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China electricity output from photovoltaic plants rose 80 per cent in the first quarter after the world’s biggest solar power market increased installed capacity.

Solar power generation rose to 21.4 billion kilowatt-hours in the three months ending 31 March from a year earlier, the National Energy Administration said on Thursday in a statement on its website. China added 7.21 gigawatts of solar power during the period, boosting its total installed capacity to almost 85 gigawatts, the NEA said.

The power-generation increase comes even as more solar plants stand idle because of congested transmission infrastructure. China idled about 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours of solar power in the first quarter, up from 1.9 billion kilowatt-hours a year earlier, according to the NEA data.

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A work crew for the Pittsburgh company Energy Independent Solutions installs solar panels at a community building in Millvale, Pa.

Craig Williams is still mining coal despite tough times for the business. “We’re one of the last industries around and hope to keep it that way,” he says in a breakroom at Consol Energy’s Harvey mine, south of Pittsburgh.

The father of two — speaking in his dusty work jacket and a hard hat with headlamp — says coal is the best way he’s able to support his family. He declines to give his salary, but nationally, coal miners average about $80,000 a year.

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The “reverse climate change machine” is an honorable mention in the Evolo Skyscraper Design Competition.

A one-stop skyscraping shop for urbane living and fighting climate change called the HEAL-BERG is among the selected entries in eVolo’s annual Skyscraper Competition, which invites the world’s designers to “challenge the way we understand vertical architecture.” The mammoth pearlescent structure would simultaneously cool Antarctic ocean water, scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and generate electricity with saltwater and wind turbines, creating what the designers call, a “reverse climate change machine.”

Luca Beltrame and Saba Nabavi Tafreshi created HEAL-BERG as a response to a potential future in which, “climate was changing at a rate exceeding most scientific forecasts; oceans warming, air pollution and climate change were caught in a discernible self-boosting loop. In the speculative world they’ve created, it’s 2039, 21.5 million people are being displaced annually due to climate change and, “the complex patterns representing the world were doomed to collapse.”

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Elon Musk was on stage at the 2017 TED Conference in Vancouver on Friday, and he revealed some of his tunnel work and aspirations, but he also talked about a few ongoing Tesla projects he’s referenced before. The multi-CEO showed a shadowy image that gives us our first look at what his forthcoming electric Semi Truck will look like, and also let drop the suggestion that Tesla will likely announce four new global Gigafactory locations sometime this year.

Elon Musk teased semi-truck at TED talk. pic.twitter.com/sY0w7KSsTx

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a double-armed, laser-guided robot that can basically 3D print a 50-foot-wide house in less than 14 hours with almost no human intervention. The Digital Construction Platform, described today in Science Robotics, consists of a large hydraulic arm mounted on a platform with motorized treads, plus a smaller electric-powered arm for finer movements. The MIT team programmed the solar-powered machine to spray out foam construction material, layer by layer, to form a 12-foot-high, igloo-like structure big enough to house a family. The researchers hope such robots could someday be sent to the moon, Mars or Antarctica to build “print-in-place” habitats from the materials at hand … or at manipulator.

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