Jim Stover @jimkimba

Energy use is way up in Texas but power prices have bucked the national trend and actually declined over the summer, mostly due to solar + storage records. VPPs are also growing in Texas and beginning to put a downward pressure on prices, too. 1/2

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Solar & wind generated 37.7% of ERCOT's (TX) electricity from Jan-Aug 2025. S&W surged from 34.7% in 2024 & 15% in 2015. Solar's record tripled to 29,877 MW in 3 years. Solar (15.2%) supplied more than coal (12.5%) this summer! Batteries also skyrocket ieefa.org/resources/summ…

In the Post (& elsewhere), Energy Secretary Wright continues to get basic facts wrong. He claims “We’ve been talking about ‘electrify everything’ for a while. Today, 15 percent of energy in manufacturing comes from electricity, same as it was 25 years ago.” False. Here's the real…

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China's National Computing+Energy Strategy: This is the layout for China's national computing strategy. Under the "East Data, West-Computer" 东数西算 slogan, high-priority tasks are handled by local clusters, while lower-priority tasks are outsourced to the energy-rich west.🧵

Gas turbines are hitting real limits. Rising costs and global supply constraints are reshaping how we power our growth. Texas saw a huge gas buildout in the early 2000s. But look where we are now: ⚡ Gas turbine manufacturing is projected to ramp 50% to ~100 GW per year…

This year, Texas has generated as much electricity from solar and wind as it has from natural gas. (and solar did pass coal by the way)

Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan

10 months ago

This year, Texas has generated as much electricity from solar and wind as it has from natural gas. (and solar did pass coal by the way) https://t.co/RNAggMiM55

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Insane fact about American red tape: There's more green energy waiting to be connected to the grid than there is energy on the grid right now.

How do solar and batteries work together? Here’s an operational stack from California. The evening discharge is the goal, but it’s also worth noting that c.7GW of demand across midday, reducing negative prices. Solar doesn’t work when it’s dark, but batteries do.

Breaking: The value of China’s exports of clean energy technologies hit a new all-time record in July, passing the previous high from March 2023. China exported $18.4 bln worth of solar and wind power equipment, EVs and batteries during the month.

One solar panel of 30 kg replaces 8 tonnes of coal (or 40 barrels of oil) and 25 tonnes of CO2 Let me show you: Every solar panel has a number of wattpeak or Wp, that indicates what it produces in "ideal" (1000W/m2) sunshine conditions. So in ideal conditions it would produce…

Covering the planet in solar panels would produce around 150-200 million TWh of electricity a year. That is 1,000x more than the global primary energy consumption of ~180,000 TWh. There's wrong and then there's @SecretaryWright wrong who is LEADING THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY ❌

Secretary Chris Wright @SecretaryWright

4 weeks ago

Covering the planet in solar panels would produce around 150-200 million TWh of electricity a year. That is 1,000x more than the global primary energy consumption of ~180,000 TWh. There's wrong and then there's @SecretaryWright wrong who is LEADING THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY ❌

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NREL (which is part of DOE) has already done the land use analysis. We could have 100% clean electricity by 2035 and wind, solar and transmission would use less land than the EXISTING federal oil & gas leases. docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/… @NREL

This is funny and sad. Secretary Wright's post is so silly and unsophisticated, and yet Twitter's Community Noters managed to find a way to miss the argument entirely and "rebut" with an even more unsophisticated response. It's just all so tiresome. 😞 But let's break it down🧵

Secretary Chris Wright @SecretaryWright

4 weeks ago

This is funny and sad. Secretary Wright's post is so silly and unsophisticated, and yet Twitter's Community Noters managed to find a way to miss the argument entirely and "rebut" with an even more unsophisticated response. It's just all so tiresome. 😞 But let's break it down🧵

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We've entered the battery age.

Ember @ember_energy

a month ago

We've entered the battery age.

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There’s a persistent myth that new solar farms don’t really help tackle climate change because panels are “made with coal” and “never pay back” their carbon debt. This is simply false. UN data show solar 8x cleaner than gas, 19x than coal per kWh. Solar repays CO2 in 4months.

What a profound impact a few batteries have on grid performance! "In Texas the price of ancillary services dropped from $3.74 per megawatt hour to $0.98, while the cost of maintaining the emergency reserve fell from $76.77 to $9.62 per megawatt hour" @Vernon3Austin @bswud

I've told people for years that the data center and AI electricity demand scare is dramatically overdone. Here's some data from Google: the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours (Wh) of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (gCO2e), and consumes…

Informative chart showing how China's economy has shifted in the past 5 years: China decided to pop its real-estate bubble in 2020 (with the "three red lines" policy). After that, investment in real estate fell markedly, while rising fast in high-end manufacturing, especially of…

One acre of corn for ethanol = 25,000 miles in a Ford F-150. One acre of solar = 700,000 miles in an F-150 Lightning. That’s the scale of possibility Bill McKibben laid out on the Energy Capital Podcast. And here’s the kicker: with agrovoltaics, farmers can still use that land.…

NEW from me: Clean energy growth helped China’s CO2 emissions fall 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024. Power sector CO2 fell 3% as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.