Wind and solar just hit a major global milestone: for the first time ever, they generated more electricity than gas for an entire month. April 2026 is now in the history books.
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In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026
Inch Fab uses 4 inch wafers, which makes it much easier
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“”France just completed the world’s largest agrivoltaic trial — installing solar panel canopies above 2,400 hectares of Provence vineyards, cereal fields, and vegetable plots, generating 500 megawatts of clean electricity from the same land producing full agricultural output.
The Sun’Agri program installs tilting solar panels on 5-meter-tall structures above crops, with panel angles controlled by sensors responding to crop water stress and solar irradiance. Panels tilt to provide shade on hot days, reducing crop water needs by 30 percent and heat stress damage by 64 percent during heatwaves while generating electricity from diffuse light above the canopy. Crop yields in pilot vineyards increased 27 percent in drought years.
France loses 18,000 hectares of agricultural land to conventional ground-mounted solar annually. Agrivoltaics eliminate this conflict entirely — 2,400 dual-use hectares replace lost food production while generating clean power.
Source: French National Institute for Agriculture INRAE, Sun’Agri France, French Ministry of Agriculture, 2025″”
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The new Cottbus Solar Park covers 3500 hectares or 35 square kilometers or 13.5 square miles – huge!! It holds 4.2 million bifacial solar panels generating 2.2 Gigawatts. That’s a lot! It’s on a former coal mine in Brandenburg. Germany has plans for 28 GW more solar.
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“”France has restarted its entire nuclear fleet after emergency maintenance …
The years 2022 and 2023 were the most difficult in the recent history of French nuclear energy. An unprecedented wave of stress corrosion cracking discovered in the cooling circuits of multiple reactors forced simultaneous outages across a large fraction of the fleet …
EDF’s industrial recovery program … systematically inspected, repaired, and restarted the affected reactors over an 18-month period. By late 2023, the French fleet was back above 80% availability. By 2024, it was approaching historical norms of 85 to 90% availability. …
The stress corrosion episode taught French nuclear operators lessons about inspection frequency, material selection, and maintenance planning that have been incorporated into revised operating protocols. The fleet that has emerged from the crisis is better monitored, more thoroughly inspected, and operated with greater margins against material stress than at any previous point in its history.
France’s nuclear fleet went through its hardest years. It came out stronger.
Source: EDF & French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), 2024″”
This is the first that I have heard about this French nuclear plants issues and shutdowns — it’s been more than 3 years! It seems to me that the nuclear industry has tried to keep it quiet — it is a black eye on the nuclear industry as a whole. This disappoints me because the public needs to be kept informed. Of course the NIMBYs will make a big thing about it. But even so, that’s the point of news media – to keep the public informed. This problem – cracks in the cooling system – was what happened with the San Onofre nuclear reactors and they shut them down and spent a hundred million to replace the cracked cooling system. But then it happened again! So they gave up and permanently shut San Onofre down and it is costing hundreds of millions of dollars to decommission San Onofre nuclear.
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He lost in court so now he’s playing dirty by refusing to give permits. So your electric bill will be increased by 13 to 18% .
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“”California’s growing battery storage network has reached a major milestone after delivering more than 12,000 megawatts of electricity to the state’s grid, an amount roughly equal to the output of 12 large nuclear power plants.
The record was quietly set in late March as battery systems supplied more than 40 percent of California’s electricity demand at one point during the day. The achievement highlights how large-scale battery storage is increasingly becoming a central part of the state’s energy infrastructure rather than simply acting as backup support, according to a report by Inside Climate News.
California has spent years rapidly expanding grid-connected battery systems, particularly to help solve one of renewable energy’s biggest challenges. Solar power generation typically drops in the evening just as electricity demand rises when people return home, use appliances, and charge electric vehicles. Traditionally, natural gas plants filled that gap.””
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“”The expansion of solar energy has always carried one tension with agricultural nations that no policy document resolved cleanly: solar farms require land and farmland is finite. Germany found a way to make that tension irrelevant by installing solar panels above active crop fields in an approach called agrivoltaics where the same land produces food at ground level and clean electricity from panels elevated above the growing area simultaneously. The panels do not replace the farm. They sit above it and the crops underneath benefit from partial shade that reduces water evaporation, lowers heat stress during peak summer temperatures, and in several crop varieties has been shown to improve yield compared to fully exposed conventional growing conditions.
The dual harvest model does something that neither solar development nor agricultural policy had previously achieved which is remove the competition between food production and energy generation for the same geographic footprint entirely. A field running agrivoltaic panels contributes to national renewable energy targets without removing a single hectare from food production and generates electricity revenue for the farmer above and beyond what the crop alone would produce. Germany has been piloting and scaling this approach with results consistent enough that other European agricultural nations are now moving from observation to implementation. The land does not have to choose between feeding people and powering them anymore. In Germany it is doing both at the same time.””
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“Engineering With Rosie” Barnes explains why EV batteries usually last longer than the car. Determining SOH = state of health. Testing for SOH. Thermal issues. Buying used EVs.
The EV batteries are guaranteed for 8 years so the risk is lowered when buying a used EV.
She mentioned that there are outliers. Occasionally a used EV may have been fast charged all its life causing its range to be shortened a lot. She said that battery replacement might cost 8000 Euros for a Tesla up to 34 thousand for a Mercedes, making replacement economically not possible, forcing the owner to sell the EV and buy a replacement.
