Bloomberg has a crackerjack video production unit. The piece above is a great historical overview of global grid development, and includes a discussion of last year’s Iberian blackout – which have spotlighted a vulnerability of renewables on the grid – the lack of spinning mass to even out fluctuations on the grid. The spotlighted solution includes adding in some equipment to replace that mass – and below, Undecided has a nice discussion of Flywheels – a technology with a long history whose time might have come again.
Below, there are other solutions as well, involving Batteries, which seem to be good for damn near everything.
Offshore wind price didn’t just go down, it “collapsed”.
Offshore wind generating more than gas. Beating new gas, and nuclear on price, putting downward pressure on rates, buffering against Hormuz closure effects.
One negative blowback: In Indonesia, expanded use of biofuels, specifically palm oil, could put additional pressure on forests. Otherwise, big push into renewables, a feared revival of coal seems less and less likely.
The Hormuz crisis has already triggered an electrification drive in south and Southeast Asia as consumers struggle with fuel price spikes and even shortages in some countries. Europe and Asia are accelerating plans to install wind, solar, and battery storage capacity to protect against the highly volatile oil and gas markets in increasingly uncertain geopolitical developments.
Investors overwhelmingly expect financing for renewable energy projects to surge in the wake of the Iran conflict, a new poll by the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF) showed last week.
Investment firms managing a total of around $7.4 trillion (£5.5 trillion) in assets under management completed the UKSIF survey last month, which showed 87% of respondents expect both global and UK-specific investment in renewable energy projects to increase following the war.
The survey also showed 78% of respondents felt global renewable energy investments were now “less risky relative to oil and gas” after the outbreak of the war.
“Despite the narrative that LNG can provide energy security through diversifying supply routes beyond fixed natural gas pipelines, in reality, we’ve seen that this has not been the case with all the cards held by a few LNG suppliers,” says Amy Kong, energy transition researcher from Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA) in a media briefing. “In essence, we’re seeing the same problems with new dealers.”
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Below: Oil/gas veteran Matt Randolph aka “Mr Global” on the current Iran impasse.
Truth generally ages well, and only gets truer with time.
Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” debuted 20 years ago today. It was apparently even more inconvenient than we thought at the time. The fossil fuel barons have since made it clear that they’re willing to lock down the world in a global authoritarian state – if that’s what it takes to maintain revenues and, more importantly, control.
I took my family to see it at a theater about 20 miles away. After it ended, my son, then about 20, mused as to whether we should walk home. I’d been following the science of the greenhouse effect since, well, since I read about the problem in Isaac Asimov’s “Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science”, when I was 10 years old. It came up again in the 70s, when Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 report mentioned it as an emerging issue in 1977.
This Australian’s reply to #Trump‘s rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
“Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker’s stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you.
PBS report from Denmark comes at a time when a Middle Eastern War for Oil has closed off 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supplies, indefinitely. Denmark is uniquely positioned to ride out the storm, and stands as a strong counterfactual to the Trump administration’s rants against clean energy, particularly wind.
The report also touches on another bogus tactic Secretary Chris Wright has used against wind energy – the myth of “national security” concerns related to wind’s radar signature.
The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.
California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”
The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.”
