Implementation With a Vengeance: Cool stories on the end of fossil fuels

“This is no longer a technology challenge. It is an implementation challenge.”

This quote may be one of the most important and coolest things said in recent days. If you take nothing else from this installment of E/lectrify, remember it.

The speaker was Jules Kortenhorst, co-chair of the Energy Transition Commission, an international coalition of industry leaders, speaking on April 28 at the Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels conference in Santa Marta, Colombia. What he was talking about was the core purpose for the 57 nations represented at the conference — concretely planning the phaseout of coal, oil and natural gas from the global economy, an environmental imperative for slowing the pace of climate change.

One of the top headlines coming out of the conference, France unveiled its roadmap to end its use of fossil fuels, setting deadlines and strategies for closing the country’s last two coal plants by 2027 and exiting oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.

Why I am telling you this is because I was recently in Chicago for the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, after which I returned to Washington, D.C. and dove right into Climate Week DC. It was kind of a one-two punch reminding me that part of why I launched E/lectrify a year ago was and still is to ensure that the connection between energy and climate change remains a vital part of the clean power narrative.

Even before Donald Trump won the 2024 election, clean tech was edging away from talking about carbon emissions and climate, and following his victory, went into full retreat. The case for clean energy has become largely economic, which has turned out to be a positive catalyst for industry growth, despite Trump’s all-out war on renewables and the explosion in electricity demand due primarily to data centers (more on which later).

The downside is that climate has become the industry’s unspoken subtext — routinely minimized, omitted or totally ignored — as we have seen at one UN climate conference after another. The small army of fossil fuel lobbyists at these events has made even mentioning a phaseout of fossil fuels a major flashpoint. 

So, in belated celebration of E/lectrify’s first birthday (on April 21) and Earth Day (April 22), this week’s post is going to focus on implementation of the world’s transition away from fossil fuels — where we are, who is and isn’t doing it and what they are and aren’t doing.

Let’s start with Ember Energy, UK-based industry analysts who put out some of the coolest and most insightful reports on the current state of the global clean energy transition, or as they call it, the electrotech revolution.  

Their latest, the Global Electricity Review, kicks off with some banging numbers from 2025: 

That last bullet and the numbers behind it really got me excited. Ember sees this kind of power-shifting as one of the game changers for restructuring the grid. According to the report, solar is providing an increasing percentage of midday power across the globe. Based on incredibly cool figures from 2025, Hungary was getting 91% of its midday summer power from solar, while Chile hit 64% and Australia, 61%. 

When you add batteries to the mix, you can move that power from mid-day to evening or nighttime. So, even with modest amounts of new batteries coming online in 2025, Australia could potentially shift 76% of the new solar it added last year, and Chile could shift 53% (see chart below).

Overall shift potential in the U.S. stands at 20%, but “California stands out because it has already moved from potential to reality,” the report says. “The state has been adding more battery capacity than solar since 2021, with most of the 2025 increase in solar generation being delivered in the evening.”

The big picture here is that in the next decade, clean energy will make fossil fuels increasingly unnecessary. Ember sees a fossil plateau — new generation dropped a tiny -0.2% last year — as declines in fossil fuel use in China and India offset slight increases in Europe and the U.S. 

Even with ongoing electricity demand growth, fossil generation could continue flat and start to decline by the early 2030s, the report says.

Again, it’s not about technology; it’s implementation.

Moving from the 30,000-foot view to very much on the ground — one of the coolest people I met at the SEJ conference was Will Heegaard, founding director of the Footprint Project, a small nonprofit dedicated to, in Will’s words, decarbonizing disaster management. Think World Central Kitchen, but instead of sending in food after a natural disaster, the Footprint Project sends in off-grid solar and batteries to help frontline communities rebuild greener and more resiliently.

One example, in the wake of the wildfires on Maui in August 2023, Footprint received an urgent call for help from an island resident whose town had burned to the ground. Coordinating with the local solar industry and other community groups, 27 sites on the island were assessed for potential microgrid development and 18 systems were installed.

According to the Footprint website, those sites included community-run relief operations in public parks, a preschool reopening after the fires, a church providing fresh drinking water via atmospheric water generation (extracting water from humid air) and off-grid farms (see below).

More recently, Footprint has focused on developing what it calls Beehive Microgrids™ — off-grid renewable energy hubs that can be dispatched quickly to provide electricity, clean water and “a reliable space to gather and rebuild.” The goal here is not only disaster relief, but long-term resilience based on local development and control of clean power — implementation on a smaller, human scale.

In a similar vein, the U.S. may not want cheap Chinese solar panels, but people in war-torn Syria, living without power, can’t get enough of them. Video clips and pictures circulating on social media show aerial shots of apartment building rooftops in Syrian cities absolutely bristling with solar panels (see below).

Apparently these are plug-in systems — panels and batteries — providing power to families in the buildings.

We aren’t quite bristling yet, but plug-in solar is building momentum in the United States. Maine, Utah and Virginia have legalized these mini-systems — generally 400 to 1,200 watts — while bills in Colorado and Maryland are waiting for their governors’ signatures, and proposed laws are working their way through various state legislatures.

High electric bills are the main drivers here, with lower carbon emissions a secondary, but still subversive benefit. One by one, people across the country will begin to experience the possibilities of life without fossil fuels.

But we aren’t there yet, and implementation in the U.S. is decidedly mixed. 

The clean power industry has taken heart from various reports, like a February release from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, predicting that solar, wind and storage will make up 93% of new electric power coming online this year versus just 7% for natural gas.

But other figures, and the longer-term trends they represent, tell a different story. 

An April 22 article in Wired reports that some of the artificial intelligence giants are planning new data centers that will come with their own natural gas power plants, which could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

This “bring your own dirty power” approach is called co-location. What it means is that these plants may not be connected to the grid, so their owners may be able to circumvent some of the lengthy and expensive approval processes involved in getting online.

According to Wired, Elon Musk’s xAI is developing two data centers — one in Memphis, Tenn. and one in Southaven, Miss. — each of which will be powered by co-located gas plants that could emit about 6.4 million tons of GHGs per year.

“Combined, that’s roughly equivalent to the emissions from more than 30 average-size natural gas plants, or enough energy to power 1.5 million homes,” the article says. 

The picture for on-grid natural gas is equally unsettling. Two major grid operators in the U.S. recently released information on the projects that have applied to connect to their systems, which for a reason I have never been able to understand, the industry calls “interconnection.” (For a relatively nonwonky explanation of U.S. grid operators — the RTOs and ISOs — see my Energy Literacy piece here.)

PJM Interconnection operates the grid that provides power to 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia. Its interconnection queue — the list of projects waiting to get online — had been so backed up, they stopped accepting new applications back in 2022 and only recently have allowed new projects to apply.

On April 29, PJM announced it had received 811 applications, with 157 natural gas projects totaling 105,797 megawatts leading the list, versus 142 projects totaling 14,781 MW for solar. Do the math, and you will find that the gas plants average out at 674 MW each, dwarfing the solar projects, which average 104 MW. 

Similarly, PJM listed 27 nuclear projects totaling 17,906 MW (663 MW each) and 349 standalone storage projects totaling 67,465 MW (193 MW each).

The pattern is similar in the Southwest Power Pool — called SPP — which serves all or part of 14 states in the Great Plains region. Interconnection.fyi reports that the grid operator recently finished the first phase of its approval process for a group of projects, with natural gas again No. 1 — 33 projects totaling 17,700 MW, or 536 MW per project. Solar followed with 62 projects totaling 13,900 MW, or 224 MW per project.

Now, not all the projects that apply to get connected are approved and built, but you can see where this is going — more and larger natural gas plants coming online probably in the early 2030s, along with the BYO plants at data centers. 

On the one hand, we could be signing up for another 30 to 50 years of increasing natural gas emissions. On the other, the growing presence of renewables and storage shows that meeting the unprecedented growth of electricity demand should not delay urgently needed climate action.

Implementation is not either/or; it is both/and. 

Speaking of which, cute pictures of sheep grazing among solar panels have become pretty commonplace — iStock, an online source for stock photos, has 385 of them. 

But Silicon Ranch, a Tennessee solar developer that has been a leader in combining solar and agriculture — called agrivoltaics — is taking the next step: raising its solar panels higher so cattle can graze around and beneath them (see below).

On April 30, the company cut the ribbon on the Christiana Solar Ranch, which it says is the first commercial-scale solar and cattle project in the country. The 40-acre ranch will host 3.25 MW of solar and a small rotating herd of 10 cows, backed up with Cattle Tracker™, a digital platform that ensures panels are in a horizontal “graze” position when cattle are nearby and will also monitor soil health and other environmental impacts. 

The ranch is located in central Tennessee, and the power generated there is going to Middle Tennessee Electric, the state’s largest electric cooperative, where it will help the co-op save on energy costs. Plus, SR says, the installation is built with American-made components.

Why solar cattle? They may not be as cute as sheep, but according to SR, the U.S. has eight times more cattle ranches than sheep ranches, and 17 times more cattle than sheep, We’re talking a whole lot of open land, much of it in red states, that could be used to produce cattle and clean energy — and offset at least some of the methane those cows produce. 

When we talk about energy, we are talking about climate. Implementation with a vengeance.