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China has driven the world’s solar energy deployment, adding capacity at such a blistering rate that the nation’s existing and planned wind and solar generation nearly doubles the rest of the world put together. However, China’s deployment of supportive infrastructure for all that new solar has not kept pace, leading to curtailment during peak hours and increased quantities of wasted clean energy. But Beijing is working hard to fix that problem, and a brand new, state-of-the-art thermal solar farm may provide a critical solution.…
For decades, the joke was that nuclear fusion was and would always be 30 years away. But a rapid string of breakthroughs over the last five years, catalyzed by privatization and the pressure as well as the support of the AI boom, has changed the calculus and suddenly brought the technology onto a real and achievable timeline. Nuclear fusion is treated as a ‘holy grail’ of clean energy because, if harnessed in a commercially viable and scalable way, it could provide limitless energy production with zero greenhouse gas emissions and negligible…
The Middle East conflict and the heightened threats to shipping in the Red Sea have prompted China to boost the use of the Arctic to move containers from the Chinese east coast to Europe. The fast-melting Arctic ice offers an alternative shipping route in the summer as the Houthi threats to shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait make cargo operators more cautious in transiting the key chokepoints in the Middle East. Shipping through the Arctic is not something new, but this time around – driven by melting ice caps and more dangerous…
With over 90% of Iraq’s annual budget still coming from oil exports and historically around 95% of that crude shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, securing an alternative export route while the Strait remains effectively blockaded has become an existential matter for Baghdad. Aside from the billions lost in immediate oil revenues for OPEC’s second-largest oil producer, the blockade meant Iraq’s domestic oil storage tanks filled quickly to maximum capacity, forcing the shutdown of several production wells. The longer that…
The strangest part of America's latest offshore-wind retreat is not that several projects have been cancelled. Some were early-stage, expensive and increasingly difficult to permit. Weak projects should be allowed to fail. The strange part is that the U.S. government is paying companies to abandon one energy technology and directing their capital toward another. Between March and August, the Department of the Interior reached a series of agreements worth approximately $3.9 billion with TotalEnergies, Bluepoint Wind, Golden State Wind, Invenergy,…
