“Spanish and Portuguese mobile and internet users turned to Elon Musk’s Starlink in record numbers on Monday, as a widespread electricity blackout on the Iberian peninsula exposed vulnerabilities in telecoms networks.

Usage of the Starlink satellite communications service rose by 35 per cent above average when telecoms coverage dropped in the two countries, according to data analysed by the Financial Times. Usage was 60 per cent higher in Spain than average on Tuesday, as mobile networks struggled to get back up to speed.”

From Financial Times.

“Pakistan, home to more than 240 million people, is experiencing one of the most rapid solar revolutions on the planet, even as it grapples with poverty and economic instability.

The country has become a huge new market for solar as super-cheap Chinese solar panels flood in. It imported 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, more than double the previous year, making it the world’s third-biggest importer, according to data from the climate think tank Ember.

Pakistan’s story is unique, said Mustafa Amjad, program director at Renewables First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad. Solar has been adopted at mass scale in countries including Vietnam and South Africa, ‘but none have had the speed and scale that Pakistan has had,’ he told CNN.

There’s one particular aspect fascinating experts: The solar boom is a grassroots revolution and almost none of it is in the form of big solar farms. ‘There is no policy push that is driving this; this is essentially people-led and market driven,’ Amjad said.”

From CNN.

“BHP Group’s joint-venture partner Lundin Mining Corp declared that the companies’ Filo del Sol project in South America to be the largest discovery of copper in three decades, based on new drilling and analysis.

The undeveloped mine contains at least 13 million tons of the metal, as well as significant amounts of gold and silver, Lundin said in a statement on Sunday. Drilling is ongoing, and the deposit’s estimated size is increasing, it said.”

From Buenos Aires Times.

“Researchers have developed a process for refining nickel that they say could dramatically cut its carbon footprint, which is currently equivalent to the total emissions of a small country.  Implementing the process on an industrial scale would present some engineering challenges, but the experiment, described in Nature on 30 April, is a first demonstration of principle…

Nickel is a key ingredient in stainless steel, and its use in lithium-ion batteries is predicted to lead to a doubling in global nickel demand by 2040. But it is also one of the dirtiest metals to process. ‘Primary production of nickel is highly carbon-intensive,’ says Manzoor. On average, refining one ton of nickel ore produces around 20 tons of carbon dioxide…

That carbon intensity could grow even higher as more nickel is extracted from laterites, a type of ore that is currently underutilised. That process can release more than 40 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of nickel, in part because it uses carbon-rich coke — a material usually derived from coal — to remove oxygen from the rock via a chemical reduction reaction.

Manzoor and his colleagues suggest an alternative method that extracts the oxygen using hydrogen plasma. They demonstrated this in a small-scale experiment, in which they put ground laterite into a tabletop electric arc furnace. They then injected hydrogen gas and ionized it with an intense electrical current. The hydrogen ions stripped the rock of its oxygen, producing a high-purity mix of nickel and iron, along with magnesium silicates from the rock, which the authors say could be used to make bricks.”

From Nature.