After eight years of research, a new study chronicles how a floating wind farm off Portugal has become a life-rich artificial reef, home to 270 types of marine animal including 5 marine mammal and 33 bird species! Octopuses and several species of fish were even more abundant around the turbines than in the surrounding ocean. Yet another excellent example of renewables actively benefiting biodiversity! This extraordinary mega-trend might just define an emerging good Anthropocene.
The Obelisk solar-plus-battery storage project in southern Egypt has entered full commercial operation! Built by Norwegian company Scatec and selling its power to Egypt Aluminum, it includes 1.1 gigawatts (1.100 MW) of solar capacity plus 200 MWh of battery storage, Obelisk is now the new largest-ever solar-plus-battery project in all of Africa — though it’ll likely be overtaken quite soon!
Leah Stokes, the climate policy powerhouse who was a major architect of 2022’s epic Inflation Reduction Act, has joined Substack at Notes from the Electric Era! One of her first articles highlights a major recent theme of this newsletter: that the American electrotech industry supercharged under the Biden Administration has been damaged since 2025 but is far from destroyed! Though consumer-support tax credits were eviscerated, parts of many manufacturing-focused tax credits survived in some form, and many solar, EV, and battery factors are still being built across America. (The Qcells solar foundry in Georgia being an excellent case in point). We strive on!
Across the remote Australian Outback, solar/battery microgrids are fast becoming the surest way to provide power. Anna Creek Station in South Australia, the world’s largest cattle ranch (called a “station” locally), just installed rooftop solar plus batteries to cut diesel generator costs. And Australia’s vast mining industry is electrifying fast, with microgrids now consistently providing over 80% of power at several gold and rare earths mines. Fully electric mine trucks are also spreading fast!
Argentina has seen an unprecedented surge in electric vehicle sales in 2026 so far, from less than 1% of sales in Q2 2025 (almost no EV market) to over 6% and climbing in Q2 2026. That’s largely driven by the arrival of world-leading Chinese EV titan BYD in mid-2025, with this one company now accounting for 89% of Argentina’s EV sales. This is one more emerging case in a fast-proliferating trend of “leapfrog” moments in which Global South countries shift to Chinese electrotech incredibly quickly, like the recent solar surges in Pakistan and the Philippines. Fascinating!
Here’s my 2025 in-person reporting visit to a BYD dealership in Mexico!
Australia has begun efforts to vaccinate several rare native bird species, both in captivity and in the wild, against the deadly H5N1 bird flu pandemic, which has ravaged species around the world in recent years and just lately arrived on Australian shores for the first time. An early push is now racing against time to vaccinate 5,000 individual wild little penguins (Eudyptula minor, the world’s smallest penguins) at the Phillip Island and St. Kilda colonies, popular ecotourism destinations in Victoria state. This is now the world’s largest-ever wild bird vaccination program — a milestone in proactive, compassionate Anthropocene conservation! Great work.
Kazakhstan used to be home to wild tigers (known as the Caspian tiger population) but after decades of over-hunting the last confirmed sighting took place in 1948. Now, after years of conservation work building up populations of prey species, the tiger has returned! On July 31, 2026, “Umit,” a wild-caught female Amur-subspecies tiger from Russia, was released from a cage on the back of a pickup track into the vast wilderness of the Ile-Balkhash nature reserve. Three other Amur tigers are now in nearby holding pens and set to be released by next year. Kazakhstan is now the first country ever to reintroduce a wild tiger population after losing all their tigers. Awesome work!
White-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal pandemic, has devastated a multitude of bat species across North America in recent decades, killing over 6.7 million individuals as it spreads fast through close-living cave colonies. Now, there are a few signs of hope, with some little brown bat fungus survivors seemingly evolving a degree of resilience and successful tests of a “probiotic cocktail” that could help protect other species.
Researchers working on coral restoration in the Pacific island nation of Palau have developed a simple, low-cost, and low-tech method to ensure that they’re planting1 corals better suited to survive warming waters. It’s a heat tolerance “fitness test,” subjecting clipped-off fragments of wild coral to extra-hot waters in an ordinary plastic cooler, seeing which ones survive and don’t “bleach,” and using those as stock for restoration efforts. Even a quick-and-dirty test over just a few days has proved to have some predictive value, raising hopes to scale up this solution across the tropics.
A new study has found that controlled (aka “prescribed”) burns, the ancient Indigenous land-management practice now being re-adopted across the American West to reduce climate-supercharged wildfire risk, have directly saved several giant sequoia trees! Giant California wildfires in 2020 and 2021 killed nearly one-fifth of all living giant sequoias, but without controlled burns it would likely have been much worse. Satellite analysis found that sequoias were four times as likely to survive if they had previously been treated with a prescribed burn to clear away flammable underbrush nearby, and estimated that such burns directly saved 1,900 trees!
Following its rediscovery by “bio-prospector” botanist Aaron Davis, a Kew project in Sierra Leone is now working to scale up cultivation of Coffea stenophylla, a “lost” West African species of wild coffee with a critically acclaimed flavor profile and much more heat resilience than the C. arabica and C. robusta species currently dominating our civilization’s massive global coffee markets. (Coffee is the second-most-traded commodity worldwide after crude oil, and may soon rise to first). Fascinating work!
Solar has been a savior during the scorching 2026 European heatwaves. As coal plants in Poland, gas plants in Italy, and nuclear plants in France, Hungary, and Romania were shut down due to rivers running low causing dire shortages of water for cooling, solar power stepped up to keep the lights, fans, and fridges running across the continent. The heatwaves increased daily power demand in Europe by up to 25%, but the hot, sunny days simultaneously increased solar generation by up to 17%, directly stabilizing the EU grid. Clean energy doesn’t just help avoid worst-case future climate change — it actively builds resilience against present-day climate change! Renewables are increasingly the least intermittent power source. Great news!
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