Oct 8, 2026 | Home Electrification, Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy
California has legalized plug-in “balcony” solar — small panels that feed a home through an ordinary wall socket — for its 39 million residents from January 2027. Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature on SB 868 sets a 1,200-watt ceiling, higher than...
Oct 5, 2026 | Battery Technology, Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
Japan has roughly 170 gigawatts of grid-scale batteries waiting to connect to its power grid and under one gigawatt actually connected. The queue is larger than the country’s entire peak electricity demand, and more than 99 percent of it has never produced a...
Oct 4, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
The US House voted 417-3 to make large data centers pay the full cost of the electricity grid they demand. Two weeks later, on September 30, the Senate let the bill die on a 57-43 procedural vote. Neither result changes a single household’s power bill — because...
Oct 1, 2026 | Battery Technology, Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
A demand charge is the part of a commercial electricity bill set by the single highest 15-minute burst of power a building draws in a month — not by how much electricity it uses over that month. It is billed in dollars per kilowatt of that peak, and for most medium...
Oct 1, 2026 | Battery Technology, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
A 100-hour battery stores electricity for more than four days at a stretch and hands back only 35 to 50% of what you put in. That sounds broken. It is the entire point. The long-duration batteries now being built — Form Energy’s iron-air cells, Noon...
Oct 1, 2026 | Battery Technology, Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy
For about fifteen years the cost of new solar and wind electricity fell almost every year. In 2025 it rose. BloombergNEF puts its global benchmark for utility solar up 6% and offshore wind up 12% over the year, and Lazard has the levelized cost of US solar up 18%. The...
