5 spunti per approfondire (8/2024)

La rubrica settimanale con i consigli di lettura di RivistaEnergia.it, dall’Europa e dal mondo. Forse non le notizie più eclatanti, ma proprio per questo interessanti da approfondire. Settimana 8/2024

“Packing ever more ions into ever smaller batteries, spangling the landscape with charging stations, lowering the cost to make electric cars and trucks: these are complex, exciting challenges that engineers, regulators and others will probably solve. The tougher problem, the one that may define the limit of the American market for electric vehicles, is much stupider. It is polarisation, the stuff that makes an EV go but in its metaphorical incarnation is cursing not only America’s politics but, increasingly, its culture and marketplace. Three researchers who studied the adoption of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles between 2012 and 2022 discovered that fully half of them went to Americans living in the 10% of counties with the highest proportion of Democratic voters. A third went to just the top 5% of such places. The pattern held even when the researchers controlled for income and population density.”

How to overcome the biggest obstacle to electric vehicles
Articolo – The Economist

“Tajikistan’s existential project to build the colossal 335-meter-high Roghun hydropower dam is proceeding apace, but costs are spiraling, and to a level that is making it hard to see where the government is going to find the funds needed to finish the work. To complicate matters for Dushanbe, this is happening against the backdrop of calls from environmental watchdogs for international development lenders to pause the allocation of any future funds to Tajikistan pending a fresh assessment of the project. The extent of the budget overshoot is striking.”

Tajikistan: Roghun dam budget spiral to make authorities sweat
Articolo – Eurasianet

“Rio Tinto’s board has approved the world’s biggest mining project in west Africa, chief executive Jakob Stausholm said as he outlined the company’s ambition to produce iron ore from the $20bn development as soon as 2025. London-listed Rio Tinto will invest $6.2bn in the mine, rail and port project in the Republic of Guinea, in a partnership with at least seven other companies, including five from China.”

Rio Tinto approves world’s biggest mining project in west Africa
Articolo – Financial Times

“TotalEnergies has again delayed making decisions on 17 newbuild liquefied natural gas carriers needed for its long-delayed Mozambique LNG project amid a recent surge in attacks by Islamist insurgents in Cabo Delgado province where the liquefaction facility will be built.”

TotalEnergies delays decisions on 17 LNG carriers amid surge in Mozambique attacks
Articolo – Upstream

“The energy transition is affected by a‘double geopoliticisation’: global competition for hydrocar-bons has increased, due to the sudden turmoil in the energy markets, whilst the urgency to cleanenergy transition has exacerbated competition for green technological leadership. This article in-vestigates whether the EU has adapted its goals and instruments to these intertwinedgeopoliticisation pressures and, if so, under what conditions has it been able to wield geoeconomicpower. Using Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of power, this article argues that geoeconomic powerpresupposes a shift from diffuse to direct forms of power and theorises the factors that facilitate orconstrain the EU’s ability to exercise this type of power. This articlefinds that the EU has signif-icantly transformed the goals and instruments of its external energy policy. Yet the extent of itsgeoeconomic power depends on a combination of often-overlooked domestic enabling factorsand the external geopolitical environment.”

EU Geoeconomic Power in the Clean Energy Transition
Ricerca – Journal of Common Market Studies

della stessa rubrica

5 spunti per approfondire (7/2024), 16 febbraio
5 spunti per approfondire (6/2024), 9 febbraio
5 spunti per approfondire (5/2024), 2 febbraio