Interesting Ideas

Steel decarbonization keeps being pulled into the wrong conversation. Call it a future hydrogen market, and the discussion moves quickly to electrolyzers, pipelines, storage caverns, offtake contracts, national hydrogen strategies, and industrial-policy speeches looking for a customer. That framing is convenient for hydrogen advocates, but it is not how the ... [continued]

The post Steel Needs A Route Transition, Not A Hydrogen Story appeared first on CleanTechnica.

YouGov poll findings commissioned by E3G, T&E and the Electrification Alliance. New polling data across five major European countries shows strong support for electrification and clean energy investment. These views cut across traditional left-right political divides. Over 6 in 10 (64%) believe that reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels makes ... [continued]

The post Majority of Europeans Back Reducing Fossil Fuel Imports to Make Europe Safer, Polling Shows appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Footage captured by a diver shows a rare sighting of a great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea, spotted between Tunisia and Sicily.

The sighting happened during a mission, organised by the NGO Healthy Seas Foundation in partnership with Ghost Diving and the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites, to remove abandoned fishing nets in the strait of Sicily.

Healthy Seas, which removes rubbish from seas, said the video was believed to be the first underwater footage captured of an adult great white shark in the Mediterranean in its natural habitat. The species has come close to extinction in the region, thought by Healthy Seas to be due to threats such as overfishing.

Record numbers linked to warming waters is mixed news for fishers, with shellfish catches down but octopus catches booming

Record numbers of octopuses found off the south-west coast of England last year have now spread as far as Scotland and Wales and are transforming the fishing industry and the marine ecosystem, according to a study.

The surge in sightings of one of the world’s most intelligent invertebrates was first recorded in 2025 off the south coast of Devon and Cornwall.

Guardian Australia road tests Hornsby Park and explores the history of turning industrial sites into peaceful green escapes in the heart of the city

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I’m a denizen of the inner city, more used to plane trees than eucalypts. But Hornsby Park won me over immediately.

A highlight is the heritage steps, which stretch for about 1km, connecting Hornsby pool at one end and the Great North Walk at the other. Constructed in the 1930s, they traverse through the new park that opened earlier this year at the site of an old quarry abandoned since 2003.

A CleanTechnica exclusive, by Ed Darmanin, as told to David Waterworth. Ed Darmanin, a retired electrical engineer from Sydney, is planning to circumnavigate mainland Australia — the world’s largest island continent — on an electric motorcycle. Why? Because no one has ever done it before — and because, as two ... [continued]

The post Ed Darmanin Does the Big Lap around Australia on an Electric Motorbike appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Solar power is surging in Europe, saving consumers billions on their utility bills just so far this year alone.

The post Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135 Million A Day appeared first on CleanTechnica.

More and more new EV chargers are being installed in various states. One of my latest articles was about 754 coming to Washington state and 435 new ones in Pennsylvania — Philadelphia to be exact. The most recent development at the state level is Connecticut’s new 370 chargers. “We’ve been ... [continued]

The post 370 New EV Chargers To Be Installed In Connecticut appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Global heating is destroying creeks the crayfish call home. They’re the canary in the coalmine for other species living in the delicate ecosystems

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Nightfall comes early under the dense cloak of the rainforest canopy and Ollie Scully – boots off and barefoot – is wading through the cool water with his torch scouring the rocky bottom of a shallow creek.

We are at an undisclosed spot in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. With leeches and trip hazards aplenty, the search has been on for hours.

ORLANDO, Fla. — The Trump Administration invoked its so-called “energy emergency” to force the Stanton coal plant in Orlando to remain open beyond its planned retirement at the end of May 2026. The facility, which was scheduled to go into extended cold shut down—meaning it will stop generating electricity and ... [continued]

The post Trump Forces Costly Florida Coal Plant to Run Past Retirement, Raising Costs for Everyday Customers appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Scaling back the EU’s electric car targets makes the transition to renewables far more expensive to achieve. Europe’s electricity system could be one of the biggest victims of plans to scale back electric vehicle targets. By providing ‘batteries on wheels’, EVs are set to fundamentally rewire the math of the ... [continued]

The post 150 New Power Plants: The Cost of Balancing the Grid If the EU Slashes EV Targets appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The solar power and battery storage project pipelines are growing in the United States. Even if government support for solar has dropped — in the US as a whole as well as in the #1 solar state of California — the clean electricity option is still hyper-competitive due to its ... [continued]

The post US Clean Energy Can Now Power ~80 Million Homes! appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Marine biologist Issah Seidu has found a way for Ghana’s fishing communities to earn a living – and help protect the ancient and critically endangered fish species

Guitarfish are an odd-looking and ancient species, with the tail of a shark and the flattened body of a ray, but their coveted fins have driven populations to the brink of extinction. In west Africa, where their meat is also a local delicacy, many guitarfish species are among the most critically endangered fish in the ocean.

Conservationists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) describe the slow-maturing ray, which produce young annually, as an “indicator species”, which reflect the overall health of an ecosystem and pose challenges in the way coastal fishing of them is managed. The IUCN red list categorises more than half of guitarfish species as critically endangered.

‘Twitchers’ rush to coastal Western Australia to see black-headed gull, which usually flies between Europe and Asia

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A lone seabird has caused a stir in the nation’s birdwatching community after landing on the Western Australian coast, thousands of kilometres off its usual migratory flight path.

The black-headed gull, which usually flies between Europe and Asia, has been spotted in the coastal city of Geraldton.

Annual killing of infant gannets has been carried out on a remote Scottish island for at least 400 years

Animal welfare campaigners have called for talks on phasing out the “inhumane” hunt for infant gannets known as guga, which are killed by hunters on a remote Scottish island once a year.

OneKind and the League Against Cruel Sports said it should be slowly phased out in dialogue with the Hebridean islanders who see the hunt, which has been carried out for at least 400 years, as a cultural pursuit and as sustainable food harvesting.

Iata boss Willie Walsh blames fuel suppliers, governments and aircraft makers, saying new ‘realistic timeline’ now needed

• Air fare rises ‘inevitable’ as airlines face extra $100bn jet fuel bill

The aviation industry’s landmark pledges to be net zero by 2050 will probably not now be achieved, airline leaders have admitted.

The collective goal to eliminate net carbon emissions was declared by global airlines only five years ago in 2021, with similar pledges made by national aviation industry leaders and governments, including in the UK, in 2020.

Global effort needed to limit effects of pollution, industrial fishing and climate crisis, World Ocean Assessment says

The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations.

The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain”.

Every auto executive across the world must know now that their in a race to offer true door-to-door self-driving capability. While Elon Musk hyped up Tesla robotaxis a decade ago and expected to be a decade ahead of everyone with such capability, what we’re seeing is various automakers and self-driving ... [continued]

The post Stellantis Gets Its Hands-Free, Door-to-Door Driving Partner — Wayve appeared first on CleanTechnica.

I am one of those people who hates the word “utilize.” The logic of the English language would seem to be that to utilize something is to alter it to give it utility that it didn’t originally have. One example is to punch holes in the bottom of a bucket ... [continued]

The post Utilize Bomb-Grade Plutonium For Energy? Really? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Badenoch, Cairngorms: It started with a tiny Scots pine growing out of a huge old birch, but soon I find more examples of this strange magic

The sight pulls me up short. It looks like something out of myth or a book of spells. Here is a miniature Scots pine growing 6ft up, right in the fork of a shaggy old birch. It delights and baffles me in equal measure. In further wanderings, I discover more examples of this strange magic. A rowan and a birch appear to sprout from the same stem, while a holly and a hawthorn are so hopelessly intertwined that I spend ages tracing back down through leaves, twigs, branches and trunks just to figure out how deep this union goes. At the bottom, this odd pairing have drawn a rusted fence into their inter-species embrace.

Investigating, I learn that there are a few wonders at work here. First, trees can grow so closely together that they become entangled and appear joined. Occasionally, though, limbs do repeatedly rub against each other in the wind, wear away the bark and fuse. Some even share vascular systems, passing water and nutrients between them. It is a natural grafting process called inosculation and can happen anywhere from the base of the trunk up to higher branches that form a linking arm. In folklore, it is called “a husband and wife tree”. Mostly occurring within species, it does sometimes cross divides.