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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, the inbox is twitchy, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about alignment. Economics, infrastructure, and deployment pulling ahead, often in spite of politics.
The big five:
China’s fossil power drops for the first time in a decade as renewables take over the heavy lifting.
Europe crosses a real threshold: wind and solar overtake fossil fuels.
US solar and batteries keep scaling, because cost curves ignore ideology.
Canada and Europe redraw EV trade lines, leaving the US on the sidelines.
AI moves from demos to doing real work, from labs to daily tools.
Also this week: the world’s largest EV moves under its own power, Germany reinstates EV subsidies, India builds renewables at continental scale, and Antarctica’s hidden landscape comes into focus.
Plus a new blog post on why businesses are ditching grid dependence, and two podcast episodes on grid limits and why ESG is now a balance-sheet issue.
Let’s get into it.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
China’s Coal Finally Blinks
I’ve been saying for a while that watching China matters more than listening to politicians elsewhere, and this week the data quietly proved the point. In 2025, China’s fossil-fuelled power generation fell for the first time in a decade, squeezed out by an absolute torrent of renewables even as electricity demand hit record highs.
Key highlights
Thermal power, mostly coal, fell 1% year-on-year in 2025, ending a ten-year run of uninterrupted growth.
Renewables scaled fast enough to meet demand growth of around 5%, while total electricity use surged past 10 trillion kWh, for the first time.
Hydropower and nuclear both grew steadily, reinforcing that this wasn’t a weather fluke or a one-off blip.
Why This Matters: When the world’s largest power system grows demand and still burns less coal, that’s not optics, it’s structural change with global climate implications.
Kismet: China’s electricity consumption in 2025 was higher than the combined usage of the EU, Russia, India, and Japan, yet coal generation still went backwards. That’s the bit that should make energy modellers sit up straight. 👉 Full story here
California Keeps Going, Even When Washington Trips Over Itself
California just sailed past its clean-car target, racking up more than 2.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road, despite federal support going missing in action. It turns out that long-term policy, infrastructure spend, and stubborn momentum still work, even when the incentives get yanked away.
Key highlights
California exceeded its goal of 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles by 2025, hitting over 2.5 million sold since 2010.
Nearly 23% of new vehicles sold in the state in 2025 were classed as zero-emission, far ahead of the U.S. average.
The state now boasts more than 200,000 public and shared charging points, cushioning the blow from cancelled federal incentives.
Why This Matters: This is what durable climate progress looks like: local policy, infrastructure, and markets carrying on even when national politics decide to sulk.
Kismet: Before 2010, California had sold fewer than 600 zero-emission vehicles in total. Fifteen years later, it’s averaging more than 450 new EVs every single day. 👉 Full story here
US Courts: 1, Offshore Wind Ban 0
Good news from the Atlantic: construction on the Empire Wind offshore project off New York is back on after a federal judge lifted the Trump administration’s suspension. Turns out “national security concerns” don’t always survive first contact with a courtroom, and 500,000 homes’ worth of clean power is back on the menu.
Key highlights
A federal judge allowed Empire Wind to resume construction after a temporary halt imposed by the Trump administration.
The project, developed by Equinor, is expected to supply electricity equivalent to more than 500,000 homes.
Empire Wind is one of several offshore wind projects targeted, with courts now steadily unblocking multiple developments along the US East Coast.
Why This Matters: This is a reminder that clean energy momentum in the US is increasingly being defended not by speeches, but by contracts, courts, and grid reality.
Kismet: The cable-laying barge reconnecting Empire Wind to New York’s grid is American-flagged, meaning one of the projects accused of undermining national security is literally being built with US ships and crews. That irony writes itself. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Isn’t Taking Jobs. It’s Taking Tasks. Quietly.
Anthropic’s latest Economic Index report is one of the more sober, data-heavy looks at how AI is actually showing up in real work, and the takeaway isn’t sci-fi panic, it’s subtler and more disruptive. AI isn’t replacing occupations wholesale yet, but it is steadily eating away at chunks of knowledge work, especially writing, analysis, coding, and research tasks.
Key highlights
The majority of AI use today is task-level augmentation, not full job replacement, with humans still firmly in the loop.
Knowledge workers dominate usage, particularly in software development, business analysis, education, and content-heavy roles.
AI is being used most where work is text-dense, iterative, and time-pressured, less so in physical or highly regulated tasks.
Why This Matters: This is how labour markets actually change in the real world: not with mass layoffs overnight, but with job content quietly reshaped until roles look very different from the inside.
Kismet: Anthropic’s data suggests AI adoption is clustering fastest in jobs that already felt overloaded, meaning burnout, not efficiency, may have been the real adoption driver all along.
(And yes, this comes from Anthropic, which makes the restraint in tone even more interesting.) 👉 Full story here [PDF]
AI Just Gave Chemists a Cookbook. And It Actually Works.
This one’s quietly huge. Researchers at Yale University have built an AI system called MOSAIC that doesn’t just predict molecules, it generates step-by-step lab procedures for making them, pulling from thousands of specialised “expert” models instead of one big generalist brain.
Key highlights
MOSAIC draws on 2,498 AI “experts”, each representing deep knowledge in a specific chemistry niche.
It can generate experimental protocols for compounds that don’t yet exist and estimate how likely they are to work.
The system has already helped synthesise more than 35 previously unreported compounds and is fully open-source.
Why This Matters: This is AI moving from prediction to production, shortening the painfully slow loop between idea, experiment, and discovery across drugs, materials, catalysts, and climate-critical chemistry.
Kismet: The researchers describe MOSAIC as “Google Maps for chemistry”, which is fitting, because just like GPS changed travel without inventing cars, this could change science without replacing scientists. 👉 Full story here
Google’s AI Advantage Isn’t Memory. It’s Context.
ChatGPT can remember what you tell it. Gemini, if you allow it, can now with what they’re calling Personal Intelligence, see what you actually do. That’s the real shift in Google’s Personal Intelligence push, and it’s why this matters far beyond a nicer chatbot experience.
Key highlights
Gemini can see and reason across Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search, stitching together intent, history, and behaviour in a way OpenAI simply can’t replicate without owning those platforms.
This turns AI from a prompt-based tool into a background system that understands timelines, habits, and context without being spoon-fed.
The rollout is US-only for now, largely because this model of integration runs straight into EU privacy law head-on.
Why This Matters: This is Google betting that the future AI winner isn’t the smartest model, but the one embedded deepest into daily workflows, data exhaust, and personal context.
Kismet: The irony is delicious: Google’s biggest AI advantage is also its biggest regulatory liability. The very data gravity that makes Gemini powerful is precisely what will slow it down in Europe. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
The World’s Biggest EV Just Floated Past a Major Milestone
Forget cars for a second. The largest electric vehicle on Earth just moved under its own power for the first time, and it’s a 130-metre electric ferry with batteries heavier than most buildings. Built by Incat, the vessel known as China Zorrilla has officially entered harbour trials in Tasmania, powered purely by electrons.
Key highlights
The ferry carries around 250 tonnes of batteries delivering roughly 40 MW of power, equivalent to about 487 electric cars.
It can transport up to 2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles over distances of up to 185 km, entirely on battery power.
Once trials are complete, it will operate for Buquebus, linking Argentina and Uruguay across the River Plate.
Why This Matters: This is electrification breaking out of the “small vehicle” box, proving that batteries can handle heavy-duty, high-capacity transport where diesel once seemed unavoidable.
Kismet: The ship was originally designed to run on LNG. Switching to full electric didn’t just cut emissions, it made it the most powerful electric vehicle ever built. Sometimes the backup plan turns out to be the future. 👉 Full story here
Canada Charts Its Own EV Path. And the US Is Starting to Look Isolated.
Canada’s has just decided to cut tariffs on Chinese EVs and it isn’t happening in a vacuum. It lands just weeks after Europe struck its own managed-access deal with China on electric vehicles, signalling a broader realignment among former US allies around affordability, industrial pragmatism, and climate timelines.
Key highlights
Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs annually, rising to ~70,000 over five years, at tariffs of around 6%, down from 100%.
Entry-level EV prices could fall below CAD $35,000 (≈ €24,000), versus an average new car price of CAD $63,000 (≈ €43,000).
The deal mirrors Europe’s recent approach: limited volumes, lower tariffs, and an emphasis on competition rather than outright exclusion.
Why This Matters: As Europe and Canada converge on managed openness, the US is increasingly the outlier, doubling down on protectionism while allies prioritise affordability, electrification speed, and supply-chain realism.
Kismet: For years, Washington warned allies about Chinese EVs. Now two of its closest partners have independently decided the bigger risk is not letting affordable electric cars into their markets. 👉 Full story here
Germany Reinstates EV Subsidies. Because the Maths Still Matter.
Germany has brought back electric car subsidies after learning, the hard way, that pulling support too early doesn’t create a “market correction”, it creates a sales cliff. The reboot is explicitly about affordability, industrial survival, and getting the transition moving again at speed.
Key highlights
The German government will offer €3,000+ subsidies for fully electric cars, with additional support for families and lower-income households.
EVs already rebounded to nearly 20% of new car sales in 2025, after collapsing when subsidies were scrapped in 2023.
Industry groups welcomed the move as stabilising demand, while environmental NGOs criticised support for plug-in hybrids.
Why This Matters: Germany’s reversal is an admission that EV transitions don’t run on ideology alone. Pricing, timing, and policy continuity still decide whether markets accelerate or stall.
Kismet: Germany didn’t reintroduce subsidies because EVs are failing. It did it because the country’s carmakers invested billions in electrification and discovered that demand doesn’t magically appear when governments walk away mid-transition. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
India Is Building the World’s Biggest Clean Energy Machine. Quietly. Relentlessly.
China gets most of the headlines, but India is busy doing something just as consequential. In the salt flats of Gujarat, it’s constructing the largest renewable energy park on the planet, a single site so vast it makes most national projects look modest.
Key highlights
The Khavda Renewable Energy Park will span 726 km² and deliver 30 GW of combined solar and wind capacity when complete, enough to power a country the size of the Netherlands.
Solar and wind are co-located to smooth output, with solar peaking by day and wind strengthening at night, backed by plans for one of India’s largest battery storage systems.
India added 50 GW of renewables in a single year, and now gets more than half of its installed power capacity from non-fossil sources.
Why This Matters: This is the energy transition shifting centre of gravity. Not driven by virtue signalling or climate diplomacy, but by growth, demand, and hard-nosed economics in fast-expanding economies.
Kismet: The land hosting this mega-project was once considered unusable due to extreme salinity. Turns out some of the most hostile terrain on Earth is perfectly suited to building the clean energy systems of the future. 👉 Full story here
One Land-Use Tweak. Every Car and Truck Goes Electric.
This is one of those stories that quietly demolishes entire talking points. New analysis from Our World in Data shows that if we put solar panels on land currently used to grow biofuels, we could generate enough electricity to power every car and truck on Earth. And using agrivoltaics, we could still use the same land for agriculture!
Key highlights
Around 32 million hectares of land are used for biofuels today, roughly the size of Germany or Poland.
Covering that land with solar could produce ~32,000 TWh per year, more electricity than the world currently generates in total.
Global road transport would need only ~7,000 TWh, less than a quarter of that output, to fully electrify all cars and trucks.
Why This Matters: This reframes the EV debate entirely. The bottleneck isn’t energy availability or land scarcity, it’s how inefficiently we’re still using both.
Kismet: When you combine solar’s efficiency with electric drivetrains, you get a jaw-dropper: the same land can move vehicles 70 times further using solar-powered EVs than biofuels. That’s not optimisation. That’s a category error finally being exposed. 👉 Full story here
US Solar Keeps Winning. Politics Loses Again.
Despite sustained attempts from Trump-era politics to kneecap renewables, US solar just steamrolled reality. New data shows solar met 61% of all US electricity demand growth in 2025, because it turns out electrons don’t care about press conferences or culture wars.
Key highlights
Solar generation jumped 27% (+83 TWh) in 2025, covering nearly two-thirds of rising US electricity demand.
In peak daylight hours, solar met 100% of demand growth, and thanks to batteries, it’s now covering part of the evening peak too.
Battery deployments surged 133% year-on-year, quietly turning solar from “cheap daytime power” into increasingly dispatchable capacity.
Why This Matters: This is the energy transition running on economics, not ideology. When demand rises, the cheapest, fastest-to-build option wins, regardless of who’s shouting from the podium.
Kismet: Even with all the noise about grid instability and “duck curves”, the US still doesn’t have one at a national level. Solar is growing so fast there’s still plenty of fossil fuel generation left to displace. The ceiling hasn’t even come into view yet. 👉 Full story here
Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in EU power supply
This is one of those milestone moments that will look obvious in hindsight. In 2025, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels across the EU for the first time, marking a structural shift in Europe’s power system, not a temporary blip.
Key highlights
Wind and solar supplied 30% of EU electricity, edging past fossil fuels at 29%, according to data from Ember.
When you add nuclear, 71% of EU power is now low-carbon, despite political pushback and a difficult hydro year due to drought.
Coal collapsed to a record low 9.2%, with Germany and Poland both hitting all-time lows.
Why This Matters: This isn’t a forecast or a target. It already happened. Europe’s power sector has crossed from fossil-led to clean-led, and every new wind turbine or solar farm now widens that gap.
Kismet: The real constraint going forward isn’t generation, it’s grids. Europe is already switching off clean power during peaks because there isn’t enough transmission or storage. The transition didn’t stall. It ran ahead of the infrastructure built to support it. 👉 Full story here
Science
We Just Saw Under Antarctica’s Ice. And It Changes the Stakes.
For the first time, scientists have mapped the landscape beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet in genuinely fine detail, revealing mountains, valleys, ridges, and deep channels that were previously little more than educated guesses. It’s a technical breakthrough with very real climate consequences.
Key highlights
Researchers combined satellite data with ice-flow physics to produce the most detailed map yet of Antarctica’s bedrock.
Tens of thousands of previously unknown hills and ridges were identified, along with deep subglacial channels hundreds of kilometres long.
These hidden features strongly influence how fast glaciers move and retreat, directly affecting future sea-level rise projections.
Why This Matters: Antarctica’s melt rate is one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science. Better maps mean better models, and better models mean fewer excuses for pretending we don’t know what’s coming.
Kismet: Scientists now know more about the surface of Mars than they did about the ground beneath Antarctica’s ice. That knowledge gap just narrowed, and it may prove pivotal in understanding how quickly coastlines worldwide are at risk. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
When the Grid Became the Risk
I wrote this piece because last year’s Iberian blackout made something uncomfortably clear: for businesses, the grid is no longer a given, it’s a variable. In the post, I unpack why solar + storage PPAs are rapidly shifting from “nice sustainability add-on” to core operating infrastructure for companies that care about cost, continuity, and control.
Key highlights
Solar is now the cheapest new power source on the planet, and when paired with batteries it becomes dispatchable, predictable, and financeable as pure opex.
Businesses are turning to PPAs not primarily for climate optics, but for price certainty, resilience, and protection against grid volatility.
Behind-the-meter solar + storage doesn’t just help companies, it actively stabilises grids by shaving peaks and providing fast-response flexibility.
Why This Matters: This is a quiet but profound shift: energy strategy is moving out of sustainability teams and into the CFO’s office, because volatility and outages have become existential business risks.
Kismet: Commercial battery systems are now responding to grid disturbances faster than traditional power plants, meaning ordinary factories and offices are starting to behave like pieces of national infrastructure. That’s not what PPAs were sold as. It’s what they’re becoming. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
This Week on the Climate Confident Podcast: Europe Doesn’t Have an Energy Problem. It Has a Grid Problem.
This week’s episode builds directly on themes from my blog post, but from a different altitude. I sat down with Rob Stait of Alight to talk less about why businesses are turning to solar + storage PPAs, and more about what’s breaking underneath the system that makes those choices inevitable.
Key highlights
Why blaming renewables for grid instability gets causality backwards.
How behind-the-meter solar and batteries reduce risk and actively stabilise the grid.
Why waiting for cheaper batteries is often the wrong business decision.
How microgrids and islanding are moving from edge cases to logical next steps.
Why This Matters: If the blog post was about energy becoming a board-level risk, this conversation is about the structural limits of Europe’s grid and why decentralised generation isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s becoming unavoidable.
Kismet: Rob makes a quietly radical point: ordinary factories and data centres are already responding faster to grid disturbances than traditional power plants. In other words, parts of Europe’s critical infrastructure are now sitting behind corporate fences, not national ones. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
This Week on the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast: ESG Just Hit the Balance Sheet
This week’s episode is where sustainability finally stops pretending to be about reporting and starts behaving like infrastructure. I spoke with Dr Nisha Kohli, founder and CEO of CorpStage, about why ESG is rapidly becoming a source of cost savings, tariff avoidance, and competitive advantage rather than a compliance headache.
Key highlights
Why companies are being forced to choose between tariffs on one side and carbon taxes on the other.
How relatively simple “greening” measures are delivering 50–60% IRR with payback periods of just three to four years.
Why ESG ratings often mislead, and why credible, auditable data is becoming essential for supply chain decisions.
How carbon pricing is quietly becoming a core input into sourcing, trade, and logistics strategy.
Why This Matters: Sustainability has moved from the footnotes to the cost structure. When carbon prices and border taxes start shaping margins, ESG stops being abstract and becomes operational reality.
Kismet: One of the most interesting insights from the episode: in many sectors, it’s now cheaper to decarbonise than to keep paying tariffs and carbon border taxes. ESG isn’t a cost anymore. It’s an arbitrage opportunity.. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Oonagh O’Grady of Hydrostor, and Priscilia Moulin, of MosaiX.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
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And Finally
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