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Hello Henry,

Thanks a lot for your question. That’s indeed a very interesting and relevant theme.

Carbon Brief has mapped the world’s coal power plants and provides a timeline of operating capacity over time (Global Coal Power, CarbonBrief 2020). Still, there’s not yet a comprehensive mapping of the uses given to decommissioned coal plants.

Retrofit with carbon capture technologies (such as CCUS) and repurposing through a combination of energy efficiency and increased flexibility to enable low-carbon energy production through other generation technologies are some of the alternatives for the future of coal-fired plants (World Energy Outlook 2019). Moreover, other repurpose options are observed, such as wind farms, data centers, solar plants, and energy storage (Today in Energy, EIA 2019; IEEFA update, 2019). An interesting article from IEEFA discusses that repurposing coal-fired plants could reduce the cost of building new renewable capacity (Repurposing coal plants, IEEFA 2020).

Finally, it might be helpful to consider Germany since they plan to phase out their coal plants by 2038. They’ve been looking at repurposing the current assets into thermal energy storage, just like the one you provided as an example. By the way, Chile is also following this example (Repurposing of existing coal-fired power plants into thermal storage plants, 2020). I hope this information is helpful! Cheers, Fabiola

Thank you Fabiola Rezende and Venkatesh Kini for your fast and thoughtful responses. This is a great start. We operate a global second hand car trading platform and are in the very early stages of exploring how to apply a GHG lens to our business. On the one hand, our platforms extend lives of vehicles which reduces impact of demand for new. On the other, I worry we extend the lives of cars that are near end of life, and keep cars with poor GHG footprints on the road longer than necessary. We believe the starting point will be the data itself, in helping us figure out methods for being smart about both alerting buyers about the footprint of the cars they might buy, as well as potentially intervening when we see a car that shouldn't be on the road any longer, and find an incentive to the seller to take it off the road. Early days. I have a hunch we could benefit from an expert consultant in this domain who can accelerate our thinking here. Welcome ideas and encouragement.

Gente estou feliz de fazer parte de um grupo assim ,tenho um projeto que acredito que vai dá certo , que engloba sustentabilidade e combate a fome .gostaria da ajuda de vocês .

Hi Albert, if you are trying to encourage NGOs to automate their processes, you may not need much funding, because there are many off the shelf platforms available. Many of them offer free versions for small customers, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Try docusign for paperless contracts, eventleaf for creating events, and many more. The biggest impact you can make is by reducing travel, and that happens by replacing in person meetings with zoom video conferences.

There is no one method that works for all circumstances. Some people swear by the concept of seedballs, others recommend the Miyawaki forest method, and there are some that prefer to let nature rewild itself with minimal human intervention. A lot depends on the space being reforested, whether it is an urban land island or adjacent to a thriving forest. Ultimately, the most important factors to consider are - do you have local community support, can you protect saplings from grazing animals till they can fend for themselves, and do you need to provide water and nutrients if the soil and rainfall conditions are not conducive.