
Solar supports life-saving care in Ukraine
March 22, 2023 6:10 amRussia’s relentless targeting of Ukraine’s soviet-era energy infrastructure has made the strategic vulnerability of centralised energy systems clear for all to see.
Russia’s relentless targeting of Ukraine’s soviet-era energy infrastructure has made the strategic vulnerability of centralised energy systems clear for all to see.
When two huge earthquakes struck the Turkey-Syria border region in February 2023, we learned once again through bitter experience, how solar energy can help to save lives in disaster zones, through its nature of being distributed, and generating power locally using sunshine.
In the Polish town of Wrocław, a small housing cooperative has cut its annual shared costs from 90,000 to 18,000 euros per year just by installing solar panels on its discussed rooftops.
Kozani was once the largest lignite mining region in Greece, and host to the country’s biggest coal power plant. But it’s now in the process of trading in its long and damaging coal legacy for a brighter future built around renewables.
The challenge to deploy enough solar and wind to achieve a fully renewables-based European power system by 2035 is big. But it pales into insignificance when compared to the amount of potential places to easily install renewable energy systems all around us!
With only 65 KM of coastline, offshore wind probably isn’t the first renewable energy technology that springs to mind when you think of Belgium.
Poland has the second largest coal industry in the EU, but while the majority of other member states will stop burning the dirtiest of all fossil fuels this decade, Poland has no such plan. That is, except for the coal region of Eastern Greater Poland, which has taken matters into its own hands and plans to be coal free by 2030.
Inaugurated in April 2022, the 204MW Kozani solar park, built adjacent to several lignite mines, is the largest utility-scale solar farm in southeastern Europe. The first of a planned 3GW of solar power to be built in the country’s lignite regions, it represents just the beginning of Greece’s ongoing massive expansion of solar generation capacity.
People in Sivas, Eastern Turkey have been breathing the poison of the local Kangal coal-fired power plant for three decades now.