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Before our towns and homes were lit by electricity, we relied on something called town gas for everything from reading lights to cooking. Eventually, town gas in most places was replaced by natural gas, which burned cleaner. But the switch from town gas to natural gas was not a one to one replacement, and it was not trivial. Because town gas, unlike natural gas, is mostly hydrogen.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and is the energy source powering our sun. The idea of a hydrogen economy has been promoted for decades. So what’s holding us back?
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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We explore two carbon capture technologies that are exploiting natural geologic processes. But the companies working on these solutions are taking those natural processes and speeding them up a bit -- giving mother nature a little extra push in order to try and slow down climate change.
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Not every place has the right geologic settings for long-term carbon storage. But Alaska is one – in fact, Cook Inlet is the best tidewater location for storage on the entire west coast of North America. North Dakota is another. And for North Dakota this isn’t necessarily so much about mitigating climate change, it’s about building a new niche market to offer a service that others are willing to pay them for.
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Like much of rural Alaska, the town of Nome relies heavily on imported fuels for heating and power. The cost of heating oil here is well over $7/gallon. That’s what incentivizes a lot of Alaska communities to pursue new energy technologies, often well before they are part of the mainstream.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive 25 licensing applications in the next five years for a new generation of advanced reactors. But getting any of these designs from the drawing board to reality is going to require overcoming a lot of hurdles and uncertainties. Getting any new technology to market is challenging, but that challenge is even more acute for nuclear because of the complexities and costs that it entails.
In this episode we’ll look at how two U.S. nuclear projects are navigating a complicated government licensing process to develop a first-of-its-kind technology that could make a pretty big difference in our ability to decarbonize our global energy supply.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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Nuclear power is different from other energy sources. When we talk about new nuclear projects, it can still bring up strong and sometimes emotional reactions for people -- more so than with other sources of energy, and those opinions are much more divided across the political spectrum than any other technology.
How did public perception change as nuclear moved from a technology of war to the energy solution of the future? And when it comes to energy technologies, or really any technology, how safe is safe enough?
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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Iceland is a powerhouse when it comes to harnessing the heat and the energy that’s pouring up through the tectonic crack that runs diagonally across the island. Icelanders originally got the idea for geothermal district heating from turn-of-the-century Idaho. But since then, the small nation managed to gather best practices from places like Boise, and then improve on them. And now they have the most concentrated know-how of geothermal energy in the world, and they market and export that expertise globally.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions. -
Iceland is widely regarded as a global leader in clean energy. Not only is their energy sustainable, it’s cheap, too. They have some of the most affordable heat and power in the world. But it was literally one of the poorest countries in Europe two generations ago. So, how did Iceland get here? What would they say are the most important choices and investments they made along the way? They share their secret recipe with us on this episode of Closing the Gap.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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We can start exploring the current energy transition by first stepping back in time to look at the last big one – the one that gave millions of people around the world widespread access to electric power. Rural electrification remains an ongoing process today, particularly in rural and remote areas of the developing world. Getting electricity monumentally changed people’s lives. We'll go back to experience that transformation through the words and voices of those that were part of that struggle in rural Alaska.
Closing the Gap is hosted by Gwen Holdmann and produced by Jennifer Pemberton. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions.
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I'm Gwen Holdmann, an energy researcher in Alaska. This podcast is where I share stories from the people I've met and the places I've visited around the world that are at the leading edge of the global energy transition: Geothermal beaches in Iceland, hydrogen-fueled tiki torches in Hawaii, solar-powered villages above the Arctic Circle, and power plants that are capturing their own greenhouse gas emissions and turning them into stone underground.
