This archive tracks real progress in clean and renewable energy — from solar and wind expansion to grid upgrades and policy wins. Each story focuses on what’s working, where, and why it matters for people and the planet.
The number of electric school buses operating or delivered in the U.S. rose from 598 in March 2022 to 1,285 in June 2023. The number of electric school buses that have been ordered or awarded funding nearly tripled in the same period. Forty-nine states had electric school bus commitments as of June 2023.
According to the East Asian nation’s Environment Ministry’s new biogas law, public and private industries that generate organic waste such as livestock manure and food waste will now be required to produce them in the form of biogas. Biogas is a gaseous renewable energy source produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, plant material and manure and can be used in vehicles that operate on natural gas.
Sodium-ion EVs just hit the road for the first time, with Chinese automaker JAC delivering its Yiwei hatchback to customers in January 2024 — the world’s first mass-produced electric car running on a battery made from one of Earth’s most abundant elements. The little urban hatchback offers about 157 miles per charge, plenty for daily commutes, and holds up better than lithium in cold weather. Because sodium is found in ordinary salt and spread across nearly every country, it sidesteps the supply bottlenecks and high costs that have kept EVs out of reach for many buyers. If the chemistry scales, it could open the door to affordable electric driving in places lithium has struggled to reach.
Nuclear fusion just cleared a crucial bar: scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have now achieved ignition four separate times, with the best shot producing 89 percent more energy than the lasers delivered to the target. That repetition is what transforms a single 2022 breakthrough into real, replicable science — proof that the Sun-like reaction can be coaxed out of a frozen hydrogen pellet on Earth, again and again. Momentum is building beyond the lab, too, with more than $6 billion now invested in fusion worldwide and governments at COP28 agreeing to speed things along. The road from a boiled kettle’s worth of energy to a clean-powered grid is still long, but the hardest physics is finally behind us.
Uruguay now generates between 90% and 98% of its electricity from renewables, a shift it pulled off in roughly 15 years after starting out almost entirely dependent on imported oil. The turning point came in 2008, when an oil price spike pushed the government to take a chance on a nuclear physicist with an unconventional pitch: skip the nuclear plant, go all in on wind. About 50 wind farms later, paired with existing hydropower, the country had one of the cleanest grids on Earth — and around 50,000 new jobs in a nation of just 3.4 million. Uruguay’s quiet experiment offers something the global energy transition badly needs: proof that a small country, starting from scratch, can actually do this.
Under the new rules, electric or hydrogen-powered cars will account for 20% of new sales by 2026, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2035. The rules mirror similar 2035 phase-out mandates in China, South Korea, the U.K. and several U.S. states, including California, New York, and Massachusetts.
Fusion energy just took a real step forward in Japan: JT-60SA, the largest experimental fusion reactor on Earth, has officially powered up in Ibaraki Prefecture. Standing six stories tall, it heats plasma to roughly 200 million degrees Celsius — hotter than the sun’s core — to study the same process that lights the stars. More than 500 scientists and 70 companies across Japan and the European Union built it together, and its job is to pave the way for ITER, the even larger reactor rising in France. Fusion still has a long road ahead, but moments like this remind us what becomes possible when nations pool decades of expertise toward a shared, emissions-free future.
At the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway in formally joining the alliance, which was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and phasing out existing unabated coal plants.
Wireless EV charging just made its U.S. public-road debut on a quarter-mile stretch of 14th Street in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Copper coils embedded beneath the pavement send electricity through a magnetic field to receivers mounted under compatible vehicles, topping up batteries with no plug, no stop, and no waiting. A Ford E-Transit van will gather real-world data over a five-year pilot, with city buses and delivery fleets as especially promising candidates down the road. There’s a lovely symmetry in the city that birthed the auto industry helping reimagine how cars are powered — and a reminder that the shift to clean transportation tends to begin with exactly these kinds of modest, hopeful experiments.
Clean ammonia shipping gets its first real-world test in 2026, when Norwegian chemicals company Yara launches the Yara Eyde — a container ship designed to run entirely on ammonia and cut about 11,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year. The vessel will sail a regular route between Norway and Germany, proving the technology under genuine commercial conditions rather than in a lab. Shipping moves roughly 90% of global trade and has long been considered one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize, since batteries and hydrogen still fall short for ocean-going vessels. Every big industrial shift needs someone willing to go first, and this one ship could help chart a credible path toward a cleaner future for global trade.
