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Wind power plants: The triumphant advance of renewables can no longer be stopped
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Anton Petrus / Getty Images
The year is almost over, Covid-19 has just stepped up in terms of meanness, the climate summit in Glasgow ended with small progress but an overall unsatisfactory result.
It seems like 2021 will have been a particularly bad year for humanity and planet Earth.
But there was also a whole range of really good news that was almost drowned in all the pandemic desperation, in the campaign riot and social strife.
Here are five of the best developments in science and technology that will have a very positive impact on the future of mankind:
1. Renewable energy
The triumphant advance of renewable energies can no longer be stopped, even if one could get a different impression if one looked at the German election campaign debates. According to the International Energy Agency IEA, around 290 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity from renewable energies were added worldwide in 2021. That was significantly more than in the previous record year 2020, and also significantly more than the IEA itself had predicted. In 2020, according to the IEA, 29 percent of global electricity production came from renewable energies, compared to 27 percent in the previous year.
Overall, renewable capacity grew by eight percent in 2021. In order to achieve the Paris climate targets, however, growth would still have to be twice as large, according to the IEA.
Incidentally, renewables are growing the most in China, but there is also rapid growth elsewhere. The IEA hopes that China could achieve its goal of generating 1,200 gigawatts from just sun and wind as early as 2026 - four years earlier than the Chinese government had planned.
There are already ten countries in the world that cover almost or even all of their electricity needs from renewable energies. Hydropower plays a central role in most of them: Albania, Butane, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Namibia, Nepal, Norway and Paraguay. In addition to hydropower, Iceland generates 30 percent of its electricity from geothermal energy. Costa Rica, with almost 98 percent renewable electricity, has the most colorful energy mix among the front runners: hydropower (68.2 percent), wind power (15.6 percent), geothermal energy (13.2 percent) and solar power (0.66 percent). Kenya and Uruguay also have more than 80 percent renewables. Scotland and Tajikistan manage more than 90 percent.
For countries with fewer opportunities to use hydropower, however, the most important message is: The prices for wind and solar power are still falling exponentially - but the current scarcity of resources could slow this acceleration in the next few years, warns the IEA.
Nevertheless, wind and solar power are the cheapest form of energy generation in large parts of the world.
The IEA expects that 95 percent of additional power generation capacity worldwide will come from renewables by 2026, more than half of that from photovoltaics.
2. Transparent solar modules
One of many examples of how solar power is likely to change the world for the better in the coming years is transparent: research has been going on for years on transparent solar modules that can be installed in buildings like windows or even applied as foils to existing panes, but now the first models are ready for the market. For example, the US company Ubiquitous Energy, a spin-off from the University of Michigan, has equipped a building at the university with a test installation of solar window panes this year. The company isn't the only one building windows that generate electricity. At the same time, research is continuing worldwide into even better materials for transparent solar cells - for example based on silicon nanowires. In the development of better solar modules, the development will also helpwhich is currently also accelerating other areas of science: machine learning. The buildings or greenhouses of the future could in future be completely encased in electricity-generating material.
3. Electromobility
The same applies to (real) electric vehicles as to electricity generated from renewable sources: growth in this area could be significantly faster than the forecasts of the automotive industry so far predicted.
In Norway, more electric vehicles were sold than petrol and diesel combined by 2020.
In Great Britain, e-car sales will probably overtake diesel sales at least significantly in 2022, according to a forecast by the association of automobile manufacturers there.
This growth has again to do with a positive market development: The prices for battery capacity have been falling exponentially for about ten years.
Here, too, there could be resource problems again - at the same time, work is still being carried out on new technologies that allow higher energy density or faster charging.
4. Biotechnology and life sciences
There is also very good news in the fields of biotechnology and life sciences, and indeed too much to list here. Representing many, another example of the growing role of machine learning in research should be mentioned: In July of this year, the Alphabet subsidiary Deepmind made something generally accessible that experts had previously assumed would be many years in the future is likely to lie: A database with so-called structure predictions of almost the entire human proteome, i.e. almost all proteins that occur in the human body. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of protein forms from other model organisms that are frequently used in research, such as mice or fruit flies.Some of the protein forms found in humans, calculated with the help of a learning machine, are more precise, others less. For at least a third, however, the Deepmind developers are very sure that the calculated shape corresponds very precisely to reality. The result and, above all, the publication of the enormous protein database were not only celebrated by company representatives. Edith Heard from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg said, “It will revolutionize our understanding of how life works. The possible uses are only limited by our imagination. "The result and, above all, the publication of the enormous protein database were not only celebrated by company representatives. Edith Heard from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg said, “It will revolutionize our understanding of how life works. The possible uses are only limited by our imagination. "The result and, above all, the publication of the enormous protein database were not only celebrated by company representatives. Edith Heard from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg said, “It will revolutionize our understanding of how life works. The possible uses are only limited by our imagination. "
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[Stöcker, Christian]
We are the experiment
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
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5. mRNA vaccines and drugs
The importance of understanding proteins in the human body - or on the surface of viruses - became apparent with the introduction of mRNA vaccines at the latest
almost too general knowledge. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life, both human and all animals, plants and pathogens. The brand new malaria vaccine, which was classified as effective for the first time this year, is based on the structure of proteins found on the surface of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The vaccine appears to be able to protect infants, at least in part, from malaria infections, and this is very good news because the disease still kills 400,000 people annually, 260,000 of whom are African children under the age of five. In China, malaria has been eradicated since this year, and the World Health Organization declared El Salvador a malaria-free area in 2021. But many African countries in particular are far from conquering the disease.
Biontech this year promised to develop an even more effective vaccine against malaria, again based on mRNA, and Curevac is also researching mRNA vaccines against the disease.
Vaccines and drugs based on this new technology will change medicine dramatically in the years to come.
At Yale University in the USA, for example, a candidate for an mRNA vaccine against Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases was developed this year. Biontech itself is promising mRNA drugs against cancer and vaccines against various infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
And yet another scourge of humanity may soon finally be combated with vaccines, albeit with more conventional methods: the HIV virus, which causes AIDS.