Good News – oh boy, do we need it!

Editorial note: Due to a combination of factors — a sore throat and the Jan. 30 National Strike protesting President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies — the regular weekly email from E/lectrify is being sent belatedly on Feb. 2. A second post will go out on Feb. 6. Apologies, and ongoing thanks for your support.

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I am looking out my window at the 6-9 inches of snow and ice still on the ground in Washington, D.C. (pictured above). The temperature is a balmy 22 degrees, and any place that regular frozen-water ice isn’t causing trouble, those thugs and outlaws from federal ICE are. (A moment of silence and respect, please, for Renee Good, Alex Pretti and the courageous people of Minneapolis.)

But the sun is out, and like many, I am looking for hope and encouragement in small things — like latest cool stories about clean energy and the U.S. and global energy transition.

Let’s start with the recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which show that the clean energy denial of President Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright is having little if any impact on the growth of renewables in the United States.

The numbers that have been grabbing headlines are the 69.5 gigawatts of solar, wind and storage that EIA is forecasting to come online in 2026, totaling 99.2% of all new generation, according to  an analysis from the SUN DAY Campaign.

But digging into the numbers for 2025 provides an even more heartening and very cool picture of what’s going on. 

Yup, the renewables that we are constantly told are too “intermittent” to provide the power needed to keep the lights on and the factories running are increasingly doing just that — in many cases because they are faster and cheaper to build and provide more flexibility. 

Beyond the numbers, what’s important here is that EIA continues to track the growth of renewables and put out reports for the public to see, belying the administration’s war on any information supporting clean energy (which I wrote about here). The question now is if or when Wright will finally acknowledge the critical role of clean energy in meeting growing electricity demand across the nation (which I wrote about here). 

Speaking of which, Ben Storrow, a reporter at Politico’s E&E News, has been posting on LinkedIn on the role of renewables in relieving stress on the grid in New England during the current round of snow, ice and subfreezing temperatures. Oil and gas remain the workhorse fuels keeping everyone safe and warm, Storrow says, but hydropower from Quebec, offshore wind from Vineyard Wind and even residential rooftop solar are all taking the edge off high demand and power prices. 

Great reporting. If you haven’t already, get on LinkedIn and follow this person.

And while we’re talking about subfreezing temps, how do you keep solar generation up and running, even with major amounts of snow on the ground? Austria’s Helioplant has developed a vertical, cross-shaped, two-sided solar system that literally stands up to the steepest, deepest terrain.

I am an absolute sucker for cool technology like this. A write-up in pv magazine details just how carefully designed these modules — industry-speak for panels — are: 

“[The] cross design, which resembles a tree or a flagpole with four wings, features 15 or 16 bifacial modules depending on the slope. The cross-shaped structure creates air turbulence even at low wind speeds, which prevents snow build-up from accumulating and decreasing efficiency. Snow around the base of the tree-like structure reflects light to the underside of the modules to further boost energy yields in what is known as the albedo effect.” 

The downside of the vertical cross structure is that panels can become shaded. The solution: Helioplant has partnered with SolarEdge, the Israeli inverter manufacturer, to incorporate advanced control technology into the system, monitoring and optimizing the output of each individual panel. 

A pilot project at Australia’s Tiefenbach Glacier, a major ski resort, kept a ski lift running for a full winter season. A 6.3 MW system is now under construction in the same location. It will include 800 of the cross-shaped structures, installed at altitudes of more than 9,000 feet, and will generate about one-third of the power needed at three ski resorts.

According to Florian Jamscheck, cofounder of Helioplant, the potential market for alpine solar is huge — 6,000 ski resorts worldwide, just waiting to cut their electric bills with cool, clean technology. 

Continuing with our cold weather theme, we all know high-efficiency, cold weather heat pumps now on the market can keep a home warm and cozy in subfreezing temperatures while potentially cutting electric bills.

In fact, according to figures from RMI, from October 2024 to September 2025, 3.9 million heat pumps were sold in the United States. For space heating, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces by 19%, and, on the cooling side, made up 46% of all air conditioning systems sold. 

In other words, the U.S. is a growing market, which is why I am a bit disappointed that, according to pv mag, Samsung is not planning to roll out its latest, very cool all-in-one model here. This one really lifts the bar. At about 33 inches tall, the compact outside unit not only heats and cools a home, it provides hot water — up to a scalding 149 degrees Fahrenheit in subfreezing weather — and heats floors as well.

The average water heating temperature for American homes is 120 degrees. 

I don’t mean to endorse Samsung or its heat pumps, but I did some online research, and it looks like most all-in-ones on the market cover space heating and cooling, but not water and floors. Imagine a home where you only need one system for heating, cooling and hot water — plus waking up on cold mornings to a toasty warm floor.

I reached out to the company to ask why it was only planning to market the EHS AIO in Europe and Korea, but not the U.S. — specific market conditions, Trump’s tariffs? — but have yet to receive an answer. 

Now the thing about Americans is that we always want the latest and greatest technology; it’s part of that weird, first-world sense of entitlement we have. But the U.S. is becoming a secondary market, whether for China’s cheap, high-quality electric vehicles or Korea’s cutting-edge heat pumps.

And why this is something we all might want to give some serious thought to is that — again, our sense of entitlement notwithstanding — most homes in the U.S. are not built for extremely cold weather.

(I have somewhat bemused memories of living in a shared apartment in San Francisco where the only heat in the large, two-story flat came from a single wall unit by the front door. We called it the wall unit because the only thing it heated was the wall directly across from it.) 

A 2024 report from the North American Insulation Manufacturers found that 89% of single family homes in the U.S. don’t even meet the woefully outdated 2012 industry standard for insulation. 

The International Energy Conservation Code, which sets residential building standards, is updated every three years, most recently in 2024. Only 12 states have adopted the 2024 or 2021 standards, and almost half, 22, have building codes based on the 2009 rules, according to a map on the Department of Energy website.

Inefficient, poorly insulated homes use more energy, which means higher utility bills — electric and gas — and more stress on local grids in extreme winter weather. U.S. consumers should demand more — and more efficient and affordable — heat pumps, creating competitive pressure for other manufacturers to follow Samsung’s example. 

Finally, I want to circle back to the EIA figures about the industrial use of solar, small but growing, which may be due in part to the spread of solar-powered thermal storage — like the sand batteries developed by a Finnish company, TheStorage.

Clean energy skeptics will often argue that the super high temperatures needed for some heavy industries — such as cement or chemical production — can only be produced by burning fossil fuels. Even “low-temperature” industrial processes may require heat at 165 degrees Celsius or 329 degrees Fahrenheit.

Thermal storage could be a total game changer, using renewable energy to heat a storage medium – in the case of TheStorage, sand – to those high temperatures, which can then be used to generate the super-hot steam needed for industrial processes. 

Yes, extremely exciting and cool — I mean, supply chain-wise, you can’t get any more abundant and easily available than sand. Here’s how TheStorage website explains the technology:

“Cool sand moves from a cold silo to an electric heater, reaching temperatures up to 800 degrees C [1,492 degrees F]. The heated sand is then stored in a hot silo, where energy is efficiently retained in stationary sand. By circulating the sand through an external heat exchanger, the system delivers steam with up to tenfold higher heat transfer efficiency compared to conventional static storage systems.”

In other words, it is also super efficient, and, as reported in pv mag, the sand battery can be called on 24/7 to power “industrial processes independently of real-time electricity availability.” The technology is now getting its first real-world demonstration at a brewery.

A U.S. company, Electrified Thermal Solutions, is rolling out its thermal battery at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. A spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ETS builds its batteries out of metal oxide fire bricks — traditionally used to line furnaces or kilns — which are heated with electricity from cheap solar and wind, according to an article from Canary Media. 

The company’s system can store 20 MWh of heat at temperatures of up to 3,270 degrees F, which is “hot enough to do the job of fossil fuels in virtually any application,” from making cement to making potato chips, Daniel Stack, company CEO, told Canary.

Manufacturers will be able to use the system in Texas to test the technology, but the company already has orders for projects that should go online late in 2026 or early 2027.  

Here’s the bottom line: People and businesses in the U.S. want clean energy and clean technologies because they are better and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that disrupt our weather. For example, a fast-warming Arctic is weakening the atmospheric jet stream that historically has kept the region’s cold air — the polar vortex — circling over the North Pole. 

This change that has been at least one factor in our recent heavy snow and plummeting temperatures. 

Climate change and clean energy are inextricably linked and will continue to affect our day-to-day lives, which is why — regardless of who is in the White House — we need to keep telling the stories about the cool stuff that gives us hope.