For much of the climate-policy era, national self-interest and climate action could plausibly point in different directions. A country could let others spend more on emissions reductions while continuing to use familiar coal, oil and gas infrastructure at home. When the low-carbon alternatives were expensive, limited or immature, that could … [continued]
For most of the fossil-fuel era, energy security meant securing a continuous flow of things that disappeared when they were used. Oil arrived in tankers, natural gas crossed pipelines or oceans as LNG, and coal moved by rail and ship. Burn the fuel and another shipment had to follow, which … [continued]
Politics in Germany is turning ugly, as neo-nazi interests like AfD gain traction with voters, especially in parts of the country that were once part of East Germany. AfD and similar political groups are vehemently opposed to all this “green” malarkey. They look askance at electric vehicles and renewable energy, … [continued]
In the summer of 2026, demand for electricity in Texas broke the previous record of 85.5 GW, set three years ago: 45 times. On July 22, 2026, ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, recorded an all time high peak demand of 91.1 GW. On August 20, Houston, Texas experienced its first … [continued]
Farm electrification is several different operating problems sharing one electrical platform. Stationary loads, redesignable services and narrow-window seasonal work require different investment sequences.
Ask whether agriculture can electrify and the conversation usually arrives at the same machine within minutes: the tractor. More specifically, the large diesel tractor working hard through planting, harvest or another narrow seasonal window. It is a legitimate engineering challenge, but it is a poor organizing principle for farm electrification. … [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]
Agrivoltaics works where panels provide useful farm functions such as shade, crop protection or water resilience, not merely where crops survive beside solar.
Agrivoltaics is appealing because it seems to solve two land-use problems at once. Put solar panels and farming on the same land, and the conflict between food and electricity appears to soften. The farm keeps producing, the panels produce power, and the project can be described as more sophisticated than … [continued]
The smarter E Europe 2026 happened this week in Munich, with the lead event of InterSolar Europe co-located with ess Europe, Power2Drive and EM-Power. Regardless of the intended organization of the conference and exhibitions, the lines between them have increasingly blurred, as solar is combined with storage, EV charging and … [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]
ChatGPT generated infographic showing the gap between Africa’s reported solar additions and module imports, where much of the real market may be hiding.
At the start of 2026, I predicted that Africa would surprise a lot of observers with solar deployment this year. That was in my 2026 energy predictions article, and the prediction was not based on one giant solar park, one government announcement, or one development bank programme. It was based … [continued]
