Jacob Hunka July 27, 2026 · 5 min read
A German farmer is growing potatoes under solar panels and treating the sun as a second crop. That's where we start this week, and solar turns out to be the through line: panels over farm fields, panels over irrigation canals, and a new cell chemistry that could rewrite what a rooftop panel can do. On the car side, a 555-horsepower electric Renault built purely to drift, and Rivian engineers taking apart the R2 battery on camera. Let's go.
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The pitch is simple: let a farmer harvest twice from the same field, once for crops and once for electricity. A euronews segment tours Agri-PV projects across Bavaria, where panels are raised over or set between growing land so the ground below stays farmed. The lead example is Feldenergy, a Munich startup building a tracker-based site of about one megawatt on one to two hectares, and it tells euronews it's building 55 installations this year for 70 megawatts total. The obvious worry, that this quietly pulls farmland out of food production, is one the report takes straight to the growers. One potato and grain farmer says he signed up partly for the climate and partly to top up a thin farming pension, with about 12 percent of his arable area given to panels. The technical trick is tracking: Feldenergy's vertical panels follow the sun, tilting 55 degrees east in the morning and west in the evening, which produces more energy in the peak evening hours when people cook and charge cars. In the Hallertau, the world's largest hop-growing region, a hop farmer plans to roof all his hop gardens with panels over two years, and says the shade keeps the ground moister and cuts evaporation, which suits hops. He puts payback at around 14 years against installations he expects to last 30. The report is refreshingly honest that the numbers don't always work without support. Payback measured in well over a decade, subsidy requests, and a slice of land handed to panels are real costs. But Europe needs more clean power and doesn't have spare land to waste, so expect a lot more panels standing between the crop rows.
Renault took one of its most famous rally cars and rebuilt it as an electric drift machine. At Goodwood, Autotrader's Rory climbed into the 5 Turbo 3E, a squat two-door that looks like a hot hatch and behaves like something angrier. Two rear-mounted hub motors make a combined 555 horsepower and 4,800 Nm of torque, with zero to 62 mph under 3.5 seconds, from a 70 kWh battery rated around 400 km, though the presenter notes that's about 20 minutes of hard track driving. The original 5 Turbo came out in 1980, built to go rallying by ripping the rear seats out of an economy hatch and dropping a turbo engine behind the driver, and Renault had to build roughly 400 road cars to qualify for competition. The new one keeps the wide, blistered look. Worth flagging for anyone reading this as an engineering statement: the motors sit inside the wheels, which is unusual, because in-wheel motors add unsprung weight that usually works against ride and handling. Renault's betting the drift brief and the novelty outweigh that. Rory didn't get to drive it, riding alongside a test driver instead, but his read from the passenger seat is that it feels quick, light, and responsive without the heavy, inert sensation he associates with EVs pushed hard. There's a three-level drift mode and an electrohydraulic handbrake that uses motor regen first, then physical braking when pulled harder. Renault will build 1,980 examples, a nod to that 1980 original, with 100 for the UK. This is a halo car, not a sensible one. The short run and 20-minute track window tell you it's for collectors, not value shoppers. The real question is price, and whether all 1,980 find homes before the novelty cools.
Solar Canopies Over Turlock's Canals Make Power and Save Water
CBS News Bay Area
In Hickman, California, a stretch of irrigation canal now runs under a roof of solar panels, and KPIX visited on a 100-degree day, which is the whole point. The Turlock Irrigation District loses a lot of water to evaporation in exactly that heat. The district's Josh Weimer says there are more than 700 panels producing about 800 kilowatts, over a main canal 110 feet wide, part of a system running 250 miles of canals serving 145,000 acres of almonds and corn. Statewide, the station reports, canals lose enough water to evaporation to supply two million people. This is one half of Project Nexus, a research effort the New York Times reported was built with $20 million in state funding, based on a 2021 UC Merced study that modeled covering all 4,000 miles of California's major canals for a projected 13 gigawatts and 63 billion gallons of water saved a year. Preliminary readings showed evaporation down by up to 70 percent, and aquatic weeds and algae down by up to 85 percent. Two cautions sit alongside that. The study's own lead author considers covering all 4,000 miles unrealistic, and building over a canal costs more than building on open ground. Dr. Brandi McKuin of UC Merced keeps her answer measured: the panels are cutting evaporation and weed growth, but the jury is still out on whether the total cost justifies expanding. The number to watch isn't 800 kilowatts, it's that 70 percent evaporation figure, because water is what California actually fights over. Solar canals will never beat a desert solar farm on cost per megawatt-hour. They win only if a district can put a hard value on the water it keeps and the land it doesn't have to buy.
Swift Solar's CEO Has a Test for Whether New Tech Is Real
Still TBD Podcast
Joel Jean has a rule he picked up from an MIT physicist: count the tooth fairies. One magical thing that has to happen for a technology to work is usually solvable. Two, be skeptical. Three or more, wait for the science. Jean runs Swift Solar, which builds perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells, and on Still TBD he used that framework to explain the gap between a lab record and a panel you can buy. Perovskites clear the first hurdle in a way no previous challenger has: stacked on silicon, he says, they lift the theoretical ceiling of a cell from around 30 percent to roughly 45. The useful translation for a homeowner is time. Panels on sale today are typically rated in the low twenties, and the estimate on the podcast is that record-setting tandem cells are roughly a decade from a residential roof. The reason isn't the top layer's physics. A panel is sold on a 25-year promise, and a technology has to earn that promise before a bank will finance projects built on it. Jean calls that threshold bankability, and it's a better thing to watch than any efficiency record. He's candid that early perovskite cells degraded in days, and that ten years of work pushed that out by orders of magnitude rather than one clever fix. In March, Swift acquired Meyer Burger, a Swiss manufacturer whose heterojunction silicon cells make a strong bottom layer for a tandem, and which had shut down after failing to compete with Chinese pricing. Swift got the equipment, the patents, and the core team, plus a proven silicon product it can sell now while the tandem matures. If you need panels today, buy silicon today. Then watch bankability, not records, because that's the number that decides when this actually ships.
Munro Live got two of Rivian's R2 engineers to stand in front of a bare battery pack in Plymouth, Michigan and explain it properly. The R2 pack isn't a box bolted under a car. Its lid is the cabin floor, the seats mount to it, and it carries crash loads a body structure would normally handle alone. Rivian moved from the 2170 cells in the R1 to a larger 4695 format and consolidated the high-voltage electronics into a single serviceable unit the team calls the powerhouse. The part worth thinking about as a buyer is that the cells sit in a potting compound that bonds to the enclosure for stiffness, and the pack was designed from day zero never to be serviced at cell level. That's a deliberate trade: it buys structural performance and a sealed design, and it means damage becomes a pack-level repair rather than a module swap. Anyone planning to keep the car past warranty should ask about replacement pack pricing and how insurers treat that repair, because sealed packs have been a friction point in EV repair economics. Rivian's answer is to move anything that might need attention outside the cell volume, under the rear seat where a technician can reach it. On the cost side, the engineers say swapping aluminum castings for stamped steel across the chassis cut cost by roughly 49 percent while also removing about 8 percent of the weight. R1's air suspension, semi-active dampers, and hydraulic roll control are gone, replaced by coil springs and a MacPherson strut. Several brackets are shaped to fracture deliberately in some crash modes while holding load in others, which the engineers describe as the hardest part of the whole program. The lost R1 hardware, air suspension most of all, will bother a slice of existing owners, and that's fair. Everyone else gets a car engineered by people who can explain on camera exactly which bracket is meant to fracture and at what load. If Rivian can build it at volume, R2 is the product that decides the company.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.