Today (2017 C.E. - 2025 C.E.)

This archive spans the years 2017 through 2025, a period marked by rapid advances in clean energy, medicine, technology, and social equity. It collects documented breakthroughs, policy wins, and scientific achievements from the present era. If you want evidence that progress is real and ongoing, this is where to look.

Lake in Switzerland, for article on pumped-storage power plant

Switzerland builds the world’s largest water battery to store surplus renewable energy

By / / Good News For Humankind

Nant de Drance represents something genuinely exciting: proof that we can store renewable energy at a scale that changes how entire continents manage their grids. Tucked 2,000 feet inside the Swiss Alps, the plant holds 20 million kWh by moving water between two mountain reservoirs — absorbing surplus solar and wind, then releasing it as hydropower within minutes when demand spikes. It can supply roughly 900,000 homes and acts as a rapid-response buffer for Switzerland and neighboring European countries. Projects like this show that the hardest engineering problems in the clean energy transition are solvable.

Hollywood street, for article on single-use plastic reduction

California passes first sweeping US law to reduce single-use plastic

By / / Good News For Humankind

California’s single-use plastic law sets a binding target to cut throwaway plastic 25% by 2032, and it puts the bill where it belongs: on the companies making the stuff. A new producer-led organization will run recycling programs and pay $500 million a year into a fund that helps clean up the mess and address its health impacts. That’s a real shift, because for decades the cost of plastic pollution has fallen on cities and taxpayers, not the businesses profiting from it. As the largest U.S. state, California tends to pull markets and other states along with it — making this a hopeful template for tackling plastic pollution far beyond its borders.

Sand, for article on sand battery storage

World’s first commercial sand battery begins energy storage in Finland

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sand-based thermal energy storage is stepping out of the lab and into real communities, and the implications reach well beyond Finland. A steel tank packed with ordinary sand captures surplus wind and solar energy as heat, then pipes warmth through a district heating network serving homes and public buildings — at under €10 per kilowatt-hour, using no rare materials. With nearly half of Scandinavian homes already connected to district heating, this technology has a ready path to scale. For communities facing long, cold winters, affordable heat storage like this could become a quiet cornerstone of the clean energy transition.

Trees reflecting in lake, for article on Onondaga land return

1,000 acres of forest to be returned to Onondaga Nation in historic lake cleanup agreement

By / / Good News For Humankind

Land has been returned directly to a Native American tribe in New York for the first time, and the parcel is significant: nearly 1,000 acres of forest, wetlands, and the sacred headwaters of Onondaga Creek. The Onondaga Nation, original stewards of central New York, will own the land outright and care for it using traditional ecological knowledge, with plans to bring native brook trout back to waters they fished for centuries. The transfer grew out of a Superfund settlement with Honeywell, the company behind decades of industrial pollution nearby. It’s one of the largest Indigenous land returns in U.S. history — a small but meaningful shift in a global movement recognizing Native nations as the rightful caretakers of their homelands.