Equilibrium & Sustainability

Equilibrium/Sustainability — Farming seaweed could help bolster food security

Expanding seaweed farming operations could help address global food insecurity, biodiversity loss and the impacts of climate change, new research shows.  

Seaweed provides a sustainable alternative to land-based agriculture and can help meet the world’s surging needs for food and materials, according to a team of Australian scientists who published their findings in Nature Sustainability.  

“Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibers, diesel and ethanol,” lead author Scott Spillias, of the University of Queensland, said in a statement.

Spillias and his colleagues mapped out the potential of farming more the 34 commercially relevant species of seaweed and estimated the environmental benefits of various land-use, emissions, water and wildlife-related scenarios.  

Ultimately, they found that growing seaweed would lessen the need for land-based crops and reduce global agricultural emissions by up to 2.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent each year.

Total greenhouse gas emissions generated by the global agri-food sector amounted to about 16.5 billion tons in 2021, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

In addition to reducing emissions, the researchers found that when they substituted 10 percent of human diets with seaweed, they were able to prevent farming on 272 million acres of land.

The gains could be even greater, as many native species of seaweed have yet to be studied from a commercial production perspective, Spillias explained.  

“The way I like to look at this is to think about ancestral versions of everyday crops — like corn and wheat — which were uninspiring, weedy things,” he said. 

“Through thousands of years of breeding we have developed the staple crops that underpin modern societies and seaweed could very well hold similar potential in the future.”

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Subscribe here.

Today we’ll start in New York City, which will host a massive airport solar array in just a few years. Then we’ll see why Ukraine is eyeing shipborne power plants.

⚡️ Plus: “Supercharging” the electric grid.

JFK terminal to host NYC’s largest rooftop solar array

New York City’s biggest rooftop solar array will illuminate John F. Kennedy International Airport’s future New Terminal One in just a few years, the firms behind the project announced on Thursday.

Harnessing the sun: The massive photovoltaic system — of more than 13,000 solar panels — will help power “the first fully resilient airport transit hub in the New York region,” according to the project partners. 

At the core of that hub will be a 11.3-megawatt, independent microgrid — producing enough electricity to power 3,570 average U.S. homes for one year, partners stated.

A collaborative venture: “This New Terminal One infrastructure project illuminates a new pathway to decarbonizing the air transportation sector,” Juan Macias, CEO of AlphaStruxure, said in a statement.

Cleaner air, local jobs: The microgrid will deliver immediate emissions reductions of 38 percent and reduce pollution levels in Southeast Queens, AlphaStruxure said.

Breaking it down: Powering the microgrid will be 7.66 megawatts from solar, or enough to power 1,039 U.S. homes annually, according to the announcement. 

Independent islands: The microgrid will consist of four “power islands” that each have independent sources of generation, storage, automation and control, the companies said.

Read more about the project here.

Shipborne power plants could aid Ukraine grid

As many as 1 million Ukrainians could soon receive their electricity via ship. 

The state-owned electric trader JSC Energy Company of Ukraine (ECU) signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday with Karpowership, a Turkish-owned operator of floating power plants. 

ECU sees the floating generators as one potential means of helping customers weather damage to the electrical grid caused by escalating Russian missile attacks in recent months. 

Under assault: The Russian army has been blasting away at the Ukrainian grid for months, and the national power grid is losing the repair war, ECU executives told Russian news outlet Interfax.

Charging up: Karpowership will provide Ukraine with up to 500 megawatts of electricity from ship-based generators, the Turkish company said. 

The shipborne power plants would be anchored near the coast, likely in nearby Romania or Moldova, and connected to the grid through underwater cables.  

They can burn liquified natural gas, fuel oil or biodiesel. 

Read more here.

5 efforts to ‘supercharge’ the US grid 

Clean energy legislation passed by congressional Democrats last year has the potential to transform all aspects of the national power system, a pair of advocacy groups say in a new report.

The Biden administration has pushed for funding in the Inflation Reduction Act to help make the U.S. electric grid carbon-free by 2035.

But Evergreen Action and the Natural Resources Defense Council say doing so will require making the best use of the estimated $370 billion in loans, grants and tax credits in the package.

The following five investments have the potential to help “supercharge” U.S. clean energy development, Lena Moffitt, chief of staff of Evergreen Action, told Equilibrium:

1: Clean Energy Tax Credits: $260 billion or more 

This is the lion’s share of the bill — an expansion of existing wind and solar tax programs to cover a vast new range of emerging technologies and institutions.   

2: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund: $27 billion

This is the old idea of a green development bank, absorbed into the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and hidden behind a nonthreatening name, Moffitt said.

3: Rural clean energy funding: $12.8 billion

This little-noticed climate stimulus provision would mostly go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help rural electric co-ops switch to renewables.

4: Department of Energy loan guarantees$8.6 billion

This sum would go to “retool, repurpose, repurpose, or replace” infrastructure such as coal-fired power plants or to build new renewables, according to Evergreen.

5: Boosting the grid: about $8.5 billion

Moffitt said these funds would work “synergistically” with new rules from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that clarify permitting new transmission lines.

Those rules are expected in the coming months.  
 
The $8.5 billion package would contain:

Thursday Threats

Biden administration protects wilderness area from mining threat, deaths from heat hit a new high in Texas and official land-rights help blunt the menace of deforestation in Brazil. 

Biden administration restricts hardrock mining in Minnesota wilderness

Record heat-death toll in Texas

Land titles protected Brazil’s forests