New Zealand Pummeled by Magnitude 7.8 Quake and Scores of Aftershocks

Just after midnight on Monday, November 14, 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook New Zealand’s South Island. Initial reports indicate that two people were killed in the quake. Hundreds of aftershocks, including several at magnitude 6.0 or higher, have followed, collapsing buildings, knocking out power and telecommunications, as well as damaging roads, railway tracks, water supplies, and sewer systems.

According to the initial reports from local elders in New Zealand and the branch office of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia, none of their members have been injured or killed in the quake. The Witnesses have organized a disaster relief committee based in Christchurch, approximately 91 kilometers (57 mi.) southwest of the quake’s epicenter. Although only minor damage was done to the Witnesses’ homes and places of worship, the relief committee is working to provide for the immediate material and spiritual needs of the victims.

The Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, operating from their world headquarters in New York, is monitoring the situation closely. As needed, they will authorize the disaster relief committee to use funds that have been donated to their global ministry work.

South Africa’s Supermoon – what time to watch it

The moon rises behind Reunion Tower in downtown Dallas, Sunday evening, Nov. 13, 2016.

Today will see the moon appearing 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual, as it comes the closest it has been to earth since 1948.

According to National Geographic, the biggest supermoon in 68 years will be “just 356,508km” from our planet.

The moon will be at its fullest at 15:52 local time.

The best time to see the moon in your city is at moonrise:

• Cape Town – 19:25
• Johannesburg – 18:33
• Durban – 18:26

Tips for taking photos: Don't just take the photo of the moon alone. Take it against an object in your vicinity, for example, a tree, a tower or anything. That way its proximity and size will be enhanced. 

Costa Rica Powers 285 Days of 2015 With 100% Renewable Energy

In March, EcoWatch reported that Costa Rica powered the first 82 days of the year solely with renewable energy. Now that we’re closing in on the end of the year, the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) announced that the country ran entirely on renewables for 285 days between Jan. 1 and Dec. 17.

“We close 2015 with 99 percent clean energy!” ICE wrote on Facebook, saying that “the energy produced … in 2015 reaches 98.95 percent with renewable sources as of December 17.”

“We are closing 2015 with renewable electricity milestones that have put us in the global spotlight,” ICE electricity division chief Luis Pacheco told AFP.

The majority of the country’s energy (75 percent) comes from hydropower, thanks to a vast river system and abundant rainfall, and the rest of its renewables come from geothermal, biomass, wind and solar. Despite a very dry year, ICE said it was ahead of its renewable energy targets and Pacheco predicted that 2016 would be an even better year because a new $2.3 billion hydroelectric plant will be coming online.

The country reportedly wants to move away from its dependency on hydropower, though, and harness more of its electricity needs from geothermal and wind. It plans to retire its heavy fuel oil-powered Moin plant in 2017 and wants to move its transportation sector away from fossil fuels. The country has made all this progress, while reducing overall energy costs, which fell by 12 percent this year and the ICE expects costs to keep falling.

“The government has pledged to build an electric train which will be integrated with public buses,” Gabriel Goldschmidt, regional head of infrastructure for Latin America and Caribbean at the International Finance Corporation, which is part of the World Bank, told the Huffington Post. “There is also a proposal to start replacing oil-powered cars with electric cars as part of a new bill in congress that aims to offer consumer incentives to lower the prices of these cars. This would have multiple benefits including better air quality.”

Costa Rica’s heavy reliance on hydropower has been criticized by some. Gary Wockner of Save the Colorado argues that hydropower is actually “one of the biggest environmental problemsour planet faces” and a “false solution” for addressing climate change.

“Hydropower has been called a ‘methane factory’ and ‘methane bomb’ that is just beginning to rear its ugly head as a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that have so-far been unaccounted for in climate change discussions and analyses,” Wockner said last month.

Still, the country is among the vanguard of nations around the world moving towards a 100 percent renewable energy future. Several countries have hit impressive benchmarks for renewables in just a few short years. And many places have already made the transition to fossil-fuel-free electricity. Samso in Denmark became the world’s first island to go all in on renewables several years ago. Most recently, Uruguay, three U.S. cities—Burlington, Vermont;Aspen, Colorado; and Greensburg, Kansas—along with Kodiak Island, Alaska, have all made the transition.

San Diego, Vancouver, Las Vegas and other major cities around the world have pledged to go 100 percent renewable. Sweden made headlines earlier this year when it pledged to be among the first countries to go fossil free. Hawaii pledged to do so by 2045—the most ambitious standard set by a U.S. state thus far. Several other islands, including Aruba, Belize, St. Lucia, Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and San Andres and Providencia have pledged to go 100 percent renewable, through the Ten Island Challenge, created by Richard Branson’s climate group the Carbon War Room.

Greenpeace and researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley have laid out plans for every state in the U.S. to adopt 100 percent renewables and a Greenpeace report published in September posits the world can achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. Mark Jacobson, one of the researchers from Stanford, said the barriers to 100 percent clean energy are social and political, not technical or economic.

Just last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview that “You could take a corner of Utah or Nevada and power the entire United States with solar power.”

And, it looks as if the Paris climate conference earlier this month helped create market certainty in renewables, as fossil fuel stocks tumbled and renewable energy stocks soared. After the landmark Paris agreement was reached, the coal industry’s European lobbying associationfeared that the deal meant the sector “will be hated and vilified, in the same way that slave traders were once hated and vilified.”

Tesla Gigafactory.

la’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transportation. To achieve that goal, we must produce electric vehicles in sufficient volume to force change in the automobile industry. With a planned production rate of 500,000 cars per year in the latter half of this decade, Tesla alone will require today’s entire worldwide production of lithium ion batteries. The Tesla Gigafactory was born of necessity and will supply enough batteries to support our projected vehicle demand.

Gigafactory construction, on November 4, 2014

Tesla broke ground on the Gigafactory in June 2014 outside Sparks, Nevada, and we expect to begin cell production in 2017. By 2020, the Gigafactory will reach full capacity and produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013.

In cooperation with Panasonic and other strategic partners, the Gigafactory will produce batteries for significantly less cost using economies of scale, innovative manufacturing, reduction of waste, and the simple optimization of locating most manufacturing process under one roof. We expect to drive down the per kilowatt hour (kWh) cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent. The Gigafactory will also be powered by renewable energy sources, with the goal of achieving net zero energy.

The name Gigafactory comes from the factory’s planned annual battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). “Giga” is a unit of measurement that represents “billions”. One GWh is the equivalent of generating (or consuming) one billion watts for one hour—one million times that of one kWh. 

BREAKING: Tesla Model X Signature Series Deliveries Begin!

Originally published on EV Obsession.

The long, long wait is about to be over for the first people who put down $40,000 (years ago) to reserve a Signature Tesla Model X — Tesla’s 100% electric SUV that is quicker than almost every sports car on the road, seats up to 7 people, is approximately twice as efficient as a Toyota Prius, can tow up to 5,000 pounds, and comes with eye-catching and convenient falcon-wing doors.

“Founders Series” Model X deliveries began nearly 3 months ago, but Tesla has been slowly delivering the rest of the small number of Founders Series Model Xs while it carefully checks all of the details of the finished vehicles, watches out for issues it doesn’t want to retain as production ramps up, and also acquires or builds all of the parts for the Signature Model Xs (a few suppliers were having a hard time ramping up, and you just can’t ship an SUV with only 99% of its parts… in most cases).

On Wednesday, someone posted on the Tesla Motors Club forum that, “Two persons with Sig 414 and 508 have their delivery dates 12/28 and 12/21 (pickup at factory) respectively.” It was later in the thread indicated that those were “soft” delivery dates, and were still subject to change. But today at 5:14 am (my time), Signature reservation holder #2, Bonnie Norman, tweeted that her delivery was scheduled for this weekend, meaning that the floodgates are indeed opening!