People always ask what it’s like being at the top of a 100-metre-high wind turbine. It does make your legs go a bit funny when you look over the top. But before I started as a wind turbine technician apprentice with SSE Renewables last year, I was more worried about being sick on the two-hour boat journey you have to take to reach the Greater Gabbard offshore wind farm, 12 miles off the coast of Suffolk.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing about the potential for the Covid-19 pandemic to distract from the ongoing fight against climate change. But the latest data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows promising signs that a “green recovery” may be materializing. Right from the start of the crisis there were fears that the coronavirus would derail fragile efforts to reduce global carbon emissions by pulling politicians’ attention away from the cause or tempting governments to throw out environmental standards to give a shot in the arm to their pandemic-ravaged economies.

In 2019, the United States generated about 4.1 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, here’s a rough breakdown as to where all that power came from: Sixty-three percent is still generated by fossil fuels, such as coal, natural gas and petroleum, while 20 percent is generated by nuclear power plants. Eighteen percent is now generated by renewable resources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power from dams and other water-generated power plants.

Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Rokke, who built most of his fortune on oil and gas, says the time has come to start investing more heavily in renewable energy. The 61-year-old suggested that a tipping point had now been reached in the energy industry, while underscoring his conviction that the world will continue to need fossil fuels for years to come.

Just a month ago, companies and investors had a financial incentive to continue investing in new oil and gas projects despite the societal and environmentalist backlash against fossil fuels. Not anymore. In just a couple of weeks, the oil price crash made investments in renewable energy starting to look more attractive. Or at least as attractive as investment in oil and gas.

The rapidly dropping cost of renewable energy has upended energy economics in recent years, with new solar and wind plants now significantly cheaper than coal power. But new research shows another major change is afoot: The cost of batteries has been declining so unexpectedly rapidly that renewables plus battery storage are now cheaper than even natural gas plants in many applications, according to a report released this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

Germany produced enough renewable energy in the first half of 2018 to power every household in the country for a year. The nation’s combined wind, solar, biomass and hydroelectric power output hit a record 104 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) between January and the end of June, according to energy firm E.On. The figure is 9.5 per cent more than the same period of 2017 and a third more than three years ago, the company said, citing in-house analysts who supply data to its sales teams.

Thermochemical solar fuel manufacturing would be an energy industry with a life of centuries, rather than decades. The feedstock of sunlight, carbon dioxide and water is essentially unlimited. Scientists with the SOLAR-JET Project have demonstrated the first-ever entire process to make kerosene, the jet fuel used by commercial airlines, using a high-temperature thermal solar reactor...