The New York Times examines the intense flooding in Southeast Asia earlier this month, which most-seriously impacted Indonesia but also devastated parts of Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand. The article describes how the deforestation conducted to create palm-oil plantations resulted in the presence thousands of logs that the flooding turned into battering rams. More than 1,100 people are dead across the region, and 500,000 others have been displaced in Sumatra alone. An Indian meteorologist notes that ‟even moderate cyclones are producing catastrophic rainfall because the ocean is warmer, the atmosphere is wetter, and communities are living close to the edge in terms of land use.” Research has also documented that, ‟as the planet warms, storms tend to strengthen more quickly near many coastlines in Southeast Asia, and then move more slowly once over land.” The Guardian notes that ‟the region’s monsoon season often brings heavy rains that can cause landslides and flash floods, but recent flooding in south-east Asia has been exacerbated by a rare tropical storm formed in the Malacca strait.” Reuters reports that, in the aftermath, water-borne diseases are spreading while damaged health-care facilities struggle to provide services.

As battery prices plummet, large and small utilities around the U.S. are taking advantage of this technology at the grid scale. MPR News describes how batteries are being deployed in Minnesota to reduce fossil-fuel use and control costs. The technology is helping the state meet its renewable-energy goals by retiring fossil-fuel power plants in favor of solar, wind and other renewable technologies. The state’s largest utility, Xcel, wants to double the amount of battery storage planned next to its Sherco coal-fired power plant. ‟Xcel plans to retire the coal plant by 2030 and is building a massive solar project at the site. The batteries would allow Xcel to store energy produced at its wind, solar, nuclear and natural gas plants across the Upper Midwest.”

Canary Media describes the implementation of mid-size (10 MW) battery projects in Virginia. These units are larger than home batteries, but cheaper and quicker to build than massive utility-scale projects. The batteries “will charge when system-wide electricity consumption is down and spot prices are low. Then, the batteries’ owner, Doxa Development, will sell power back when demand is at its peak, creating revenue that will help lower bills for co-op consumers.” Near the North Carolina border, another municipal utility is building a second battery as its first 10.5-megawatt battery project, which came online in 2022 and is on track to save customers $40 million over the next 20 years.

Canary Media explains how batteries installed by the municipal utility in Chattanooga, TN, are keeping the lights on during outage situations, while saving money for all customers by lowering the utility’s peak electricity consumption. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which generates electricity for Chattanooga and other cities in the region, is making a major investment in batteries. The technology is clearly reducing costs and outages in California and Texas where large deployments have been made.

Of course, the U.S. government is doing the fossil-fuel industry’s bidding and actively trying to screw this up. Inside Climate News reports that two-thirds of planned solar and battery-storage projects in Texas are at risk due to Trump’s policies. The Sierra Club previews the arguments against Trump’s policies: ‟Texans know how nonsensical it is for President Trump and Congress to cancel tax incentives for renewables and Solar for All grants so they can spend hundreds of millions to prop up old, polluting coal plants.”

Indeed, Canary Media reports that the Trump Administration ‟appears poised to force more coal plants to stay open past their planned closing dates — an unprecedented intervention in the power sector that is already making energy even more expensive for Americans.” After forcing a coal-fired power plant to stay open despite no support for this action, which is costing the customers of Michigan’s Consumers Energy about $615,000 a day, Trump’s DOE is now looking to force coal plants to stay open in Colorado. These plants are scheduled to close as part of plans by the utilities that own them to save money for their customers by switching to cheaper sources. Colorado utility customers have already been paying for the energy infrastructure to replace coal units, and so Trump is trying to force them to pay for coal as well.

An op-ed in Electrek examines the economic implications of cheap batteries, which in a predominantly electric economy become virtual bank accounts. While I’m just an environmental scientist, I found this article very thought-provoking, including the concept that mining cryptocurrency is just a way to burn through your electric savings.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) concludes, as have other analysts, that the transition away from natural gas to solar for electricity generation in California is well underway. The EIA examined January – July 2025, and concludes that while electricity demand has increased by 8% over the same period in 2020, natural-gas use for electricity generation declined by 18% while solar generation doubled over this period. ‟Although natural gas generation still provides more electricity than any other source in California, electricity generation from natural gas has decreased over the past several years while generation from solar has increased.” This is what the energy transition looks like. A key positive factor here is that, instead of firing up natural-gas plants as the sun goes down, battery facilities are pouring electricity back onto the grid for the evening peak.

The Economist reviews enhanced geothermal technology, which has the capability to meet electrical demand around the globe 24/7 with no greenhouse-gas emissions. This industry is getting ready to take off, and will likely be very important in the future, particularly if wells can be drilled into ‟super hot” rock (400°C). The author visits Fervo Energy in southern Utah, where this startup backed by Google ‟will start producing electricity next year in the first phase of a 500-megawatt deal with the power division of Shell, an oil company, and with a Californian utility. That is the largest commercial contract agreed for geothermal electricity in the industry’s history.” The New York Times describes how the oil-drilling industry is enthusiastically expanding into drilling geothermal wells (one reason Trump has not attacked geothermal like he has attacked solar and wind power). It is not a coincidence that Fervo Energy has its headquarters in Houston.

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