cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11079345

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Serbia is pursuing two intertwined energy agendas: reducing its long-standing dependence on Russian gas and building renewable generation capacity capable of eventually replacing coal.

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The rise of Chinese investment in Serbia's renewable energy sector has revived debate over a new form of energy dependency, this time technological and financial. Chinese companies operate in Serbia in several capacities at once: as majority shareholders in project companies, as general contractors under EPC arrangements — engineering, procurement and construction — and as suppliers of wind turbines or solar inverters.

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Several of Serbia's largest wind projects follow a similar pattern. A Western developer — Nordic, Dutch-Belgian or British — advances a project to a mature stage, once permits are secured, land rights obtained and sometimes a state-aid quota won through public auctions, before selling a majority stake, or nearly the entire project, to a Chinese investor or group of investors.

This mechanism has applied to several of the country's largest wind farms. In one of the most documented cases, the project was initially 100% owned by private Serbian investors before being sold to Chinese state-linked entities.

An emblematic case of divestment and political proximity

One of the sellers in that transaction, Mr. Nikola Petrović, had a long-standing personal relationship with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, in office since 2017. Several analysts describe this proximity as a governance issue rather than a mere biographical detail, in a sector where the awarding of projects and public quotas remains sensitive. The account of this transaction must name this link explicitly to grasp its significance.

Mr. Petrović headed Elektromreža Srbije (EMS), Serbia's electricity transmission grid operator, from September 2012 to late 2016. He remained a 50% shareholder in the project company Crni Vrh Power until 2023, before divesting his stake. This trajectory illustrates the overlap observed between past public office, personal networks and stakes in energy project companies in Serbia.

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The technological dimension of the risk [lies in] the nature of the equipment installed. Mr. Stefan Vladisavljev, an analyst at the BFPE foundation (Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence), and Mr. Caspar Hobhouse, an analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies, point specifically to wind turbines that are remotely connected and controllable, as well as solar inverters — equipment whose operation and maintenance underpin a fast-growing global market, as highlighted by a recent study on the global solar operations and maintenance market. Mr. Zhang Chuanwei, president of Chinese turbine manufacturer Mingyang Smart Energy, leads one of the industrial groups whose equipment is installed in several Serbian wind farms.

Several Western countries have already restricted the use of Chinese equipment in their energy infrastructure on security grounds, a precedent that fuels questions over the path Belgrade is following.

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Archived

Yesterday I posted a video about this because I found it fascinating and wanted to share, but it fell short of the rules and I'm not mad at that. But I still think it's valuable enough to be posted, so I have gone for a write-up of the video instead.

So the subject at hand is the evolution of smart toilets and in particular, water-cleansing seats (bidets). I guess the attempt is to reframe how we look at our bathroom habits and that we should factor things in from an environmental perspective. When you consider the ecological savings, particularly regarding water and ancient forests, suddenly the impact of something so central to our lives is staggering. The technology now available actually aligns with building resilient, sustainable systems, which is what we all want.

The current industrial scale of toilet paper production is an actual environmental disaster. In the UK alone, we consume 8.5 billion rolls every single year (averaging around 127 rolls per person, which is more than double the European average). To sustain just the UK's habit, an estimated 7 million trees are felled annually.

Crucially, this wood isn’t just coming from sustainable tree farms. A massive portion of global toilet paper is pulped directly from old-growth boreal forests. These forests are both essential carbon sinks and vital habitats for biodiversity. If you're anything like me, you see this happening in the Amazon in Brazil for cattle farms and it breaks your heart, but this is equally widespread. It happens in the Canadian Boreal forest and worldwide. We are literally shredding ancient, irreplaceable ecosystems just to manufacture single-use dry paper that is flushed away seconds after it touches the skin.

When I watched the bidet video, my initial question was: doesn't that use more water though? It didn't help that I just watched a Mrwhosetheboss video where YouTubers recommended him tech, and he was given a portable travel bidet. He failed with the demonstration, failing to clean chocolate off of a doll's bum. And that's the most common argument against water-cleansing seats, that they waste water. A quick check will easily show you that the numbers completely disprove this, especially when you look at how far the water goes. But preconceptions are going to preconcept.

Here is the actual breakdown of the numbers for those interested:

• Manufacturing one roll of toilet paper requires approximately 140 litres of water, alongside nearly 0.70 kg of wood, and massive amounts of chlorine for bleaching.
• Using a water-cleansing seat uses roughly 0.5 litres per wash.
• A standard UK toilet roll contains about 200 sheets. With the average person using roughly 8 sheets per visit, a single roll lasts for approximately 25 visits.
• In contrast, the 140 litres of water used to manufacture that single roll of paper would power a water-cleansing seat for 280 visits (140 ÷ 0.5).

That means the water required just to make a single roll of dry paper could power a water seat for over 11 times as many bathroom trips. When a household makes the switch, toilet paper consumption typically drops by over 80%. Using water at the point of cleaning drastically reduces our overall global water footprint.

Relying on imported toilet paper (speaking for the UK) makes communities highly vulnerable to supply chain shocks, as we all remember from the pandemic. The empty supermarket shelves were both hilarious and frightening, with people literally fighting over loo roll. But we do have a view of the alternative. In countries where smart toilets are already the default (over 80% adoption in some parts of the world), consumption is so low that paper has mutated into highly compressed, ultra-efficient formats. In Japan, some office buildings even use localised recycling machines that turn shredded waste paper into usable rolls on-site, completely cutting off reliance on industrial pulp imports.

And it's not even just about the environmental benefits. Beyond those, the hardware itself is evolving to democratise health tracking. The newest generation of smart toilets features built-in optical line sensors that scan stool and categorise it using the medical Bristol scale. Others use contact-free optical sensing to analyse urine for hydration and wellness markers. There's even a toilet that lets family know if someone hasn't used the toilet in twelve hours, so you can monitor family from afar. Sorry, I'm a carer, I care about stuff like this.

But I digress. Instead of flushing away health data every day, these new toilets can act as a passive health checkpoint, sending data directly to a local smartphone app.

I say all that to say this: the transition away from toilet paper isn't just about hygiene on its own (shush, I'm paraphrasing the video here). It's a systemic shift away from a highly resource-hungry, chemical-heavy industry. By adopting bidets (sorry, I know it's a disservice to call them bidets), water-cleansing technology, we can drastically reduce the felling of trees, save billions of litres of fresh water, and build locally resilient homes that actively monitor our wellbeing. In my opinion, it's a great example of technology working to reduce our footprint rather than expanding it.

We are pleased to announce that the Animal History article, “Toward an Animated History of Technology,” by Christian Zumbrägel, has won the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) 2026 Tarr Envirotech Article Prize.

Animal History Co-Lead Editor Daniel Vandersommers says of the prize-winning article, “With astute historiographical reflection and a palpable desire to push the history of technology toward new horizons, Christian has fashioned a must-read essay for any scholar or student interested in how animals and technologies have overlapped across the centuries. “Toward an Animated History of Technology” is a timely and lively read with humbling implications, as well as a great introduction to an entire special issue on animals and the history of technology.”

What happens to the history of technology when we take animals seriously as agents rather than as objects of control? Christian Zumbrägel’s compelling essay answers by proposing an “animated history of technology” — one that treats technological change as the product of dynamic interactions among humans, animals, artifacts, and infrastructures.

—2026 Tarr Envirotech Article Prize Committee

https://online.ucpress.edu/ah/article/2/3/5/218429/Toward-an-Animated-History-of-TechnologyA

The vessel is also fitted with two foil-type wind-assist propulsion units supplied by Econowind. The foils are expected to deliver around 10 per cent additional thrust, thereby reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions accordingly, according to Econowind.

10% ain't no joke, that is a lot of energy!

Also see https://oceannews.com/news/energy/baltic-iron-and-baltic-timber-enter-service-with-econowind-ventofoils/

https://windpowernl.com/2026/08/12/econowinds-ventofoils-installed-on-first-of-four-leonhardt-blumberg-cargo-vessels/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion

https://econowind.nl/ventifoil-to-ventofoil-simpler-design-for-more-overall-force/

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10721490

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10703946

A European Union ban on public funding for utility-scale solar inverters from "high-risk" countries is set to shift the ​market towards European suppliers, SMA Solar's chief executive said ‌on Thursday.

The 27-country bloc imposed the ban in May, mainly affecting Chinese-made products, citing fears that internet-connected inverters supplied by what it called "high-risk" countries could ​be used to disrupt Europe's power grid.

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"Roughly a fifth of ​all bigger projects are EU-funded and on those, the ⁠restriction on China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, of course will ​help us," CEO Jürgen Reinert told Reuters, estimating that SMA Solar ​could gain around 10% share in the utility-scale market in Europe.

Chinese manufacturers, led by Huawei and Sungrow, supplied about 70% of Europe’s inverters in recent ​years, leaving the region reliant on foreign equipment for a ​fast-growing share of its electricity supply. Based on current deployment levels, the EU-wide ban ‌would ⁠affect at least 14 gigawatts of new solar capacity, according to Reuters calculations.

"There will be a shift from Chinese players towards European players when it comes to European finance projects, but it will ​still take some ​time," said Reinert, ⁠predicting the situation would become more certain by the start of 2027.

But the German photovoltaic and ​battery storage equipment supplier has already held "lots of ​discussions" with ⁠new customers who previously purchased inverters from Chinese companies, he added.

SMA Solar has reduced its dependence on China, where it currently sources ⁠between ​2% and 4% of components for its ​large-scale inverters, and sees limited risk of supply chain disruptions from potential retaliatory measures, ​Reinert said.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10395497

• Tata Power sees a potential 2-3 GW market for Indian-made solar cells and modules in at least one European country.
• The company has 4.9 GW of integrated cell and module capacity and plans up to 10 GW of upstream ingot and wafer manufacturing.
• Indian supply could help Europe reduce its reliance on China, although diversification through imports is not the same as rebuilding European manufacturing.

Tata Power is preparing to export solar cells and modules to Europe for the first time as procurement rules and energy security concerns encourage developers to seek alternatives to Chinese equipment.

Chief executive Praveer Sinha told reporters during a post-results call that the Indian company had identified a potential opportunity of between 2-3 GW in one European country. He did not name the market or disclose any specific orders.

Tata Power currently has 4.9 GW of integrated cell and module manufacturing capacity. It is also considering up to 10 GW of capacity to manufacture solar ingots and wafers, the upstream materials needed to produce cells.

The proposed exports would represent a significant change from late 2024, when Sinha said output from the company’s new Tamil Nadu factory was committed to the Indian market for the following 12 to 16 months. Since then, India’s manufacturing base has expanded rapidly, creating greater pressure to identify overseas customers.

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Europe offers a large but highly contested market. More than 95% of solar modules installed in the EU are imported, with China accounting for roughly 94% of module and cell supplies in 2023. Low Chinese prices have supported rapid deployment but contributed to factory closures and weak investment in European manufacturing.

The EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act seeks to reduce that exposure by introducing resilience and sustainability criteria into renewable energy auctions. It also sets an ambition for European manufacturing capacity to approach 40% of the bloc’s annual deployment needs by 2030.

Italy provided an early test of the approach in 2025, awarding more than 1.1 GW to 88 solar projects in its first auction restricted to equipment made outside China. The average tariff was €66.38/MWh, around 17% higher than in earlier auctions without sourcing restrictions, according to Reuters.

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Supply chain resilience

Indian manufacturers' equipment can offer buyers an alternative to Chinese final assembly without carrying the full cost of European production. An EU-India trade agreement concluded earlier this year, which reduced tariffs on most goods, could improve that proposition further.

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However, the distinction between assembly location and supply chain origin will matter. Unless suppliers can demonstrate where wafers, polysilicon and other inputs were produced, modules assembled in India may still contain a substantial amount of Chinese material. Tata Power’s planned upstream expansion could therefore prove more strategically important than its existing module capacity.

The development is relevant to the UK even though EU procurement rules do not apply directly. The UK’s Solar Roadmap calls for more resilient, diverse and sustainable supply chains, with particular emphasis on traceability and eliminating forced labour.

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Archived

Her project, the SAGE Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice, is more than 360 entries and 800,000 words, all woven together by Taylor in three tightly bound volumes.

Instead of disposing of this biomass waste, the team processes it into a plastic-like material through an innovative process involving molding and air-drying, resulting in a small, approximately 0.5 cm thick plate with a density of 1.23 g/cm³, comparable to the density of conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs). Using direct ink writing or a standard etching process and manual soldering, the researchers were able to deposit electronic components directly onto the fungal plates.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10061950

Security researchers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) have exposed critical vulnerabilities in Hoymiles solar inverters that allow attackers to remotely control, manipulate, or destroy hundreds of thousands of solar installations across Europe. The Chinese manufacturer holds roughly 20 percent of the European microinverter market, making the security flaw a widespread threat to balcony power plants and small rooftop solar systems.

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During experimental tests, a modified handheld scanner located two dozen foreign inverters and their identification numbers within 20 minutes. In Augsburg, Hunz identified 42 hackable systems within just one hour. The radio signals can travel several hundred meters, making it feasible to mount attack equipment on drones for systematic scanning of residential areas.

Once attackers have the serial numbers, they can switch inverters on or off, alter power limits, and inject malware through an unprotected firmware update command. Tampering with sensitive network parameters or erasing bootloader memory could lead to fires, electrical accidents, or device destruction requiring physical repair.

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The CCC informed Hoymiles [which is headquartered in China] about the vulnerability in February but received no initial response. Only after the German Federal Office for Information Security contacted the Chinese authority CNCERT did Hoymiles react at the end of June. The company announced a security update for mid-October.

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Archived

Thermodynamics has given us the concept of emergent behavior. There are properties that billions of particles possess that thousands do not. As the saying goes, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Nowhere is this more true than in cell-phone radiological detection. The ubiquity and density of many millions of phones would give rise to two-dimensional image tracking, instead of simple zero-dimensional thresholding. And once the real-time geographic background has been recorded, innumerable machine learning and astronomy algorithms could compete for detection supremacy in ways we could not have anticipated two decades ago; this democratizes the stopping of nuclear terrorism and converts the problem into a machine learning competition.

Convincing a society is a slow percolation problem. Years ago, Japan’s MEXT was interested, and Chiyoda Technol Corp was curious. Eventually, SoftBank released a phone with a small dosimeter in it and an app for putting push-pins on map locations. While we researchers were grateful for these increments, we failed to persuade our colleagues on central points: large detection aperture, spectroscopy, ubiquity, real-time reporting, automatic 2D geo-mapping, without human intervention, with server-side algorithmic source detection, are all required components. But so far, the systems that have been built have had only unconnected pieces of that puzzle.

Systems of thousands of nodes have been done as demonstrators. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (the folks who funded the internet, and did much of the early research into satellite navigation, among other things) showed the effectiveness of this approach at first, with 100 detectors, and then 1,000 detectors around the year 2016. By 2018, there was a roll-out to state, local, and federal authorities, but these likely remain in the thousands of nodes. We applaud every baby step, but we wish to be clear that life begins in the tens of millions. Tens of thousands won’t cut it. We will keep insisting after every future radiological crisis that ubiquitous, real-time, internet reporting, gamma-ray spectroscopy, has to be on every smartphone if you want to save the world from nuclear terrorism.

I understand this is potentially dystopian, I get that, but also just focusing on a distributed capacity for Nuclear Radiation Detection that is impossible to completely sabotage and that requires little additional build out and maintenance (since everyone already has a smartphone) could genuinely change how a Nuclear Emergency might unfold. Even if large Nuclear Radiation detection systems were able to get a message out through centralized systems, the ability of individuals to monitor it themselves would decrease panic and uncertainty even if it didn't actually change the message or conclusion being conveyed to the civilian population to flee or take shelter. This also reduces the potential benefit from a bad actor to sabotaging centralized state run emergency responses to a Nuclear radiation emergency since at the very least everyone has a detector to give them some ground truth to the wildly frightening things being said about a force that is mostly invisible to the human eye. Wild fabricated claims using AI generated footage deployed to manipulate and spread panic would be far less effective if people generally knew how to check themselves what the environment was like around them.

Outside the context of disaster, radon buildup in houses is also a thing...

City plans to triple system of underground pipes that distribute chilled river water, reducing need for individual cooling units

I made a post on !gardening@lemmy.world about the different methods I use to automate my plant watering.

It features "solarpunk" ways to achieve that, mostly low-tech that isn't reliant on any electricity or water grid. I want to spread the solarpunk spirit on Lemmy, to safe lots of water, labour and stress.

Check it out if you're interested! :)