Miami Living Magazine

Climate Hope

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Following a decade-long fanfare of private and government pledges to combat the warming of the planet, the recent United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow painted a grim picture of the world’s climate progress. The takeaway: the world is on course to overshoot the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords in all but the most optimistic scenario, which would require all announced targets to be fully implemented. That scenario, however, seems distant today as the pivot to a sustainable energy market is unevenly distributed across the globe, with many fossil fuel dependent countries still struggling to close the energy gap as demand for power increases. What is worse, while some countries have improved their ambitions, others slipped backward at COP26 by retracting set climate targets. Since our only hope is a massive scale up of renewable energy, our best bet is the large scale projects underway that could tip the scales domestically while compensating for shortcomings in other countries. The good news is that such ambitious clean energy projects — some large enough to power millions of homes — are multiplying not only in Europe but also in Asia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. From wind and solar to tidal and thermal power, here are six of the largest renewable energy projects in the global pipeline. Started in 2015, China’s Wudongde hydropower plant finally began operations in July this year. The $18.6 billion project — built near the provincial border of Yunnan and Sichuan on the Jinsha River in the southwest of the country — has 10.2 gigawatts of installed capacity and is a key component in China’s quest to reach net-zero by 2060. According to the constructors, the dam will offset the use of 12.2 million tons of coal and reduce CO2 emissions by 30.5 million tons per year. The massive dam, topping out at 240 meters, has also been labeled one of the smartest in the world. The foundation was constructed with low heat cement, where pipes in the concrete detect the temperature and adjust the flow of water automatically to cool the concrete and avoid cracking.

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