Vertical’s Farnborough flights demonstrated real engineering progress. Five years after listing, outside capital still funds the path toward certification and an unproven passenger market.
Vertical Aerospace’s July appearance at the Farnborough International Airshow was a real engineering milestone. The company publicly demonstrated piloted transition between vertical and wingborne flight, something a powered-lift aircraft has to do safely and repeatedly before certification can advance. Vertical then flew on successive days in front of a large … [continued]
Cheap electricity cannot solve Europe’s productivity gap by itself, but it can raise energy productivity, support automation and reduce recurring fossil-fuel exposure.
Europe is running out of workers while still debating how long to preserve machines that burn imported fuel. That is an odd starting point for a competitiveness strategy. Europe’s central economic problem is not electricity prices alone. Mario Draghi’s competitiveness diagnosis is broader: weak productivity, fragmented markets, difficulty turning research … [continued]
Electric freight rail is established technology. The unresolved North American question is where electrification pays first, not whether electric traction works.
Direct electric freight rail is not speculative technology. It already operates across enormous railway systems, moves very heavy freight and works in difficult climates. The interesting North American question is therefore not whether electric freight rail can work, but where catenary should go first, where batteries or dual-mode locomotives make … [continued]
IFA Berlin, which stands for “Innovation For All,” is a diverse technology show. There were numerous mobile, entertainment and AI-enabled devices, but there were also a range of clean technology products. On the first day of IFA, I saw several different paths to sustainability. Products from large companies and small … [continued]
Electrolyzer stacks are manufactured, but hydrogen plants are built. Much of the apparent learning challenge—and most of the project cost—lives outside the stack factory.
Hydrogen cost forecasts often borrow one of the clean-energy transition’s most useful empirical tools: the experience curve. If a technology has historically fallen by a given percentage in cost every time cumulative deployment doubles, analysts can estimate how many doublings lie ahead and compound the learning rate into a future … [continued]
Hydrogen’s detour persisted because incumbent assets, skills and institutions had reasons to keep the molecule economy politically viable after the economics weakened.
In 2023, a senior executive responsible for decarbonizing a major transportation company asked me, with some exasperation, what drove the “madness on hydrogen.” Hydrogen proposals kept arriving for applications where the energy balance and economics looked dreadful. That conversation became What Drives This Madness On Hydrogen?, an attempt to explain … [continued]
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane traps heat in the atmosphere more efficiently than CO2, but has a significantly shorter lifespan, fading after just a few decades. Therefore, reducing emissions of methane — a gas primarily produced by agriculture, fossil … [continued]
"Plant-Based Dishes, Raw Food (29103285347)" by Ella Olsson from Stockholm, Sweden is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
One principle of media literacy involves stepping back from a favored topic and doing a deep dive to figure out what motivates our interest in that topic. Known as metacognition, gaining such critical distance asks us to reflect on our self-knowledge and evaluate the sources that contribute to our perspectives. … [continued]
Africa’s solar imports, rooftop imagery and customer-side market channels are beginning to reveal deployment that official capacity statistics miss.
Africa officially added about 4.5 GW of solar in 2025. It also imported about 18.2 GW of solar modules. Those numbers cannot simply be substituted for one another — panels sitting in warehouses or ports are not operating solar systems — but the gap is too large to dismiss as … [continued]
CUTRIC’s institutional conflict is now the core issue: transit agencies should verify independently, while members decide what their participation endorses.
CUTRIC has a credibility problem that extends well beyond its long enthusiasm for hydrogen buses. The underlying issue is whether an organization whose mission includes commercializing technologies should receive a presumption of neutrality when it advises transit agencies on investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars. After reviewing CUTRIC’s strategy, … [continued]
