Jacob Hunka July 13, 2026 · 5 min read
Clean power isn't the expensive, virtuous choice anymore. It's just the cheap one. That's the argument Bill McKibben makes this week, and two fresh reports say the numbers back him up: solar grew faster than anything else on the grid last year. Also in the mix, a truck you fix with a screwdriver, a wind turbine that ships flat-packed, and a three-wheeled solar car that charges as it drives. Here's the week.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
Bill McKibben on the Moment Clean Energy Became the Cheap Choice
The Ezra Klein Show
Bill McKibben has spent decades as a climate writer and activist, and his pitch on the Ezra Klein Show is that the whole argument has flipped. Solar, wind, and batteries used to be the Whole Foods of energy, he says. Now they're the Costco: cheap, in bulk, sitting on the shelf. He backs the cost story with numbers from the think tank Ember, which found solar met about three quarters of the growth in world electricity demand in 2025, that renewables passed a third of generation and overtook coal, and that fossil generation fell in China and India for the first time. He describes Australia giving away free power midday because there's so much solar, and California running for stretches on more than 100 percent clean electricity with batteries carrying the grid after dark. The stories he finds most striking are off the usual map, like Pakistani households covering rooftops with cheap imported panels, no government program involved, learning to wire them from videos online. He keeps coming back to a short list he calls the trinity: the EV or e-bike, the heat pump, and the induction cooktop. But the episode doesn't stay sunny. McKibben spends the back half on how fast the climate is shifting, including the risk to the Atlantic currents that keep Europe temperate. His thesis is that the tech has arrived just as the physical stakes climb, so speed is the scarce resource now. Where his optimism gets thin is the grid itself. Transmission, permitting, and storage are the unglamorous parts he mostly waves past, and they're exactly where build-outs stall.
Slate's Truck Is Built to Be Fixed in Your Driveway
JerryRigEverything
Slate wants to sell you a truck you're allowed to fix yourself, and JerryRigEverything built his first drive around testing that. The price starts just under $25,000, about half of what the video puts as the average new car. Underneath is a single 65 kWh battery good for 205 miles, rear-wheel drive, and a zero to sixty around 8 seconds. No touchscreen. The windows crank by hand. The unusual part isn't the powertrain, it's the body: unpainted composite panels held on with exposed screws, meant to come off with a screwdriver. Most of the walkthrough is about that serviceability. The grille and light covers use T20 screws, similar to what's inside some phones, and the outer panels use exposed T30 fasteners. Replacement grille plates run about $60, light covers about $50 for the pair, and Slate actively supports owners 3D printing their own. Owners can even do warranty repairs themselves without voiding coverage. The panels are gray glass-filled polypropylene, so there's no paint to match; color comes from wraps at around $500. A roughly $5,000 package adds a rear bench and a roll bar with side airbags. The used-car case the host makes is interesting: EVs shed about 40 percent of their value in three years, but motors and batteries can run well past 200,000 miles, so a cheap three-year-old Slate could still have most of its life left. That's his projection, not a promise. And it all rests on one thing the video doesn't dwell on: cheap self-repair and strong resale both need Slate to stay in business and keep parts flowing, which plenty of EV startups have failed to do. The low sticker is real. The long-term math depends on the company surviving.
The Flat-Pack Wind Turbine Betting on Vertical Blades
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
Most offshore wind turbines bolt to the seabed, which only works in water shallow enough to reach, roughly 80 metres or less. That leaves the deeper ocean, where the wind is strongest, untapped. A Swedish company called SeaTwirl is going after it with a floating vertical-axis turbine that assembles on land in flat-packed pieces, no crane needed, then gets towed out and moored. Undecided with Matt Ferrell lays out the pitch and the risk. The appeal is maintenance. A normal turbine keeps its generator in a nacelle at the top of the tower, so crews climb up or fly in by helicopter to service it. SeaTwirl puts the generator down at sea level and drops the systems that aim conventional blades into the wind, cutting moving parts and, in theory, service trips. The catch is efficiency. Vertical-axis turbines are about 25 percent less aerodynamically efficient than the familiar propeller design, and they carry more of their spinning mass out at the blades, which stresses the structure. History isn't encouraging either: the biggest vertical-axis turbine ever built, the 3.8 MW Eole in Canada, lasted only about five years before fatigue failures. SeaTwirl's bet is that far fewer bearings, roughly four sets against about 26 for a geared horizontal machine, tilt the lifetime math back its way. Progress has been bumpy. A 30 kW prototype has run off Sweden since 2015, a planned 1 MW test lost its site license, and the company jumped straight to a 2 MW demonstration set to run through late 2029. If that unit delivers, deep-water wind gets a real second option. It's a hypothesis worth following, not a settled case.
A Solar Three-Wheeler That Charges While It Drives
Tailosive EV
Tailosive EV's Aptera video is played as a heist bit, the host insisting he's leaving with a solar car whether or not anyone stops him. Under the comedy is a real look at how the three-wheeled Aptera drives. The headline is the solar. The host reports pulling more than 200 watts from the roof and hood panels on a cloudy day, and over 300 watts in better light, including while the car is moving. That's the part almost no other EV on sale even attempts. It also sets expectations that are easy to miss: solar output depends on weather, parking, and panel angle, so those readings are best-case numbers in direct sun, not a fixed daily yield. Park in a garage or live under grey skies and the panels are a bonus, not a fuel source. The Aptera is front-wheel drive, steered by a yoke, with cameras instead of side mirrors and doors that open straight up. The host is mostly won over on the drive. He says the cargo space beats his Model 3, the camera views near the yoke are quick to read, and the split rear window that looks awkward online stops mattering in person because your brain fills the gap. One practical wrinkle the video skips: in much of the US a three-wheeler is registered as a motorcycle or autocycle, which can change licensing and insurance depending on your state. For someone with a sunny commute who watches an efficiency readout for fun, this offers something genuinely rare, miles that show up without a plug. Everyone else should treat the solar as a supplement and judge the car on space, visibility, and its oddball charm.
Two reports out this week say the same thing from different angles: solar is now growing faster than any other power source. CBC News, covering studies from the International Energy Agency and the think tank Ember, says solar's rise from 2024 into 2025 outpaced every other fuel, led by big emitters like China and India. One figure the segment pulls out: global solar output is now large enough to cover the entire electricity demand of the European Union, all 27 countries. The reports also conclude that renewables can now meet the world's year-over-year growth in electricity demand, meaning no new fossil fuel projects are needed just to keep the lights on. Where this differs from the usual climate framing is the security angle. CBC sets the story against nearly two months of tension around the Strait of Hormuz, a reminder of how exposed oil and gas importers are to shocks they can't control. Jessica Isaacs of the World Resources Institute argues that dependence on fuel imports is a constant drag on a country's finances, and points to Pakistan, where rapid solar deployment has helped avoid an estimated $12 billion in costs during the current oil crisis. The reporter is careful to note Pakistan still leans on Iranian oil and gas, so the shift is a buffer, not a clean break. For anyone driving on electricity, a grid that leans more on cheap domestic solar quietly improves the running-cost math on every mile. The honest caveat is the same one McKibben runs into up top: adding panels is easy. Storage and transmission are the slow work that decides whether these numbers keep climbing.
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.