Heart Aerospace’s X1 represents the less glamorous but more consequential aviation transition: electrifying an existing market rather than inventing a new one.
Heart Aerospace’s X1 demonstrator flew for 27 minutes on August 12 from Plattsburgh International Airport, powered entirely by batteries. The aircraft has a 106-foot wingspan, weighed more than 25,000 pounds at takeoff and drew more than a megawatt at peak. Heart calls it the largest battery-electric aircraft ever flown. The … [continued]
Across 25 assessed power systems, planning, markets and project pipelines are consistently more mature than the delivered portfolios needed to provide dependable flexibility.
Grid flexibility is easy to mistake for a technology market. One jurisdiction announces several gigawatt-hours of batteries, another creates a new ancillary-service product, and a third launches a capacity auction, pumped-hydro program or demand-response target. Those are meaningful signs of activity, but they do not answer the harder question: can … [continued]
Lower Saxony’s decision point is not the next fuel-cell repair. It is whether to recapitalize a dedicated hydrogen system after the evidence has moved.
Lower Saxony’s hydrogen trains will probably not be retired because a politician announces that battery-electric multiple units were the better technology. They will be retired when the bill arrives for extending the life of an underused, specialized hydrogen system and the state has to compare that cost with buying the … [continued]
The home is becoming a grid resource as solar, storage, EV charging and flexible loads replace simple export credits.
BC Hydro’s change to net metering looks, at first glance, like another rooftop solar fight. The old Rate Schedule 1289 is closing to new customers on July 1, 2026, and new self-generation customers will move to Rate Schedule 2289, where excess generation is paid at 10¢/kWh in the billing cycle … [continued]
Shipping’s transition starts by shrinking the fuel pool, then using electrons and scarce liquids only where they fit.
Maritime fuel debates usually start with the wrong object. They look at today’s bunker fuel demand, line up replacement molecules, and ask whether ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, LNG, biofuels, or synthetic fuels can scale far enough to replace it. That sounds like a practical question, but it skips the larger one: … [continued]
The updated aviation fuel-service projection starts from post-COVID recovery, then bends liquid-fuel growth through regional-electric displacement, constrained SAF and demand pressure.
Aviation is one of the harder transition sectors to model well because it invites two bad shortcuts. One is to assume that flying keeps growing as it did in the cheap-kerosene era, with a cleaner molecule somehow dropped into the same demand curve. The other is to assume that decarbonization … [continued]
The core of the Fat Boy bomb, which leveled two square miles of Nagasak, weighed 13.6 pounds. It was about the size of a softball. Photo by Diana Polekhina, Unsplash, cropped.
I am one of those people who hates the word “utilize.” The logic of the English language would seem to be that to utilize something is to alter it to give it utility that it didn’t originally have. One example is to punch holes in the bottom of a bucket … [continued]
CleanTechnica has carried reviews on a number of backup battery systems in the last few years, including Anker Solix, Bluetti, and Jackery. Reading the reviews, I got ever more intrigued by what I found. These are not just batteries, but power stations with charge controller and inverter built in. They … [continued]
Zachary Shahan’s review of the Bluetti Elite 400 battery made me smile, I have to admit. Let me explain. Perhaps you might smile as well. I have been interested in getting a solar power system for a very long time. So long, in fact, that I remember talking about such … [continued]
ChatGPT generated image of a gas turbine assembly facility, illustrating the multi-year manufacturing delays that new gas plants face—delays renewables avoid entirely
In recent remarks, John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, laid out a curious and somewhat baffling narrative: renewables should serve as a transition solution toward expanding natural gas generation. Yes, you read that correctly. After decades of framing gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to a renewable future, the argument … [continued]
