• The US will default to a nuclear-centric energy strategy as nuclear enjoys bipartisan support from policymakers - unlike either renewables or fossil fuel plants. More broadly worldwide, the growing need to pair intermittent renewables with energy storage is eroding their perceived cost advantage over nuclear energy - although this depends on local wind and solar conditions.
• China now accounts for 30% of global manufacturing, and still growing - but its future competitive advantage, under the hood, will be very different in future compared to today and yesterday.
• 144 GWh of energy storage supply deals were signed between Chinese OEMs and overseas customers in the first five months of 2025 alone - up over 400% year-on-year, and with only 3.4 GWh of it destined for the US.

• Flying cars are being brought to market by several major EV manufacturers in 2025 and 2026 - and their demand for weight efficiency will boost adoption of autonomous driving and all-solid-state batteries, even if those technologies are too expensive for standard EVs.
• Chinese OEMs have unveiled a new tranche of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers as the SNEC exhbition - bringing cost-effective green hydrogen one step closer.
• Virtual Power plant adoption is heading towards a scale of perhaps 10% of grid generating capacity by 2030 and 20% by 2040 - with a mutually reinforcing relationship between VPP adoption, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) payments, and EV market penetration likely to manifest in future.

• Rio Tinto has announced a further $900 million investment into lithium mining in Chile - we discuss the inexorable logic that today's 2x overcapacity will give way, due to constantly growing demand, to a second lithium shortage within the next 10 years.
• JinkoSolar's whitepaper on their latest TOPCon solar module, which boasts 24.8% efficiency, demonstrates that technological progress in silicon PV has yet to slow - but there are only five years left before the theoretical Shockley-Queisser limit on photovoltaic performance per square meter is effectively reached. After that, perovskites will be the primary remaining avenue for further research.

• With Republicans sabotaging renewables and Democrats bound to push out fossil fuels, nuclear stands to benefit as the 'least interfered with' option. President Trump has signed a new EO upping the Biden 2050 target of 200 GW, to 400 GW of nuclear power - to include 10 constructions beginning by 2030, and this is backed by data center hyperscalers, which combine massive future electricity demand growth and the necessary private funds to support nuclear projects.
• California curtailed almost 1 TWh of wind and solar in the month of April, even as batteries ramp up to discharge 10 GW each evening.
• The China Hydropower Research Institute has released a sweeping report into renewable energy capex - in which the most surprising finding is that compressed-air energy storage is cheaper upfront than lithium energy storage batteries, if there's a natural salt cavern to use - and scarcely more expensive even with artificial excavation.

• In this episode Toronto-based energy consultant and analyst Ed Ho joins us to discuss the present situation of the nuclear power industry - and the prospects for future deployments.
• We ask - what is the "true" cost of nuclear power - is it more like the recent Western new-build overruns on cost and construction time which resulted in levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) north of $150 per MWh due to repeated overruns, or is the surface-level $40 per MWh for nuclear power on South Korea's power market more realistic?

• The discussion also covers prospects for several major future markets such as Poland and the US - and the potential for South Korea's KEPCO to develop projects in other countries as it has so successfully with the Barakah power plant in the UAE.

Both the EV power battery industry and the energy storage industry have grown over 60% year-on-year in Q1, according to various statistics - but even a fourfold growth in demand could be acommodated by the existing production capacity of lithium, as the energy storage segment can respond to future raw material price hikes by adopting alternative chemistries like vanadium-flow and sodium-ion.

China will implement a major new power market reform next month, introducing Contracts for Difference (CfDs) and an ancillary services market which will greatly increase the revenue of battery energy projects. Renewable additions will slow down compared to the immense boom of the past two years, but the battery energy storage industry needed this - it needs to switch to organic market-driven growth, rather than an unsustainable co-location requirement based paradigm which resulted in poor-quality installations and a 50% utilization rate.

The biggest consequence for the rest of the world will simply be that China's power prices are not significantly shifting as it shifts from coal plus hydro, over to new energy. China's competitive advantage is going nowhere.

• South Korea is to develop a 3.2 GW, $13 billion offshore wind complex - which will also require transmission expansions to deliver power to load centers.
• Poland's nuclear development deal with Bechtel and Westinghouse has been renewed - with as much as $51 billion and six reactors at stake, with wind and solar possibly insufficient as the main national energy strategy.
• The US' battery supply from China is obstructed by tariffs - while US and Indian manufacturing efforts have yet to reach anything like the necessary scale to replace China.

In this episode we spoke to Tina Anderson, Head of Sales at Hystar, a Norwegian electrolyzer manufacturer with 100 MW production capacity - growing towards 4.5 GW. We cover topics including ramping up and down to react to electricity prices - as well as providing demand response services to the grid, the production cost of hydrogen electrolysis, and the policy environment in Europe.

• Spain's massive blackout vindicates the investments being made into synchronous condensers and grid-forming inverters in Australia and northern China. While an official post-mortem has not been released yet for Spain's blackout, South Australia's 2016 blackout may provide a close parallel - including the policies adopted afterwards to stop it from happening again.
• Thermal energy storage is being adopted at scale in China in order to provide heat to industry - with molten salt tanks installed in pilots at coal power plants.
• The solar industry's silver paste consumption is roughly equal in scale to the global silver shortage - we discuss the prospects of adopting alternatives to intensive silver paste use.

In this episode, we spoke to Randall Bowen, Managing Director of Voltalis UK – the biggest European demand-side flexibility operator. Of particular interest to the UK's energy strategy is its GW-scale fleet of storage heaters, which are not currently responsive to spot market electricity prices. When the relevant authorities give their stamp of approval for Voltalis to install its devices, they will become part of grid flexibility – a crucial step given the UK’s struggles with other types of grid development.

Voltalis is a French company with 1,500,000 integrated appliances across more than 200,000 residential and commercial buildings in Europe, now expanding into the UK.

• Australia's pumped hydro fleet now promises over 500 GWh of storage capacity - meaning the county is set to be a world leader (or leader of the West) on pumped hydro, mostly with 10-hour duration, just as it was a world leader on BESS adoption.
• President Trump has mauled the offshore wind industry by calling Empire Wind 1's approvals into question - in an even harsher move than we'd expected.
• Solar manufacturing is down 45% year-on-year, as output declines back towards the 600 GW "plateau" value of demand - which the world will struggle to accelerate beyond.

• Trump's tariffs mark a redoubled shift of the US away from free trade, but it's hard to find a direct impact on renewables - since the US was already a hostile policy environment, and the rest of the world already had Chinese overcapacity.
• The UK and South Korea are both considering zonal pricing reforms to their power markets, which would rationally push industries to move closer to renewable energy power projects, but may disadvantage renewables and South Korea's KEPCO.
• Trina Solar and Oxford PV's technology licensing deal is big news for perovskites - but it's still hard to say how far away commercialization is.

• Silver paste usage in solar cell manufacturing remains at around 10 mg/W, or 10 tons per GW, and the global silver demand remains elevated at 20% higher than supply even since 2021 - with the solar industry accounting for 20% of all demand for silver worldwide. This is causing a constant increase in the price of the metal, which has doubled from pre-pandemic levels and is still rising. There are negative feedback mechanisms such as adoption of copper electroplating, and recycling of lower-purity waste, but there's a lot more room for price rises before these are worth implementing in a way which would seriously alter supply or demand. The same supply-demand gap and constant gradual price rises can be expected to persist for some time. 

In this episode we spoke to Chris Hyde, senior Sales Manager and Meteorologist at Meteomatics - a company which forecasts the weather for the energy sector. Forecasting data is useful for everything from deciding where to build wind and solar power plants, to deciding when to discharge batteries in light in expected wind-solar power output and demand on the grid, to deciding when the schedule maintenance operations.

Meteomatics is a Swiss company established across Europe and expanding its operations in the US - especially Texas.

• Trina Solar has announced a 3.1 square meter, 808-Watt silicon-perovskite tandem solar module, which with 26% efficiency is better than any module on the market today - but extra manufacturing cost and a shorter lifespan means the upcoming semiconductor is not across the finish line yet.
• Texas has adopted a power market reform under which 50% of new power plant development in the state to be "dispatchable" - which in this case is defined to mean gas, not batteries. Utilities and power plant owners not complying with the 50% requirement will have to pay a reliability fee as compliance.

• RWE and TotalEnergies have signed a 30,000-ton annual green hydrogen supply deal to run from 2030 to 2044 - how can green hydrogen production become cost-effective in the context of the German energy crisis?
• Kelin Electric has announced an intention to raise $200 million for a 1 GW perovskite cell and module factory - but its product offering appears to be the peculiar single-junction, full-weight type being pursued by several Chinese companies, which has a less obvious business case compared to tandems.

• Spain's utility Iberdrola is upgrading its pre-existing hydropower reservoirs to pumped hydro - a huge potential storage reservoir for Western Europe.
• The UK has announced it will expedite offshore wind permitting times, potentially halving lead times in the world's second-largest market for such projects
• Some perovskite solar manufacturers have raised the funding they need to fund mass production and commercialisation - but many others haven't yet, in the context of economic uncertainty and a looming recession.

• Data centers are pursuing a mixture of renewable energy, gas, and nuclear power to ensure they have a supply of sustainable, reliable and affordable power, in a microcosm of the energy trilemma
• A 2,600-kilometer submarine HVDC line has been proposed to link New Zealand and Australia - with huge arbitrage potential across demand peaks over a 2-hour timezone distance.
• Europe's leadership has proposed a $100 billion clean manufacturing fund - is this enough to finally shore up domestic manufacturing in the face of China and the US' Inflation Reduction Act?

• German elections have seen the Green Party sidelined and a centre-right government taking power - but this seemingly won't be enough to prompt a restoration of mothballed nuclear plants, even as German industry shrank for the seventh quarter in a row due to energy costs.
• The IEA has published a report on the lengthening lead times and supply bottlenecks for transmission infrastructure - this problem will shape Western energy deployments for decades to come, skewing investments in favour of distributed resources and microgrids.
• Flexible solar panel products are appearing using silicon cells, demonstrating that the limiting technology is more the encapsulation solution rather than the need for flexible semiconductors such as perovskite.
• HD KSOE is exploring the development of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) built into a container ship - and floating nuclear could be useful off US coasts as well.