Category:Renewable Energy

August 2026

GreenPolicy360: Venture Capital Gets the Picture (Why Doesn't the Current US Administration?)

What will electricity in the US look like in the coming decades?

From Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z)

Base Power, Home Power, & the Future of Electricity

'Electricity is a commodity, and the best electron is the cheapest electron'

https://www.a16z.news/p/base-power-and-the-future-of-electricity

a16z News

August 4, 2026

In 2018, Zach Dell was a summer analyst at Blackstone studying the utility-scale battery opportunity. “One thing became really clear to me,” he recalls. “The marginal cost of solar plus storage was going to fall below the marginal cost of coal and natural gas.”

He was right. Solar is now the fastest-growing source of electricity in history, and the price of a lithium-ion battery pack has fallen more than 90% since 2010...

Cheaper batteries could help fix our aging grid infrastructure because a battery and transmission line essentially do the same job: both move power from where it’s worth less to where it’s worth more. A transmission line does it through space, carrying power from where it’s made cheaply, like a solar farm in Arizona, to customers hundreds of miles away. A battery does it through time, storing power at noon when solar is flooding the grid and releasing it in the evening when everyone is home, the sun is down, and power is expensive.

The only problem was that the way incumbents were deploying battery storage was too slow, and the batteries weren’t where the grid needed them. “Ninety-nine percent of storage on the grid is utility-scale storage..."

The grid has been called the largest machine in the world – building it took decades, millions of workers, and hundreds of billions of dollars – and fixing it is an almost impossibly ambitious task. But in 2023, Justin Lopas and Zach Dell founded Base Power to try anyway, and it turned out that a lot of talented people wanted to work on this problem too. The engineer who got Starlink’s laser mesh network working joined to lead their software. A Tesla veteran who’d spent thirteen years on everything from the original Roadster to the Powerwall joined to build their battery. And investors have since bet billions of dollars that they’re onto something...

Within three years of founding, Base has grown its battery fleet to over 500 megawatt-hours and expanded beyond Texas into Illinois. In October of last year, it raised a $1 billion Series C and converted an abandoned newspaper factory in downtown Austin into a fully functioning battery factory in eight months. This week it announced a $1 billion Series D alongside the launch of the Base Core battery, which is now in production there. The factory turns out thousands of systems a month, and the plan is to manufacture four gigawatt-hours of batteries a year, with over 10 at the next facility. “It is so critical to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., especially for critical infrastructure." ...

America will need more than cheap electrons. China accounted for over 80% of battery cell production in 2025, and its share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing (polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules) exceeds 80%. Washington has responded to this supply chain risk with tariffs, which pushes energy prices higher still.

[Ed: Here's the green solution in the mix] Base wants to help solve this by building more factories and vertically integrating further over time.

So: Go Alternative Energy, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy

Making a future-looking case 'on the merits'...

More:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/08/04/base-power-launches-39-2-kwh-u-s-made-base-core-home-battery-secures-1-billion-in-new-funding/

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/base-power-raises-another-1b-to-save-the-grid-using-backyard-batteries/

https://fortune.com/2026/08/06/michael-dell-son-built-home-battery-business/

Tesla Powerwall Provides Monthly Rent-It Option

"Powerwall Lease", Tesla Electric Backup Plan (Texas)

https://electrek.co/2026/08/13/tesla-powerwall-backup-lease-tesla-electric-texas/

In Australia, a Home Battery Boom Has Helped Cut Wholesale Power Prices in Half

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries

Australia is the world leader in rooftop solar, with panels installed on more than one in three households, the highest rate of adoption globally

https://www.green.com.au/solar/solar-statistics

Australia is on track to more than double its home battery capacity in 2026, Bloomberg reports. The program has also been a boon to the grid. By relying on batteries in the early evening, when demand peaks, homeowners are reducing the need for utilities to fire up additional power plants during those hours, which is helping to lower costs for other ratepayers, officials say.

The subsidy program has been “the major factor in the wholesale price of energy falling in Australia by 47 percent in the last 12 months... “Australia is one of the very, very few countries in the world which is reducing wholesale prices in the midst of a global energy crisis.”

Home Batteries Are Suddenly Cheap and Everywhere (in the US)

Here's Why

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/home-batteries-are-suddenly-cheap-and-everywhere-heres-why/

🌎

April 2026

Trump killed the federal tax credits for wind power. He added new permitting barriers. He attacks the industry almost daily. Meanwhile, the largest wind farm ever built in the United States just quietly started generating electricity. SunZia Wind in New Mexico has 916 turbines and a 550-mile transmission line to California. It will power 3 million people. In the past four weeks, California has broken its wind generation record eight times. Neither the developer nor the grid operator announced the milestone. Good news travels slowly in Trump's America.

-- Alexander Verbeek

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Thinking Energy Conversion

Think of moving away from fossil fuels and their full costs

Think of a Terawatt and then think.... Petawatt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terawatt

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting

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World has installed 1TW of solar capacity

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/03/15/humans-have-installed-1-terawatt-of-solar-capacity/

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Science, Technology & Competitive Renewable Energy: Solar Shines Bright in the Markets

For the first time, according to the International Energy Agency, (IEA), in its World Energy Outlook 2020 published in October 2020, renewable solar is the “new king,” beating non-renewable coal at its own game.

In fact, solar has surpassed IEA’s predictions made last year by 20-50% (the range varies with location). On- and offshore wind projects also enjoyed similarly large cost reductions from previous estimates...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics

2021

The Renewable Revolution and Pushback

Via OilPrice.com

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Whats-Holding-The-Renewable-Revolution-Back.html

Even in the U.S., where many of the global clean energy giants are based, renewable energy only made up 11 percent of the national primary energy consumption in 2018.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

Before analyzing why the much-talked-about renewable energy boom has yet to significantly impact the fossil fuel industry, a quick overview of the renewable successes in the last decade is necessary.

'The Decade of the Renewable Revolution

In 2010, more than 15 GW of solar was installed globally in a single year for the first time ever. By 2018, that number had soared to 102 GW.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy launched the SunShot Initiative, aiming to make solar costs competitive with other forms of energy. The initiative reached its 2020 goal three years early.

In 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany alone, as the nation strove to become a global leader in renewable energy.

In 2013, wind power became cost-competitive with both natural gas and coal, with some wind farms in the Midwest signing power agreements at as low as $25 per megawatt-hour.

In 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Facility opened in the Mojave Desert with the potential to power 100,000 Californian homes and prove the viability of large-scale solar.

In 2015, 153 GW of renewable energy was installed, which was more than the amount of conventional fossil fuel added that year. This prompted Fatih Birol to claim that “We are witnessing a transformation of global power markets led by renewables”.

In 2016, Portugal ran for four days straight on renewable energy alone, with solar, wind and hydropower sourcing all of the country’s electricity consumption for 107 hours.

In 2017, renewable energy surpassed nuclear energy as a percentage of U.S. energy generation for the first time in the modern nuclear era.

In 2018, California approved a historic policy that required all new homes in the state to incorporate solar panels as of 2020. Legislative wins like this for the clean energy industry shows that there is plenty of political will behind the renewable revolution.

In 2019, the UK generated more of its energy from zero-carbon sources than from all fossil fuels combined for the first time since the industrial revolution.

An impressive list of renewable energy milestones. But there have been plenty of obstacles for the industry to overcome and the reality is that big ambitions and even an increasing amount of political will aren’t going to be enough.

What’s stopping renewables?

The single most important issue when it comes to integrating renewables into our energy mix is the lack of energy storage...

Editor: And then there are the politics...

Visit Fossil Fuels @GreenPolicy360

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Fossil_Fuels

Visit Money in Politics

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Money_in_Politics

Visit Merchants of Doubt

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Merchants_of_Doubt

Via the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.

Proposing reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full

A number of studies... have concluded that an 80% decarbonization of the US electric grid could be achieved at reasonable cost. The high level of decarbonization is facilitated by an optimally configured continental high-voltage transmission network. There seems to be some consensus that substantial amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions could be avoided with widespread deployment of solar and wind electric generation technologies along with supporting infrastructure.

It is not in question that it would be theoretically possible to build a reliable energy system excluding all bioenergy, nuclear energy, and fossil fuel sources. Given unlimited resources to build variable energy production facilities, while expanding the transmission grid and accompanying energy storage capacity enormously, one would eventually be able to meet any conceivable load. However, in developing a strategy to effectively mitigate global energy-related CO2 emissions, it is critical that the scope of the challenge to achieve this in the real world is accurately defined and clearly communicated.

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California's Brown signs renewable energy bill in another rebuke to Trump

September 10, 2018 / Via Politico

SACRAMENTO — California will aim to derive all its retail electricity from renewable sources by 2045 under a bill Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law on Monday, with backers framing the measure as the state’s latest rebuke to environmental backsliding by the Trump administration.

The bill “is sending a message to California and the world that we are going to meet the Paris agreement and we are going to continue down that path to transition our economy,” Brown told reporters, referencing the climate accord from which President Donald Trump withdrew the United States last year.

Brown’s signature comes in the waning months of his fourth and final term, and serves as a capstone to his efforts to make California a global leader on climate change. He timed the public signing ceremony to a global climate summit that will bring public officials from around the world to San Francisco this week.

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China Shifting to Renewable Energy

China’s Green Shift is Positioning it to Overtake US in Energy Technology

Pollutionwatch: Air contamination drops by 30% in China

Utility of renewable energy in China’s low-carbon transition / May 2018

"In 2017, renewable energy encompassed 36.6% of China’s total installed electric power capacity, and 26.4% of total power generation.

According to Energy Production and Consumption Revolution Strategy 2016-2030, by 2030, 50% of total electric power generation will be from non-fossil energy sources, including nuclear and renewable energy.”