Climate, in brief

The US installed 20.2 gigawatt-hours of grid batteries between April and June, its biggest quarter on record. [1][2]

That took the first half of 2026 to 30.8 gigawatt-hours, 23% more than the same months last year, on figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association and the research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. [1]

Batteries have already sent more electricity into the US grid in eight months of 2026 than in the whole of 2025. [1]

Arizona alone added 6.2 gigawatt-hours, the most any single US state has ever added in three months. Texas added 3.8 and California 3.6. [1]

More than half of the new large batteries - 56% - are wired to no power plant at all. They buy from the grid at one hour and sell back to it at another. [1]

The reason is what solar did to the clock. Every panel in a region makes its power in the same few hours, so midday electricity got cheap and evening electricity did not. [3]

Across the world in the first half of 2026, solar covered more than a quarter of electricity demand between 11am and 2pm, and almost none between 8pm and 5am. [3]

In Chile solar met 71% of demand at midday and had virtually vanished by 9pm. In the Netherlands it met 58% at 1pm. [3]

Burning fossil fuels at midday fell from 86 gigawatts to 69 between the first halves of 2023 and 2026. At the evening peak it barely moved, from 106 to 101. [3]

Storing a kilowatt-hour cost $2,634 in 2010 and $140 in 2025, a 95% fall, and batteries built in 2026 can move 34% of each day's new solar into the dark hours against 4% for those built in 2021. [3]

The money has followed the gap rather than the panels. Investment in solar farms on their own fell 20% to $75.4bn, its lowest since 2021, while solar farms built with a battery took a record $25bn. [4]

US home batteries went the other way, down 27% to 657 megawatt-hours in the quarter, after the federal tax credit for household clean energy was removed. [1]

Why it matters. The number to watch is the evening peak. Fossil generation there has barely moved in three years, and that gap is what pays for every battery going in. [3]

Turkmenistan has repaired corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares at eight sites, the first documented fixes since UN satellites named it the world's worst source of methane mega-leaks. It answered about 20% of the 192 alerts it was sent in a year. The US was sent 138 and answered none, as did Iran, Russia and China. [11]

Why it matters. Methane traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and causes a quarter of today's warming, and a single super-emitting leak heats the planet more than a coal-fired power station.

Rescue teams helped by Chinese and Indian experts worked overnight to reach people believed trapped inside blocked hydropower tunnels after last week's Himalayan flood. 933 workers are missing from projects in the flood-hit region, and nearly 800 people are confirmed dead. Almost 21,000 security personnel have joined the search. [12]

Why it matters. China blamed a glacier collapse linked to warming, which puts the dams built for clean power in the path of the melt that warming causes.

A US judge ruled that New York cannot enforce its climate 'superfund' law. The law was written to make large fossil fuel producers pay $75bn towards the costs of climate damage in the state. [13]

Why it matters. It was the furthest any US state had got in sending that bill to the companies that sold the fuel, and other states had been drafting from it.

Solar is now China's largest source of installed power capacity, overtaking coal for the first time. [15]

Why it matters. Read it carefully: capacity is what is installed, not what is produced. Solar only makes power while the sun is up, so coal still generates far more of China's electricity than this ordering suggests.

The nuclear developer Oklo filed an emergency complaint at the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission after the grid operator PJM dropped its 750-megawatt project from the queue of plants waiting to connect. Oklo says the delay is at least 14 months. The project mixes 150 MW of advanced nuclear, 300 MW of fuel cells and 300 MW of gas, and is meant to power Meta data centres in Ohio. [14]

Why it matters. PJM's connection rules were not written for a plant that is three technologies at once, so the novelty that makes the project interesting is what stalls it.

Europe installed 8.8 gigawatts of wind capacity in the first half of 2026, according to WindEurope, the industry's association. Germany's build-out has stalled on transport problems. [16]

Why it matters. Turbine blades travel by road, so a country can have the money, the permits and the sites and still be held up by bridges and bends.

Mexico's state power utility, the Federal Electricity Commission, published a 2026-30 plan with MXN 651bn ($32.9bn) of investment and 18.6 gigawatts of new capacity. Solar projects named in it total 5.48 gigawatts, mostly built with private partners and due online between 2028 and 2030. [17]

Why it matters. Mexico spent years steering power back to the state utility and away from private renewables; this is the state utility doing the building instead.

The US Environmental Protection Agency proposed removing the requirement that states publish air-pollution permit applications and take comments on them, for data centres and the power plants built to run them. Disclosure would become voluntary for state officials. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states objected. [19][20]

Why it matters. Data centres emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and heavy metals, and the notice is how a neighbourhood learns a project exists before construction starts.

Separate EPA guidance removes one of the steadiest tools for tracking pollution from power plants and encourages data centres to generate their own electricity on site. Pennsylvania and Texas have each already restricted data centres that draw from the shared grid. [18]

Why it matters. Making a data centre build its own power protects other customers' bills, and moves its exhaust from a regulated plant to a private one.

The Trump administration moved to rescind the 2001 roadless rule, opening more than 45m acres of national forest to roads, logging and drilling. A report from the Center for Biological Diversity says over 400 endangered species and 1,800 miles of protected rivers are affected. [21]

Why it matters. The stated reason is wildfire control, but the Forest Service's own draft assessment records fires as significantly less frequent in roadless areas than in roaded ones. [22]

The 2024 US rule limiting hazardous air pollutants from petrochemical plants is being rewritten. Scores of facilities have already been exempted from it, including plants in the Louisiana corridor known as Cancer Alley. The rule covers chemicals such as ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride. [23]

Why it matters. The rule took communities there years to win, and an exemption removes it one plant at a time rather than in a single visible repeal.

A study in Science led by Julia Cole at the University of Michigan finds that recent strong El Nino events have themselves been intensified by warming from burning fossil fuels. The one now building is expected to be the strongest in at least 80 years of precise records. [24][25]

Why it matters. It was already understood that El Nino pushes global temperatures up; this reverses the arrow as well, and the UN's World Food Programme projects the event could push tens of millions more people into hunger.

Nearly 200 countries closed the UN desertification talks in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, without deciding whether to create a legally binding global drought agreement. The decision was pushed to the next round, in Egypt in two years, having already been deferred once. Up to 40% of the world's land is degraded. [26]

Why it matters. Specialists at the talks said drought severity is set by what happens to soil before the rain stops, which is a slow problem no summit deadline matches.

Nevada became the first state to sue the US government over the federal plan imposed on the Colorado River after seven states failed to agree. Most experts expected Arizona, which faces the largest immediate cuts, to move first. Southern Nevada has cut water use per person by 58% in about 20 years. [27]

Why it matters. Nevada had spent years positioning itself as the compromise state between the upper and lower basins, and it has now filed before the state with more to lose.

Researchers built the first systematic inventory of damage from post-wildfire flash floods and debris flows in the US, covering 1879 to 2025. Damaging events average more than one a year over the long run, and deaths and financial losses in 2016-2025 appear higher than in earlier periods. [28]

Why it matters. A burned slope sheds water instead of holding it, so the flood arrives in the years after the fire, and nobody had been counting that second bill.

During the June 2025 heatwave in the eastern US, 9.2% of all emergency department visits were attributable to heat, and 8.3% during the August one, from 8.17 million visits across 19 states. [29]

Why it matters. Heat rarely appears as a cause on a hospital record, so counting all visits against temperature is one of the few ways the toll becomes visible at all.

Field measurements at 156 sites show the layer that thaws each summer got significantly deeper at 55% of Arctic sites, 38% of Antarctic ones and more than 90% of European mountain and high-elevation Asian ones between 2000 and 2024. At several mountain sites it doubled. [30]

Why it matters. Frozen ground holds carbon and holds up roads, pipelines and houses, and the depth of the summer thaw is the measurement that tracks both.

A proposed amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment would rule that findings depending on the highest-emissions pathways, RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, should not be used as expected, baseline or policy-relevant futures in US federal planning. It calls them implausible outputs. [31]

Why it matters. The high pathway was built as a stress test rather than a forecast, and this would settle by rule what the science has argued about for a decade.

The seventh round of the coordinated climate modelling project, CMIP7, has published a new set of emissions pathways to replace the ones used in the last IPCC assessment. They are named by their emissions rather than by their heating effect. [32]

Why it matters. These pathways are the inputs every major climate projection runs on, so changing them changes what the next generation of forecasts can say.

Analysts at Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab tracked Chinese customs records instead of installation data and found Africa will add the equivalent of 17 gigawatts of solar this year, more than its average annual demand growth. 36 countries will install record volumes. Most of it is rooftops and small systems that no register counts. [33]

Why it matters. Because the systems are untracked, governments plan as if they are not there, which risks too little spending on batteries and wires and too much on fossil fuel plants.

New York's grid operator triggered its demand response programme, which pays customers to cut their electricity use, 22 times in 2025 to stop overloads. Eighteen of those were in summer. In the previous ten years it had never used it more than eight times in a year. Nearly 10,000 people in Southeast Queens lost power in a July heatwave. [10]

Why it matters. Paying people to stop using power is the cheapest thing a grid can do when it runs short, and how often it reaches for that is a plain measure of how tight the summer has become.

New Jersey's utility board proposed buying 150 megawatts of batteries sitting in homes and small businesses, at up to $200 per kilowatt a year for ten years, to be discharged together at peak. Nevada approved tariffs that pay households for the same service but kept the utility NV Energy in control, rejecting requests to let customers assign that payment to outside companies. [6][7]

Why it matters. A household battery earns nothing for being available unless a rule says it does, which is why the same machine is worth different amounts in different states.

The Finnish firm Capalo AI will trade two solar-and-battery projects for the Danish developer European Energy. One is the 78.5 MW Anyksciai park in Lithuania, with a 25 MW/65 MWh battery. The other is the Saldus park in Latvia, still being built. European Energy's own earlier announcements gave different sizes for the Latvian battery, and nothing public says which is final. [8]

Why it matters. Earning the gap means buying and selling several times a day in three separate markets, which is a trading job rather than a power-station one.

Denmark added 336.7 megawatts of solar in the first half of 2026, up 11% on last year, with utility-scale projects rising to 271 megawatts. Home installations fell from 36.3 to 28.2 megawatts and commercial ones from 55.2 to 37.2. [34]

Why it matters. The Danish solar association says the segments that relieve the grid most are growing the weakest, which is the same split the US battery figures show.

A draft Indian framework imposes extra approval requirements on foreign reactor designs, which experts say could steer companies to domestic technology and slow the flow of outside capital and expertise. It follows the law passed last year that opened India's nuclear sector to private firms. [35]

Why it matters. The law was written to attract foreign builders, and the rules under it may do the opposite.

Ontario Power Generation is building the first of four GE Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors at Darlington, and lifted the 2.1-million-pound reactor base into place in April. Unit 1 is due to start in 2029. It runs alongside a 10-year, C$12.8bn refurbishment of the site's four existing CANDU reactors. [36]

Why it matters. The province is betting that the workforce and suppliers trained on the refurbishment are what make the small reactors buildable.

The US Department of Energy's fusion roadmap aims to deploy early-stage fusion power plants by the mid-2030s, coordinated by an Office of Fusion created in November 2025. Industry leaders say it depends on more federal money. Developers still have to make materials that survive neutron bombardment and breed their own tritium fuel. [37][52]

Why it matters. Fusion joins light atoms together instead of splitting heavy ones, and no developer has yet made the step the roadmap is aimed at: commercial net energy gain, where a plant makes more energy than it takes to run.

BYD's second-quarter net profit rose 29.8% to 8.2bn yuan ($1.22bn) on record exports, ending four straight quarters of decline. First-half revenue still fell 7.1% to 344.8bn yuan and first-half profit fell 20.5%. [38][39]

Why it matters. The world's largest electric carmaker is now making its money outside China while its home market stays in a price war.

BYD has installed 10,000 of its 1.5-megawatt 'flash charging' stations since starting earlier this year, halfway to a goal of 20,000 by year's end. Chinese makers are quoting charge times in minutes: CATL says it has a battery that will go from 10% to 80% in 3 minutes 44 seconds. [40]

Why it matters. A charger that fast needs a grid connection the size of a small town's, which is why chargers and batteries are increasingly built together.

China ordered Tesla and domestic makers to fix 4.3 million vehicles, its largest recall to date, over emergency door releases that are hard to find if the power fails. It has also banned exterior electronic handles with no manual backup. [41]

Why it matters. China is now writing the safety rules that the world's most advanced cars are built to, rather than following them.

The Polestar 4 lists at $56,400 and sells for $31,400 after a $25,000 incentive, because the Chinese-owned brand is leaving the US market after the 2026 model year. Its connected-car software did not meet a new US security standard banning such systems from firms with Chinese or Russian ties. [42]

Why it matters. The discount is the cost of the exit, and it lands on whoever will own a car whose maker has left the country.

South African mining companies are accelerating investment in their own renewable generation to cut reliance on the state utility Eskom, after decades of outages. Anglo American supplies subsidiaries through a joint venture; Sibanye is buying power under contract rather than owning plants. They still expect Eskom for steady supply for years. [43]

Why it matters. When a shared grid becomes unreliable, the largest customers leave it first, and what is left is carried by everyone who cannot.

The US is building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China and more than any other country, after a 76% rise in projects under construction in the first half of 2026, according to Global Energy Monitor. Gas capacity in development rose from 252 to 378 gigawatts since January, a third of the world total, at a capital cost above $647bn. [44]

Why it matters. Two-thirds of gas capacity in development worldwide has no named turbine maker, and nearly a quarter of data-centre projects has no start year, so much of the total may never be built. [45]

Data centre developers are turning to small modular reactors, which generate 70 to 350 megawatts each, to avoid gas turbines. 22 designs are in development in the US and two have regulatory approval, but as of August none is commercially deployed there. [46]

Why it matters. Nuclear experts say the constraint is the timeline, and a plant that is not built cannot answer a demand that has already arrived.

A 13,000-cow dairy at Kerman in California's San Joaquin Valley is making electricity and hydrogen from cow manure, a first that state regulators call groundbreaking. Environmental groups argue the credits propping up the biogas industry harm the communities living beside it. [47]

Why it matters. A credit paid for capturing methane rewards keeping the herd that produces it, which is the argument running underneath the whole biogas market.

Tampa's University Area lost millions when the US environmental justice block grant programme was cancelled. Eighteen months on, organisers still have no replacement route for cleaning up ponds that collect runoff from industrial sites, brownfields and failing septic systems. [48]

Why it matters. The grant was one of the few that reached a neighbourhood directly rather than a state, so its cancellation left nothing underneath it.

Meeting Indonesia's 50% biodiesel blending target by 2030 would require converting 4.85m to 8.55m hectares of land, and rice self-sufficiency up to 2.3m more, with the two competing for the same ground, researchers found. [49]

Why it matters. A fuel target and a food target written separately turn into one land shortage, and the forest is what sits on the land.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off a fifth of the world's oil and gas shipments. Six months into the US-Israeli war with Iran, governments from South Korea and Thailand to the European Union have pledged more money for renewables. Rooftop solar is spreading fastest, because it installs quickly. Coal generation is rising too. [50]

Why it matters. The IEA expects renewable output up 8.5% this year against coal up 1.4%, and still expects emissions of the gases that cause warming to rise 1.1%, to a record 14.2 billion tonnes.

Adani Energy Solutions won a $493m transmission project in the Indian state of Maharashtra. [51]

Why it matters. India's clean power sits far from its cities, so the wires are the part of its transition that decides whether the panels matter.

A study of solar mini-grids with battery storage in Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal assesses whether they can deliver affordable electricity to rural areas where extending the main grid does not pay. About a third of the 565 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa without electricity live in western Africa. [9]

Why it matters. Where there is no grid to connect to, the battery is not an optional extra, it is the only thing that makes the sun useful after dark.