The Big Picture: Agrivoltaics
For years, this newsletter has reported on a multitude of exciting studies showing that agrivoltaics can increase productivity for a range of crops. Now, a new study pulls it all together, analyzing the results of agrivoltaics research and calculating potential global impact of widespread adoption. Amazingly, they find that extending agrivoltaics worldwide across the crops that have demonstrated yield increases from the protection of solar panels could produce an additional 1,800 million tonnes of food, enough to feed an extra 2.1 billion people and earning over $1 trillion in extra agricultural income! Truly epic potential here — a Good Anthropocene superstar!
India
The magnificent five-foot-tall greater adjutant stork (Leptoptilos dubius, aka hargila, the “bone-swallower”) is recovering from local near-extirpation across the state of Assam in northeast India thanks to dedicated community conservation efforts. An all-women local group, the Hargila Army (now with over 20,000 members), has transformed historic negative associations with the species into widespread cultural support, creating hargila-themed textile merchandise for sale and protecting their communal nesting sites in kadamba trees. The hargila population across Assam is estimated to have risen from around 450 birds in 2007 to around 1,800 today. Superb!
India installed a record-high 36.6 GW (36,600 MW) of new solar power in 2025, up by a whopping 43% year-on-year since 2024. 29.5 GW of that was large-scale solar, with the rest being small-scale (e.g. rooftop) solar. Mass clean electrification continues!
Beginning in February 2024, the PM Surya Ghar program offered subsidies for rooftop solar in India. As of December 2025, just this program has helped install 2,085,514 rooftop solar systems benefiting 2,614,446 Indian households! Awesome.
The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, home to over 240 million people (more than Brazil!) is experiencing an ecological revival. Its forest cover increased from 16,580 km2 in 2016-17 to 17,720 km2 in 2023-24 as millions of new trees have been planted.
In 2022, India began a project to reintroduce the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), with adults translocated from Namibia to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. In February 2026, India’s environmental minister reported the 8th new Indian cheetah litter since 2022, with Namibian transplant mother Aasha giving birth to five healthy cubs! Despite 21 deaths (due to heatwaves among other causes), the nascent cheetah population of India has now grown to 35 individuals, including 11 adults from Africa and 24 cubs born in India. India continues to excel in big cat conservation. Great work!
Romania
Much of the world has now decoupled economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, growing richer while polluting less, but Romania is a particularly striking case. Since 1990, Romania’s net greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 75%, while its real GDP has grown by over 102%, as Ceaucescu-era coal plants close, the grid decarbonizes, and reforestation accelerates. A 750 MW solar farm with battery storage, Europe’s largest (so far!), is now under construction near Bucharest!
United Kingdom
In February 2026, two pairs of beavers were released into the Par and Fowey rivers, becoming the first wild beavers in Cornwall since local extinction in Great Britain in the 1600s. They’re the latest in a wave of successful beaver reintroductions from Scotland to London! Over 100 more beavers are planned to be reintroduced across seven UK rivers in 2026. The British rewilding renaissance continues! Great work.
New final tallies report that UK greenhouse gas emissions fell by 3% from 2023 to 2024. From 1990 to 2024, the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 53% while the economy grew by 80%. Solar build-outs continue. Decoupling at work — excellent!
Energy Minister Ed Miliband (electrotech champion!) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Governor Gavin Newsom for the UK and California to further collaborate on clean energy, including sharing UK offshore wind expertise and major investments in California by rising-star UK grid-tech startup Octopus Energy. Great!
Rwanda
Kigali, capital city of Rwanda, is executing a sweeping plan for urban wetland restoration to help soak up intensifying flooding. After the success of water-purifying and tree-planting ecological renewal at the Nyandungu urban wetland park, work is now underway to restore five more degraded Kigali wetlands totaling 500 hectares. A continuous 36-mile ribbon of stormwater-abating wildlife corridors and bike lanes should be complete by mid-2026. Solarpunk urbanism proliferates! Excellent news.
China
In 2025, total across-the-economy carbon emissions from China fell by 0.3%, with declining emissions in sectors like cement-making, decreased utilization of coal and gas for power, and transport (all those EVs!) counterbalanced by increased emissions from the chemical sector (in large part plastic-making). China’s carbon emissions have now been “flat or falling” for 21 months straight. This is…uh…really, really good news!
Ember has an excellent new in-depth report about China’s mass retrofitting of coal plants to serve as flexible “peaker” plants, not baseload power, as renewables take off!
Relatedly, clean energy drove over 33% of the entire nation of China’s GDP growth and over 90% of all of China’s investment growth in 2025! An electrostate, for real.
In February 2026, the largest-ever electric container ship began its sea trials off Shanghai. The Ning Yuan Dian Kun weighs 10,000 tonnes, is nearly 128 meters long, can carry 740 TEUs (a standard shipping container size) and is powered by 10 batteries generating up to 19,000 KWh driving two magnetic propulsion motors.
This exact kind of seaborne containerized shipping, the backbone of global trade, was long considered one of the hardest-to-decarbonize industries. That’s done now. As with seemingly everything, the answer is just “batteries keep getting better.” WOW!
Our World in Data reports that China is leading the world in industrial robot deployment, with 276,000 annual installations in 2023. Surely many more by now. Chinese EV-makers are now running “dark factories” so fully automated they don’t even put lights on for humans, with robots making up to 1,200 EVs per day. Wow.
Georgia
Construction has begun on “First Light,” a 24 MW solar farm in the country (not the U.S. state) of Georgia that will provide on-site industrial-scale power for leading local company Rustavi Azot’s manufacturing of fertilizers and industrial chemicals.
Not long ago, solar for direct decarbonization of industrial manufacturing was a utopian dream. Now, it happens even in a remote Caucasus republic. Progress is fast!
Bolivia
The Sehuencas water frog (Telmatobius yuracare) seemed on the edge of extinction for much of the 21st century. One male captured in 2009, “Romeo,” was feared to be an “endling,” the last of his species, until five more wild individuals including a female (“Juliet”) were found and brought into captivity in 2018. Romeo died of old age in 2025 without having fathered offspring — but that same year, biologists discovered a new wild population of Seheuncas water frogs in the Carrasco National Park of Bolivia! Numbers appear “small but stable,” and underwater acoustic monitoring devices have been installed to noninvasively keep tabs on their health and well-being. Great work!
United States
Despite the disgusting gangsters in the White House, people across America keep building real progress towards a brighter future!
As the U.S. coal power fleet has nearly halved since 2010, the current monstrous U.S. president has overseen the most coal plant retirements of any president in history (despite increasingly desperate efforts to force aging money-losing coal plants to stay open!) with 57 GW of coal capacity retired in the one-and-a-quarter terms so far compared to 48 GW retired during Obama’s two terms and 41 GW retired during Biden’s one term. Many more old coal plants will likely retire soon. A delicious irony!
U.S. geothermal superstar Fervo has drilled its hottest well yet at a new geothermal power site in Utah, exceeding 555°F at 11,200 feet deep in under 11 days of work!
A UCSB research team has invented an efficient and reversible way to store solar energy in Dewar pyrimidone molecules, at a higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries! It’s already been used to boil water in the lab. Fascinating potential!
Leading Chinese EV-maker BYD has sued the United States government over the tariffs blocking them from U.S. sales, joining many companies arguing that the U.S. President has no legal authority to unilaterally set tariffs without Congress’s approval.
The 350 megawatt-hour Cross Town grid-scale battery storage project has opened in Gorham, Maine, the town where this writer went to university. It’s the largest battery storage project in New England so far, able to supply continuous full power to 19,000 homes for 2.5 hours or just run at lower levels to help balance the grid. Great work!
The U.S. state of Michigan has sued four fossil fuel companies and a lobbying group over “cartel” conspiracy to strangle clean energy and EV growth, driving up utility bills. This first-of-its-kind lawsuit is a great new offensive against a cabal of saboteurs!
A new study has found that U.S. forests have shifted to sequestering more carbon in the period from 2005 to 2022 as atmospheric carbon concentrations rise.
A wild wolf has been seen in Los Angeles County for the first time since the local extirpation of wolves across California in the 1920s. BEY03F is a GPS-collared 3-year-old female, and has walked over 400 miles so far, likely in search of a mate. Wolves first returned to California in 2011, and as of 2025 the Golden State had an estimated 50-70 wild wolves in 10 packs. Here’s my in-depth interview on the history. Awesome!
I always look forward to the beginning of your report on the United States, today's being "Despite the disgusting gangsters in the White House."