u/ceph2apod

1 Norway 0.9%
2 Denmark 8%
3 Netherlands 9% (H1 2026)
4 France 14%
5 Portugal 20%
6 Thailand 21% (H1 2026)
7 Iceland 24% (H1 2026)
8 Spain 26%
9 Switzerland 27% (H1 2026)
10 Germany 31%
11 Ireland 33% (Jan to Jul 2026)
12 Austria 34% (Jan to Jul 2026)
13 China 35%
14 Poland 35% (Jun 2026)
15 Finland 37%

The petrol engine is dying by a thousand cuts

I dropped the source Assaad Razzouk, in the comments...

According to Ember, this is one of the fastest solar expansions taking place anywhere in the world today.

Solar has not solved Cuba's energy crisis. Oil still provides most of the country's electricity and blackouts remain common.

But solar is one of the fastest ways available to reduce dependence on imported fuel. Panels can be deployed in months, fuel is free and sunlight cannot be disrupted by geopolitics.

And that lesson extends far beyond Cuba.

For decades, energy security was associated with securing access to fossil fuels. Increasingly, it's coming from reducing the need for them. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/13/climate/cuba-solar-us-oil-blockade-trump-china

Stress is real for a lot of households, and the delinquency data shows it

Republicans struggle to defend Trump's economic record...
"The July jobs report is sparking worry of a weakening labor market after the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs. This comes as consumers continue to pay higher gas and grocery prices. Axios Chief Economic Correspondent Neil Irwin and University of Michigan Professor of Economics Justin Wolfers join Antonia Hylton to break down the latest economic news." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2JRNPK3Z0c

→ 91,547 battery electric vehicles sold in H1 2026, matching full-year 2024 sales in half the time
→ 40,178 plug-in hybrids sold, almost double all of 2024
→ BNEF now expects EVs to pass 80% of new car sales by 2035

This isn’t a niche market story anymore.

The car market isn't growing. It's flipping.

BNEF expects ICE vehicles to fall from ~96% of new sales to under
10%, inside a market that stays roughly the same size it is today.

The real contest over the next decade isn’t who wins new EV buyers. It’s who’s still standing once the existing customer base finishes converting.

The primary source for this chart and data is BloombergNEF (BNEF), specifically from their Australia Energy Transition Outlook 2H 2026 report published in August 2026.
https://theenergy.co/articles/how-evs-can-help-not-hinder-the-grid

We have all the green, clean, renewable and energy storage technology and resources needed to drive the whole economy and benefit every single postcode. And as we see the climate crisis unfold in the raw, now is the time to get on with it, build the wind and solar projects, the grid network, the flexible power plants and the storage needed, and face down those ne’er-do-wells who want to slow it down.'' https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/holyrood/26443881.andy-burnhams-vision-north-starts-scottish-onshore-wind/

Shocking data. from Mark Jacobson:

"In April and May, 2026, 89.2% and 85.0%, respectively, of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant's electricity output was wasted since its inability to ramp forced the curtailment of that amount of solar and wind output on the CAISO grid.

For the full year August 1, 2025-July 31, 2026, 29.0% of DC's output was wasted by curtailing solar and wind. This compares with 19.7% the prior year.

For the first 7 months of 2026, 41.7% of all DC's output was wasted, versus 30.2% in '2025

Subsidizing and keeping DC and similar nuclear plants open in the face of overwhelming S+W growth not only wastes huge amounts of much-needed energy but is also clearly responsible for rising electricity prices."

https://x.com/mzjacobson/status/2086503475895291921

by Michaal Barnard...

"That was the deliberately provocative headline I used in 2023. Three years later, the financing structures actually being assembled for new reactors have made the underlying point harder to dismiss.

A gigawatt-scale reactor commits billions for years before it earns operating revenue. Every delay extends the period in which financing costs accumulate inside one enormous asset. Hinkley Point C has demonstrated what carrying that exposure looks like. Britain’s response at Sizewell C wasn’t to find private investors suddenly willing to accept the same construction risk more cheaply. It was to redesign the financial structure so government, regulated customers and public backstops carry substantially more of it.

Private companies can manufacture reactors, build them, operate them and invest in nuclear businesses. Capitalist economies can certainly have nuclear power. But new nuclear remains a poor fit for hands-off merchant project finance, because the economics improve when someone with a very long balance sheet absorbs risks that ordinary project capital prices brutally.

There’s a second requirement that gets less attention: repetition. Nuclear benefits from freezing designs, carrying experienced teams and suppliers from one project to the next, and building enough units for the learning to stick. China is the strongest possible test of that proposition because it has patient state capital, huge industrial capability and national infrastructure planning. Yet even China has rationalized around evolving reactor families rather than creating the tightly frozen product line that nuclear economics reward and isn't scaling rapidly as a result.

The useful question, then, isn’t whether nuclear is ideologically compatible with capitalism. It’s who carries the construction and revenue risk, who controls design variation, and whether the program is large and disciplined enough for repetition to work.

I worked through the current European financing structures, Britain’s SMR program, China’s standardization problem and what all of that says about the industrial conditions new nuclear actually requires in the latest TFIE Strategy Briefing."

Full analysis:

https://briefing.tfie.io/p/new-nuclear-needs-the-state-to-make

The deeper piece follows the financing structures, risk transfer and standardization problem across Sizewell C, Dukovany, the UK SMR program and China.

https://mitchklein.substack.com/p/a-competition-in-cruelty?r=b162

Argentina's Peso has fallen to an all-time low against the U.S. Dollar and has now collapsed 99.8% since 2009

Texas startup Base Power offers a 78.4 kWh home backup battery for just $695 upfront plus a $19 monthly fee. The system pays for itself by allowing the company to sell excess stored energy back to the grid, giving homeowners affordable multi-day outage protection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJrHpN1Fz98&t=10s

sweeter and juicier and could change the future of American farming

https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/massachusetts-farm-installs-832-solar-panels-above-berry-fields-and-the-berries-grown-underneath-turned-out-sweeter-and-juicier-and-could-change-the-future-of-american-farming/articleshow/132809461.cms

We keep being told that if we just eliminate every planning barrier and let developers build whatever they want, the housing crisis will be solved.

So explain what’s happening across Boston right now: Millions of square feet of massive mixed-use and residential projects—like 425 Medford St. in Charlestown (1.8 million sq ft)—are 100% permitted and sitting completely idle.

No neighborhood pushback. No zoning delays. No "NIMBYs" in the way. Just developers holding onto shovel-ready land because high interest rates and construction costs mean the projects won't hit their profit targets right now.

“High interest rates and fuel costs have halted major developments across the city. Millions of square feet of permitted space sit idle. Factors both local and not, & inside and outside real estate, are keeping Boston's biggest construction projects at a standstill.”

“A mixed-use site at 425 Medford St. in Charlestown was approved for 1.8 million square feet of development in 2024. But construction is not imminent, as with many other huge Boston projects.”

https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2026/07/30/unbuilt-boston-construction-projects-stalled.html