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This artist’s rendering at left suggests a device that its proponents say will, one day, capture CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere, and mitigate the growing threat of climate change.  But let’s think about this for a moment.

The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is fairly consistent from the planet’s surface up to about 60 miles in elevation.

Given that the radius of the Earth is ~4000 miles, and that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 πr3, this means the volume of this section of our atmosphere is 4060 4/3 πr3 – 4000 4/3 πr3, = 2.9 trillion cubic miles.

How many of these devices will be required to make a significant dent in the overall CO2 concentration, given that they need to process almost 3 trillion cubic miles of our atmosphere?  What’s the cost per each one? How will they be powered, given that our grid-mix is largely fossil fuels?  Won’t this only make matters worse?

This is a sad joke, but even sadder, it’s not the only one out there.

Whenever We See an Artist’s Rendering, Rather than a Photograph of a Working Prototype, We Need to Wonder 

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Tolerance

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If I were asked to explain the huge correlation between poorly educated people and Trump supporters, I’d point to the quote from Helen Keller at left.

Tolerance

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SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines

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Weather Guard Lightning Tech

SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines

Allen covers SunZia coming online as America’s largest wind farm, Ørsted’s stance on Chinese turbines, a record floating platform leaving China, Canada’s first offshore wind bidders, and a centuries-old North Sea shipwreck.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTubeLinkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Good Monday everyone.

America just switched on the biggest wind farm it has ever built. Out in New Mexico … a vast field of spinning turbines called SunZia. Enough power for more than a million homes across the Southwest. It is a landmark. It may be the last landmark for some time. After this year … forecasters expect annual onshore wind additions to fall … all the way to twenty thirty. The tax credits that powered the boom … expire this year. Add tariffs … supply troubles … local opposition … and a federal permitting freeze. One developer put it plainly. Capital investments … frozen. Solar is cheaper now. Batteries are faster. And the wind industry did not see the breadth of the campaign against it. So the biggest American wind farm ever … arrives just as the road ahead narrows.

Now … cross the Atlantic to Denmark. Ørsted … the offshore giant half-owned by the Danish state … is being asked a hard question. Will it buy Chinese wind turbines? Its chief executive will not say no. Right now … he says … it is not expected. But they are keeping an eye on it. Analysts call that a wake-up call. Because the Chinese builders offer lower cost … faster delivery … and bigger rotors. And if a European champion turns east for turbines … that is a signal Europe is losing its edge. Not everyone is buying it. Britain has banned Chinese turbines from its offshore projects. The competitiveness fight … is just beginning.

Now set to sail from southern China. The world’s largest tension-leg floating wind platform. Sixteen megawatts. More than three hundred meters tall … and nearly eight thousand tons. It left port headed for the deep sea. And its power will run straight to an offshore oil field … clean wind … feeding fossil-fuel production. China connected more than three-quarters of the world’s new offshore wind last year. As the shallow sites fill up … the industry moves into deeper water. And the deep water … is where floating wind grows up.

Across the Pacific … a brand-new frontier is opening. Canada cleared the first bidders for its very first offshore wind farms. Off the coast of Nova Scotia … seven qualified players … from nine countries. The province dreams big. A megaproject called Wind West … forty gigawatts … far more than the region could ever use itself. The first phase alone … an estimated sixty billion dollars. Enough surplus power to supply a quarter of all Canada’s demand. The formal call for bids comes later this year.

And finally … a story that comes up from the seabed. While surveying the site of a future wind farm in the North Sea … Ørsted found something far older than any turbine. Three lead ingots … resting beside the bones of a wooden shipwreck. Late sixteen-hundreds … maybe early seventeen-hundreds. A Dutch vessel … likely bound for home … lost on the run from England to the Netherlands. Seventy kilograms each … mined, it seems, in the very English hills they will now return to.

And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 28th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines

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Metaphysics

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Here’s a very short video on the subject of metaphysics, the philosophy of being and reality.

It’s a great example of what I mean when I say that it has been a terrible last few centuries for philosophers.

In ancient times, if you wanted to know what the fundamental building blocks of the universe, you asked a philosopher, perhaps the ancient Athenian Democritus, who propounded the theory of the atom, which was, by definition, indivisible.  Now we refer this question to the realm of particle physics.

Far more recently, those who struggled to know the ultimate nature of reality asked a metaphysician.  Now, once again, we’ve put our trust in science.

I hope you’ll check out the video linked above.

Metaphysics

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