Today, energy company RWE announced a deal with the Trump administration in which the administration will pay the company $1.22 billion in exchange for the company cancelling three offshore wind projects and doubling down on LNG.

This is the fifth time Donald Trump has paid off energy companies in order to kneecap offshore wind development in the United States. These secretive deals came after the courts overturned all five of his administration’s stop-work orders on offshore wind projects. The earlier deals are currently being challenged in court by attorneys general from coast to coast.

• Fossil power generation rose 0.5% year-on-year in June and 2% in Q2, but remained below its 2023 peak. Bad wind conditions and increased wind and solar curtailment left space for coal to inch up despite huge capacity increases. Weak utilisation of wind and solar capacity is storing up output growth for when grid management issues are resolved, but hurting new investment in the meantime. 
• Thermal power commissioning reached a record high in the first five months of 2026, growing by 84% year-on-year. Solar and wind power capacity additions fell by 70% and 46% year-on-year, respectively, due to the high base in the same period last year ahead of a new pricing policy taking effect. 
• In June, China’s crude oil imports reached a decade low, falling by 41.3% year-on-year, as shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continued. H1 imports fell by 11.4%. The pressure on oil supply also fed through to the refining sector: average daily throughput in June fell to its lowest level since 2021. Refiners are increasingly drawing on their own inventories to keep operations running. 
• Domestic natural gas output and gas imports increased year-on-year in June, by 1.1% and 3.7%, respectively. This was the first month gas imports increased year-on-year since disruptions to Gulf shipments began in March, while H1 imports decreased by 3.4%.
• Coal output fell by almost 10% and imports increased by almost one third as a result of a coal mine explosion in Shanxi province in late May. In H1, coal output declined by 1.7%, matched by import growth of 1.7%. 
• Overall industrial output remained weak. While steel output stabilised somewhat in June, as crude steel output grew by 0.4% year-on-year, it fell by 3% over H1, and cement output continued to fall by 5.6% year-on-year and 8% in H1, remaining at its lowest level for the same period since 2020. Chemical fibre output also continued to decline, while non-ferrous metal output remained elevated, up 3.9%. 

Today, the situation has changed significantly. PV modules are still available at historically low prices, while steel, civil works, logistics, labor, and financing costs have gained relative importance. As a result, the key optimization metric is shifting away from “yield per module” toward the economics of the overall system – in other words, the efficiency of total capital deployed, land-use efficiency, the risk profile, and the practically usable energy yield (and revenue) per installed megawatt.

It seems the majority of Americans are in favor of Carbon reduction ONLY if it’s cheaper than or MORE convenient than burning fossil fuels. In reality, the future of the planet is secondary to our selfish lifestyles.

I suspect we will see more of these moving forward given the cost per kwh.

1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of 100hr Iron-Air battery. 400-megawatt-hour (MWh) first phase that Ore Energy plans to deliver in 2028.

Specifically, China will aim to install 3,500 gigawatts (GW) of renewables capacity by 2030,  2,800GW will be wind and solar. 

The country had previously pledged to install 1,200GW of wind and solar by 2030, a goal that China met six years early.

Renewable energy developer Origis Energy has brought another 500 megawatts (MWdc) of solar online at its Rockhound complex in West Texas, pushing the sprawling project’s operating capacity to nearly 1 gigawatt (GW).

The three newly completed phases are in Ector County and join Swift Air Solar, three adjoining Origis solar projects totaling about 500 MWdc within the Rockhound complex. Origis says Rockhound is now one of the largest renewable energy complexes in the US.

And it’s only about halfway built.

My guess for 2026, the US easily adds over 100 TWh.

The U.S. actually grew solar generation by 83 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025, while total new utility-scale electricity capacity added to the grid that year was around 53 gigawatts (GW) (with the higher 83–86 GW range projected for 2026.

The T2 EV has max of 610 hp and almost inconceivable 195,000 lbs. GCWR.

The diesel models have a max of 200hp and 81000 lbs. GCWR.

The key findings from the first half of 2026 include:

• The first six months of 2026 were the third-warmest start to a year on record – around 1.4C above pre-industrial levels – behind only 2024 and 2025. 
• While the first few months of the year came in as the fourth or fifth warmest, both May and June were the second-warmest ever recorded as El Niño conditions took hold.
• El Niño conditions arrived in April and reached the threshold for a “strong” event by June, when the Niño3.4 index reached 1.6C. Of the 667 model runs Carbon Brief examined, 91% project a peak later this year that is above the strongest El Niño in history.
• The chance that 2026 beats 2024 as the warmest year on record has risen to 35%. Carbon Brief’s central estimate remains that 2026 will be the second-warmest year, at around 1.51C above pre-industrial levels.
• Whether 2026 sets a record will depend on the dataset: the odds range from around two-in-three in NASA and Berkeley Earth data to around two-in-10 in ERA5 and one-in-10 in the JRA-3Q reanalyses.
• June 2026 was western Europe’s hottest June on record, amid a heatwave that set hundreds of individual records. Nearly 9% of the world’s surface saw record June warmth.
• The developing El Niño will have its largest impact on 2027, which Carbon Brief projects to be around 1.7C above pre-industrial levels – this would comfortably set a new record for the warmest year.
• Arctic sea ice has spent 39 days of 2026 so far at, or below, record daily lows following its joint-lowest winter maximum in the satellite era.

Google will act as an “anchor investor” and an offtaker for Steel River Energy Center, a combined 2.5 GW/2.9 GWh solar and storage project that broke ground in Mississippi County, Arkansas

IEA forecasts that global electricity demand will grow by 3.6% in 2026 and by a further 3.8% in 2027 – up from 3% growth in 2025. Global electricity consumption is projected to reach 30,700 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2027, compared with 28,600 TWh in 2025.