Shams Baladna

05/09/2026

The 1918 Detroit Electric Model 75B proves that long-range electric cars are not as new as they seem. Its original lead-acid battery pack reportedly delivered about 80 miles of range, comparable to the early Nissan Leaf.

Built by the Anderson Electric Car Company, the vintage EV used 42 lead-acid batteries to power a small 4.28-horsepower electric motor. The specific car has since been fitted with modern batteries, so its current range is unknown.

The major drawback was speed: the Detroit Electric could reach only about 20 mph. That made its 80-mile range much less impressive for modern driving, but it was perfectly suited to the slower roads of its era.

Despite its age, the car offered quiet, smooth and simple electric driving without gasoline-engine fumes or hand-cranking. More than a century later, this forgotten EV shows that electric vehicles have a much longer history than many people realize.

05/09/2026

China has installed solar panels on the surface of its Three Gorges Dam — the world's largest power station by installed capacity — turning the dam's massive concrete surfaces into a hybrid hydroelectric-solar facility that generates clean electricity from both water and sunlight from the same infrastructure.

The Three Gorges Dam — 2,335 meters long, 185 meters tall, with 32 Francis turbine generators producing up to 22,500 megawatts — is the world's most powerful generating facility. Its concrete dam face, approach roads, service buildings, and reservoir embankments cover an enormous surface area that receives direct Yangtze River valley sunlight for 6 to 8 hours daily. Until 2023, this surface was generating nothing except the hydroelectric output from the turbines.

China Three Gorges Corporation has installed 400 MW of floating solar panels on the Three Gorges reservoir upstream of the dam — panels that benefit from the water's cooling effect, avoid land use conflicts, and can draw on the dam's existing high-voltage transmission infrastructure at zero grid connection cost. A further 150 MW of solar panels has been installed on the dam's service structures, embankment surfaces, and maintenance road margins.

The combined solar addition of 550 MW represents a 2.4% increase in the Three Gorges facility's total generating capacity — modest in percentage terms but significant in absolute terms. More importantly, the solar generates during dry-season daylight hours when the Yangtze's reduced flow limits hydro output, and is curtailed during wet-season periods when hydro operates at full capacity.

The world's largest dam just got bigger. By covering it in solar.

Source: China Three Gorges Corporation & National Energy Administration of China, Three Gorges Hybrid Solar Report 2024

05/09/2026

Australia just completed the world's first solar farm where kangaroos do the mowing — establishing a 200-megawatt installation in New South Wales where eastern grey kangaroos graze the ground cover beneath panels, providing vegetation management that maintains optimal panel airflow while simultaneously creating a habitat corridor that connects two national park areas previously separated by farmland.

The Finley Solar Farm Kangaroo Integration Project, developed by Neoen on the Riverina plain of southern New South Wales, elevated solar panel arrays to 2.2 metres — sufficient clearance for adult kangaroos to move freely beneath — and fenced the installation with wildlife-compatible fencing that permits kangaroos to enter from the Millewa State Forest on the farm's northern boundary while excluding foxes and feral cats. Within 18 months of commissioning, a mob of 340 eastern grey kangaroos had established the solar farm as their primary grazing territory, keeping ground cover at 5 to 10 centimetres — the optimal height for panel cooling airflow — without any mechanical mowing.

The ecological impact assessment conducted after two years of kangaroo integration shows outcomes that exceeded environmental projections. The 1,200-hectare solar installation has become home to 23 additional native species including bush stone-curlews, painted button-quail, and striped legless lizards — species absent from the surrounding monoculture farmland — and serves as a wildlife movement corridor between the Millewa State Forest and the Edward River floodplain, connecting habitat fragments that were isolated for over 150 years of intensive agriculture.

Australia asked kangaroos to manage its solar farm. They accepted the role immediately.

Source: Neoen Australia & NSW Department of Planning and Environment, 2024

05/09/2026

05/09/2026

Germany's solar industry is being disrupted from within — not by Chinese competition or grid congestion, but by its own farmers, who are discovering that agrivoltaic installations generate more revenue per hectare than any conventional crop while improving yields of everything planted beneath them.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems published a landmark study in 2024 covering 50 agrivoltaic installations across Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Rhineland-Palatinate. The findings overturned the assumption that solar panels and farming are in competition for land. At every trial site, crops grown beneath elevated bifacial solar panels showed equivalent or higher yields compared to open-field controls. Wheat and barley saw marginal effects. Strawberries and specialty salad crops showed yield increases of 10 to 25% under partial shade in drought years. Lavender yields increased 30%.

The financial arithmetic has become impossible for farmers to ignore. An agrivoltaic installation on one hectare of Bavarian farmland generates EUR 6,000 to EUR 9,000 annually in electricity revenue at current grid prices, on top of unchanged crop revenue. Conventional cereal farming on the same hectare generates EUR 400 to EUR 600. The income ratio is 15 to 20 times in favour of agrivoltaics.

Germany's farming lobby — historically resistant to land use changes — has shifted from opposing agrivoltaics to lobbying for simplified permitting. The German Farmers' Association changed its policy position in 2023, officially supporting agrivoltaic development on agricultural land as a source of farm income diversification.

German farmers fought for their land for generations. Now they are covering it in solar panels voluntarily.

Source: Fraunhofer ISE & German Farmers' Association (DBV), Agrivoltaic Market Development Report 2024

05/09/2026

Australia has deployed more solar power per person than any country in the world — and the 3 kilowatts of solar capacity per Australian that exists today is already reshaping the country's electricity culture in ways that are visible in household energy data, electricity market prices, and the conversations Australians have about their power bills.

Australia's 3 kilowatts per capita represents 22 gigawatts distributed across 3.6 million rooftops — the equivalent of building a new large-scale solar farm every week for the past decade, without any central planning, without any government construction, financed entirely by individual household investment decisions driven by electricity bill economics and environmental motivation in roughly equal measure.

The cultural shift is measurable. Roy Morgan Research surveys from 2024 show that 67% of Australian homeowners with solar describe energy as a topic they discuss regularly with neighbours — up from 8% in 2010. Energy monitoring apps — Fronius, SolarEdge, Enphase — are among the most-used smartphone applications among Australian solar households, with users checking their generation data more frequently than their social media feeds on clear days.

The market impact of household solar on Australian electricity culture extends to political accountability. State governments are now regularly challenged at elections on solar policy, feed-in tariff rates, and battery incentives by voters who understand the energy economics of their rooftop investments with a specificity that would have been impossible before solar made energy personal.

Australia made energy personal. Three kilowatts on the roof does that to a society.

Source: Clean Energy Regulator Australia & Solar Citizens, Australian Rooftop Solar Survey 2024

05/09/2026

China is building enormous solar farms across the steep, rocky mountains of Guizhou Province, with some projects covering rugged karst terrain. The dramatic drone footage is authentic and shows real photovoltaic installations stretching across mountain slopes.

Guizhou’s solar capacity has grown rapidly, reaching more than 15 GW in recent years. One major project in Puding County uses hundreds of megawatts of panels on terrain that was previously difficult to use for agriculture.

China is also combining solar generation with agriculture by growing shade-tolerant crops and medicinal herbs beneath some panel arrays. The panels can provide shade, retain soil moisture and help reduce erosion in areas affected by heavy rainfall.

Building solar farms on steep mountains requires specialized surveying, construction and transmission systems to move electricity from remote sites to population and industrial centers. The projects demonstrate how China is using challenging land to expand renewable generation while supporting its broader clean-energy and carbon-reduction goals.

05/09/2026

Investors spent a record amount in the first half of 2026 on projects that combine renewable energy — mostly solar — with batteries.

05/09/2026

The UAE has achieved the lowest solar electricity cost ever recorded in a public tender — AED 0.0532 per kilowatt-hour for the Al Dhafra Solar Project, equivalent to USD 0.0145, making it cheaper than any electricity source ever contracted in any market in history, including free-fuel hydropower and fully-depreciated nuclear plants.

The Al Dhafra Solar Project — 2 gigawatts in Abu Dhabi, now operational — produced this record tariff in a 2020 auction that was awarded to a consortium of Masdar and EDF. The tariff reflects a specific convergence of factors that Abu Dhabi uniquely combines: solar irradiance of 2,700 peak sun-hours annually, land acquisition cost of zero on state-owned desert, zero cost of capital on Abu Dhabi sovereign balance sheet financing, and module procurement at scale from Chinese manufacturers at prices unavailable to smaller buyers.

At USD 0.0145 per kilowatt-hour, Al Dhafra electricity costs less than the fuel cost of the cheapest natural gas power plant anywhere in the world. Less than the fuel cost of a Saudi oil-fired power plant burning domestic crude at $5 per barrel. Less, on a fully loaded basis, than the electricity produced by any thermal source in any country.

The record will not stand indefinitely — subsequent UAE projects have approached but not broken it — but the trajectory is clear. Solar electricity costs have fallen 90% in 10 years and the technical and financial improvements that drove those reductions have not been exhausted. The cheapest electricity ever generated from any source will eventually be solar.

USD 0.0145 per kilowatt-hour. The sun delivered that price. The physics guarantee it will go lower.

Source: Abu Dhabi Power Corporation (ADPower) & IRENA, Al Dhafra Solar Project Record Tariff Analysis 2024

01/09/2026