By Michael Booth , The Colorado Sun.  Excerpt: Colorado’s electric grid has winter capacity “headroom” to power millions more clean energy heat pumps to replace natural gas furnaces, a transformation that would ease consumer bills and expand the global warming fight, according to a new study. The energy analysis nonprofit RMI, formerly Rocky Mountain Institute, says Colorado’s electrical demand peaks tend to come in summer from air conditioning, and that in winter the state could handle 1.6 million more heat pumps, or 17 times more than currently installed.  Heat pumps run on electricity instead of natural gas, and provide both winter heating and summer cooling. As Colorado’s electrical grid transitions to clean solar and wind generation, state officials and environmental groups see home and commercial furnaces as a key opportunity to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning.  Switching that many heating and cooling systems to heat pumps could lower expected ...

By Brooklyn Smith, The Cool Down (TCD).  Excerpt: In Northern Ireland, a four-bedroom house shows what happens when a family runs both its home energy use and its driving on electricity: two major expenses collapse into a single, lower bill. The owners of Tigh Beag, in the Glens of Antrim, said running the property and their electric vehicle together costs about £44 (approximately $59 USD) per week. ...Anne-Marie McGoldrick said, "We wanted a home that was really comfortable and easy to live in and that's exactly what we've ended up with. It just makes everyday life feel comfortable and effortless. And it's reassuring to know when we hear about another tariff hike or diesel price rise, we're much less affected. So much of our energy comes from our own renewable generation and battery storage, which gives us a lot more peace of mind." ...roughly half of [the cost] contributing to driving; and that's around 12,000 miles per year."...Instead of sending ...

By Ajit Niranjan , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths. Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering. The “staggering” death toll, modelled using historical relationships between heat and health in 854 cities, was the worst on record, the study found. Hot weather marked by relentless heatwaves killed nearly twice as many people as it did in each of the two next most dangerous years. ...People succumbed to heat at the highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, while absolute death tolls were greatest in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK. Because death certificates rarely record contributing fa...

By Sara Herschander , Vox.  Excerpt: When the sun goes down, the wind picks up in central New Mexico, whipping through arid canyons with a ghostly howl that for centuries, locals have likened to the wails of the folkloric ghost La Llorona. A few hours east of Albuquerque, this June, those gusts began powering the largest wind farm this continent has ever seen, twirling over 900 colossal steel turbines. Each is as tall as the Statue of Liberty, scattered across a patch of desert roughly the size of Chicago. They plug into a 550-mile transmission line stitched across the Southwest and are now powering over one million homes — as far away as California....  Full article at https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/507189/sunzia-wind-energy-transmission-project . 

By Nicholas Kusnetz , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt:  United Nations fund to help developing nations pay the costs imposed by climate change voted Thursday to allocate money for Nepal as the country recovers from devastating flooding in August. It was a historic step for the fund—the first time it has allocated money to a vulnerable country in an immediate response to climate impacts. But that also highlighted the severe limitations it faces. It was 2022 when nations agreed to create the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage. The aim was for wealthy nations to contribute money that would flow to developing countries to cover irreversible economic losses caused by climate change. The fund has yet to disburse any money. The disaster in Nepal, where flooding unleashed by a landslide and glacial collapse killed some 1,500 people, with more than 5,000 still missing, was exactly what the fund was meant to address....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/221020...

By Nathaniel Eisen , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Picture a buoyant triangular steel or concrete platform roughly the dimensions of a baseball field.  Now place a wind turbine taller than the London Eye on top, connect mooring lines to the seabed and power cables to the grid, and you’ve got a floating wind turbine. This fantastical-sounding technology is real. At demonstration and small-scale projects in Europe, Asia and a single U.S. site in Maine, floating turbines are producing power. Multiple different platform designs have been field tested, from the aforementioned triangle to a single massive cylinder. But plans to build larger projects of 10 or more turbines, each capable of powering a neighborhood, have lagged behind early projections. The business case for floating turbines, as opposed to their fixed-bottom counterparts, boils down to two points: they can do their thing making power farther from shore, where the high winds are and the people generally aren’t. In so...