Renewable energy
Electricity and heat generated from sources that replenish on human timescales — sun, wind, water, geothermal.
Renewable energy comes from flows that nature continuously restores: sunlight, wind, falling water, geothermal heat. Unlike coal or gas, the fuel is free once the hardware is built, which shifts the cost structure toward upfront capital and away from ongoing fuel. The hard part is intermittency — the sun sets, the wind stills — so matching supply to demand requires either dispatchable backup, storage, or a grid flexible enough to absorb the mismatch. As solar and wind costs have fallen faster than almost any technology on record, the constraint has shifted from generation economics to grid integration.
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Gas got passed standing still
For one month — April 2026 — wind and solar together out-generated natural gas across the entire world's grids for the first time, 22% of global electricity to gas's 20%.
The halfway line that isn't
Renewables now make up 49.4% of the world's installed power capacity — but that counts hardware, not electricity, and only about a third of the electrons actually come from them.
The fusion scoreboard
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has started bolting in the 18 high-field magnets that the whole compact-fusion bet rides on — even as the company's own people quietly push the date for net energy from this year to next.
Panthalassa
A startup just raised $140M, led by Peter Thiel, to anchor data centers offshore that generate their own power from wave motion — no cable, no grid queue, no land.
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