Today I learned – something I had not heard about the forces setting this current massive El Niño cycle in motion – two mirror-image cyclones on either side of the equator, spinning in tandem in such as way as to amplify the winds that bring warm Pacific surface water to the Western Pacific off Peru…
That El Niño event, now emerging, might be more powerful than the largest on record, in 1877, which lead to droughts, heat, crop failures and famine that caused the deaths of 50 million people, 3 percent of the then-population of planet earth.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.
Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.
It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere notoriously hot and sunny. Right?
Well, you would be wrong. The global leader is Hungary, according to a recent report from think tank Ember that pulls from full-year 2024 data and only considers nations that generated over 5 terawatt-hours of solar.
The Central European country got nearly one-quarter of its electricity from solar panels last year, leapfrogging Chile, which had held the top spot since 2021. Hungary’s win is no fluke: From January through October this year, solar grew to account for about one-third of power generated in the nation of 10 million.
It’s quite the shift. Just five years ago, Hungary got only 7% of its power from solar. Ember attributes the rapid growth to robust policies supporting both utility-scale and residential installations.
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By the way, next time you hear someone say “We are too far north for solar to work”, be advised that Hungary is more northerly than large parts of Canada. Other top ten countries for solar, like Germany and the Netherlands, are at the same latitude as Hudson Bay.
Since ending his tenure as Director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office under Joe Biden, Jigar Shah has been producing hands down the most useful and informed energy transition content available.
Shah has pointed out that my state of Michigan has been doing some of the most forward leaning work to harness Data Centers and the AI juggernaut on behalf of clean energy goals, and I’m hoping he’ll consider doing an interview to help support my work in communicating that reality in a political year when everyone seems to have lost their damn minds in a panic about AI and how to deal with it.
I got my “Energy Empire” swag today, little reward for submitting a question to the “Ask Jigar” segment of the Energy Empire podcast. See Below
The U.S. government is swinging behind a fledgling startup’s moonshot bid to dislodge Boeing as America’s only major maker of commercial airliners.
The aircraft that JetZero wants to do it with is no less radical than its ambition. It looks more like a manta ray than the tube-with-wings blueprint that has been the default for over 70 years. If JetZero can cross the line, the blended-wing aircraft would mark the biggest shift in passenger-jetliner design since the supersonic Concorde.
Forget one or two aisles, this one has four and is set to fly about 10,000 feet higher than today’s airliners. Initial designs replace passenger windows with digital screens and, to compensate, a skylight in the ceiling to flood the cabin with natural light. Each seat, the company says, has its own overhead luggage compartment. And each toilet has a dedicated waiting space.
JetZero, based in Long Beach, Calif., last week reached an early deal with the U.S. Export-Import Bank as part of its Make More in America Initiative for as much as $3 billion in loans and guarantees that the company needs to build its first factory. The preliminary agreement is helping JetZero’s chief executive answer a question that has been plaguing him for years: Is this thing even real?
“The question’s a good one…is it real?” Chief Executive Tom O’Leary said in an interview. He is targeting a first prototype flight of the aircraft, known as the Z4, by the end of next year. “How real it is is effectively, ‘Where’s all the money coming from?’ ”
As energy prices continue to rise and power outages become more frequent amid extreme weather events, ComEd customers have a new option to help navigate both problems.
A giant backyard battery.
Base Power, an Austin, Texas-based startup, has made Chicago its second market for an outdoor battery system that promises to lower monthly electricity supply charges while providing up to two days of whole-home backup power during outages.
The 3-year-old energy company is carving out a unique niche with its residential battery power plant, which charges overnight when electricity is cheaper and then discharges back to the grid during peak demand, generating revenue for Base Power and savings for the customer.
“We’re basically making your home run on 4 a.m. power versus 6 p.m. power,” said Zach Dell, 29, co-founder and CEO of Base Power. “We’re time-shifting that electricity to balance the grid out and drive your prices down.”
Following the disruption to global energy markets caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Commission launched the REPowerEU Plan in May 2022. The strategy aims to end the EU’s dependence on imports of Russian energy by reducing energy consumption, expanding the use of renewables and securing energy supplies from alternative sources.
Between 2021 and 2024, the EU reduced its gas demand by approximately 78.5 billion cubic metres (bcm), equivalent to a 20% decline. Renewables and heat pump deployment, combined with gas demand reduction policies, were significant drivers of this decline. Between 2021 and 2024, EU households cut gas consumption by 24%, industry by 20%, commercial and public services by 19%, and electricity and heat generation by 18%.
EU heat pump deployment grew rapidly for much of the past decade, primarily in residential and commercial buildings.1 The EU deployed around 7.6 million heat pumps over 2022–2024. France installed the most, with roughly 2 million units, followed by Italy (1.5 million) and Germany (nearly 1 million).
EU countries installed 146 gigawatts (GW) of solar photovoltaics from 2022 to 2024, led by Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Utility-scale solar makes up 39% of the EU’s cumulative solar capacity, with the rest installed on rooftops, according to SolarPower Europe. EU countries installed more than 43GW of wind capacity from 2022 to 2024, led by Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland.
No one has tried operating a commercial nuclear reactor deep underground—until now. The so-called Gravity Reactor is the creation of Liz Muller and her father, Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley and an inventor. They founded Deep Fission, a three-year-old California startup that has raised around $150 million in the past year, including $40 million last month through an initial public offering, largely to fund the work in Parsons.
Parsons, with a population of 9,600, sits about midway between Kansas City and Tulsa, Okla. Deep Fission drilled a first test hole this spring on 100 acres at a mostly overgrown industrial park dotted with old munitions bunkers just outside town.
Deep Fission’s is using a common, scaled-down, reactor design; its innovation is putting it underground.
The key to the plan is avoiding the need for hulking containment buildings. Instead, the mile-deep hole will provide the necessary pressure, cooling and containment. A single reactor will generate just 15 megawatts, enough to power about 12,000 homes, but Muller envisions an array of 100 or more, providing more than a gigawatt, enough for a data center. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would oversee approval of commercial licensing, needed to sell electricity.
Since the start of the year, four high-speed charging stations have opened in Bentonville, Arkansas, even though the state has been a laggard in transitioning to electric vehicles.
Bentonville, however, is Walmart Inc. country and these are Walmart chargers — three at stores near the company’s headquarters and one at the airport.
In a matter of months, Walmart has become a major player in the burgeoning business of quickly fueling electric vehicles, speeding past Costco as well as more established charging companies with its in-house network of electron pumps. Walmart has hosted chargers from brands like Electrify America since 2018. But now the company is building its own network — and quickly. As of March of last year, every EV station at a Walmart is under the company brand.
While the blitz of infrastructure will fuel in-store sales, it will also redraw the American charging map, making public electrons cheaper and easier to find.
“They’re steamrolling,” said Bill Ferro, cofounder of Paren, a charging consultancy. “It’s the right time to do this and they’ve got the right locations.” Walmart, meanwhile, isn’t alone in its play for EV pilots. If anything, it’s a little late to the game. Target Corp. has 150 high-speed charging stations spread around its US stores, according to Paren, while Costco Wholesale Corp. is selling electrons in 42 of its lots. Home Depot Inc. and Lowe’s Companies Inc. have 101 stations between them.
Shiri Levi-Laor, chief executive officer of Driivz Inc., a consultancy, says adjacent charging generally increases a store’s sales by 5%. By 2030, she estimates one in five fast-charging stations in the US will be in the parking lot of a big-box retailer. —–
More evidence of the transition happening despite furious resistance and sabotage by the administration.
You may have heard of the peculiar quantum effects of superposition and entanglement, which allow mostly very tiny objects to behave very strangely. They could also allow quantum computers to solve problems conventional computers cannot.
One strange feature of the quantum world is what are called “collective effects”. They are what give quantum batteries their unique properties.
Under the right circumstances, the storage units of quantum batteries don’t act individually, but behave collectively. In a counterintuitive twist, this means the units charge faster together than if they were charging alone.
Let’s say your quantum battery has N storage units, and each unit takes one second to charge. Collective effects mean that if all units are charged at once, each unit will take only 1∕√N seconds to charge.
This means that the bigger your quantum battery, the less time it takes to charge. If it doubles in size, charging will take just a little more than half as long.
It is as if each unit somehow knows there are other units around, and their presence makes the unit charge faster. Strange, right?
This is radically different from how conventional batteries work, where bigger batteries typically take longer to charge. That’s why it might take an hour to charge your mobile phone, but your electric car needs all night.
