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Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week.
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Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026.
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We have a returning guest in waiting.
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Tim McDonnell of Semaphore will be joining the show shortly.
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If you don't know me by now, I'm Factor This content director Paul Gurky, typically joined on the program by Cleantech commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom, but he had to go see a guy about a horse or something.
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Won't be joining us today, so it'll just be my dulcet tones blasting through your airpods.
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We do appreciate hearing from the viewers and listeners of this program.
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You guys have been hitting up our inboxes in mass lately.
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I'm not complaining about that.
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It's a good thing.
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We like to make your opinions part of the show.
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If you've got a story you'd like to see covered or two cents to share, you can email us anytime.
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The address is TWIC Twick at tigercom with twoms.us.
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That stuff gets sent right to my work inbox.
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I've learned that the hard way.
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As always, we've got five Queen Tech stories on tap.
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Let's get into them.
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The first story this week from Greg Ryan and Mark Chetiack from Bloomberg.
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It's titled, Massachusetts will require new data centers to use clean energy.
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So the story here is about Massachusetts Governor Mora Healy, who signed an executive order Tuesday requiring new data center developers to procure their own clean energy generation.
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They also have to get local approval before they can even apply for state construction permits.
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If a developer cannot meet its power needs with renewables, it'll have to pay into a new fund, and that fund will benefit Massachusetts ratepayers.
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The rules kick in for any data center with peak demand larger than 25 megawatts.
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Massachusetts hasn't seen as much data center build out as some other states have, particularly as you work your way south, thanks to high energy and real estate costs.
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But Healy says she wants guardrails in place before that changes.
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This puts Massachusetts alongside some other states, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, which have all paused or pushed back with new limits on data center development amid local backlash.
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Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro ordered something pretty similar last month, requiring developers to bring their own power, with an increasingly significant share of it having to be clean.
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Even Healy's Republican opponent in the governor's race, former medical device executive Michael Minogue, says the state should not be trying to attract data center development at all and wants existing facilities required to provide energy support and water purification for their communities.
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It's worth remembering here, Healy's own record is mixed on this.
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She paused a data center sales exemption she'd signed back into law in 2024, and now she's essentially converting the voluntary framework she floated in June into a mandate.
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Story number two this week.
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It's by Kate Aronoff from the New Republic, titled Carbon Capture Won't Save Us Any Time Soon.
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A new UN environment program found that the world is on track to blow way past that one and a half degree Celsius warming threshold that they'd set in the 2015 Paris Accord, and it's going to happen in the next few years without any major changes.
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Looks like we're headed closer to 2.6 degrees of warming, and that's in Celsius, not Fahrenheit.
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To stabilize temperatures back at that 1.5 degree range over a 20-year rolling average after we overshoot it, the report said we're not only going to have to get off of fossil fuels, but we're going to have to figure out carbon capture in a big way, capturing between 15 and 24 gigatons of CO2 per year by the year 2100.
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Right now, total carbon removal sits at 2.2 gigatons a year.
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So we're not close, but there's something there.
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99.95% of that comes from conventional methods, things like tree planting and forest management, not the engineered sort of carbon capture that we're going to need in this instance.
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A new paper looked at all 28 permanent geological carbon storage projects that are or have been operational, and it's ugly.
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On average, these projects hit just 59% of their projected injection rates.
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The biggest one that they studied was Shell's Gorgon plant in Australia.
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It currently captures 0.4 megatons of carbon per year.
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That is way below the three and a half megatons that Shell projected when they launched this project back in 2019.
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The average across all commercial scale projects was just 0.19 megatons per year.
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A separate Princeton study on U.S.
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Net Zero found we need to capture two and a half gigatons per year, mostly for industries like steel and concrete that don't have zero carbon alternatives that are easy to get to.
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Hitting that at Gorgon scale would mean building 250 similar-sized facilities every single year through 2050.
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I don't need to be the one to tell you that that's not going to happen.
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For context on how far off we are, the researchers note that the U.S.
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had just 581 active drilling rigs as of mid-2026.
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And they argue the drilling needed to hit those sequestrian targets.
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Sequestration targets.
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Sequestrian?
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That's like some weird equestrian.
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Sorry, guys, it's early in the morning for me.
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Be larger than the entire existing oil and gas industry.
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This is where Mike would make fun of me, but since he's not here, I've got to tease myself.
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We go to story number three.
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This one by Ivan Penn, former guest on the show from New York Times.
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It's titled Why California is reconsidering its decision to shun nuclear power.
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The nuclear nouveau, very much invoke lately.
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We've been seeing it all over the headlines.
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California, in this story, is weighing extending the life of Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear plant, in lifting a 50-year moratorium on new reactors, driven less by old spent fuel storage concerns and more by a push to hit that 2045 goal, that albatross of 100% clean electricity that California's been working toward.
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The legislature passed a bill last month to study partly lifting that ban, and Governor Newsom has also voiced some support.
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This is a notable shift for a state where nuclear has long been unpopular with lawmakers and environmental groups.
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Diablo's reactors generated more than 8% of California's power last year, and the federal government is stepping up to back it to 271 million bucks from the DOE in August, up to$1.1 billion more available.
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Some groups still argue renewables and batteries are the cheapest, fastest option.
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California and Texas, but that's another conversation, are really proving that out.
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Solar, wind, hydrogeothermal accounted for 70% of in-state generation in California last year, up from just 49% in 2020.
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Big leap there.
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The tension here, of course, is cost.
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California has the second highest electricity prices in the country.
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Depending on where you live, it might be the priciest.
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Critics say new reactors, which routinely blow past budget, look no further than plant Vogel, would push rates higher.
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Existing plants like Diablo are the exception.
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They tend to produce relatively cheap power, which is why even some skeptics support running it longer without building a new one.
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PG ⁇ E says Diablo cuts pollution equal to removing 1.6 million gas cars from the road annually, and it became the state's only nuclear plant after the other one closed in 2013.
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Utilities also co-own the Palo Verde plant in Arizona, which does feed some power back to California.
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I was caught in the middle of this too.
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You may have seen NextEra just handed a$1.9 billion federal loan to restart the Dwayne Arnold Energy Center, writing about that today on factorthis.com.
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It's been dark for six years, aiming to bring it back online by early 2029.
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Our fourth story and the last one before we welcome our guest into the fold is by Mae Valsa from Latitude Media.
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It's titled China's Clean Tech Exports Are Widening the Energy Dominance Gap.
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This one covers a new report from Energy ThinkTech Ember, which found that China's clean energy tech exports hit 6.6% of all of its exports in the first half of this year.
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It amounts for about$140 billion.
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It's closing in on the scale of China's traditional exports, engines like garment, furniture, appliances, the stuff you might think of that's made in China.
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And China's power demand is growing too, jumped up 5% last year.
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All of that growth met with clean power, pushing coal generation down slightly, even as total consumption did hit a record 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours.
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Just last week, solar passed coal and install capacity in China for the first time.
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We'll talk more about that in just a second.
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Coal generation has also slowed there, flattened, or is actively declining across 17 of the 26 regions that Ember tracks.
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Together, that accounts for more than half the country's total coal power capacity.
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U.S.
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tariffs don't seem to be slowing China down, just redirecting where those exports are headed.
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Solar shipments to sub-Saharan Africa are up 37% year over year.
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Brazil's EV registrations about tripled on a wave of Chinese imports.
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Pakistan alone imported more than 50 gigawatts of Chinese solar to protect itself from swings and fossil fuel import costs.
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Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., 2025 was the first year of net negative clean energy investment since at least 2012, a$22 billion drop from 2024.
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The back and forth, federal policy stuff, one of the main reasons long-term manufacturing investment continues to stall out.
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China's approach has been to add clean generation before they retire fossil fuel plants.
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The U.S.
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is doing the opposite.
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You hear about it all the time on this show, blocking wind and solar projects, tariffing imports, and leaning harder into oil and LNG exports.
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Our last story this week, courtesy Tim McDonnell.
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He wrote a piece called China's Solar Beats Coal.
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Tim, welcome back to the program.
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Always great to have you here.
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And even better, considering I can bring in a second voice.
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Finally, for those of you listening or watching who haven't read China's Solar Beats Coal, and we do want you to read the piece, please, Tim, give us a preview.
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What's in it?
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Well, so thank thank you, Paul.
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I'm always always happy to join you here.
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And, you know, sort of just building on the last piece that you were speaking about with China's um kind of amazing global dominance in clean tech exports.
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And then, you know, you kind of look inside the the country um and see what's happening there under the hood.
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And you know, it's it's important to note um that this milestone with with solar in China is about installed capacity.
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So that's not the same thing as uh generation.
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So it it's a great milestone for them to hit that they now have more um uh you know gigawatts of solar installed than they do of coal in China, which is kind of huge and surprising.
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I don't they're they're not quite to the point of um consistently outperforming on generation um there yet.
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So that'll be sort of the next thing to watch.
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And you know, there's an interesting new development um in this story just this morning.
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The International Energy Agency had its latest kind of outlook on global coal demand.
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And what we see is that this year, 2026, we're going to hit another uh all-time record high for global coal demand, close to 9 billion metric tons this year, uh of which China's increasing consumption is a part of that.
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Also see uh consumption growing in India, Southeast Asia, and um you know, this is really again sort of uh tying into the Iran war and everything happening in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.
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Um, I think we've probably talked on this program before about the advantage that China has had during this crisis uh in in being able to increase these clean tech exports, just like you you were just speaking about.
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It's been kind of a geopolitical win for them.
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But when it comes to uh the parts of their economy that are still reliant on um coal to some degree, uh or on gas, um they're importing gas uh LNG from the Middle East, that price has gone up.
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And so you see this kind of um return to coal in China and across Southeast Asia.
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So it's a sort of this balance story of the straight of four moves.
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On the one hand, it is driving clean energy adoption in some corners, but then at the same time also pushing up coal to a new record high.
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And I'll just close by saying, you know, the IEA pointed out in this report that um on this question of have we reached peak coal finally?
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I mean, we keep waiting for peak global coal demand to come around.
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And um, you know, I thought it was gonna be here or sooner, but it's not yet.
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Each year, I mean, it should have gone down this year prior to the the war, that was the expectation, but yeah, it's it's gone back up again.
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So the the the real criteria for whether we've uh actually hit peak coal or not um next year again is gonna come back to what's the situation with with Qatar and the Strait of Hormoes and LNG exports um from that region.
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And if that is still very constrained, I think it's likely that that we'll see coal uh continue to rise.
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Tim, you were thinking exactly what I was thinking here, and that's that we've written the obituary on peak coal a few times now.
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Right.
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And it seems like we've turned that corner, and yet, not just in China and not just because of the Strait of Hormuz, here in the United States, we're talking about extending the life of coal plants, um, even the ones that bipartisan had bipartisan support to shut down.
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Um, you know, I I I don't want to lead you anywhere, but what does that tell us about the predicament that we're in um globally right now and the demand for electricity?
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Well, one thing, I mean, one thing with China to just remember is that, I mean, of course, the the power sector where where coal is competing with um renewables or gas is I mean, that's the predominant source of demand for coal, right?
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But I mean, and actually the IEA report um very interestingly points out that uh the China's power sector alone uh consumes one-third of total global coal consumption.
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So that's I mean, that just gives you a sense of how important that sector is.
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But in China, there but there are other sectors that also consume coal that are harder to decarbonize.
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Coal to chemicals, the the kind of petrochemical sector is still relying on coal.
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We still have you know coal use and coking coal use in steel making and and other sectors.
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So, you know, if we're thinking about the energy transition, you know, it's great to see renewables start to edge out coal in the power sector.
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Um, but you know, there's there's other areas um that are also very emissions intensive where the the solutions, cleaner solutions are not always um so so evident.
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And in the US, you know, it's a different story because um as you just mentioned, there's this we're kind of in this situation right now where there's a lot of political uh support uh from the Trump administration to keep these uh uh coal plants operational that probably are reaching the should be reaching the end of their life.
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And so it it kind of distorts the market signal a little bit because in the US, uh, you know, unlike China or unlike uh Southeast Asian countries, for example, that have to turn to coal because gas is becoming more expensive for their power plants, in the US, we still have extremely cheap natural gas.
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So we you don't have the same kind of competition um between gas and coal.
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I mean, if you know, on a purely economic basis, gas should be winning in in most cases.
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Um, but we're we're sort of seeing instead this sort of artificial um extension of the life of these coal plants.
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And that's you know, obviously going to make it harder for renewables uh to compete there as well.
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So you know, I think um Javier Bloss at Bloomberg, who I've, you know, of course we all know and love and and follow is you know one of the people who's um every time somebody has an obituary for coal, he's always the first one to say, not yet.
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I promise it's not done yet.
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And um, you know, there's a lot of corners of the economy that it's going to be harder to dig coal out of um in the future.
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So I think um, you know, are are we at the peak or not, you know, who knows?
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But I I think we we we're definitely not anywhere near a sort of sudden drop-off in coal as much as some of us may wish to see that.
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Tim, we talk about China and their clean energy economy an awful lot on this program, often comparing their gains to how meager they are here stateside.
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Um, but I've been hearing some things lately about a bit of a slowdown in China as a result of losing out on some credits for uh building uh generation in particular.
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Um what's your what's your takeaway on what's happening over there in general?
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And is there something to be learned about the way they've sort of set up their grid and different to ours and that there's just a surplus of of generation everywhere and waiting for opportunities to to satisfy that um other than the other way around, the sort of the way that we've done things classically?
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Well, China, I mean, you know, China has like this huge problem of of over of overproduction, right?
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And so I think what they've what they've had to do is, I mean, in in order to reach the point where you you get to this world-leading export market, as we were you were talking about earlier on the program, you know, they they've had to pour a lot of state resources into standing up a very extensive manufacturing sector that by now has has gone way beyond uh what you know domestic uh power generation demand is actually asking for um or or is capable of supporting uh in the in the existing grid that they have.
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So I think that's why you've you've seen some of these credits pull back because the solar industry, for example, was just totally cannibalizing itself and you had companies going bankrupt left and right because they were in these brutal price wars and it it just became a totally unviable um corner of the market.
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And uh and uh you know, there's uh one analyst that I was speaking to in, you know, was telling me in in China they have this great expression uh about cabbage.
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When you have a commodity that's just totally undifferentiated and there's way too much of it and it's super cheap, you know, they they call that like being like cabbage and solar was basically has become cabbage.
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And so that they have to have some way of keeping this industry um profitable so that they get more kind of innovation and investment um in in you know new manufacturing to stay competitive against other manufacturers in Europe and and the US and not somehow you know lose this advantage that they that they have.
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But but to your point, I mean, I think now the the challenge um you know it's gonna be it's you know it's almost like a kind of California-esque situation where you have uh you know at certain times of day you have way more solar power than the than the grid can handle.
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And so you need to have some better combination of transmission and storage and um these other things to to kind of you know start to bend the curve on on power generation, because you know, we do we don't really we don't really care that much about uh you know solar capacity installation.
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The main thing is is generation.
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How do you kind of bend that curve?
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And you know, this is where again, you know, there's another structural advantage that China has, which is that when you have a centrally planned um state economy, you know, but they don't have to worry about all the same kind of issues with permitting reform that that we have in the US, and uh they can make decisions in a more centralized way, move more quickly on things like long distance transmission um than maybe we are able to do in the US.
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So there's a there's a policy dynamic to this and uh that that will be all the stuff to watch going forward.
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But I I think you know there's there's no question that um you know, especially on some of these other clean technologies, um offshore wind and and batteries and EVs and and all this stuff.
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I mean, China's uh and stationary batteries, um, you know, China's is pushing ahead very rapidly.
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So there's still more growth to go there.
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Uh you don't want to let your solar gale like cabbage, though, not cabbage type growth.
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I think it is it is it is cabbage, so now we have to turn it into like something reverse cabbage, yeah.
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Bring the real damage.
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You have to uncabbage.
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Yeah, make it into a nice piece of it.
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Tim, I could chat with you all day, but we do have to roll to our clean tech of the week.
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This week's clean tech of the week is Kofi Asante, founder and CEO of Blue Core Energy.
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Just two months after that company launched out of stealth, Asante's startup closed an oversubscribed$50 million seed round this week.
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I actually saw that press release come down.
00:19:14.160 --> 00:19:15.839
They're building small nuclear reactors.
00:19:15.920 --> 00:19:22.400
Uh, they're mounted on floating barges, generating clean power for ports and nearby infrastructure without needing a fixed ground site.
00:19:22.559 --> 00:19:23.200
Pretty cool stuff.
00:19:23.359 --> 00:19:24.799
We talk about the nuclear comeback.
00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:27.920
Shout out to Kofi Asante, our clean tech of the week.
00:19:28.079 --> 00:19:32.880
One last shout out to everyone involved with the show, our terrific producer Brian Mendez, who joined me here this morning.
00:19:32.960 --> 00:19:37.680
Alex Peterson, Claire Querin, for help identify the stories and put an outline together each week.
00:19:37.839 --> 00:19:44.319
And a shout out to Casey, even though he's not around to give me grief this week for always being a stalwart show.
00:19:44.720 --> 00:19:45.440
Yeah, right.
00:19:45.599 --> 00:19:48.720
And thank you, Tim, for joining us for another episode of This Week in Clean Tech.
00:19:48.799 --> 00:19:49.759
Always great to have you here.
00:19:49.920 --> 00:19:52.640
If you haven't read his latest piece in semaphore, go check it out.
00:19:52.799 --> 00:19:56.720
Please subscribe, give a little feedback, share a story suggestion if you enjoyed the program.
00:19:56.960 --> 00:19:59.839
Remember, you can check out every article we talk about each week.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:05.359
There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where this thing lives on factorthhis.com.
00:20:05.519 --> 00:20:07.200
Until next time, be good, people.
00:00:12.880 --> 00:00:20.719
Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week.
00:00:20.879 --> 00:00:23.760
Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026.
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We have a returning guest in waiting.
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Tim McDonnell of Semaphore will be joining the show shortly.
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If you don't know me by now, I'm Factor This content director Paul Gurky, typically joined on the program by Cleantech commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom, but he had to go see a guy about a horse or something.
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Won't be joining us today, so it'll just be my dulcet tones blasting through your airpods.
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We do appreciate hearing from the viewers and listeners of this program.
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You guys have been hitting up our inboxes in mass lately.
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I'm not complaining about that.
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It's a good thing.
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We like to make your opinions part of the show.
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If you've got a story you'd like to see covered or two cents to share, you can email us anytime.
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The address is TWIC Twick at tigercom with twoms.us.
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That stuff gets sent right to my work inbox.
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I've learned that the hard way.
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As always, we've got five Queen Tech stories on tap.
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Let's get into them.
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The first story this week from Greg Ryan and Mark Chetiack from Bloomberg.
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It's titled, Massachusetts will require new data centers to use clean energy.
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So the story here is about Massachusetts Governor Mora Healy, who signed an executive order Tuesday requiring new data center developers to procure their own clean energy generation.
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They also have to get local approval before they can even apply for state construction permits.
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If a developer cannot meet its power needs with renewables, it'll have to pay into a new fund, and that fund will benefit Massachusetts ratepayers.
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The rules kick in for any data center with peak demand larger than 25 megawatts.
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Massachusetts hasn't seen as much data center build out as some other states have, particularly as you work your way south, thanks to high energy and real estate costs.
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But Healy says she wants guardrails in place before that changes.
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This puts Massachusetts alongside some other states, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, which have all paused or pushed back with new limits on data center development amid local backlash.
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Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro ordered something pretty similar last month, requiring developers to bring their own power, with an increasingly significant share of it having to be clean.
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Even Healy's Republican opponent in the governor's race, former medical device executive Michael Minogue, says the state should not be trying to attract data center development at all and wants existing facilities required to provide energy support and water purification for their communities.
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It's worth remembering here, Healy's own record is mixed on this.
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She paused a data center sales exemption she'd signed back into law in 2024, and now she's essentially converting the voluntary framework she floated in June into a mandate.
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Story number two this week.
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It's by Kate Aronoff from the New Republic, titled Carbon Capture Won't Save Us Any Time Soon.
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A new UN environment program found that the world is on track to blow way past that one and a half degree Celsius warming threshold that they'd set in the 2015 Paris Accord, and it's going to happen in the next few years without any major changes.
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Looks like we're headed closer to 2.6 degrees of warming, and that's in Celsius, not Fahrenheit.
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To stabilize temperatures back at that 1.5 degree range over a 20-year rolling average after we overshoot it, the report said we're not only going to have to get off of fossil fuels, but we're going to have to figure out carbon capture in a big way, capturing between 15 and 24 gigatons of CO2 per year by the year 2100.
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Right now, total carbon removal sits at 2.2 gigatons a year.
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So we're not close, but there's something there.
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99.95% of that comes from conventional methods, things like tree planting and forest management, not the engineered sort of carbon capture that we're going to need in this instance.
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A new paper looked at all 28 permanent geological carbon storage projects that are or have been operational, and it's ugly.
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On average, these projects hit just 59% of their projected injection rates.
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The biggest one that they studied was Shell's Gorgon plant in Australia.
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It currently captures 0.4 megatons of carbon per year.
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That is way below the three and a half megatons that Shell projected when they launched this project back in 2019.
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The average across all commercial scale projects was just 0.19 megatons per year.
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A separate Princeton study on U.S.
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Net Zero found we need to capture two and a half gigatons per year, mostly for industries like steel and concrete that don't have zero carbon alternatives that are easy to get to.
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Hitting that at Gorgon scale would mean building 250 similar-sized facilities every single year through 2050.
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I don't need to be the one to tell you that that's not going to happen.
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For context on how far off we are, the researchers note that the U.S.
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had just 581 active drilling rigs as of mid-2026.
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And they argue the drilling needed to hit those sequestrian targets.
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Sequestration targets.
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Sequestrian?
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That's like some weird equestrian.
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Sorry, guys, it's early in the morning for me.
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Be larger than the entire existing oil and gas industry.
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This is where Mike would make fun of me, but since he's not here, I've got to tease myself.
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We go to story number three.
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This one by Ivan Penn, former guest on the show from New York Times.
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It's titled Why California is reconsidering its decision to shun nuclear power.
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The nuclear nouveau, very much invoke lately.
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We've been seeing it all over the headlines.
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California, in this story, is weighing extending the life of Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear plant, in lifting a 50-year moratorium on new reactors, driven less by old spent fuel storage concerns and more by a push to hit that 2045 goal, that albatross of 100% clean electricity that California's been working toward.
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The legislature passed a bill last month to study partly lifting that ban, and Governor Newsom has also voiced some support.
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This is a notable shift for a state where nuclear has long been unpopular with lawmakers and environmental groups.
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Diablo's reactors generated more than 8% of California's power last year, and the federal government is stepping up to back it to 271 million bucks from the DOE in August, up to$1.1 billion more available.
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Some groups still argue renewables and batteries are the cheapest, fastest option.
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California and Texas, but that's another conversation, are really proving that out.
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Solar, wind, hydrogeothermal accounted for 70% of in-state generation in California last year, up from just 49% in 2020.
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Big leap there.
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The tension here, of course, is cost.
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California has the second highest electricity prices in the country.
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Depending on where you live, it might be the priciest.
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Critics say new reactors, which routinely blow past budget, look no further than plant Vogel, would push rates higher.
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Existing plants like Diablo are the exception.
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They tend to produce relatively cheap power, which is why even some skeptics support running it longer without building a new one.
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PG ⁇ E says Diablo cuts pollution equal to removing 1.6 million gas cars from the road annually, and it became the state's only nuclear plant after the other one closed in 2013.
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Utilities also co-own the Palo Verde plant in Arizona, which does feed some power back to California.
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I was caught in the middle of this too.
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You may have seen NextEra just handed a$1.9 billion federal loan to restart the Dwayne Arnold Energy Center, writing about that today on factorthis.com.
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It's been dark for six years, aiming to bring it back online by early 2029.
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Our fourth story and the last one before we welcome our guest into the fold is by Mae Valsa from Latitude Media.
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It's titled China's Clean Tech Exports Are Widening the Energy Dominance Gap.
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This one covers a new report from Energy ThinkTech Ember, which found that China's clean energy tech exports hit 6.6% of all of its exports in the first half of this year.
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It amounts for about$140 billion.
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It's closing in on the scale of China's traditional exports, engines like garment, furniture, appliances, the stuff you might think of that's made in China.
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And China's power demand is growing too, jumped up 5% last year.
00:08:01.759 --> 00:08:10.079
All of that growth met with clean power, pushing coal generation down slightly, even as total consumption did hit a record 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours.
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Just last week, solar passed coal and install capacity in China for the first time.
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We'll talk more about that in just a second.
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Coal generation has also slowed there, flattened, or is actively declining across 17 of the 26 regions that Ember tracks.
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Together, that accounts for more than half the country's total coal power capacity.
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U.S.
00:08:28.079 --> 00:08:32.720
tariffs don't seem to be slowing China down, just redirecting where those exports are headed.
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Solar shipments to sub-Saharan Africa are up 37% year over year.
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Brazil's EV registrations about tripled on a wave of Chinese imports.
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Pakistan alone imported more than 50 gigawatts of Chinese solar to protect itself from swings and fossil fuel import costs.
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Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., 2025 was the first year of net negative clean energy investment since at least 2012, a$22 billion drop from 2024.
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The back and forth, federal policy stuff, one of the main reasons long-term manufacturing investment continues to stall out.
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China's approach has been to add clean generation before they retire fossil fuel plants.
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The U.S.
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is doing the opposite.
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You hear about it all the time on this show, blocking wind and solar projects, tariffing imports, and leaning harder into oil and LNG exports.
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Our last story this week, courtesy Tim McDonnell.
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He wrote a piece called China's Solar Beats Coal.
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Tim, welcome back to the program.
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Always great to have you here.
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And even better, considering I can bring in a second voice.
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Finally, for those of you listening or watching who haven't read China's Solar Beats Coal, and we do want you to read the piece, please, Tim, give us a preview.
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What's in it?
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Well, so thank thank you, Paul.
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I'm always always happy to join you here.
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And, you know, sort of just building on the last piece that you were speaking about with China's um kind of amazing global dominance in clean tech exports.
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And then, you know, you kind of look inside the the country um and see what's happening there under the hood.
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And you know, it's it's important to note um that this milestone with with solar in China is about installed capacity.
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So that's not the same thing as uh generation.
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So it it's a great milestone for them to hit that they now have more um uh you know gigawatts of solar installed than they do of coal in China, which is kind of huge and surprising.
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I don't they're they're not quite to the point of um consistently outperforming on generation um there yet.
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So that'll be sort of the next thing to watch.
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And you know, there's an interesting new development um in this story just this morning.
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The International Energy Agency had its latest kind of outlook on global coal demand.
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And what we see is that this year, 2026, we're going to hit another uh all-time record high for global coal demand, close to 9 billion metric tons this year, uh of which China's increasing consumption is a part of that.
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Also see uh consumption growing in India, Southeast Asia, and um you know, this is really again sort of uh tying into the Iran war and everything happening in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.
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Um, I think we've probably talked on this program before about the advantage that China has had during this crisis uh in in being able to increase these clean tech exports, just like you you were just speaking about.
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It's been kind of a geopolitical win for them.
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But when it comes to uh the parts of their economy that are still reliant on um coal to some degree, uh or on gas, um they're importing gas uh LNG from the Middle East, that price has gone up.
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And so you see this kind of um return to coal in China and across Southeast Asia.
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So it's a sort of this balance story of the straight of four moves.
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On the one hand, it is driving clean energy adoption in some corners, but then at the same time also pushing up coal to a new record high.
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And I'll just close by saying, you know, the IEA pointed out in this report that um on this question of have we reached peak coal finally?
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I mean, we keep waiting for peak global coal demand to come around.
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And um, you know, I thought it was gonna be here or sooner, but it's not yet.
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Each year, I mean, it should have gone down this year prior to the the war, that was the expectation, but yeah, it's it's gone back up again.
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So the the the real criteria for whether we've uh actually hit peak coal or not um next year again is gonna come back to what's the situation with with Qatar and the Strait of Hormoes and LNG exports um from that region.
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And if that is still very constrained, I think it's likely that that we'll see coal uh continue to rise.
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Tim, you were thinking exactly what I was thinking here, and that's that we've written the obituary on peak coal a few times now.
00:12:33.759 --> 00:12:33.840
Right.
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And it seems like we've turned that corner, and yet, not just in China and not just because of the Strait of Hormuz, here in the United States, we're talking about extending the life of coal plants, um, even the ones that bipartisan had bipartisan support to shut down.
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Um, you know, I I I don't want to lead you anywhere, but what does that tell us about the predicament that we're in um globally right now and the demand for electricity?
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Well, one thing, I mean, one thing with China to just remember is that, I mean, of course, the the power sector where where coal is competing with um renewables or gas is I mean, that's the predominant source of demand for coal, right?
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But I mean, and actually the IEA report um very interestingly points out that uh the China's power sector alone uh consumes one-third of total global coal consumption.
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So that's I mean, that just gives you a sense of how important that sector is.
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But in China, there but there are other sectors that also consume coal that are harder to decarbonize.
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Coal to chemicals, the the kind of petrochemical sector is still relying on coal.
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We still have you know coal use and coking coal use in steel making and and other sectors.
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So, you know, if we're thinking about the energy transition, you know, it's great to see renewables start to edge out coal in the power sector.
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Um, but you know, there's there's other areas um that are also very emissions intensive where the the solutions, cleaner solutions are not always um so so evident.
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And in the US, you know, it's a different story because um as you just mentioned, there's this we're kind of in this situation right now where there's a lot of political uh support uh from the Trump administration to keep these uh uh coal plants operational that probably are reaching the should be reaching the end of their life.
00:14:10.399 --> 00:14:25.279
And so it it kind of distorts the market signal a little bit because in the US, uh, you know, unlike China or unlike uh Southeast Asian countries, for example, that have to turn to coal because gas is becoming more expensive for their power plants, in the US, we still have extremely cheap natural gas.
00:14:25.519 --> 00:14:29.600
So we you don't have the same kind of competition um between gas and coal.
00:14:29.679 --> 00:14:34.159
I mean, if you know, on a purely economic basis, gas should be winning in in most cases.
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Um, but we're we're sort of seeing instead this sort of artificial um extension of the life of these coal plants.
00:14:39.679 --> 00:14:44.639
And that's you know, obviously going to make it harder for renewables uh to compete there as well.
00:14:44.799 --> 00:14:56.879
So you know, I think um Javier Bloss at Bloomberg, who I've, you know, of course we all know and love and and follow is you know one of the people who's um every time somebody has an obituary for coal, he's always the first one to say, not yet.
00:14:57.039 --> 00:14:58.559
I promise it's not done yet.
00:14:58.799 --> 00:15:05.840
And um, you know, there's a lot of corners of the economy that it's going to be harder to dig coal out of um in the future.
00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:10.000
So I think um, you know, are are we at the peak or not, you know, who knows?
00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:17.120
But I I think we we we're definitely not anywhere near a sort of sudden drop-off in coal as much as some of us may wish to see that.
00:15:17.600 --> 00:15:28.080
Tim, we talk about China and their clean energy economy an awful lot on this program, often comparing their gains to how meager they are here stateside.
00:15:28.159 --> 00:15:37.279
Um, but I've been hearing some things lately about a bit of a slowdown in China as a result of losing out on some credits for uh building uh generation in particular.
00:15:37.440 --> 00:15:41.279
Um what's your what's your takeaway on what's happening over there in general?
00:15:41.360 --> 00:15:55.600
And is there something to be learned about the way they've sort of set up their grid and different to ours and that there's just a surplus of of generation everywhere and waiting for opportunities to to satisfy that um other than the other way around, the sort of the way that we've done things classically?
00:15:55.919 --> 00:16:00.240
Well, China, I mean, you know, China has like this huge problem of of over of overproduction, right?
00:16:00.320 --> 00:16:30.399
And so I think what they've what they've had to do is, I mean, in in order to reach the point where you you get to this world-leading export market, as we were you were talking about earlier on the program, you know, they they've had to pour a lot of state resources into standing up a very extensive manufacturing sector that by now has has gone way beyond uh what you know domestic uh power generation demand is actually asking for um or or is capable of supporting uh in the in the existing grid that they have.
00:16:30.639 --> 00:16:46.240
So I think that's why you've you've seen some of these credits pull back because the solar industry, for example, was just totally cannibalizing itself and you had companies going bankrupt left and right because they were in these brutal price wars and it it just became a totally unviable um corner of the market.
00:16:46.480 --> 00:16:54.000
And uh and uh you know, there's uh one analyst that I was speaking to in, you know, was telling me in in China they have this great expression uh about cabbage.
00:16:54.240 --> 00:17:04.160
When you have a commodity that's just totally undifferentiated and there's way too much of it and it's super cheap, you know, they they call that like being like cabbage and solar was basically has become cabbage.
00:17:04.319 --> 00:17:21.119
And so that they have to have some way of keeping this industry um profitable so that they get more kind of innovation and investment um in in you know new manufacturing to stay competitive against other manufacturers in Europe and and the US and not somehow you know lose this advantage that they that they have.
00:17:21.279 --> 00:17:35.039
But but to your point, I mean, I think now the the challenge um you know it's gonna be it's you know it's almost like a kind of California-esque situation where you have uh you know at certain times of day you have way more solar power than the than the grid can handle.
00:17:35.119 --> 00:17:51.599
And so you need to have some better combination of transmission and storage and um these other things to to kind of you know start to bend the curve on on power generation, because you know, we do we don't really we don't really care that much about uh you know solar capacity installation.
00:17:51.839 --> 00:17:53.599
The main thing is is generation.
00:17:53.839 --> 00:17:55.599
How do you kind of bend that curve?
00:17:55.839 --> 00:18:19.759
And you know, this is where again, you know, there's another structural advantage that China has, which is that when you have a centrally planned um state economy, you know, but they don't have to worry about all the same kind of issues with permitting reform that that we have in the US, and uh they can make decisions in a more centralized way, move more quickly on things like long distance transmission um than maybe we are able to do in the US.
00:18:19.920 --> 00:18:24.880
So there's a there's a policy dynamic to this and uh that that will be all the stuff to watch going forward.
00:18:25.039 --> 00:18:33.920
But I I think you know there's there's no question that um you know, especially on some of these other clean technologies, um offshore wind and and batteries and EVs and and all this stuff.
00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:39.759
I mean, China's uh and stationary batteries, um, you know, China's is pushing ahead very rapidly.
00:18:39.839 --> 00:18:41.680
So there's still more growth to go there.
00:18:42.079 --> 00:18:45.759
Uh you don't want to let your solar gale like cabbage, though, not cabbage type growth.
00:18:46.960 --> 00:18:51.200
I think it is it is it is cabbage, so now we have to turn it into like something reverse cabbage, yeah.
00:18:51.279 --> 00:18:51.920
Bring the real damage.
00:18:52.559 --> 00:18:53.519
You have to uncabbage.
00:18:53.920 --> 00:18:55.519
Yeah, make it into a nice piece of it.
00:18:55.759 --> 00:18:59.359
Tim, I could chat with you all day, but we do have to roll to our clean tech of the week.
00:18:59.519 --> 00:19:04.960
This week's clean tech of the week is Kofi Asante, founder and CEO of Blue Core Energy.
00:19:05.119 --> 00:19:12.000
Just two months after that company launched out of stealth, Asante's startup closed an oversubscribed$50 million seed round this week.
00:19:12.160 --> 00:19:14.000
I actually saw that press release come down.
00:19:14.160 --> 00:19:15.839
They're building small nuclear reactors.
00:19:15.920 --> 00:19:22.400
Uh, they're mounted on floating barges, generating clean power for ports and nearby infrastructure without needing a fixed ground site.
00:19:22.559 --> 00:19:23.200
Pretty cool stuff.
00:19:23.359 --> 00:19:24.799
We talk about the nuclear comeback.
00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:27.920
Shout out to Kofi Asante, our clean tech of the week.
00:19:28.079 --> 00:19:32.880
One last shout out to everyone involved with the show, our terrific producer Brian Mendez, who joined me here this morning.
00:19:32.960 --> 00:19:37.680
Alex Peterson, Claire Querin, for help identify the stories and put an outline together each week.
00:19:37.839 --> 00:19:44.319
And a shout out to Casey, even though he's not around to give me grief this week for always being a stalwart show.
00:19:44.720 --> 00:19:45.440
Yeah, right.
00:19:45.599 --> 00:19:48.720
And thank you, Tim, for joining us for another episode of This Week in Clean Tech.
00:19:48.799 --> 00:19:49.759
Always great to have you here.
00:19:49.920 --> 00:19:52.640
If you haven't read his latest piece in semaphore, go check it out.
00:19:52.799 --> 00:19:56.720
Please subscribe, give a little feedback, share a story suggestion if you enjoyed the program.
00:19:56.960 --> 00:19:59.839
Remember, you can check out every article we talk about each week.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:05.359
There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where this thing lives on factorthhis.com.
00:20:05.519 --> 00:20:07.200
Until next time, be good, people.
