Green Energy

The world needs to move from fossil fuels to renewable ones, but the narrative pushed by powerful financial, political, and environmental institutions — that it’s necessary to massively scale up mining of “transition” or “critical” minerals to achieve this — is false, a new op-ed argues.

Pakistan has experienced one of the world’s fastest expansions of consumer solar in recent years, driven by falling panel prices and high grid electricity costs. Net-metered solar capacity reached 7,319 megawatts by March, according to the government’s latest Economic Survey.

Switzerland is building one of the world’s largest vanadium redox flow battery installations — a giant underground energy storage system designed to help stabilise the renewable electricity grid. But why choose a huge flow battery instead of the lithium-ion systems now dominating global energy storage?

Ireland’s solar capacity passed 3 GW for the first time, Minister Darragh O’Brien announced, spanning rooftop and utility-scale installations. This follows a separate record of 1.3 GW in utility-scale solar generation on the grid, with solar supplying over a third of dispatchable generation at points on Monday. Capacity has grown from just 2 MW a decade ago to over 3,000 MW today; the first grid-scale solar farm connected in April 2022.

Main link requires registration. An archived copy of the article should eventually show up here but will likely not include videos.

Access options: * gift link — requires one-time registration * archive.today

The bipartisan bill approved by the state legislature on Tuesday now goes to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has until Sept. 30 to sign it into law. Newsom hasn’t taken a position on the legislation and his office declined to comment. If he does enact the bill, California will become the ninth state to legalize plug-in solar since 2025.

Ramón Mendez Galain is the man most responsible for Uruguay being the first country to consistently utilize over 90% renewable energy. He discusses how he ended up in that roll, the choices he made to succeed, and his determination to bring the same success to other nations, all a part of the interview with David Roberts on Volts.

The New York Times now requires registration to access gift links. An archived copy should eventually show up here

The main bottleneck in expanding the country’s power supply is not generating electricity, but connecting new power plants, especially from renewable sources, to the grid. Known as generator interconnection, this process has become increasingly slow and expensive.

Solar PV installations hit record levels in 2025. Again. But that growth is now at risk of stalling. So how can that possibly be, and what are governments and commerce doing about it?

Surge in proposals follows Labour’s lifting of de facto ban, with about 45 plans submitted in the year to March

The UK is pioneering the use of “super batteries” that can store energy for long periods, smoothing the output from wind and solar power as the country moves towards net-zero.

Is this beautiful enough to be worthy of c/dataisbeautiful?

It’s only the third such project to hook up to the U.S. grid. It comes as surging electricity demand drives interest in the source of around-the-clock clean power.

Chinese companies obscured origins by using facilities in Indonesia and Africa to stay ahead of Trump’s tariffs and continue supplying solar panels to the US.

“The decision does not apply to inverters that have already been acquired or installed, nor does it prevent “retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously” through the FCC, but to new devices that have not yet been certified by the FCC.”

Building trades spent the past five years preparing for an offshore wind boom that went bust. Now, U.S. workers mourn the well-paying careers they don’t see coming back.

Shell is selling wind and solar farms built with government support to TotalEnergies and KKR, turning its back on green energy.

The VB1F project, carried out by a consortium of four partners, including Voodin Blade Technology, has been awarded a €48.18 million grant under the Innovation Fund to build the world’s first commercial manufacturing facility in Spain for fully recyclable wooden wind turbine blades.

“You can see it from space” is less impressive now that everyone has satellite maps, but Utah’s new solar farm the kind of massive that would have previously garnered such praise. Among the largest solar parks in North America, it features a million panels that generate a total of 400 megawatts, and 400 megawatts-hours of battery storage. It’s expected to be fully online and connected to the grid in 2027.

Gift links to Financial Times articles like this one often have a view count limit. If it has run out, you can check archive.today for a copy or use the app version of the site. Be aware that archive.today sometimes modifies archived pages, and generally fails to archive complex multimedia content.

Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election.

I somewhat recently connected Emporia Vue’s ’net production/consumption’ metric to my OpenEVSE so I can make use of the ‘eco divert’ feature that only charges from excess solar production. Since my utility charges for transmission of net-metered power, this leads to some savings. When we have cooler summer weather it shows up very nicely on the graph.

Big Tech is moving towards fossil fuels, coincidentally this is happening after the hopped on the Trump-Train, $$$ are calling ;)

The thing about this stuff is that it has given California the nation’s lowest wholesale electricity prices. The high retail cost of electricity is largely about utility profits and wildfire liability.

Timing of Devon switchoff ‘could not be worse’, says board, as members face an estimated £2m in lost revenue

Small, “balcony solar” units hold particular appeal for renters who cannot install rooftop panels and could take portable units with them should they move.

Sodium-ion batteries promise cheaper, more durable energy storage. Peak Energy seeks to kick-start the next-gen battery market by building the first big U.S. plant.

Just a good explanation I came across. Hopefully not AI generated.

Electricity generation, which reached about 45 terawatt-hours in 2010, tumbled to under 20TWh by 2015 and did not recover. Now, the new post-Assad government is hurrying to restore gas supplies and repair dams and power stations, but this is a lengthy job. Solar power is crucial to filling the gap. It could do even more.

The bribe from the fossil fuels industry probably has a lot to do with it.

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources has just awarded 10 grants to nonprofit organizations in the state for more rooftop solar power deployment. This is the third round of grants from the department’s Low-Income Services Solar Program (LISSP).