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.
Renewable energy quietly crossed a threshold in 2015, when solar, wind, and other renewables made up roughly two-thirds of all new power capacity added worldwide, according to an IEA report released the following year. China led the wave, installing more solar and wind than any other country. It was the moment the energy transition stopped feeling hypothetical.
Wind-hydro turbines are rising in Germany’s Swabian-Franconian forest, where four towers double as gravity batteries by pumping water up inside themselves when the wind blows and releasing it downhill when it stops. At 809 feet, they’re the world’s tallest, and they hint at a cleaner way to solve wind power’s oldest problem: timing.
The Suva Declaration on Climate Change, signed by Pacific Island leaders in Fiji in 2015, was the first time national governments formally called for a halt to new fossil fuel extraction. Nations like Tuvalu, sitting less than two meters above sea level, named the source of the crisis directly. It helped seed a decade of supply-side climate diplomacy.
France’s green roof law, passed by Parliament in 2015, made the country one of the first to require new commercial buildings to top their roofs with either living vegetation or solar panels. The mandate was a compromise, narrower than activists hoped, but it turned ecological rooftop design from a nice idea into a national baseline.
Solar power took over a major airport in 2015, when Cochin International in Kerala, India became the first in the world to run entirely on the sun. More than 46,000 panels spread across 45 acres of former cargo land now meet all the airport’s needs, with surplus flowing back to the state grid — an early proof that big infrastructure could go fully renewable.
America’s first offshore wind farm came to life in 2015, when construction began on five turbines in the Atlantic waters off Block Island, Rhode Island. A 21-mile submarine cable eventually linked the island to the mainland grid, replacing its diesel generators. Small in scale, it proved offshore wind was buildable in U.S. waters.
Charanka Solar Park opened in April 2012 in Gujarat’s Patan district, launching as the world’s third-largest photovoltaic station at the time. Built on 2,000 hectares under a shared model that let 36 private developers operate side by side, it showed utility-scale solar was possible in the developing world earlier than most believed.
In 2006, a Beijing engineering team unveiled a wind turbine whose rotor floated on magnetic levitation, spinning without touching any bearing. By eliminating friction, the design could reportedly start generating power in breezes as slow as 1.5 meters per second. It was an early, imperfect signal of the engineering ambition now reshaping wind energy worldwide.
Egypt’s Red Sea Wind Energy project came fully online in June 2025, making a stretch of coastline near Ras Ghareb home to the largest operational wind farm in Africa and the Middle East. Its 650 megawatts can power more than a million Egyptian homes, a quiet signal that the region’s energy story is shifting.
Offshore wind began quietly in 1991, when Danish workers planted 11 small turbines in the shallow waters off Vindeby, on the island of Lolland. Each one produced just 450 kilowatts, powering a few thousand homes and proving turbines could survive the sea. It was the first offshore wind farm ever built — a modest experiment that opened a door.
