Crypto News: Island climate tech

Today's newsletter looks at some of the progress Singapore has made in deploying technologies that will prove crucial for any island country's survival in the 21st century. You can read the full story on Bloomberg.com.

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By Sheryl Lee and Akshat Rathi

Singapore has gone from a mudflat swamp with fishing villages to an island metropolis boasting one of the world's highest incomes and population densities—in a little more than 150 years. It's going to have to go through a different kind of transformation in less than 30 years, if it's to meet its newly set goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

The formula to reach net-zero requires a country to move to carbon-free energy sources and capture any residual emissions that it cannot fully mitigate. But building renewables like solar and wind requires a lot of land, one thing Singapore doesn't have. That's why the country has floated the idea of importing renewable energy from other nations (even as far as Australia) through long undersea cables. But the high cost and technical hurdles behind such ideas means they have yet to fully come to fruition. The watchdog Climate Action Tracker currently rates the island country's climate plan "critically insufficient."

While Singapore's gameplan has its critics, it's made progress in several pockets that many small-island countries can learn from. Singapore has deployed and scaled up some of the technologies that will prove crucial for any island country's survival in the 21st century. Last month, we got to tour a number of them.

District cooling

Five floors below the luxury shops at Marina Bay Sands, SP Group runs a giant cooler. It provides cooling to dozens of skyscrapers and developments in the vicinity, saving a huge amount of premium space in each building that would otherwise be taken by air conditioning equipment.

Below Singapore's financial district, a thermal storage tank feeds the world's biggest underground cooling system. Photographer: Wei Leng Tay/Bloomberg

Crucially, the bigger a cooling network, the more energy efficient it can be. In one test, when SP Group connected an existing building with its own cooling system, its energy use dropped 40%, said Foo Yang Kwang, SP Group's chief engineer of sustainable energy solutions.

The plant can also act like a huge ice battery. During off-peak hours, such as at night, the plant has vast stores of water that can be cooled to near freezing temperatures. Then in the day, it can tamp down electricity consumption by using the freezing waters to supply the cooling network.

Offshore solar

As solar panels have become cheaper, they are finding use in all sorts of places. One promising application is to put them on top of bodies of water, which brings multiple advantages. Covering a reservoir reduces evaporation, while sitting atop water keeps panels cool and increases how much energy they can produce.

Singapore is also building floating solar on lakes and even its coast line. While an offshore solar farm could experience waves large enough to cause panels to break, that did not stop EDP Renewables APAC from investing in the idea. The company owns a 5-hectare floating solar farm in Johor Strait on the northern shore of Singapore where water disturbance is manageable.

A floating solar photovoltaic power plant in Singapore. Photographer: Bryan van der Beek/Bloomberg

Built during the pandemic, the 5-megawatt peak solar plant makes use of plastic pontoons filled with air to hold the solar panels in place. However, the system is flexible enough that waves up to 2 meters simply pass through. The plant, which cost more than S$7.5 million ($5.6 million), is more expensive than what could be built on land elsewhere, but in Singapore there's just not enough land to spare.

Water desalination

Singapore used to get most of its water from Malaysia, but that dependency is now down to only about half of its needed supply. The rest is made up using rainwater, recycling waste water, and making seawater drinkable. That last solution is hugely energy intensive, taking up 3.5 kWh of electricity for every 1,000 liters or about three times as much as would be needed to purify rainwater.

"With climate change, heat and water stresses are very real" especially for a tropical island, said Melissa Low, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore's Center for Nature-based Climate Solutions. "Some energy-intensive technologies, like desalination, are crucial for Singapore, so we have to make them more energy efficient."

The Keppel Marina East Desalination Plant in Singapore. Photographer: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg

Public Utilities Board, which is responsible for Singapore's water management, has a long-term goal of reducing the energy use of water desalination to 1 kWh per 1,000 liters. That's going to require using technologies still in their infancy. In a positive sign for feasibility, PUB says it has run a pilot plant that cuts energy-use of desalination down to 1.65 kWh, which is less than half the average of current technology.

"As a small, low-lying island, Singapore has its own unique circumstances and its decarbonization trajectory has to be different from other countries," Low said. "Climate change is an existential issue for Singapore so we're looking into as many solutions as we can."

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2,000

This is how many tons of ash and non-incinerable waste is sent to Singapore's only landfill site each day. The country is studying ways to remove and reuse incinerated waste ash to handle the rising volumes.

"We've always believed in the possibilities Sun Cable presents in exporting our boundless sunshine, and what it could mean for Australia."

Mike Cannon-Brookes

Australian billionaire

Cannon-Brookes acquired the assets of the Sun Cable project earlier this year, reviving a stalled A$30 billion plan to export solar power from Australia to Singapore.

By Brian K. Sullivan

Phoenix ended its run of 110F degrees or hotter days at 31 when readings peaked at 108F on Monday, the National Weather Service said. The record streak began on June 30 and the warmest days recorded during the run were 119 on July 20 and 25.

The average monthly temperature was 102.7F — making July the hottest month on record in Phoenix, according to the weather service. The previous high was 99.1F set in August 2020.

The average high temperature for the month was 114.7F and the average low was 90.8F.

Phoenix firefighters check the vital signs of a resident called for help at a laundromat during a heat wave in Phoenix on July 20. Photographer: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg

Daily high temperatures are forecast to hit 110 again on Thursday and then possibly get as high as 115 on Saturday, the weather service said. So, the respite, if it can be called that, will be brief.

Elsewhere, coastal flooding is possible in eastern Massachusetts, southern Long Island and Connecticut, as well as New Jersey and Delaware. The Moon hits its full phase Tuesday, which means higher-than-normal tides called king tides, will occur along the coastline. As sea levels rise due to climate change these high-tide flooding events are 300% to 900% more likely in many locations along the US coasts than they were 50 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Beyond US shores, Typhoon Khanun is forecast to meander around Japan's smaller islands including Okinawa through at least the weekend. While the storm may avoid a direct hit, it will certainly bring heavy rain to the area. In some places as much as 1 to 2 feet of rain, Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections, wrote in an analysis.

In addition, the typhoon is very large — hurricane-strength winds extend 160 miles, which means it will have the reach to rake the islands even if it misses, Henson wrote. Upper level steering patterns in the atmosphere are expected to break down later this week, meaning Khanun could drift back towards Okinawa for a second round later in the week.

Meanwhile, China continues to recover from Typhoon Doksuri, as the death toll rose to 20 following days of torrential rain.

While it's too soon to determine whether Typhoon Doksuri was made stronger by climate change, higher temperatures are raising the odds of more intense precipitation around the world — and the dangers that come with it. So far this year, rain-induced flooding has hit regions that include India, the Philippines and California and Vermont in the US. Last August, after flooding killed 1,700 and displaced 8 million in Pakistan, researchers at World Weather Attribution were able to calculate that climate change made the rainfall 75% more intense. As temperatures increase, so too does evaporation. That's because warmer air is able to absorb more water. "That means that globally, there's going to be more precipitation," says Anthony J. Broccoli, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Rutgers University.

Residents transport a motorcycle on a boat to avoid floodwaters left by torrential rains of Typhoon Doksuri in the Philippines on July 29. Photographer: Earvin Perias/AFP/Getty Images

Egypt's power grid struggles under 100F. Already mired in its worst economic plight in years, Egypt is now also reckoning with sporadic power cuts in the midst of a sweltering summer.

'Greener' cruises risk shorter term climate damage. In an effort to make travel greener, some operators are replacing oil-based fuel with LNG to run their ships. The change, however, may include methane leaks.

Seabed mining hits a roadblock. A meeting of the UN-affiliated agency that regulates deep-sea mining ended with most nations refusing to accept mining applications until regulations exist.