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Earth

Brazil Signs On To Global Climate Deal To Triple Renewable Energy (reuters.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Brazil has signed onto an agreement to triple renewable energy globally by 2030 and shift away from using coal, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Friday, joining a prospective deal backed by the European Union, U.S. and United Arab Emirates. From a report: South America's largest country is now one of roughly 100 countries that have signed onto the deal, according to a European official familiar with the matter. Sources told Reuters earlier this month the aim is for the deal to be officially adopted by leaders attending the United Nation's COP28 climate negotiations that begins next week in Dubai.

Brazil's embassy in Abu Dhabi said in a letter to the United Arab Emirates' Foreign Ministry that it would join the deal titled the "Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Targets Pledge." A spokesperson for Brazil's Foreign Ministry confirmed the country has decided to join the pact. Brazil is already a major player in renewable energy. More than 80% of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources, led by hydropower with solar and wind energy expanding rapidly.
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Brazil Signs On To Global Climate Deal To Triple Renewable Energy More

Brazil Signs On To Global Climate Deal To Triple Renewable Energy

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  • Cop28 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those are the "you'll own nothing" people.

  • Burning wood is also considered renewable energy, and Brazil has plenty of it that they have no qualms deforesting like there's no tomorrow.

    And they're also big on bioethanol [wikipedia.org] which also renewable, despite being a completely insane scheme.

    I would take any pledge Brazil makes on renewable energy with a grain of salt.

    • Re:Careful there with Brazil (Score:5, Informative)

      by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @05:13AM (#64030297)
      Brazil uses sugar cane for that. We use corn. Our biofuel scheme makes no sense. Theirs actual works. Turns out sugar cane has a lot more energy in it than corn. That being said, there isn't enough land to make all the fuel they need so they burn FFs too. Only when you use sugar cane does a biofuel actually make sense. The rest are subsidies to swing states.

      • Re:Careful there with Brazil (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @06:04AM (#64030329) Homepage

        No, it does not make sense with sugar cane, either. "Better than mind-numbingly stupid" is not a good argument. The amount of energy you get per hectare of sugarcane is orders of magnitude below using the same hectare for solar panels.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sfcat ( 872532 )
          Solar panels make fuel do they? Also, those solar panels weren't made by magic elves. You have to count all the emissions they make in their manufacture. And when you do that, you find that the sugar cane based biofuels are better. Also, no issues with disposal of PV panels filled with heavy metals. Both are terrible compared to nuclear though.

          • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

            by Rei ( 128717 )

            1) See above [slashdot.org].

            2) A cleantech economy involves far less mining and far less emissions than our current economy. Solar panels - when the generation over their while lifespan is considered - have an energy density similar to that of nuclear fuel.

            3) Only CdTe panels - a small minority - contain heavy metals (and only in minuscule amounts, and well bound in the panels).

            4) Nothing - I and I mean literally nothing, not even coal - has done as much damage to this planet's ecosystems as agriculture. Full stop.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

              4) true. Let's stop making food.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Rei ( 128717 )

                Who is proposing that?

                The question is whether to use land to extremely inefficiently power vehicles.

                • Yes, were better off using the land for good and using, on the whole, batteries. Except as we transition or in a few edge cases.

                • If the question is about powering vehicles then WTH does eating have to do with it?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by sfcat ( 872532 )
                    Because food is energy. And we use energy in the form of fertilizer to grow food. Without that fertilizer we can't feed 80% or more of the people on earth. And renewables do nothing to replace that fertilizer we make from fossil fuels. Also, we use far less land to grow that food when we use fertilizer. So its also about land use. When the scientifically illiterate tree-huggers propose such schemes, they are literally proposing to let the majority of humanity starve. We are just pointing this out so

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sfcat ( 872532 )
              Your entire post is completely false. Not a single point is correct. EVs are already running into resource limits. They just waste a rare resource (Li) to make you feel better. Compliance cars like the old gas Prius do a better job of reducing emissions. There are plenty of heavy metals in every single class of PV. It is just that they don't appear in the name of the class of PV. You do realize there are things in a PV panel that don't appear in the name of the panel right? As for the energy density

          • The TFA suggests that Brazil is the nation state version of the dude commenting on Slashdot who won't let us forget that he rides his bicycle and takes the bus or the occasional Uber because he doesn't own a car, he is the only coder who doesn't power his mental concentration with junk food and sugared drinks, despises his coworkers who power their mental concentration with junk food and sugared drinks for being of weak character, and has installed Linux on his grandmother's computer.

          • Solar panels make fuel do they?

            Solar panels can make fuel, and one name I've seen use for this is "e-fuel". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            Both are terrible compared to nuclear though.

            Nuclear power plants make fuel? Well, they can. One difference with nuclear fission over most other energy sources is that it can produce high temperature heat, heat that is useful for synthesizing fuels. Concentrated solar thermal can produce heat, that's kind of in the definition, but not at the temperatures that nuclear fission can reach. For processes like synthesizing ammonia solar therma

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sfcat ( 872532 )
              Can't make e-fuels with renewables. Its been tried. It wasn't even close. Even corn biofuels which are actively harmful to the environment are better.
          • The emissions are counted. EROEI is above 1.

      • Sugar cane does contain more energy than corn but it is still a terrible use of land, water, and sunlight. Consider just how much land would be used when sugar cane produces power at a rate of about 1.5 watts per square meter.
        http://www.withouthotair.com/c... [withouthotair.com]

        Solar PV produces power more like 22 watts per square meter.
        http://www.withouthotair.com/c... [withouthotair.com]

        That's not exactly an apples to apples comparison as the data shows sugarcane in Brazil vs. solar PV in UK. To even that up the solar PV in Brazil might be m

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          It's worse than that. Sugarcane yields in brazil translate to about 6000 litres of ethanol per hectare [google.com]. For a very efficient hybrid car driving 20k km/yr at 7l/100km (remember that ethanol contains 30% less energy than gasoline, so 7l/100km is very efficient for pure ethanol!), that's 1400l/yr, or about 4 cars powered per hectare. For your average Brazilian car, probably more like 2 cars per hectare.

          The sun shines at 1kW/m2. Accounting for capacity factor (angles, clouds, night, etc) - which for commerci

          • I'd caution against using a hectare with the assumption it would be completely covered in panels. In reality, for reasonable cost, there will be access ways, also bezels. You might want to scale by a factor of around 0.8 to account for that. Also, 28% is a maximum but angle of the sun varies during the day so you have to take that into account too. There are a few other smaller effects such as panel cleanliness and dead panels. However, for sugar cane you also need to take into account losses in the product

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rei ( 128717 )

              I'd caution against using a hectare with the assumption it would be completely covered in panels.

              Did you miss the entire third paragraph?

              Also, 28% is a maximum

              It is not. It is the US average for utliity-scale plants. Or at least was - seems to be higher now [eia.gov].

              so you have to take that into account too

              Again, did you entirely miss my third paragraph where I cut 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude off both utility and home-scale solar production to account for this sort of stuff?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

                Did you miss the entire third paragraph?

                It lacked detail but I take your point.

                In terms of 28% I misunderstood that as efficiency not capacity factor. The most efficient panels are around 22% and I misread it as a claim.that average panel efficiency was 28%. Average USA capacity factor in 2022 was 24% not 28%. Same ballpark as 28%, though.

          • Sorry, you mentioned angles, clouds

        • The sugar cane info is enlightening. TIL. What might be the best way to do fuels is something like Porsche's synthetic gasoline which directly pulls CO2 from the air, so at best it removes carbon, at worst, it is carbon neutral. For energy, there is nothing that beats nuclear. Solar and wind have their place, but next to a hydroelectric plant, nothing beats the energy density of nuclear, especially for base loads.

          Nothing wrong with onshore wind power. It seems to be having first generation issues, wher

      • I am surprised E-85 from sugar cane isn't more prevalent in the US. Sugar cane is easier to grow than corn, and doesn't take food out of peoples' mouths. Yes, E-85 doesn't have as much energy per liter than gasoline, but it is a lot better for the environment.

        It would be nice to have E-100. With newer yeasts which can make 20-25% ABV, distilling that into fuel isn't tough, and ethanol is relatively idiot-resistant. It may not be good for the ground if dumped, but nowhere near as bad as gasoline. E-100

        • Growing sugar cane means that the land cannot be used for food so definitely has the potential to "take food out of people's mouths" just as much as corn.

        • One problem with E-100 ethanol fuel is that it can freeze in fuel tanks. The freezing point of pure ethanol is well below what we would likely see on Earth, with possible exception of Antarctica. The problem is that ethanol fuel is rarely pure ethanol, and I don't mean it contains gasoline, it contains water. Distilling the ethanol into pure water is difficult in the first place, and even if it could be achieved with a process that would keep the fuel affordable the ethanol will take up water from the ai

    • Burning wood is considered to be renewable only if it is done in combination with renewal of the stock. Cutting down the rainforest is not considered to be renewable and raises much environmental concern because of and would even if was replaced due to how unique the Amazonian ecosystems are and how long, even with replanting, they would take to recover even if they could do so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      70% of the power of Brazil comes from hydroelectrics, with the second largest being natural gas with 11%
      "tripling the renewables" would be basically tripling the power generation.

  • My main worry... (Score:3)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @04:33AM (#64030277) Homepage

    ... given that this is Brazil, is that this means "giant dams and biofuels" :

  • While Brazil and friends make a pledge to triple renewable energy production globally we see the USA, UK, and friends pledge to triple nuclear energy production globally.
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]

    In looking for an update on this news I see many media outlets focusing on nuclear fusion as part of this pledge but, and I suspect that the people writing these reports must know this on some level, there's no nuclear fusion energy right now so tripling that isn't all that impressive. Nothing times three i

  • From the article: "Coal makes up just over 1% of Brazil's electricity, according to official statistics."

    Let's give Brazil a round of applause for this bold move

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