G7 to end coal by 2035

TURIN (Reuters) -Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) wealthy countries reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants by 2035 at the latest, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels.

"We have an agreement to stop using coal in the first half of 2030's... it is an historical agreement," Britain's minister for Energy Security and Net Zero Andrew Bowie told Class CNBC according to a video posted on X.

Italian diplomatic sources said a technical deal had been reached.

The accord will be included in the G7 energy ministers' final communique to be released on Tuesday at the end of a two-day meeting in Turin.

One source told Reuters earlier that diplomats from the G7 nations - Italy, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Japan - discussed the issue until late on Sunday, before the start of the ministerial gathering.

The agreement marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit for a transition away from fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting.

"It helps accelerate the shift of investments from coal to clean technology in particular in Japan and more broadly in the whole Asian coal economy, including China and India," Luca Bergamaschi, co-founding member of Italian climate change think-tank ECCO, said on X.

Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through its six remaining coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028.

In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year.

Last year under Japan's presidency, the G7 had pledged to prioritise concrete steps towards phasing out coal power generation, falling short of indicating a specific deadline.

(Reporting by Francesca Landini; Editing by Gavin Jones, Alvise Armellini, Jan Harvey and Jonathan Oatis)

should you shut down your computer?

Shutting off your computer every night has downsides. If you just put your computer to sleep, everything is right where you left it in the morning. But if you shut down, you need to wait for your computer to boot up and then re-open all of your applications and documents. It’s annoying.

I wanted to get an idea of just how little power so I ran a few simple tests. First, I charged my laptop around 6PM after an afternoon of using it outside. In that time, it was just about fully charged, after which I unplugged it and closed the lid. The charge in my laptop barely went down—only by one percent—and this is on a nearly six year old laptop with a battery that doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. 

I wanted a slightly more precise number, though, so I used a Kill A Watt to measure how much power my laptop uses when asleep. Leaving it plugged in and suspended from 4PM until 7AM the following morning—15 hours—used up 0.02 kWh of energy. That’s not a lot. Here in Portland, Oregon the price per kWh for residential use is 19.45¢, meaning leaving my laptop plugged in overnight cost me a little over one third of a penny. Over the course of an entire year this adds up to $1.42. 

Now, this isn’t to say that you should never shut down. I shut down my laptop if I’m leaving town without it for more than a week. At that point the amount of energy the computer will use, compared to the annoyance of having to start it up again, tips back into being worthwhile for me. Plus, sometimes a sleeping laptop will run out of batteries when left alone that long, which is just plain annoying.

And there’s another reason to shut down, or at least restart, your computer regularly: it can sometimes solve annoying computer problems. The main reason for this is software bugs—over time such issues can fill your device’s memory and generally just cause your computer to become unstable.

-- Justin Pot, Popular Science