Climate & Energy · Monday, 31 August 2026

01 Briefing what happened

The world will build less new clean power this year than last, the first drop in over a decade. Money for offshore wind fell 72%.

Climate & Energy 1 min 48 sources

Clean power is still arriving faster than ever - US renewable output rose 10.9% in six months. The money for the next round is not. BloombergNEF's half-year count shows offshore wind investment down 72%, solar on its own at its weakest since 2021, and a record $25bn going only to solar farms with a battery attached.

-72%

the drop in money going into offshore wind farms, first half of 2026 against 2025

poor auction results, dearer borrowing and a shrinking pipeline of projects reaching financial commitment [1]

$25bn

put into solar farms built with a battery on the same site, a record

money for solar on its own fell 20% over the same months, to $75.4bn [1]

459 GWh

of new batteries the world is on course to install in 2026

half again as much as 2025, and enough to shift about a third of new solar generation into the dark hours [2]

10.9%

growth in US renewable electricity output, first half of 2026

the machines already built keep producing more even as the money for the next ones falls [3]

The lead story — what happened

Money going into offshore wind farms fell 72% in the first half of 2026 against the same months of 2025, BloombergNEF's count shows. [1]
BloombergNEF, a research firm that counts what the world spends on energy, blames three things: weak prices won at auction, dearer borrowing, and fewer projects reaching the point where the money is actually committed. [1]
Investment in solar farms built on their own fell 20% to $75.4bn, the lowest since the solar boom started in 2021. [1]
Solar farms sharing a site and a grid connection with a battery took a record $25bn, nearly double the second half of 2025 and three times the first half. [1]
BloombergNEF now expects fewer new renewable installations in 2026 than in 2025 - the first year-on-year fall in more than a decade - with growth resuming in 2027. [1]
None of that is a shortage of sun or wind. What is already standing is producing more than ever: US renewable output rose 10.9% in the first half of the year, and utility-scale solar output rose 21.6%. [3]
The IEA, the agency that advises rich countries on energy, forecasts renewables overtaking coal-fired generation worldwide during 2026 and reaching 37% of electricity by 2027, up from 33% in 2025. [4]
Two developers walked away from projects in the same week. Orsted, Denmark's biggest offshore wind builder, shelved 1.4 gigawatts off Incheon in South Korea because the returns failed its own investment test. [5]
Taiwan's Shinfox Energy cancelled its 700-megawatt Youde array, the latest failure of a local developer and builder whose collapse it caps. [6]
In the United States the money went the other way for one reason: developers rushed. Clean-energy investment there rose 54% as firms raced to lock in tax credits before they expire. [1]
China fell to a quarter of world clean-energy investment, from more than half in 2022, after it changed the rules of its electricity market. [1]
Europe bucked the trend. Germany, Romania and Serbia each recorded record investment after recent auctions, Vietnam quadrupled its spending, and Nigeria put more into small-scale solar and storage. [1]

Who is involved

BloombergNEF

a research firm that counts what the world spends on energy; its half-year figures are the count the industry works from [1]
Orsted

Denmark's biggest offshore wind developer; it has shelved 1.4 gigawatts of South Korean projects because the returns failed its investment test [5]
Ember

a British energy think tank that measures how much of each day solar actually covers; it says batteries are starting to push solar into the evening [2]
Golden State Wind

the venture that held a lease for a 2-gigawatt floating wind farm off California; it took $120m of US federal money to hand the lease back, and California is suing over it [8][9]
The IEA

the agency that advises rich countries on energy; it forecasts renewables overtaking coal worldwide during 2026 [4]

What is pushing on this

The price of borrowing High↑

BloombergNEF names dearer money and weak auction prices as the reason offshore wind investment fell 72% [1]

Power still arriving Building↑

US renewable output up 10.9% in six months, and renewables pass coal worldwide this year [3][4]

Patience with solar on its own Easing↓

standalone solar investment at its lowest since 2021, as midday power earns less [1]

Deadlines pulling money forward High↓

US clean-energy investment rose 54% as developers raced expiring tax credits [1]

How it unfolded

2022 China alone accounts for more than half of world clean-energy investment [1]
H1 2025 solar-with-a-battery draws a third of what it draws now [1]
25 Aug Taiwan's Shinfox cancels its 700-megawatt Youde wind array [6]
26 Aug Orsted sidelines 1.4 gigawatts of South Korean offshore wind [5]
28 Aug BloombergNEF publishes the half-year count; California sues over a cancelled 2-gigawatt lease [1][8]
2027 BloombergNEF expects installations to grow again [1]

Where this points

Watch whether the 2027 recovery BloombergNEF expects shows up as projects reaching the point where the money is actually committed, rather than as more projects announced. [1]

The rest of the day

40 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Africa's solar boom is invisible to its own planners

Households and businesses will add about 17 gigawatts of solar in Africa this year, more than the continent's average yearly growth in demand, analysts at Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab estimate. Because most of it is unregistered, they counted it through Chinese customs records instead. [10]

Why it matters — Nobody has to borrow for it - a panel is bought outright, which is exactly why it is growing while financed projects stall.
03
The US East Coast has no easy substitute

The stretch of the United States that most needs new clean electricity has the fewest places to build it. Crowded land and ageing power lines leave offshore wind as its one large option, and those projects are now failing on cost and on federal policy at once, Grist reported. [7]

Why it matters — A region can lose one technology and have nothing to put in its place.
04
Qatar's gas cutoff to Italy runs to November

QatarEnergy told Italy's Edison it has extended a force majeure suspension until early November, cancelling five more cargoes and bringing the total to 29 since April. Edison holds a 25-year contract for 6.4 billion cubic metres a year, about 10% of Italy's gas. [24]

Why it matters — A long-term contract turns out to be a promise about a shipping route, not about gas.
05
Qatar has shipped 18 LNG cargoes, against 509

Six months into the war, Qatar's liquefied gas exports are down 96% and the country has lost about $24bn in sales, roughly five months of state income, Reuters calculates. Two Qatari tankers have been attacked. [25]

Why it matters — Before the war Qatar supplied about a fifth of the world's liquefied gas.
06
Ocean surface hits its hottest reading on record

The average surface temperature of the seas outside the polar regions reached 21.1C on 22 August, edging past the 21.09C of March 2024, according to the EU's Copernicus climate service. [19][20]

Why it matters — Sea temperatures normally peak in March or April, and this El Nino is nowhere near its own peak.
07
Nevada is first to sue over the Colorado River plan

Nevada, which had spent years casting itself as the compromise state on the river, became the first to sue the US federal government over the management plan imposed after seven states failed to agree. Southern Nevada has cut water use per person by 58% in about 20 years. [23]

Why it matters — Most experts expected Arizona, which faces the largest cuts, to sue first.
08
Study ties 122 companies to half the West's lost water

From 2014 to 2024 climate change removed over a third of the American West's usual snowpack and cut streamflows by about 13%. Roughly half of that traces to emissions from 122 fossil fuel and cement companies, a paper in Communications Earth and Environment found, and the lost water is about the full capacity of Lake Mead. [22]

Why it matters — It is the first study to put named companies behind a specific regional water shortage.
09
Woodside drops $5bn of clean-energy plans

Woodside, Australia's biggest oil and gas producer, abandoned $5bn of planned clean-energy spending by 2030 and scrapped its Scope 3 target, the one covering emissions from burning what it sells. Chief executive Liz Westcott said the targets were set in a different market and that customers had not been there. [17]

Why it matters — It kept its target for its own direct emissions, which are the smaller share.
10
UN desertification summit ends divided

Countries at COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, could not agree whether a global drought protocol should be binding, leaving it unresolved for the second round running. They did announce more than $1.3bn for land restoration and drought resilience. [21]

Why it matters — A separate report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found countries far short of their land-restoration targets.
11
New Zealand blocks all climate-harm claims

New Zealand's parliament passed a law preventing all current and future civil claims for climate loss or harm, Climate Home News reported. [20]

Why it matters — It closes a route that courts elsewhere have been slowly opening.
12
China's biggest refiner says oil demand has peaked

Sinopec, China's largest refiner, said the country's oil demand probably peaked last year, Bloomberg reported. [20]

Why it matters — China buys more crude than any other country, so its ceiling is close to the world's.
13
Hormuz makes a $42bn Tanzanian gas plant look better

Equinor, Norway's state oil and gas company, said the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz makes it more attractive to develop a long-stalled liquefied gas export plant in Tanzania, a project the country estimates at about $42bn. Talks have dragged for years. [26]

Why it matters — The war is redrawing the map of who supplies Asia, and East Africa is one of the places it moves to.
14
Louisiana gas terminal set to double

The US Army Corps of Engineers gave Plaquemines LNG fast-tracked permitting under the national energy emergency declared last year, cutting public comment from 30 days to 10. The $18bn expansion would take the site from about 590 acres to 1,220 and could damage up to 470 acres of wetlands. [27]

Why it matters — It would become the largest gas export terminal in North America, on a coast that is already losing land.
15
US has pledged over $4bn to gas exports

Federal agencies have pledged more than $4bn since July 2025 to push liquefied gas export projects over the line, alongside tariffs and executive orders aimed at speeding approvals, Inside Climate News reported. [28]

Why it matters — There are more proposed export projects than there is demand to buy their gas.
16
Trader Gunvor bids for US shale gas

Gunvor, one of the world's biggest commodity traders, is in early talks to buy gas-producing assets in the Haynesville basin of Texas and Louisiana from Silver Hill Energy Partners, valued at $1.2bn to $1.5bn, four sources told Reuters. [29]

Why it matters — Traders are buying wells, not just cargoes, betting on power demand from data centres.
17
CNOOC posts a record half-year profit

CNOOC, one of China's big three state oil companies, made a record first-half profit of 85.8bn yuan, up 23.4%, as its average realised oil price rose 23.6% to $85.49 a barrel. Output hit a record 398.7 million barrels of oil equivalent. [30]

Why it matters — The war that cost Qatar $24bn in sales is paying producers who can still ship.
18
Norway will drill the Arctic regardless

Norway's energy minister Terje Aasland said the country will keep developing oil and gas in the Barents Sea whatever the European Union decides about an Arctic moratorium, and no longer sees itself as Europe's green battery. [31]

Why it matters — Norway supplies about 30% of the gas used by the EU and Britain.
19
India's draft rules may shut out foreign reactors

A new draft framework adds approval requirements for foreign reactor designs, which experts told Reuters could steer buyers towards Indian technology and slow the money coming in. India expects to need about $210bn to raise nuclear capacity almost tenfold, to 100 gigawatts. [32]

Why it matters — The law it follows was written last year specifically to attract foreign capital.
20
Ontario finishes a reactor overhaul under budget

The C$12.8bn, ten-year refurbishment of the four CANDU reactors at Darlington in Ontario finished in March, ahead of schedule and under budget. It adds about 30 years to the plant's life and kept the trained workforce together for the next build. [33]

Why it matters — Nuclear projects almost never finish early, and the reason given is that the same crews had done it before.
21
Saudi nuclear deal reaches the US Congress

The Trump administration submitted a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia to the US Congress that could let the kingdom enrich its own reactor fuel, two officials told the New York Times. [34]

Why it matters — Enrichment is the step that makes reactor fuel and, taken further, bomb material.
22
Data centres bet on reactors that do not exist yet

Twenty-two small modular reactor designs are under development in the United States and two have regulatory approval, but not one is operating commercially, Inside Climate News reported. Developers are turning to them to avoid gas turbines. [35]

Why it matters — The timeline is the problem: the demand is now and the reactors are not.
23
Texas's biggest planned gas plants are all for data centres

The twelve largest gas power projects planned in Texas are all intended to run data centres, Global Energy Monitor found. Planned gas generation in the state grew 50% in six months, and a handful of the projects could emit over 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gas a year. [36]

Why it matters — That is roughly the annual emissions of a mid-sized industrial country, from a dozen buildings.
24
China's data centres to outdraw South Korea

China's data centres will quadruple their electricity use by 2030 to 774 terawatt-hours, about 6% of the country's power, according to Wood Mackenzie figures reported by Bloomberg. [44]

Why it matters — The same demand story is running in both of the world's biggest power systems at once.
25
New York's grid called for help 22 times

New York's grid operator activated its programme paying users to cut consumption 22 times in 2025, 18 of them in summer; in the previous decade it had never done so more than eight times in a year. Nearly 10,000 people in Queens lost power during a July heatwave. [37]

Why it matters — Electric heating and chip factories are due to raise demand further.
26
New Jersey wants 150 MW of home batteries

New Jersey's utilities board proposed buying 150 megawatts of batteries sitting in homes and small businesses, to be pooled into a virtual power plant programme starting next year and turned into an open market tariff in 2029. [38]

Why it matters — It is cheaper to borrow other people's batteries at the peak than to build a plant for it.
27
Nevada adopts pay-for-performance grid tariffs

Nevada's regulator approved tariffs paying customers for what their batteries and thermostats actually deliver, replacing a framework 15 years old. It did not adopt requests to let third parties be paid directly or to require open data sharing, both of which NV Energy opposed. [39]

Why it matters — Who gets paid decides who bothers to install the hardware.
28
UK approves 400 MW of solar with a bigger battery

Britain's energy secretary approved Beacon Fen Energy Park near Sleaford: 400 megawatts of solar sharing a grid connection with a battery rated at 600 megawatts. Building starts in 2027. [11]

Why it matters — The battery is larger than the solar farm, which is what the money is now asking for.
29
Sungrow starts a battery factory in Egypt

Sungrow broke ground on a $50m plant in the Suez Canal Economic Zone. It will assemble 10 gigawatt-hours of battery storage systems a year from April 2027, and Egyptian authorities call it the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa. [12]

Why it matters — Its first customer is already lined up: a 1.95-gigawatt solar and 3.9-gigawatt-hour storage project.
30
India adds 3 GW of company-bought solar

India added 3 gigawatts of open-access solar in the second quarter, where a factory or business buys power from an off-site solar farm rather than from its local utility. Rajasthan took a quarter of it. [13]

Why it matters — Developers rushed to beat the phase-out of a transmission charge waiver.
31
Colombia's limit is wires, not panels

Solar has been about 98% of all new generating capacity installed in Colombia since 2022, and the industry there says grid upgrades are now the critical need. [14]

Why it matters — The same pattern as Ireland and Chile: panels arrive faster than the wires to carry them.
32
One in seven US students attends a solar school

More than 7 million US students now attend a school with solar panels, on Generation180's count - nearly double the number of solar schools since 2016, with combined capacity over 2.4 gigawatts. Roanoke's district in Virginia expects to save $46.5m over 35 years. [15]

Why it matters — School boards buy on a payback period, not a policy view.
33
US rooftop solar heading for a 21% fall

New home solar capacity in the United States will fall about 21% this year against 2025, Wood Mackenzie projects, after tariffs on imported panels and the phase-out of the main federal tax credit for rooftop systems. [16]

Why it matters — Installers say it is enough to close companies.
34
China orders its largest ever car recall

Nine carmakers including Tesla, Xiaomi and Leapmotor will fix 4.3 million vehicles in China because the emergency handle that opens a door when the power fails is hard to find. China has also banned exterior electronic handles without a manual backup. [40]

Why it matters — China's regulator is now writing safety rules that the rest of the industry will follow.
35
High fuel prices are selling electric cars in Europe

European EV sales have climbed since the Iran war began in February and the price at the pump rose. More than half of Renault's UK orders in July were electric, against 10% two years ago. [41]

Why it matters — The open question is whether buyers stay when fuel prices fall back.
36
BYD installs 10,000 megawatt-class chargers

BYD has installed 10,000 of its 1.5-megawatt flash-charging stations since March, half its target of 20,000 by the end of the year. Its Blade 2.0 battery is rated to go from 10% to 70% in five minutes. [42]

Why it matters — A battery that charges in minutes is useless without a charger that can deliver it.
37
A wave-energy test site opens off Oregon

The first large site in the continental United States for testing machines that make electricity from ocean waves has opened, after the Trump administration granted a key approval. The same administration has spent nearly $4bn buying back leases to stop offshore wind. [43]

Why it matters — The line being drawn is not clean against dirty; it is wind against everything else.
38
A record heat dome settles over the US southwest

More than 45 million people face daytime highs of 110-115F (43-46C) into early September, the US National Weather Service forecast, with little cooling overnight. August is on track to be the hottest August on record in the United States once weighted by where people live, and US gas prices rose as the forecasts turned hotter. [45][46]

Why it matters — Heat is now a demand event on the grid before it is a weather story.
39
North Sea fields: the damage outweighs the value

The climate damage from burning the oil and gas in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields would cost between £119bn and £336bn. Adura, the company promoting the fields, puts their value to Britain at £28.7bn, an analysis submitted to the UK consultation notes. [18]

Why it matters — The figure excludes extreme weather, sea level rise and deaths, so the authors call it an underestimate.
40
Climate coverage fell as the heat rose

Climate coverage in UK media fell 38% between 2021 and 2025. More than 70% of the reporting on Britain's hottest month on record this June did not mention climate change at all, the head of the Climate Group wrote in a Reuters commentary. [47]

Why it matters — Research it cites finds people do engage when the subject is their food price or home insurance rather than targets.
41
Pennsylvania accused of standing still on solar

The non-profit PennFuture accused Pennsylvania's legislature of policy inertia for not passing bills that would let renters buy into shared local solar arrays, saying most lawmakers prefer more gas now. [48]

Why it matters — The state led on renewables before its fracking boom.

02 Lesson why it matters

The wind is free. The money is not.

A wind farm pays almost all its cost before it makes any power, so the price of its electricity is mostly the price of borrowing.

The twist

The cheaper a machine's fuel, the more completely the price of its electricity is the price of money - so the technologies with no fuel bill at all are the ones a change in interest rates hits hardest.

How it works

A wind or solar farm has almost no fuel bill
So nearly all its cost is paid before it makes any power
That money is borrowed and paid back over 20 or 30 years
Which makes the project a loan wearing a turbine
So when borrowing gets dearer, the same machine in the same wind costs more
And the price it was promised at auction, fixed years earlier, does not move with it

Where you've seen this

Buying a home

the house costs the same in March and September; what changes is the rate, and with it whether anyone can buy it

A taxi driver

buying the car outright beats renting a shift only while the loan is cheap

Water mains and railways

dug once, charged for over a century, and priced almost entirely by what the money cost

A farmer buying land

the field yields the same crop either way; the interest decides whether owning it beats renting it

The catch

Money is not the only thing that stopped these projects. Weak auction prices, supply chains and permits show up in the same numbers, and where nobody borrows at all - a household in Nigeria buying a panel outright - the interest rate stops mattering.

And the whole of it

Everyone in this is behaving sensibly. The pension fund wants a safe return, the developer cannot sign for less than its borrowing costs, and the energy ministry that ran the auction set its price two years ago in a different world. The money that builds a wind farm is mostly ordinary people's savings, pooled; the electricity that does not get built shows up later in everybody's bill. No single seat in that chain can see the whole of it.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The clean-power slowdown showing up in this year's numbers is not a fall in demand for clean power or a rise in the cost of the machines - it is a fall in what investors will accept for lending money against a fixed price agreed years ago, and the projects being abandoned are the ones that borrow the most before earning anything. [1][5]

Why it works on us — Investment figures are reported as verdicts on a technology, which is why a 72% drop reads as wind failing rather than as borrowing getting dearer - a fall is easier to picture as a broken thing than as a changed price. [1]

Who gains

Battery makers and the developers who pair them with panels — Money leaving standalone solar is not leaving the sector, it is moving next door: co-located solar-and-storage took a record $25bn while solar alone fell 20%. [1]
Oil and gas producers who can still ship — The route disruption that cost Qatar about $24bn in lost sales lifted realised prices for everyone outside it - CNOOC booked a record 85.8bn yuan half-year profit at $85.49 a barrel. [25][30]
Equinor and Tanzania's stalled gas project — A supply gap in Asia makes a $42bn plant that could not be justified for a decade look investable, on Equinor's own account. [26]
Gas plant builders in Texas — The twelve largest gas power projects planned in the state are all intended to run data centres, and planned gas generation in Texas grew 50% in six months. [36]
Domestic reactor makers in India — Extra approval steps for foreign designs push buyers towards Indian technology, which is the effect experts told Reuters the draft framework would have. [32]

Who pays

Offshore wind supply chains in South Korea and Taiwan — Orsted's reversal in Incheon will cost jobs in the country and elsewhere, and Shinfox's collapse in Taiwan ended a 700-megawatt array and the local builder with it. [5][6]
US rooftop solar installers — Panel tariffs and the phase-out of the main federal credit put new home solar on track to fall about 21% this year, enough to close companies. [16]
Electricity customers on the US East Coast — The region has few places to build large clean generation, and the one large option it had is being cancelled, so the shortfall gets met by whatever already exists. [7]
Households in Bangladesh and Pakistan — Both rely on imported liquefied gas and are more price-sensitive than richer buyers, and the IEA records fuel conservation measures there that cut electricity use outright. [4]
Coastal Louisiana — The Plaquemines expansion was fast-tracked with a 10-day comment window instead of 30 and could damage up to 470 acres of wetlands in a parish already losing land. [27]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether new clean-power installations really fall this year.

BloombergNEF's expectation of the first annual drop in over a decade is a forecast made from half-year investment data, and the same six months included a US rush to beat expiring tax credits that flatters the total. [1]
02

How much solar Africa is actually installing.

Nobody knows, and that is the finding: analysts had to estimate about 17 gigawatts from Chinese customs records because most of the systems are never registered anywhere. [10]
03

What Qatar's exports do next.

QatarEnergy has extended its force majeure on Edison again, now to early November, and has not said what would end it. It did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. [24][25]
04

Who ends up paying for the offshore leases the US government bought back.

California argues in its lawsuit that the $120m reimbursement to Golden State Wind broke two federal laws; no court has ruled on whether the payments were lawful. [8][9]
05

Whether any small modular reactor arrives in time for the demand it is being promised to.

Twenty-two designs are in development in the United States, two are approved, and none is running commercially - and the demand from data centres is being contracted now. [35]
06

How much water the West lost to any one company.

The new paper attributes about half of the region's climate-driven snowpack and streamflow losses to 122 carbon majors as a group; it does not settle any single firm's share, and nothing in law attaches to the finding. [22]
07

Whether India's draft nuclear rules will be softened.

The framework is a draft, and Reuters' sources said questions on tariffs and returns are still unanswered, so companies are waiting rather than deciding. [32]
08

How high the ocean record goes.

21.1C was set on 22 August, months before the usual March-April peak and before this El Nino has peaked, and the BBC notes the margin over the old record is very small and that any global estimate carries uncertainty. [19][20]

04 Hope carry this

Bulgaria had almost no grid batteries in 2023. By May this year it had 8.6 gigawatt-hours of them, and solar and storage together now cover about a quarter of the country's electricity between seven and nine in the evening.