More than 100 planned wind farms in 21 states are now stalled indefinitely as the Pentagon delays military reviews once seen as routine.

More than 100 planned wind farms in 21 states are now stalled indefinitely as the Pentagon delays military reviews once seen as routine.

© Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

The economic shock of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sparked calls to abandon fossil fuels faster. But that's the wrong lesson, says Richard Lyon – and Net Zero obsessed Britain will learn this the hard way.

The post Hormuz: The Slow-Motion Crash appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy

Even as Donald Trump boosts coal over clean energy, solar power is hitting new milestones in the US and remains the leading source of new power.

Data released on Wednesday by the global energy thinktank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (Seia) and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy. In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.

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© Photograph: Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.

As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.

© Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Solar generated more U.S. electricity than coal for the first month on record in May 2026, according to new analysis from global energy think tank Ember. Solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity during the month, while coal dropped to 12.2%. That's a dramatic shift in the U.S. power mix. Just five years ago, coal generated 19.7% of U.S. electricity in May, while solar accounted for only 5.4%. U.S. solar generation hit a record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May 2026, up 17% from May 2025 and higher than the previous record set last July. Ember says another record could be broken again this summer. Solar output usually peaks in June or July, but its share of the electricity mix is often highest in spring, when strong sunshine lines up with milder temperatures before summer cooling demand ramps up. May was also the first time solar became the third-largest individual source of electricity in the U.S., behind only natural gas and nuclear. (If solar is included with all other renewables, then they're the second-largest source of electricity as an overall category of electricity.) Meanwhile, coal keeps sliding (and will continue to slide). Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Output rose slightly in May to 43.4 TWh, but it was still 11% lower than May 2025 levels. Even with that small rebound, coal couldn't keep pace with solar's rapid growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fusion power startup Avalanche Energy said its reactor prototype heated a plasma to over 10 million degrees Celsius.

Ambrosia Energy wants to build power plants in less than 12 months while undercutting natural gas. It hopes to build gigawatts' worth by 2030.

The net zero economy is booming, so claims that prosperity depends on oil and gas are bunkum – unless you’re a Reform backer with fossil fuel interests, of course

Really? You want to destroy a million jobs? Vote Reform UK for mass unemployment: is that your pitch? Hammer these questions home whenever you meet a supporter of the party. Or, for that matter, a Conservative, as their party now takes an almost identical line.

The figures are stark. They were compiled not by Just Stop Oil or the Green party, but by that bastion of conservatism, the Confederation of British Industry. They show that the net zero economy now directly employs more than 300,000 full-time workers, while supporting the jobs of 1.1 million. The net zero sector is worth £100bn to the UK already, and is likely to grow by hundreds of billions more. The rest of the green economy directly employs a further 600,000.

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© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

The 700 projects include wind and solar farms, battery storage, gas and hydro plans

More than half the renewable energy projects needed to meet the government’s clean power targets by 2030 are now able to plug into the electricity grid after years of delay, according to the system operator.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso) has offered more than 700 clean energy projects in Great Britain a grid connection date since the start of the year, after a two-year process to unblock a bottleneck that threatened to delay projects into the 2030s.

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

The carmaker will follow Tesla in making components for large batteries used by electric utilities, data centers and other businesses to handle fluctuations in power supply and demand.

The carmaker will follow Tesla in making components for large batteries used by electric utilities, data centers and other businesses to handle fluctuations in power supply and demand.

© Rebecca Cook/Reuters

The scientific community has a plan for achieving fusion power. It involves getting a better understanding of how to control fusion in a tokamak-style reactor using the currently under construction ITER reactor, and then using that knowledge to build DEMO-style plants. But ITER isn't even expected to see hot plasmas until the middle of the 2030s, by which point solar panels will be so cheap that we'll probably all be getting them free in our cereal boxes.

Commonwealth Fusion is a startup that's basically asking "what if we did that, but now?" Its ITER equivalent, a tokamak called SPARC, is over 70 percent complete and is planned to be operating as soon as next year. The company already has a site and customers for the power-generating follow-on, called ARC. Both of those projects are predicated on using high-temperature superconductors to generate an extremely powerful magnetic field that will allow the company to build a smaller reactor, and thus get things done faster.

Years of running plasmas through tokamaks has given us confidence that the basics of these plans are sound. But there are lots of potential devils in the details (otherwise there'd be little need for experimental reactors). So Commonwealth's scientists, in collaboration with the academic community, have recently released five peer-reviewed papers that detail its plans for ARC: what our best models tell us now, and what we'll still need to learn from SPARC to finalize the design of a production fusion plant.

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© Commonwealth Fusion

The ferrite beads developed by Bourns can carry more than 10 A of current with minimal resistance and a wide impedance range.

© ID 20083125 © Sirddeic | Dreamstime.com

A unique version of common nylon fabric delivers stress-driven energy harvesting.

© RMIT University

Power Integrations said its GaN-based auxiliary power supplies bring space and component savings to 800-V DC AI systems.

© ID 67552534 © Vladimir Timofeev | Dreamstime.com

Testing a power supply at different load currents and different input voltages is important, but it only shows part of the truth. A Bode plot can reveal the rest.

© Dreamstime_Butenkow_114132903

Infineon said its new coreless current sensor can handle higher frequencies than traditional Hall-based current sensors.

© Infineon Technologies

You’d be amazed what can be accomplished when you apply advanced electrochemistry and production techniques to biological materials.

© Pennsylvania State University