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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday. The batteries are getting bigger, the datasets deeper, and FutureProof is back.
This week feels like acceleration.
Not just more technology.
More proof that the technology works.
Because across energy, AI, and mobility, the pattern is the same: systems that looked experimental a few years ago are now operating at industrial scale.
The big threads:
China’s solar boom crosses another milestone as the country generates more power from solar than wind for the first time
Grid storage leaps forward as a 100-hour iron-air battery project dwarfs what used to be the world’s largest battery
EV myths keep collapsing as real-world cars clock hundreds of thousands of miles with minimal battery degradation
AI moves deeper into daily life, from how teenagers study to how scientists are uncovering new signals in Alzheimer’s research
Astronomers release the most detailed map yet of the turbulent heart of our own galaxy
Plus: a Climate Confident episode exploring why fashion’s biggest climate lever might be wearing clothes more often, and a Resilient Supply Chain conversation about finding the hidden “Jesus nuts” that can bring entire supply chains down.
The transition isn’t slowing down.
If anything, it’s getting harder to ignore.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
China’s New Climate Plan: More Wind, More Solar… Still Some Coal
China has unveiled its latest five-year climate strategy, promising a 17% cut in carbon intensity by 2030, powered largely by an explosion in renewable energy. The catch? Coal isn’t going away just yet.
Still, when the world’s biggest emitter doubles down on wind and solar at industrial scale, that matters a lot more than political rhetoric.
Key highlights:
China aims to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 17% between 2026–2030, after missing its previous five-year target.
The country plans to replace around 30 million tonnes of coal per year with renewables while pushing for coal consumption to peak during the period.
China’s renewable build-out continues to accelerate, with wind and solar capacity expected to reach 3,600 GW by 2035.
Why This Matters: China may not be quitting coal yet, but its relentless scaling of renewables is quietly reshaping the global energy system faster than most climate pledges ever could.
Kismet: Here’s the wild part: China already installs more solar capacity in a single year than most countries have installed in their entire history, a reminder that the energy transition isn’t really about promises anymore, it’s about deployment at mind-bending scale. 👉 Full story here
King Canute vs The Sun: Guess Who’s Winning
Political hostility toward renewables from the Canute Trump administration hasn’t slowed them down one bit. Wind and solar just smashed another record in the US, even as policy headwinds tried to hold them back. Turns out physics, economics, and the price of sunshine are stronger forces than politics.
Key highlights
US utilities generated 1,162 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity in 2025, a new record and about 26% of total US power generation.
Nearly 93% of new power capacity expected to be added this year will come from wind, solar, and batteries.
Energy market shocks linked to Middle East tensions are boosting investor appetite for renewables, which avoid the commodity price volatility of fossil fuels.
Why This Matters: Energy transitions accelerate when the economics flip, and we’re now firmly in the phase where renewables keep growing even when governments actively try to slow them down.
Kismet: The real King Canute story is often misunderstood. He didn’t believe he could stop the tide. He staged the famous beach scene to prove to his courtiers that even kings cannot command the forces of nature. Turns out the same is increasingly true for the physics and economics of renewable energy. 👉 Full story here
AI News
Teenagers + AI: The Homework Revolution Has Already Begun
While schools are still debating what to do about AI, teenagers have already made their decision. A new survey finds most teens are using AI chatbots for information and homework help, and many think the technology will actually improve their lives.
Translation: the AI debate isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s happening every night at the kitchen table.
Key highlights
57% of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots to search for information, and 54% use them for help with schoolwork.
About 30% of teens use AI daily, while 1 in 10 say they do most or all of their schoolwork with AI help.
59% of teens say cheating with AI happens regularly at their school, highlighting how fast classrooms are changing.
Why This Matters: The real AI disruption in education isn’t coming in the future. It’s already here, driven by students who adopted the tools long before institutions figured out how to respond.
Kismet: When calculators first appeared in classrooms in the 1970s, many schools banned them for years out of fear students would “forget how to do maths.” Today they’re standard equipment. AI may be heading down the same path, just about ten times faster. 👉 Full story here
AI May Finally Be Giving Alzheimer’s Research a Fighting Chance
Alzheimer’s isn’t just a statistic to me. My Dad was diagnosed in 2010. Nearly 16 years later he’s still alive physically, but the man he was is long gone. That’s the reality millions of families live with, which is why new research using AI to understand the disease feels quietly important.
Scientists are now using machine learning and advanced imaging to uncover biological signals in the brain and blood that were previously invisible.
Key highlights
Researchers created the first high-resolution chemical map of the Alzheimer’s brain, using laser imaging and AI to detect molecular changes across different brain regions.
The findings suggest Alzheimer’s may involve widespread metabolic disruption, affecting cholesterol and energy molecules across memory-related brain regions.
Another study identified a new class of blood biomarkers based on structural changes in proteins, potentially allowing earlier and more precise diagnosis.
Why This Matters: Alzheimer’s has resisted decades of research, but AI is finally giving scientists tools powerful enough to detect the disease earlier and understand its biology in far greater detail.
Kismet: Right now around 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, and that number is expected to triple by 2050. Even delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by just five years would cut the number of cases nearly in half. That’s why earlier detection could be one of the biggest breakthroughs of all. 👉 Full story here
The AI Wars Just Got Messy
The AI industry had a strange week. One company leaned hard into ethics, another leaned hard into capability, and users suddenly realised switching between AI assistants might be easier than expected.
Anthropic launched a tool that lets people move their preferences and context from other AI services into Claude, while OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.3, promising smoother conversations and fewer hallucinations.
Key highlights
Anthropic introduced a feature that allows users to import memory and preferences from other AI systems, letting Claude pick up conversations without starting from scratch.
OpenAI simultaneously released GPT-5.3 Instant, a new model focused on smoother dialogue, stronger writing, and significantly lower hallucination rates.
The two launches come amid a growing debate in the AI community about how closely frontier AI companies should work with military and government agencies.
Why This Matters: We’re entering the phase where AI platforms compete not just on raw capability, but on trust, ethics, and how easy it is for users to switch ecosystems.
Kismet: The “switching cost” problem has defined the tech industry for decades. Email, messaging apps, social networks, operating systems. If AI assistants become easy to migrate between, it could be the first major tech platform where users can move their entire digital brain with a single copy-paste. 👉 Story links inline
Electromobility
EV Batteries Refuse to Die (Despite What the Internet Thinks)
Two high-mileage EV stories landed this week and together they quietly demolish one of the most persistent myths about electric cars: that the batteries wear out quickly. Turns out they don’t.
One Ford Mustang Mach-E has clocked 316,000 miles with just 8% battery degradation, while a Hyundai IONIQ 5 has reportedly crossed 410,000 miles and is still running strong.
Key highlights
A rideshare driver’s Mustang Mach-E surpassed 316,000 miles while losing only 8% of its battery capacity, while still delivering roughly 300 miles of range per charge.
Modern EV batteries typically degrade around 1.8% per year, meaning many could remain useful for decades.
The Mach-E in the story has carried over 7,000 passengers, burned through 24 tyres, and still has its original brake pads thanks to regenerative braking.
Why This Matters: Battery longevity has been one of the biggest psychological barriers to EV adoption, and real-world data like this keeps showing that the concern is largely outdated.
Kismet: Most petrol cars struggle to reach 200,000 miles without major engine work. These EVs are blowing past 300,000 miles while their most expensive component is barely breaking a sweat. 👉 Links inline
EV Batteries Aren’t Just Lasting Longer, They’re Going Further Too
Just as real-world EVs are proving their batteries can survive hundreds of thousands of miles, the next wave of battery tech is quietly raising the bar again. Engineers are now road-testing solid-state batteries capable of pushing EV range to around 1,000 km (620 miles) on a single charge.
In other words: the batteries aren’t just lasting longer… they’re getting better.
Key highlights
Volkswagen partner Gotion has begun vehicle testing of all-solid-state EV batteries with a potential range of about 1,000 km (620 miles) per charge.
The new cells reach 350 Wh/kg energy density, significantly higher than many current lithium-ion batteries.
The batteries are being tested across extreme temperatures from −40°C to 80°C, suggesting improved durability in real-world conditions.
Why This Matters: The EV transition isn’t just about replacing petrol engines; it’s about a technology curve where vehicles keep getting longer-range, longer-lasting, and cheaper at the same time.
Kismet: Petrol cars spent more than a century slowly improving their engines. EV batteries have increased energy density roughly threefold in just the last 15 years, and the curve still hasn’t flattened. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
China’s Solar Boom Hits a New Milestone (And Starts Planning for the Afterlife)
China’s solar expansion just crossed another threshold: for the first time ever, the country generated more electricity from solar than from wind. At the same time, Beijing is already preparing for the next phase of the industry by building a massive recycling system for ageing panels.
In other words, solar in China is no longer an experiment. It’s infrastructure.
Key highlights
China produced roughly 1.17 million gigawatt-hours of electricity from solar in 2025, a 40% jump year-on-year, overtaking wind generation for the first time.
Solar now accounts for around 11% of China’s electricity generation, up from less than 1% just a decade ago.
With early installations beginning to age out, the government plans large-scale solar panel recycling, targeting about 250,000 tonnes of retired modules processed by 2027.
Why This Matters: China isn’t just deploying clean energy at unprecedented speed; it’s starting to build the full circular economy around it, from mass manufacturing to recycling.
Kismet: China’s solar generation last year produced more electricity than Japan’s entire national grid. When a single technology in one country outproduces the total electricity system of the world’s fourth-largest economy, that’s not a trend. That’s a structural shift. 👉 Links Inline
From “World’s Biggest Battery” to Something 300× Larger
A few years ago the 100 MW Hornsdale battery in South Australia was hailed as the world’s biggest. It was a breakthrough moment for grid storage. Now Google is planning something that makes it look… quaint.
The company has agreed to deploy a 300 MW battery with a staggering 30 GWh of storage capacity in Minnesota using iron-air technology, designed to keep renewable electricity flowing for days, not just hours.
Key highlights
Google plans to deploy a 300 MW / 30 GWh iron-air battery system, set to become the largest battery by energy capacity ever announced.
The system can store renewable electricity for up to 100 hours, far longer than typical lithium-ion batteries used for short-duration storage.
The project will be paired with 1.6 GW of new wind and solar, helping power energy-hungry data centres while keeping emissions down.
Why This Matters: Renewables need long-duration storage to replace fossil generation, and projects like this show that grid-scale batteries are evolving from four-hour buffers into multi-day clean power reserves.
Kismet: The Hornsdale battery that once stunned the energy world stored about 129 MWh. Google’s new system will store 30,000 MWh. That’s more than 200 times the energy capacity of the project that first convinced the world batteries could stabilise a grid. 👉 Full story here
Science
The Milky Way Just Got Its Most Detailed Portrait Ever
Astronomers have captured the largest and most detailed image ever taken of the centre of our Milky Way, revealing a tangled web of molecular gas where new stars and planets are born. The image comes from the ALMA radio telescope in Chile and maps the chaotic heart of our galaxy with unprecedented clarity.
And yes, it’s as beautiful as it is scientifically useful.
Key highlights
Scientists mapped the Central Molecular Zone, the turbulent region at the core of the Milky Way where extreme conditions drive star formation.
The survey revealed long, filament-like streams of gas flowing through the galaxy’s centre, helping explain how stars and planetary systems form.
The work involved more than 160 researchers and years of observations to stitch together what is essentially the first complete “map” of this region.
Why This Matters: Studying the centre of our own galaxy lets scientists understand how stars formed in the early universe, because the conditions there resemble those found in the first galaxies.
Kismet: The image shows structures roughly 25,000 light-years away, which means the light reaching the telescope tonight actually began its journey before humans invented writing. Cosmic time really does put things in perspective. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Climate Confident: What If the Most Sustainable Shirt Is the One You Don’t Own?
The fashion industry generates about 10% of global emissions and 20% of industrial water pollution, largely because we produce far more clothes than we actually wear. In this week’s Climate Confident episode, I spoke with Phoebe Tan, co-founder of Taelor, about a deceptively simple idea: what if the real climate breakthrough in fashion isn’t new materials, but wearing the same clothes more often?
Phoebe’s company runs a menswear rental subscription service that uses AI styling and real-world garment performance data to extend clothing lifecycles. It’s a fascinating look at how shifting from ownership to utilisation could reshape the entire apparel industry.
Key highlights
The fashion sector accounts for roughly 10% of global emissions and 20% of industrial water pollution, largely driven by overproduction and fast fashion.
Rental models increase garment utilisation, allowing the same piece of clothing to be worn by many people instead of sitting unused in wardrobes.
AI and real-world wear data can help brands understand how long garments actually last, informing better design, inventory, and circular fashion strategies.
Why This Matters: If utilisation becomes the metric that matters most, the fashion industry could dramatically reduce emissions and waste without waiting for a breakthrough in fabrics.
Kismet: The average garment today is worn about seven to ten times before being discarded in many markets. Double that utilisation, and the climate impact of clothing could fall by nearly half without producing a single new “sustainable” fibre.
Resilient Supply Chain:
Resilient Supply Chain: Finding the “Jesus Nut” in Your Supply Chain
A helicopter has a single nut that holds the rotor assembly together. Engineers call it the “Jesus nut”. If it fails, nothing else matters.
In this week’s Resilient Supply Chain podcast, I spoke with Jonathan Doller from Logility about why most supply chains have similar hidden single points of failure, and how AI and better data can help companies find them before they break.
Key highlights
AI is increasingly being used to separate real demand signals from noise, improving forecasting and planning accuracy.
Modern supply chain platforms allow AI “agents” to coordinate decisions across forecasting, inventory, and distribution, helping companies respond faster to disruptions.
Resilient supply chains require redundancy and scenario testing, including “digital readiness drills” that simulate disruptions like port closures or factory shutdowns.
Why This Matters: Most supply chains look strong until something breaks; identifying hidden single points of failure before a crisis hits is what separates resilient organisations from fragile ones.
Kismet: The “Jesus nut” on a helicopter really is a single bolt holding the entire rotor system together. Aviation engineers inspect it obsessively because if it fails, the helicopter literally falls apart. Supply chains often have equivalent hidden weak points, companies just don’t realise it until the crisis arrives. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Michael Swain from Evotix and John Dony from the What Works Institute, and Prof Dana R. Fisher, School of International Service, American University.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
More batteries are being installed, esp longer duration batteries, as prices drop and economics work in their favour (4 hours and over)
The UK’s decarbonisation plans seem to be going well.
Brexit seems to be going well for the UK!
Not a lot of tankers (in red here) passing through the Strait of Hormuz at the moment. Sunlight and wind have no issues passing through though!
Misc stuff
Timeless advice!
Physics and dinosaurs FTW!!!
And cute doggies 😍😍😍
Engage
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Finally, since being impacted by the tech layoffs, I'm currently in the market for a new role. If you know someone who could benefit from my tech savvy, sustainability, and strong social media expertise, I'd be really grateful for a referral.
If you have any comments or suggestions for how I can improve this newsletter, don’t hesitate to let me know. Thanks.
*** Be aware that any typos you find in this newsletter are tests to see who is paying attention! ***
And Finally
MRI’s of babies aren’t nearly as cute as ultrasounds, in case you were wondering!
Know What Matters in Tech Before It Hits the Mainstream
By the time AI news hits CNBC, CNN, Fox, and even social media, the info is already too late. What feels “new” to most people has usually been in motion for weeks — sometimes months — quietly shaping products, markets, and decisions behind the scenes.
Forward Future is a daily briefing for people who want to stay competitive in the fastest evolving technology shift we’ve ever seen. Each day, we surface the AI developments that actually matter, explain why they’re important, and connect them to what comes next.
We track the real inflection points: model releases, infrastructure shifts, policy moves, and early adoption signals that determine how AI shows up in the world — long before it becomes a talking point on TV or a trend on your feed.
It takes about five minutes to read.
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