The 100-hour battery is real

Intra-day storage — soaking up solar at the middle of the day to be released in the evening and overnight — is perfectly feasible using lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper.  But what happens when there are prolonged spells where there is little solar, no wind, and high demand because it's cold, what the Germans have dubbed dunkelflaute (doonkel-flowta)?  For that we need long-duration storage, which I've talked about before.

One of the options for long-duration storage is the iron-air battery.  And it's now in commercial production in the US.  The video below from Just Have A Think discusses it.

Wind and solar generate more than gas

 From Canary Media

It’s the first month [ever] [that] wind and solar [have] combined to produce more electricity than natural gas did, per new global data from energy think tank Ember.

Just five years ago, the gap between what those renewable resources and gas generated was huge. Even in the best month for renewables, gas plants churned out about twice as much power. Now, the picture is very different: Wind and solar generated about 532 terawatt-hours of electricity [+13.4% yoy] worldwide last month, while gas contributed just 477 TWh [-3.9%].  

This won’t be the first time wind and solar outcompete gas on the global stage.

Last year, the world met 75% of its new electricity demand with solar alone, and the remainder with other forms of carbon-free energy. The result? Fossil-fuel power generation declined — very slightly — even though the world consumed more electricity.

Meanwhile, the ongoing war in the Middle East bolsters the case for renewable energy. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and its retaliatory strikes on Qatar forced one-fifth of the global liquefied natural gas export capacity offline earlier this year, causing supply shortages and price spikes for the many countries that depend on imported, rather than domestic, natural gas.

Already, some nations appear to have increased their adoption of renewables to shore up their national energy security.

The caveats of the April milestone must be mentioned. It’s just one month — and occurred during the shoulder season, the best time of the year for renewables, as breezes pick up and days get sunnier [in the northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern.  The seasonal cycles obvious in the data are because the northern hemisphere has more land and more people than the southern]

Then there’s King Coal, which still produces far more electricity worldwide than wind and solar. But it’s clear where we’re headed. The share of coal-fired electricity actually fell by half a percentage point from 2024 to 2025, marking the first annual drop since Covid and the first time in history that the dirty fuel produced less than a third of the world’s power. [Just as important: wind plus solar plus other renewables (mostly hydro) provided more electricity in April (925 TWh) than coal (758 TWh).]

In other words, coal should watch its back: It’s only a matter of time before wind and solar come for its crown, too.

Oz recession is prolly already happening

 I haven't updated my Australian coinciding and leading indices, because I haven't updated my data banks.  But fortunately, the Australian Industry Group (AIG) and S&P Global have updated their "PMIs", and in the past these have correlated quite well with my coinciding index. The charts are shown below.  Clearly this is in part a response to the Gulf War, but it is also being driven by the RBA's interest rate increases.  

A humungous El Niño is on the way

From Zack Labe

Sea surface temperatures are already surging to record high levels for this time of year in key El Niño monitoring areas.

This will prolly push global temperatures towards 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. This is releasing heat into the atmosphere already accumulated in the sea, so it doesn't change the underlying trajectory — though it may move some world climate systems past tipping points — but it will still deliver terrible heatwaves, droughts, bushfires and floods. And meanwhile the underlying temperature is continuing to rise, and its increase appears to have been accelerating.

AI plumber

 By Australian cartoonist Matt Golding

Super fast growth in wind and solar

 From Gavin Mooney

Wind and solar generation is scaling faster than any other electricity sources in history.

This chart looks at the time taken for different technologies to grow from 100 TWh to 1,000 TWh of annual electricity generation.

✅ Solar took just 8 years
✅ Wind took 12 years
✅ By comparison, gas took 28 years, coal 32 years and hydro 39 years

Nuclear also reached the milestone in 12 years, but then its growth slowed sooner than wind.

Importantly, this chart is not measuring market share. It is measuring how quickly different technologies scaled once they reached meaningful levels of deployment.

And the story today is also bigger than generation alone.

Batteries are increasingly extending solar generation into the evening peak, while electrification is creating new demand for clean electricity in transport, heating and industry.

Much of this growth is being driven by improving economics, with wind, solar and batteries becoming increasingly competitive across a growing range of applications.

That combination is beginning to reshape energy systems around the world.

Renewables now generate more than one third of global electricity, and wind and solar continue to account for the majority of new power capacity added each year.

The pace of deployment matters because energy transitions are ultimately about scale. And by that measure, wind and solar are growing faster than anything that came before them.

Amazing Trump coin

 By Rick McKee