Adam Clare

Renewables Overtakes All Other Energy Sources

Solar Panels during Dusk Photo by Magic K

Solar just keeps winning on every metric! The International Energy Agency (IEA) released their 2026 Global Energy Review and it provides a good look into the use and generation of energy on a global scale. Growth of energy demand slowed slightly to 1.3% while the growth in renewables is quite noteworthy. Last year solar was the single biggest contributor to energy supply and this marks the first time that renewables have led primary energy growth. It’s not just solar where the renewable success is coming, it’s across the board with renewables being the preferred energy source.

The increase in generation from renewables and nuclear power in 2025 exceeded the total growth in electricity supply. The 2025 increase in solar PV of 600 terawatt-hours (TWh) was the largest-ever electricity generation increase by any source in one year, outside of periods of post-crisis recovery. The rise in solar PV alone met around 70% of electricity generation growth. Renewables combined now virtually match total global generation from coal. In the European Union, the share of solar PV and wind reached 30% in 2025, surpassing that of fossil fuels for the first time. Electricity generation from natural gas and from nuclear power continued to grow at the global level in 2025.

Real Time Street Level Vehicle Exhaust Emission Monitoring

small car

A team of researchers have used the NYC traffic congestion charge as a place to test out some of their hypothesis. Spoiler: the city got better and air quality improved. The research team were able to figure out how to monitor pollutants on individual streets instead of neighbourhood or city-wide levels. They used cameras and phone data to track traffic (removing personally identifiable information). Their method has increased monitoring accuracy and showed that previous pollutant monitoring solutions could vary widely by up to almost 50%

It also helps with better modelling by figuring out which transit options will reduce pollutants the most.

For one, they modeled what would happen to emissions if a certain percentage of travel demand shifted from private vehicles to buses. In another scenario, they looked at what would happen if morning and evening rush hour times were spread out a bit longer, leaving fewer vehicles on the road at once. They also modeled the effects of replacing fine-grained emissions inputs with citywide averages — finding that the rougher emissions estimates could vary widely, from ?49 percent to 25 percent of the more fine-tuned results. That underscores how seemingly small simplifications can introduce large errors into emission estimates.
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To study that, the researchers looked at what happened to vehicle traffic at intervals of two, four, six, and eight weeks after the program began. Overall, congestion pricing lowered traffic volume by about 10 percent — but there was a corresponding drop in emissions of 16-22 percent.

Your City Could Improve Thanks to World War Oil

The American/Israel bombing of Iran and the subsequent closing of the Strait of Hormuz has sent shockwaves around the world, particularly to places that consume fossil fuels. Indeed, the energy disruption is so severe that a global recession is inevitable and that countries the world over are rethinking their commitment to burning fossil fuels.

Not Just Bikes takes a look at the current, and growing, oil shortage through the lens of how cities improve when the costs of oil increases. He looks at the last major oil crisis in the 1970s and how different parts of the world reacted. Spoiler: modern Amsterdam exists in part thanks to the high cost of oil. Governments change policies and laws to reduce reliance on oil and promote good urban design that puts people as the priority rather than cars.

There are things you can do right now to reduce your oil consumption to save money and the planet, and maybe even reduce the American desire to invade countries for oil. You can ride a bike, get solar panels, use an electric stove, and so much more!

Of course, if governments allocated subsidies to renewables and away from fossil fuels then we wouldn’t be in this position at all. People don’t go to war over sunshine.

These Solar Panels Also Turn Rain Into Electricity

Solar panels on grass

Researchers at the Institute of Materials Science of Seville have used a perovskite-based solar panel that can create electricity from the rain. They created a nanometer-thin film that covers the panel and when drops hit the panel it causes a tiny amount electricity to be produced. As a bonus the film provides protection to the panel, which the perovskite panels needs since the material is more fragile than your standard solar cell.

A decade ago we looked at perovskite , and it’s really neat to see this technology continue to improve.

This extremely thin film plays a dual role. First, it acts as an encapsulant that protects the perovskite cells’ chemistry while also increasing their light absorption. In addition to this, the layer acts like a triboelectric surface – one that can convert kinetic energy into electrical energy.
In experiments conducted at the ICMS facility, the researchers found that a single raindrop could generate a potential difference of 110 V, sufficient to power a small portable device.
“Our work proposes an advanced solution that combines perovskite solar cell photovoltaic technology with triboelectric nanogenerators in a thin-film configuration, thus demonstrating the feasibility of implementing both energy harvesting systems,” said Carmen Lopez, a researcher at ICMS, who was involved in the work in the press release.

Denmark is the Best Place for Women

Denmark has earned the title as the best place for women to live based on the Women, Peace and Security Index. It uses 13 indicators that span women’s inclusion from education to justice in order to generate scores. Denmark continues to lead the rankings, while Afghanistan performs the worst. Notable the USA dropped in the rankings as they are removing healthcare and attempting to remove voting rights from women. Hopefully for those living in the USA the shame of falling down the rankings will help change things there for the better. Many developed counties are in the top 20 and we can also hope that they all do as well as Denmark next year, after all the wellbeing of women is directly connected to the wellbeing of nations.

Denmark
Iceland
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Luxembourg
Belgium
Netherlands
Austria
New Zealand
Australian
Estonia
Ireland
Slovenia
Lithuania
Canada
Latvia
Singapore
Switzerland
United Arab Emirates