China’s aluminum output is still rising. A sectoral CO₂ peak now depends on emissions per tonne falling faster.
Earlier this year I argued that China’s aluminum-sector carbon emissions had probably peaked around 2024. Since then, the output data have weakened one important part of that case. China produced 45.02 million tonnes of primary aluminum in 2025, 2.4% more than the year before, and another 23.19 million tonnes in … [continued]
Ontario should build clean energy and flexibility first, then size new nuclear to the durable gap that remains.
Ontario needs a lot more electricity. Demand hit 145.6 TWh in 2025, up 4.4% in a year, and IESO’s reference case gets to 250 TWh by 2050. But its own range runs from 207 to 297 TWh. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a completely different buildout depending on which … [continued]
By Irene Sans, Yale Climate Connections The Eastern Pacific continues to be very active. This is very typical for this time of year — and especially in seasons like this one, with an El Niño event strengthening — and with record-setting sea-surface temperatures, the activity is not expected to stop … [continued]
China has released a five-year plan dedicated to addressing climate change. The 15th five-year plan for a national response to climate change is the latest in a series to outline in-depth climate and energy targets for the 2026-2030 period. These include five-year plans for “building a Beautiful China”, developing a “new-type … [continued]
Massachusetts pension fund says review findings will inform manager-quality evaluations & selection. The Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board (MassPRIM) has completed a review of how active equity managers assess climate-transition risk in high-emitting portfolio companies and incorporate that analysis into their investment decisions. The fund plans to use the findings in … [continued]
Germany’s 6 GW hydrogen headline shrinks sharply once the reservations and planned network are unpacked.
Germany’s hydrogen industry finally has a demand number it can put in a headline: nearly 6 GW of paid reservations on the country’s emerging hydrogen core network. FNB Gas presented the reservations and customers’ willingness to pay as a strong indication that the hydrogen economy is gathering momentum. Six gigawatts … [continued]
AI has changed the data-center electricity story. Demand is rising much faster than it did through much of the 2000s and 2010s, hyperscale facilities are being proposed and built at extraordinary scale, and utilities in several US regions are confronting loads large enough to affect generation planning, substations, transformers and … [continued]
New nuclear becomes financeable by shifting construction, financing or revenue risk toward governments, state institutions and regulated electricity customers.
Nuclear power works. It produces low-carbon electricity, avoids the health burden of fossil-fuel combustion, provides firm generation and can operate for many decades. My skepticism about building large new nuclear fleets has never depended on pretending otherwise. The more interesting question is why countries that have built nuclear successfully have … [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]
Supercritical CO₂ is genuinely useful in compact, controlled industrial systems, but those successes do not by themselves justify climate-scale carbon pipelines or a broad new thermal-power market.
Supercritical carbon dioxide is genuinely useful stuff. Above roughly 31° Celsius and 73.8 bar, CO₂ enters a state that combines gas-like flow behavior with densities that can become much closer to liquids. Engineers have found good uses for that combination. It can extract caffeine from coffee, separate valuable compounds from … [continued]
