2014 host Brazil has an electricity sector dominated by hydropower, but it also built a brand new stadium in the middle of the rainforest that was effectively abandoned the moment the tournament ended.
New Zealand can make a case as one of the most climate-friendly hosts of a World Cup ever. (This requires a key caveat from the outset: You need to consider hydropower an environmentally friendly renewable. Right now, most people in the energy world do — though researchers have raised questions about methane emissions from reservoirs and the broader impacts of disrupting an ecosystem.)
The country’s electricity sector is overwhelmingly supplied by hydropower. Renewables in total generated 81% of the country’s electricity in 2021. Hydropower has made up a significant piece of New Zealand’s electric generation for more than a century — and while installing new facilities requires significant investment, the cost of generation itself is low. By one analysis, “business as usual” would still mean that 98% of the country’s generation will come from renewables by 2030, in large part driven by wind and solar.
The country has also made significant climate pledges, albeit ones that have raised questions about their enforcement — including an emissions budget for 2022-2025 and net zero by 2050 (excluding biogenic methane). And its carbon credits have spurred the transformation of farmland to forestry.
That leaves questions about energy and other emissions that most other countries have yet to act on. Watching a game in New Zealand is a reminder of the questions that remain: How can fans get between host cities without flights? How fast can the country kick its reliance on fossil fuels for heating and industry? And perhaps most importantly, how can New Zealand slash emissions from its extensive agriculture sector — especially when levying a tax on methane emissions from cows has proven a third rail among farmers?
Still, if New Zealand has moved to the most challenging part of decarbonization, Australia is at the outset of its process — the easy part, in some ways. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has expressed the goal of the country becoming a “renewable energy superpower,” but that process is just starting.
The country has made some progress: 29% of electricity generation came from renewables in 2021, largely driven by solar and wind, better than the United States’ 21% but a far cry from New Zealand, much less France. Australia, thanks to friendly government policy, easy permitting and speedy grid connections, has also enjoyed a particularly robust deployment of rooftop solar. And recently, the country established its own emission reduction commitments (43% by 2030) that leave room for more action in later years — their most recent try at comprehensive climate policy, following the passage and repeal of a carbon tax in the 2010s.
Australia, though, does not only rely on fossil fuels: It is also the world’s second-largest producer of coal, significantly ahead of any other country save for Indonesia. Coal dominates their energy use, with oil and natural gas making up the other major sources. And while Australia has signaled that they will transition away rapidly from coal, that transition could prove bumpy for both the grid and workers.
While New Zealand is a climate leader with caveats to sort out, games hosted in Australia will take place in a country that has fallen well behind its neighbor and most other high-income countries in addressing climate change. On the other hand, Sam Kerr is likely to be so dominant that fans will have little time to think about anything else.
Practically, what does this mean for the World Cup? In truth: Not much. As long as the lights stay on and the TV cameras work, we almost certainly won’t hear about the electric grid — and given that it’s winter in the southern hemisphere, the topic of climate change might not come up at all save for player-led activism. But as tournaments take place, they’ll offer a chance to check in on a given host country’s decarbonization efforts.
The next World Cup after this? The 2026 men’s tournament — in Mexico, Canada, and the United States.
Read more about climate and sports:
Home Runs Are One Way Climate Change Affects Baseball. Here Are 11 More.
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Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.
On Azerbaijan’s plans, offshore wind auctions, and solar jobs
Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.
The Interior Department set a date for an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, an area which the government sees as suitable for developing floating offshore wind technology. The auction will take place on October 29 and cover eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The area could provide 13 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, if fully developed. The Biden administration has a goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and has approved about half that amount so far. The DOI’s terms and conditions for the October lease sale include “stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for floating wind.” Floating offshore wind turbines can be deployed in much deeper waters than traditional offshore projects, and could therefore unlock large areas for clean power generation. Last month the government gave the green light for researchers to study floating turbines in the Gulf of Maine.
In other wind news, BP is selling its U.S. onshore wind business, bp Wind Energy. The firm’s 10 wind farm projects have a total generating capacity of 1.3 gigawatts and analysts think they could be worth $2 billion. When it comes to renewables, the fossil fuel giant said it is focusing on investing in solar growth, and onshore wind is “not aligned” with those plans.
The number of jobs in the U.S. solar industry last year grew to 279,447, up 6% from 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Utility-scale solar added 1,888 jobs in 2023, a 6.8% increase and a nice rebound from 2022, when the utility-scale solar market recorded a loss in jobs. The report warns that we might not see the same kind of growth for solar jobs in 2024, though. Residential installations have dropped, and large utility-scale projects are struggling with grid connection. The report’s authors also note that as the industry grows, it faces a shortage of skilled workers.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council
Most employers reported that hiring qualified solar workers was difficult, especially in installation and project development. “It’s difficult because our projects are built in very rural areas where there just aren't a lot of people,” one interviewee who works at a utility-scale solar firm said. “We strive to hire as many local people as possible because we want local communities to feel the economic impact or benefit from our projects. So in some communities where we go, it is difficult to find local people that are skilled and can perform the work.”
The torrential rain that has battered central Europe is tapering off a bit, but the danger of rising water remains. “The massive amounts of rain that fell is now working its way through the river systems and we are starting to see flooding in areas that avoided the worst of the rain,” BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor explained. The Polish city of Nysa told its 44,000 residents to leave yesterday as water rose. In the Czech Republic, 70% of the town of Litovel was submerged in 3 feet of flooding. The death toll from the disaster has risen to 18. Now the forecast is calling for heavy rain in Italy. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, toldThe Guardian.
A recent study examining the effects of London’s ultra-low emissions zone on how students get to school found that a year after the rules came into effect, many students had switched to walking, biking, or taking public transport instead of being driven in private vehicles.