EnviroPolitics Blog

As Seaweed Piles Up, Caribbean Bets On Boats, Barriers And Biofuel

MEXICO CITY, July 31 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Mexican hotel workers, tractor operators and specialized Navy personnel are heading out to the beach each day at dawn to clean record masses of rotting sargassum seaweed off pristine Caribbean coastlines around popular tourist resorts.

The seasonal phenomenon has caused hotels across the Caribbean to cut rates and invest millions of dollars in clearing up piles of the foul-smelling algae from their beaches, while governments and businesses look for solutio

Sargassum – a brown seaweed that forms floating mats on the ocean surface – was historically confined to the so-called Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic, but unusually strong winds around 2010 blew sargassum into nutrient-rich tropical waters off West Africa, where it found ideal growing conditions.

The displaced seaweed turned into a self-sustaining belt that rides on ocean currents to northern Brazil and through the Caribbean, bringing masses of algae onto Caribbean island nations, the popular Riviera Maya and into the Gulf of Mexico.

In the tropical Atlantic, sargassum feeds on nutrients running in from major rivers such as the Amazon, Orinoco and Congo rivers, as well as upswells from the deep ocean, Saharan dust and warming sea temperatures.

WHERE IT’S GOING

The University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab expects 2026 to be at least the second-largest year for sargassum abundance, with more seaweed likely to heap up around the Caribbean and southeastern Florida in coming months.

Brian Barnes, research assistant professor at the university’s College of Marine Science, who works in the lab, told Reuters the novelty of the phenomenon and its seasonality makes predicting its future course challenging.

“Before 2010 there’s nothing, and since then we’ve gone to up to 1 million metric tons over the entire area in 2011 to 40 million last year,” he said, suggesting the seaweed could be doubling in mass every five years.

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Battery storage, not rooftop solar, becomes the battleground for corporate competitiveness

Berde Renewables handout photo

By Raine Musñgi, ABS-CBN News

MANILA — The next corporate energy race has already begun, and it isn’t about solar panels.

Philippine businesses have spent the past decade installing rooftop solar to rein in some of Southeast Asia’s highest electricity costs. Now, industry leaders say the next competitive advantage is no longer generating electricity.

It’s storing it.

As battery prices continue to fall and technology rapidly improves, Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are emerging as the next frontier in corporate energy strategy.

The shift comes as the Philippines works toward raising renewable energy’s share in the power generation mix to 35 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040, targets set by the Department of Energy that will require significantly more energy storage to support the growing use of solar and wind power.

Globally, the International Energy Agency identifies battery storage as one of the fastest-growing clean energy technologies as costs continue to decline and renewable generation expands.

“The biggest challenge for renewables over the past decade has actually been its intermittency,” Berde Renewables Group Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Morris Zhou said on ANC’s Business Outlook.

“When the sun shines, that’s great. When there’s a cloud, when there’s a typhoon, when it’s cloudy for a few days, you don’t get the power.

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Rethinking how wind energy turbines are made

PHOTO/Shutterstock

By Nate Williams, Slashgear

For years now, the U.S. Department of Energy has had one major roadblock to the streamlining of wind turbine installation: the sheer amount of work it takes to manufacture blades. Thanks to 3D printing, the DOE has a new approach that could dramatically change how quickly these lightweight blades are designed and built.

Rather than relying exclusively on the traditional process of creating a full-scale plug before manufacturing a blade mold, researchers are finding ways to use large 3D-printed molds to make manufacturing faster, more affordable, and more flexible in designing future blades. The best wind turbine blade design is currently the three-bladed horizontal-axis rotor, but that could change if experimental blades were more accessible.

This 3D printing effort is currently moving in various different directions, including the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office and Advanced Manufacturing Office alongside national laboratories and various private-sector partners. Wind energy already supplies more than 10% of U.S. electricity and generates enough power for tens of millions of American homes. With these advances, the DOE could take the nation’s renewable energy infrastructure to new heights, and the U.S. is also home to many large wind turbine manufacturers.

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Dozens of abandoned box turtles discovered in New Jersey

Dozens of abandoned box turtles discovered in NJ

CRANFORD, N.J. (PIX11) — A summer stroll along the Rahway River became an ongoing wildlife rescue operation after more than 150 box turtles were discovered abandoned along the riverbank in Cranford, NJ.

New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection believes someone illegally dumped the turtles along the river on Wednesday. Crews say there are Eastern box turtles, which are native to New Jersey, and Three-toed box turtles, a species not native to the state.

Through the efforts of local residents, animal control officers, firefighters and law enforcement, nearly 100 turtles have already been recovered.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Fish and Wildlife division is leading the investigation, assisted by local animal control officers and the Cranford Fire Department.

One local teenager has been helping rescue the stranded turtles, carefully collecting them and bringing them to the Cranford Fire Department, where officials have established a collection point for recovered animals.

Wildlife experts say box turtles are primarily land animals, not aquatic turtles

“I thought it was really sad,” said Cranford resident Alexandra Augenzucker, who learned about the rescue effort through social media.

“You can’t just dump them in the ponds here. If you get here first thing in the morning, they’ll be out there sunning themselves. It’s one of the cool things about living in the Venice of New Jersey.”

Animal rescue organizations are now caring for the recovered turtles.

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Scope of attacks on U.S. water supply widens. Iran suspected as culprit

Michigan officials said some of their water systems had been affected but continued to operate safely. Credit:Erin Kirkland (NYTimes)

By Dustin Volz and Ernesto Londoño, The New York Times

Aug. 1, 2026, 10:46 a.m. ET

The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.

While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.

The attack has little precedent, experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of Americans.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined that Iran was responsible for the attack and that the investigation was still preliminary. But they said Iran had stepped up cyberattacks since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the country five months ago, and had previously targeted similar water systems and other critical infrastructure in the U.S. There seemed no financial motive, making a criminal attack less likely.

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Biggest battery east of the Mississippi will help power AI complex

2 Aerial shot of warehouses

Outside Columbus, a host of data centers has transformed the Ohio countryside in just a few years. Soon, Eolian’s massive battery will deliver power in the midst of the AI hub. (Eolian)

By Julian Spector, Canary Media

Just northeast of Columbus, Ohio, the leafy Main Street of New Albany gives way to lush green fields and agrarian ponds — but soon the countryside transitions into mile after mile of enormous white boxes that emit a low hum. This patch of former farmland has become one of the densest clusters of AI computing in the nation, recently joined by Intel, which is constructing a $28 billion computer-chip factory at the northern end of the industrial bloc.

All of this requires a tremendous amount of electricity, but the area falls within the multistate market managed by PJM Interconnection, which has consistently struggled to bring new power plants online even as demand booms. The resulting power price spike has drawn the ire of both Republican and Democratic governors, who are demanding that PJM and tech giants figure out how to stop data centers from driving up costs for everybody around them. No less than the White House is pushing AI companies to “build, bring, or buy new power supply.”

A huge battery that just began construction in the heart of the New Albany computing cluster could model a way to accomplish that task.