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This year’s G-7 Summit takes place in the county of Cornwall, a part of south west England known for its stunning coastline, historic fishing villages and natural beauty.

Not only is Cornwall a popular tourist destination – the county’s beaches are full of vacationers in the summer – it is also becoming a hub for companies working on renewable energy and innovation projects.

A number of these developments have made significant strides this week. On Wednesday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson installed the first solar panels in what has been dubbed the UK’s “first utility-scale energy farm”.

According to the energy company ScottishPower, a subsidiary of the Spanish Iberdrola, 10,000 modules will be installed at the site. The 10-megawatt solar park will complement a 20-MW wind park that is already in operation and a 1-MW battery storage system.

ScottishPower said the energy farm at Carland Cross – which is just a short drive from Carbis Bay, a small coastal town believed to be the epicenter of the G-7 talks – would be able to generate enough energy “to do that The equivalent of 15,000 households. “

While Johnson is keen to be seen as a renewable energy advocate and a priority for sustainability, the fact that he flew to Cornwall instead of using an alternative form of transportation has received harsh criticism from some quarters.

In a response to his critics, widely reported in the UK media, Johnson was quoted as saying, “If you attack my arrival by plane, I respectfully point out that Britain is indeed a leader in developing sustainable aviation fuel and one of the points in the 10-point plan for our green industrial revolution is to achieve ‘Jet Zero’. “

In addition to wind and solar projects, Cornwall is also home to a fledgling geothermal sector. A company called Geothermal Engineering Limited is working on a number of projects including a geothermal swimming pool in the town of Penzance.

The company is also developing the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power Project near the town of Redruth.

The United Downs project, which is focused on the construction of a geothermal power plant, has been developed over the years and focuses on two wells, 5,275 and 2,393 meters (17,306 and 7,851 feet) deep, respectively.

On Monday, a company called Cornish Lithium announced that it had successfully built a geothermal water test site in United Downs. The company’s goal is to test direct lithium extraction technologies in shallow and deep geothermal waters.

In a statement released with the announcement, Jeremy Wrathall, CEO of Cornish Lithium, said that his company’s testing ground in United Downs gave him “an opportunity to demonstrate what modern, low-carbon mineral extraction looks like”. The results, he added, would “feed into the development of a larger pilot plant”.

As electric car sales rise and the world’s hunger for technology grows, materials like lithium will be important in the years to come, a point Cornish Lithium highlights on its website.

“As vital components of electric vehicle batteries and energy storage,” it says, “the potential for metals such as lithium, tin and cobalt to be extracted in Cornwall could be a significant strategic advantage for the UK.”

While Cornwall is home to a number of land energy projects, the nearby waters also offer room for development.

For example, in April it was announced that a research project focused on the potential of tidal, wave and floating wind technology has received support from Marine-i, a program that focuses on innovation in areas such as ocean energy.

The project is based on the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago off the Cornish coast, and is led by Isles of Scilly Community Venture, Planet A Energy and Waves4Power.

According to Marine-i, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the overall objective of the Isles of Scilly project is to “build a new database of data on wave and tidal resources”.

This data will contain information about a number of metrics, including wave height, wind speed, and tidal current speeds.

As homebound Americans waited out the coronavirus pandemic last year, people increasingly turned to animal shelters and adopted dogs and cats as lockdown companions.

Though lockdowns have eased and the country has reopened, adoption rates have largely kept shape, according to Sumit Singh, CEO of Chewy.

“Overall adoptions, we believe, [are] up still year over year by double-digit percentages both across dog and cat,” he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer Thursday.

Additionally, it does not look like pets are being returned to shelters in elevated numbers, said Singh, who appeared for an interview on “Mad Money.” Chewy, a $33 billion online pet food and supply store, last month launched a pet adoption service and is currently working with 6,000 shelters, he noted.

“The pets coming back into the shelters actually matches the rate that we were seeing in 2019, which actually would say that, when you balance out new adoptions and pets coming back, there’s still a whole lot more pets getting adopted right now, which is great for the industry.”

While Singh did not cite any statistics, online searches for pets remain elevated and the pet owner market has expanded greatly, based on research from Piper Sandler. The firm reports that searches for terms like “petfinder” and “puppies for sale” are up on a two-year basis, though it began tapering in April.

The pet products industry made $103.6 billion in sales in 2020, according to the American Pet Products Association. It’s the first time annual sales crossed the $100 billion mark, the trade group announced in March. The association projects that number to grow nearly 6% in 2021, which would exceed the historical average of about 3%.

After the close Thursday, Chewy reported results from its fiscal first quarter that ended May 2. The company’s revenues grew 31.7% to $2.14 billion from $1.62 billion a year ago. Results topped Wall Street’s estimates on the top and bottom lines.

Shares rose 2% during Thursday’s session to close at $79.35. The stock was down more than 1% in after-hour trading.

A sign for the Food and Drug Administration is seen outside of headquarters on July 20, 2020 in White Oak, Maryland.

Sarah Silberner | Getty Images

A third member of a key advisory body to the Food and Drug Administration has resigned over the agency’s controversial decision to approve Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, CNBC has learned.

Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the agency’s decision on Biogen was “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history,” according to his resignation letter received by CNBC.

“At the last minute the agency switched its review to the accelerated approval path based on the questionable premise that the drug’s effect on the amyloid of the brain would likely help patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” he wrote on retiring from the peripheral and central nervous system of the FDA advisory committee.

He was “clear”, he wrote, that the agency “is currently not in a position to adequately integrate the scientific recommendations of the committee into its approval decisions”.

“This will undermine the care of these patients, public trust in the FDA, the pursuit of useful therapeutic innovations, and the affordability of the health system,” he said.

Biogen’s shares rose 38% Monday after the FDA approved the biotech company’s drug, the first drug approved by U.S. regulators to slow cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the first new drug for the disease for nearly two decades.

Biogen’s drug targets a “sticky” compound in the brain known as beta-amyloid that scientists expect to play a role in the devastating disease.

The FDA approved the drug under a program called accelerated approval, typically used for cancer drugs, in the expectation that the drug would slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients. The agency granted approval on condition that Biogen conducts another clinical study.

The agency’s decision differed from the advice of its independent panel of external experts, which unexpectedly refused to approve the drug last fall, citing inconclusive data. At that time, the committee also criticized the agency staff for checking the data too positively.

At least two other members of the FDA panel have resigned due to the agency’s decision on the drug. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. David Knopman, and Washington University neurologist Dr. Joel Perlmutter, have also submitted letters of resignation.

“I was very disappointed with the way the FDA handled the input from the advisory committee,” Knopman told Reuters. “I don’t want to be put in such a position again.”

Federal agencies have come under intense pressure from friends and family members of Alzheimer’s patients to speed up the drug scientifically known as aducanumab, but the road to regulatory approval has been controversial since it showed promise in 2016.

In March 2019, Biogen withdrew from development of the drug after analysis by an independent group found it was unlikely to work. The company then shocked investors a few months later by announcing that it would apply for regulatory approval for the drug after all.

When Biogen filed for approval for the drug in late 2019, its scientists said a new analysis of a larger data set showed that aducanumab “reduces clinical decline in patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.”

Alzheimer’s experts and Wall Street analysts were immediately skeptical, wondering whether the clinical trial data was enough to prove the drug works and whether approval could make it difficult for other companies to enroll patients in their own drug trials.

Some doctors have said they won’t prescribe aducanumab because of the mixed data package that supports the company’s application.

– Reuters contributed to this report.