In the global electrification race China is marching ahead. The US and Europe risk falling behind clinging on to yesterday's technologies.

And we warned them with our new 2025 State of the Climate Report which you can check out here: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf149

The diagnosis The common interpretation of stalled progress is a deficit of discipline. In reality, the core issue is frequently one of cognitive overload. A...

Sustainable cooling is critical for climate change mitigation and energy resilience, potentially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions while addressing rising demand for cooling. Solar refrigeration technologies offer alternatives to electricity-intensive refrigeration systems but remain underutilised in industrial applications where thermal energy is required for many manufacturing processes. Specifically, Vuilleumier refrigerators – heat-driven devices with mechanical simplicity – show unexplored potential when powered by concentrated solar energy, as no existing models integrate a solar concentrator with the refrigeration cycle irreversibilities. Here, we develop an endoreversible thermodynamic model of a solar-driven Vuilleumier refrigerator, coupling optical concentration, absorber design, and regeneration effect. Numerical analysis reveals that the coefficient of performance ( β ) exhibits concentration-dependent thresholds ( ξ > 0.18 at 273 K; ξ > 0.11 at 253 K), with asymptotic plateaus at β ≈ 9 and β ≈ 4 respectively. Normalised sensitivity analysis identifies regenerator effectiveness ( ɛ ) as the dominant parameter (12–16 times more influential), compared with the solar-specific parameters. These results resolve a critical gap in solar-thermal refrigeration by demonstrating that regenerator design – not concentrator scaling – limits maximum coefficient of performance. This work provides a thermodynamic blueprint delineating the fundamental performance boundaries of solar-Vuilleumier technology, governed by irreversibility constraints and asymptotic efficiency limits.

Contrary to some media reports, heat pumps aren’t new tech — they’ve been around for 100+ years! ✅ First built in 1856 by Peter von Rittinger ✅ Zurich City Hall used one from 1938–2001 ✅ UK’s first in 1945 (Norwich) ✅ ~200 million in use worldwide today

The most demanding phases of an academic career are often the most invisible. This truth resonates profoundly during the doctoral journey, yet it persists wi...

The doctoral journey presents a landscape of unspoken challenges that often remain obscured by formal academic structures. What follows are seven hard-won tr...

Heat pumps remain the cheapest way to heat in Germany for 2025. Despite overall increases, heat pumps rise only ~5% and still beat gas, oil, pellets, and district heat on annual costs. Fossil systems are a long-term cost trap. @co2online.bsky.social

The most undervalued competency in academic development is not a methodological technique but a strategic practice: the disciplined art of refusal. Researche...

Real stories of climate action remind us that change is possible, and that we each have a role to play. This week’s newsletter highlights how individuals and communities are reshaping the future of clean energy. Read on Mailchimp: shorturl.at/80vk6 Read on LinkedIn: shorturl.at/aOmil https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/how-a-single-voice-can-start-or-stop

Academia thrives not on consensus, but on disciplined dissent. The unchallenged assumptions that underpin scholarly life do more than shape individual experi...

When I first entered graduate school, I carried the assumption that one must produce a groundbreaking contribution to knowledge—something monumental, field-a...

On 15 August, the first 100-MW CSP project in Qinghai Province—the CTGR Qingyu HVDC Phase II, Lot 3, 100-MW CSP plant—r

Our scholarly discourse increasingly centres on depletion: the scarcity of time, the weight of unrelenting demands, the quiet despair of measuring intellectu...

Parabolic trough-shaped solar reflectors move, while the receiver pipe at the focal point is stationary. Switch to the opposite, and...