Climate & Energy

The US put in more grid batteries in three months than ever before. More than half of them sit beside no power plant at all. →

20.2 gigawatt-hours went in between April and June, and batteries have already delivered more electricity to the US grid this year than in all of 2025. The reason is not generosity toward clean power. Solar has made midday electricity cheap and left evening electricity dear, and a battery earns the distance between the two.

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%. →

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.

The US says it now controls 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's oil. OPEC keeps losing members. →

Trump announced majority US control of a fifth of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. Venezuela is weighing an exit from OPEC, and the group's share of world output has fallen to 40%.

An emergency order targets the grid's foreign parts. It can reach the ones already installed. →

Trump declared a national emergency over foreign-made grid equipment and gave the Energy Department 120 days to write the rules. The order covers transformers, batteries, inverters and their software, and it can be applied to kit already bolted in.

Nobody has ever built one. The US Army just ordered more than twenty. →

The Army will pay up to $2.2bn to five companies for small nuclear reactors at five bases. Not one has ever been built, and none supplies the American grid.

Heat killed 40,000 in England since 1988, the official count says. Three new studies say the count is too narrow. →

Britain's statisticians put a 38-year number on heat deaths in the same week three separate studies found heat sitting inside illnesses nobody had been counting.

A low river switched off Hungary's nuclear plant. Solar kept the lights on. →

Record-low water on the Danube cut Hungary's Paks reactors to a tenth of their rating and left Romania's Cernavoda shut. Record solar held Hungary's grid within 3% of normal, and Europe still has to buy winter gas at a three-year high.

Panama caps its ships, Washington cuts the Colorado. Nobody is preventing this weather now - they are paying for it. →

Panama will cap crossings as El Nino dries its lakes, and Washington has cut three states' Colorado water by 21%. Both are coping with weather that has already arrived - the half of the work that gets a fraction of the money.

Washington wants fewer futures on the table. New work says each one runs hotter. →

The US moved to strike its hottest emissions scenario from federal planning, in the same week a study found each unit of carbon may warm the planet about a quarter more than assumed.

The clean machines are being built. That is where their carbon goes. →

A giant new battery plant opened in Michigan, Europe's storage fleet passed 100 GWh, and the world's biggest battery maker admitted where its emissions really sit: upstream, in the making.

Britain's coldest rented homes belong to its most famous landlords →

A Guardian investigation found more than 100 homes on King Charles's and Prince William's inherited estates fail the legal minimum energy standard. In the same week California became the first US state to regulate tyre efficiency, a cut that saves drivers money. Both sit at the cheap end of a ledger nobody is claiming, while the loud fights happen at the dear end.

Europe's seas took the summer's heat, and the ocean gives it back slowly →

Scientists say carbon pollution drove a massive expansion of marine heatwaves around Europe this year, with peak sea temperatures that would have been virtually impossible without it. A record El Nino is now building in the Pacific, the heat bill is landing on European budgets, and the energy system is pulling two ways at once.

Britain will pay for air conditioning, as long as it also heats →

A record-heat summer has turned the heat pump from a winter machine into a summer one, and Europe is rewriting its energy taxes around it.

Britain moves to slow the one climate policy that was working →

Petrol is dear and electric car sales are climbing almost everywhere. Britain has opened a consultation that could cut its 2030 target from 80 percent to as low as 50.

Kenya's grid is straining, and it is not short of power →

A national utility says wind and solar swings force it to run costly backup plants and pass the bill to customers. Europe spent a year planning for two hours of eclipse. Drought and heat pulled its steadiest reactors offline. One problem underneath all three: how fast a grid can change what it is making.

Britain pays households to live beside pylons, because the wires are what is missing →

The UK named the first 43 places where new power lines are going in and offered nearby homes 250 pounds a year off their bills. It spent over a billion pounds last year paying wind farms to switch off, because the network could not carry what they made.

A heatwave knocked out Europe's cheap power, and the price jumped for everyone →

A fifth summer heatwave spiked electricity demand across Europe while curbing the cheapest plants - French nuclear, German wind - so the grid leaned on dear gas, and spot power prices rose more than 20%.

The world keeps setting heat records even as clean energy wins →

Another summer of shattered temperature records lands the same week solar becomes the world's biggest new power source. The heat tracks the carbon already in the air, not this year's emissions.

AI's power hunger hits records, and the grid runs into a hard truth about "capacity" →

US electricity demand is set to break records again as AI data centres multiply, and utilities from Texas to Kenya are colliding with the gap between a power source's nameplate rating and what it actually delivers.

The oil industry bets record money on the hardest oil left →

Nigeria courts up to $50bn for deep-water fields while the majors bank $93bn in a quarter, all of it chasing barrels that cost far more energy to lift than the gushers of old.

Kenya fences in its carbon credits as the offset market's honesty problem resurfaces →

Kenya capped how many carbon credits it will sell abroad, one of Africa's most detailed rulebooks yet - just as fresh research shows most forest offsets never cut the carbon they claim.

Scrapping a working petrol car pays off for the climate - but not for you →

A new study finds retiring even a functional petrol car for an electric one cuts lifetime emissions in most cases - yet it stays too costly to do. That gap runs through every big energy bet this week.

RWE pays $1.22bn to abandon US offshore wind →

A German wind giant writes off three US leases as policy turns against it - while cheap solar leaves gas plants facing the same squeeze from the other side.

China writes its climate math into a five-year plan →

Beijing's new climate plan reaffirms peaking emissions before 2030 by cutting how much carbon each unit of its economy needs - a bet that efficiency falls faster than growth.

The world's biggest hydrogen firm walks away from its clean bet →

Air Products booked a ~$2.9bn charge exiting clean-hydrogen projects it couldn't sell at a profit, while China set a green-ammonia export record - two ways of handling the same problem: clean fuel still costs far more than the dirty kind.

Solar crossed 3 terawatts - and got so cheap its makers are losing money →

The world's installed solar just tripled to 3 terawatts, and prices have fallen so far that Chinese panel makers are bleeding cash. China's regulator is now trying to stop the price war it built.

Electric cars and solar hit their steep middle →

EV and solar adoption crossed fresh records on two continents at once - the accelerating stretch of a curve that stays flat for years, then bends sharply upward.

The machines got more efficient, and the grid buckled →

AI chips do more computing per watt every year, yet data centres are now driving the first rise in US power emissions in a decade - the clearest sign yet that efficiency alone does not cut total energy use.

The West runs out of water to argue over - and Washington steps in →

The US federal government imposed Colorado River cuts after seven states failed to agree, as drought spread across England and the American West.

Europe blinks - the EU moves to soften its flagship carbon rule →

Brussels proposes slowing the cap-and-trade system that halved its industrial emissions, to "bring relief to industry." The move revives climate policy's oldest question - whether tightening the rules at home just pushes the pollution abroad.

Britain decides whether to open two North Sea oilfields →

A new UK government weighs approving Jackdaw and Rosebank, while the wider evidence keeps needling a comfortable belief - that blocking a well is the same as cutting what the world burns.

Australia bets on a refinery the rest of the world is closing →

A new oil-refinery plan runs against a two-decade retreat, while solar quietly out-produces coal and a fresh El Nino loads the dice for a record-warm year.

The grid's new problem isn't how much clean power, but when →

Solar now floods the middle of the day so hard that prices go negative, then vanishes at the evening peak. The race is to move energy across the hours, not make more of it.

The climate's slow answer to a fast question →

A new study finds that reaching net-zero really does stop the warming, and then slowly reverses it, even as this year's electricity demand and oil keep the carbon flowing.