Friday, 11 September 2026

Most of what offshore wind farms do to ocean ecosystem services has never been measured. A 2025 paper puts the share of possible impacts classed as unknown at 86%, Mongabay reported.

Aedan Smith, who leads policy and advocacy in Scotland for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a U.K.-based NGO, calls the contest for the best near-shore sites in the North Sea and elsewhere a "gold rush".

Scotland's Berwick Bank Wind Farm is sized at 307 turbines, enough to supply roughly six million homes when it runs, according to Mongabay.

Consent for Berwick Bank rested on a seabird compensation plan that would pay for habitat protections on land rather than at the turbine sites.

RWE, a German energy company, operates the Sofia Offshore Wind Farm, where recyclable blades are installed on half of the 100 turbines.

The Hydrogen Council tracks nearly 600 low-carbon hydrogen projects, and 90% of them are under construction, Semafor Net Zero reported, citing the council. The tracked projects make hydrogen from renewable energy or from natural gas with carbon capture.

Production capacity now being built exceeds the hydrogen demand that policy currently underwrites, the council's report says.

The report ties that finding to economics: tax credits, clean fuel standards, or other government intervention are needed to make most clean hydrogen competitive with ordinary natural gas.

Solar recycler We Recycle Solar (WRS) has set Q3 2027 as the opening date for a US plant built to pull critical materials out of retired panels, a facility the company describes as the country's first end-to-end operation of its kind, Electrek reported.

The plant is designed to pull out silver, copper, silicon, aluminum, and glass, and WRS says that recovery happens without shipping material abroad for downstream smelting, according to Electrek.

WRS also plans to spend around USD 100 million on four more US facilities within the next four years, Electrek reported.

Across the decommissioning, recycling, and resale work it already runs, WRS puts the count of panels kept out of landfills at more than 1 million.

Nigeria bought about 2.9 million solar panels last year, worth more than 400 billion naira (USD 295 million), with over 70% sourced from China, Climate Home News reported. That volume makes Nigeria the second-largest African importer of Chinese panels after South Africa.

The buying is happening against a failing grid. Nigeria's national transmission system has collapsed about 22 times over the last two years, a record Climate Home News attributes to transmission constraints, gas shortages and ageing infrastructure.

More than 85 million Nigerians, roughly four out of 10, still lack reliable access to grid electricity, according to Nigeria's Rural Electrification Agency.

Mostly small-scale installations have lifted the country's cumulative solar capacity to about 6 GW, according to a report by research provider BloombergNEF.

President Bola Tinubu has framed the import dependence as a manufacturing opportunity. "We are preparing to produce in this country the solar technologies that the entire continent will use," Tinubu told a group of Chinese investors in 2024.