The Milken Institute and the Motsepe Foundation have launched the Milken-Motsepe Prize in Green Energy, a $2-million prize competition to reward entrepreneurs and innovators working to address accessibility to green and renewable energy. The winning individual or team will be awarded $1-million, with an additional $1-million to be disbursed throughout the competition as finalists progress and field test ideas.
The Gauteng High Court has reviewed and set aside an Eskom decision to exclude Babcock Ntuthuko Engineering from contracts to maintain and repair of boiler pressure parts and high-pressure pipework across 15 power stations. The contracts are valued at R16.3-billion. The contracts were awarded in October 2021 to Actom and Steinmuller Africa, with Babcock disqualified by Eskom for failing to submit a welding certificate, which the utility described as a “mandatory returnable for evaluation”.
Countries negotiating at the climate summit in Egypt are on track to reject calls for phasing down the use of all fossil fuels, snuffing efforts by India and key developed nations to target oil and gas as well as coal in an overarching deal at COP27.

The Egyptian presidency published the first draft of its so-called “cover decision” and largely kept last year’s pledge made at Glasgow to “accelerate measures towards the phase down of unabated coal power” and phase out fossil fuel subsidies. It also stuck with a commitment to keep global warming to 1.5 ºC. It highlighted that countries are currently falling well short on meeting the climate finance needs of developing countries.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an autonomous specialised agency of the United Nations, has launched a new initiative to help countries understand the role nuclear energy can play in reducing their carbon emissions. The initiative, Atoms4NetZero, was announced by IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi at the COP27 Climate Summit, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. COP27 was the first Climate Summit at which the IAEA had a pavilion, named the Atoms4Climate pavilion. “Nuclear energy …