Technology & Innovation Active Updated Sep 15, 2026
The clean-energy tipping point
Where it stands as of Sep 15, 2026
Solar generated more US electricity than coal for the first time in the country's history, and global solar capacity reached roughly 3 terawatts in early 2026, with wind and solar together supplying 22 percent of global electricity by April 2026. Cheap panels, mostly made in China, have pushed solar into millions of individual homes, small businesses and factories, cutting bills and bringing reliable power to places grids never reached. Grids engineered for one-way power flow are struggling to keep pace with that s
Solar power and storage are crossing milestones that reorder the grid, even against policy headwinds.
Sep 15, 2026 Latest
Ars Technica reported global solar capacity hit almost 1.2 terawatts by the end of 2025, roughly three times the size of the world's nuclear fleet, mostly built with cheap Chinese-made panels, with millions of households, small businesses and factories installing it directly rather than waiting on utility-scale projects. The report noted power grids built for one-way flow are struggling to keep pace with electricity now flowing from millions of small generators, a mismatch that contributed to a day-long blackout across Spain and Portugal.
Aug 25, 2026
The Optimist Daily reported the world crossed 3 terawatts of solar capacity in early 2026, with the third terawatt added in just 19 months after 664 gigawatts of new solar went up worldwide in 2025, and wind and solar combined generated 22 percent of global electricity in April 2026, edging past natural gas's 20 percent for the first time according to Ember.
Aug 17, 2026
A Nanjing University team led by Xiao Ke and Hairen Tan installed a 1 megawatt perovskite solar array beside a 3.5 megawatt silicon array at the same power plant and found the perovskite panels generated 3.42 percent more electricity in March, 3.79 percent more in April and 5.81 percent more in May, with the gap widening as it got hotter.
Aug 1, 2026
Good News Network reported that 46 percent of new US homes built last year came with a heat pump already installed, with heat pump sales now outpacing older gas furnace systems by 32 percent.
Jul 30, 2026
Zanskar revived Lightning Dock, a cooling geothermal plant in New Mexico, by drilling a new well to 8,000 feet after finding the original wells, at 2,500 feet, barely reached the edge of the underground reservoir. The deeper well came online in May 2025 and a year later was still pumping more than 4,000 gallons of hot water a minute, reversing a plant that had been losing 50 degrees Fahrenheit of water temperature over five years, five times the normal rate of decline.
Jul 27, 2026
Highview Power is building a liquid-air storage facility on a former coal plant site in Trafford, near Manchester, that will deliver 300 megawatt-hours and power roughly half a million homes for six hours, while a separate Nevada project stores heat by raising industrial salt to 1,040 degrees Fahrenheit; neither needs cobalt, nickel or lithium.
Jul 22, 2026
Quaise Energy and other companies are pursuing drilling deep enough into hot rock that the specific combination of heat, water and permeable rock that Iceland relies on for geothermal power would no longer be necessary. Quaise co-founder Matt Houde said the energy stored in the Earth's crust exceeds all hydrocarbons combined by orders of magnitude, and Iceland already gets more than a quarter of its electricity from geothermal.
Jul 17, 2026
US heat pump sales outpaced natural-gas furnace sales by 32 percent in the first quarter of 2026, even after the federal tax credit of up to 2,000 dollars for installing one expired at the start of the year. Energy economist Lucas Davis at UC Berkeley said shipments stayed flat through winter and have climbed gradually since.
Jul 11, 2026
Chinese researchers built a quasi-solid gel electrolyte, nicknamed Sn-FB QSE, that physically blocks the dendrite growth that has long made fast-charging sodium batteries unsafe, letting a cell charge from empty to full in four minutes while holding 80.1 milliampere-hours per gram, and retain 90 percent of its capacity over 2,000 cycles at a gentler 20-minute charge, matching the ceiling of today's lithium-ion cells.
Jul 9, 2026
Four nuclear microreactor companies, three of them founded in 2023, achieved criticality under the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program on or before July 4, a striking pace for an industry known for decade-long delays [190]. California's SB 1350 qualified green hydrogen as a renewable source under the state's Renewables Portfolio Standard, clearing the commercial path for the Lancaster Clean Energy Center, the largest planned green hydrogen facility in the country, set to open in 2028 [243]. And Saskatchewan geologists drilled 1.2 miles into Precambrian bedrock targeting geological hydrogen and struck a 28 percent concentration on the first well ever drilled for it in Canada [223].
Jul 6, 2026
Solar panels built over California irrigation canals were shown to generate power while also cutting water loss to evaporation.
Jun 28, 2026
California brought online its first grid battery able to discharge for a full eight hours.
Jun 20, 2026
Solar generated more US electricity than coal for the first time in the country's history, in May 2026.
The checkable promises in this story, dated the day they were made. A promise is marked kept, slipped or partly met only when a later report says so; past its own date with no report, it reads "no word", which is what silence honestly is.
California's largest planned green hydrogen facility, the Lancaster Clean Energy Center, is set to open in 2028 after SB 1350 made green hydrogen power commercially viable in the state.
Reporting in the Today Got Better brief
The Lancaster Clean Energy Center in Southern California, the country's largest planned green hydrogen facility, is set to open in 2028.
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