My thoughts of the World: 2025

As I sit here on a cool December day, I am saddened and appalled at what is happening to humanity in the world. I am comforted by the fact that I am surrounded by a loving family, friends, and a community that shares my beliefs and values, which in a way buffers me from the hate, greed, and stupidity that is going on outside of my life bubble. I’ve become very philosophical in my old age, but I find it hard to express all my thoughts and feelings into words. I am glad that I am no longer in a classroom where I would be forced to make my arguments towards creating a just and sane world.

I need to summarize my thoughts on what a big part of my life’s main work has focused on: energy and the environment. Climate change has now entered into all aspects of human society, way beyond just polar bears stranded on ice floes, but its all-encompassing impacts are increasing exponentially and being felt in every aspect of our lives. The real hoax has always been the blatant denial by the powerful energy industry, and it’s spending billions of dollars bribing politicians and the media to hide the truth. The myth and the spending continue today.

Everything is pointing to the fact that eventually electricity will replace oil as the benchmark for economic analysis. I am encouraged that renewables are rapidly gaining ground in the production of electricity throughout the world. Renewable energy sources, primarily wind and solar, have become the world's largest source of electricity for the first time, surpassing coal in the first half of 2025. (1) Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Lesotho, and Norway get almost all of their electricity from renewable. Solar accounted for over 75% of US new electrical generating capacity added in the first nine months of 2025. The mix of all renewables, mainly wind and solar, remains on track to exceed 40% of installed capacity within three years; solar alone may be 20%. Solar panels from Asia now cost 8 cents/watt, down from the 50 cents goal 10 years ago. Australia has installed so much solar that it does not charge its customers for two hours of use during peak production times (2). They will soon have 5,500MWH of battery storage to balance the intermittent renewable generation. This is happening all over the world, with more efficient solar and wind technologies proving their mettle. China is assumed to be close to meeting all its electricity needs via renewables within a few years. They are phasing out their coal plants, and they are building some new nuclear power plants in anticipation of the huge demand for electricity in the future.

Here in the US, you don’t hear much about gains made in our renewable use. The FF industry still controls the major media. For example, most of us didn’t know that on Sept. 9, solar produced a huge 29.9 GW of electricity in Texas! Also on that day, solar provided more than 40% of the state’s power from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (3) Wind power provided another 40%! California is not far behind, and other states are quietly adding wind and solar to their energy mix.

Of course, this is enraging the big money energy industry, and they are now in charge of federal energy policy, and pumping billions of dollars into not only oil and gas, but the new nuclear renaissance. They know that electricity use will maybe skyrocket with electric vehicles and AI data centers, and are hoping that their new small modular reactors, gas generators, and future fusion reactors will fill the bill. Meanwhile, the US is cancelling huge renewable projects, some of which are almost online and cost-effective, eliminating jobs, and raising prices for consumers.

The Trump administration has cancelled the 80%completed wind farm in federal waters of the Rhode Island coast. That would have produced 700MW. Put on hold was the major wind development in Humboldt Bay. That was to provide a new industry replacing the decreased fishing and timber in our community, and created many new infrastructure jobs. They have also cancelled a 6,200MW solar project just north of Las Vegas. Meanwhile, First Solar just completed a $1.1B solar module manufacturing facility in Louisiana. It will soon produce 3,500 MW of panels…each year! It will use glass from Ohio and Illinois, and recycled steel (a lot of it recycled) from Mississippi. First Solar will be manufacturing 17,000MW of modules per year, adding 5,500 jobs and its economic multipliers to the Louisiana economy. Prologis is a huge industrial real estate company owning thousands of industrial warehouses. They are putting systems on the roofs of their facilities. With nearly 800 MWs of rooftop solar and energy storage already deployed and 82 more coming from Northern Illinois alone, Prologis is on track to reach its goal of 1 gigawatt by the end of 2025. (4) There are many other renewable and non-carbon energy technologies coming into the energy mix, such as geothermal, ocean wave and tide capture, organic wastes, and efficiency. So, we have a huge potential to add to our renewable energy base, even with all the obstacles being put in place over the years. Think of what could be happening if we put our money and policy focus in the right direction.

So now, let’s look at our new nuclear future. It’s a bit different from the big nuclear renaissance plans pushed in 2006 for 20 new reactors. Only two are actually online today after 15 years of construction delay and a $35b cost that was 3x over the original estimate. Other plants were abandoned due to time and cost constraints, and corruption! Today’s hope is pinned on small (50-300MW) modular reactors. The hope is that they can be built in a factory and deployed where the need is, such as near large AI data centers. The first is expected to be online by 2030+. That’s probably not going to happen (again, I am taking bets!) for many reasons. First, a prototype of the many designs has not been built and tested. It all looks good on paper, but most of these new designs require specialized enriched uranium fuel (most of which is now imported from Russia). Some are molten salt cooled (early sodium reactors didn’t work out so well), and are going to be buried below ground, eliminating the need for huge containment domes. Of course, they will only produce heat…to boil water and drive a steam turbine-generator set, and nuclear waste (which some experts say will be more per MW than the large water reactors we use now), and will need some sort of cooling system…water source? There are so many questions to be answered, but mainly the cost and time to build. Solar and wind are now coming in 5-10 times lower than today’s nukes (14-40 cents per KWH), and then, who will pay for them? The industry wants us!!!! Two great articles talk about utilities not willing to invest because of so many concerns. (5) (6) A big piece of this puzzle has to do with the aging grid. Built to move electricity from the large power plant system constructed 50-60 years ago, it needs a massive upgrade and overhaul. If Google needs huge amounts of electricity, let them build the plants where they need them. Bill Gates is getting a $1b “loan” from the Trump administration to restart the shuttered, undamaged Three Mile Island reactor for Microsoft data. Most other companies want the old way of doing business, having utilities build and distribute it via the grid. Expensive! The hot new company in the nuke business is OKLO ( buy stock now…the next Microsoft, Apple, Google! ). They are going to construct a reprocessing/enrichment plant in Tennessee to produce the highly specialized fuel for their 15MW reactor, which they will build and test in Idaho, supposedly in 2027. They are going to “recycle” nuclear waste and use the plutonium in used nuclear fuel rods. Interesting that today the Trump administration has halted the start of testing the $35B vitrification plant (25 years of construction and 7X over budget), which would hopefully solidify the liquid wastes at Hanford, which are the remains of reprocessing!!! Of course, no one is really talking about nuclear waste, since there is no solution to dealing with it other than spending millions of dollars each year to just sit on it. Producing more…we’ll have a solution by then. As we can see, the nuclear industry has a huge set of dreams that, by any logic, don’t make sense. It doesn’t matter…they are all making lots of money playing the game.

One last fairy tale…fusion. I’m sure we will achieve a sustainable fusion reaction, which we have been trying for so many years and so many dollars. But for this technology to meet our energy needs is pure fantasy. First, we already have a working fusion reactor…it’s called the sun! Achieving a self-sustaining reaction of hundreds of millions of degrees on Earth is not going to be cheap or practical. Unlimited energy!!! Yes, but the energy is in the form of heat! Just like nuclear fusion, where we split the heaviest element, Uranium, to produce heat to boil water to spin a turbine to spin a generator to produce electricity, fusion will combine Hydrogen atoms to release heat to boil water to spin a turbine-generator to produce electricity. Fusion does not produce electricity or gasoline, or any other usable fuel. There is an unlimited amount of Hydrogen available, especially in seawater. But for fusion, you need Deuterium, a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen. Out of 6500 atoms of hydrogen, one is deuterium, so we would electrolyze water to isolate the Deuterium, and have Hydrogen as a “waste” product. We have that technology today! But then you have to fuse the Deuterium with Tritium, which really doesn’t exist in any usable amount on planet earth, but is produced in a fission nuclear reactor. Cheap, clean, unlimited…power for the future…$$$$$$!

So now true to life…Hydrogen!!! Electrolyze water to get Hydrogen gas. If you ever took a chemistry class, that is usually the first lab experiment, and you probably didn’t blow up the classroom. Hydrogen is storable, transportable, and can be produced just about anywhere there is an electricity source. It can then be oxidized either in a fuel cell to directly produce electricity or combusted in an engine for transportation or any other use. The waste product is H20…water! Hydrogen is rapidly coming into mainstream…like batteries when they were first deployed…in ships, trains, large transportation trucks, etc. BMW and Toyota are going all in with Hydrogen cars, powered by Hydrogen canisters that can be switched out in a matter of minutes. (7) Cleaner, safer than gasoline and even lithium batteries, which frequently ignite into fires that are difficult to put out. New technologies and applications are being deployed every day around the world.

The biggest potential for Hydrogen is storage for renewable energy production. A “ground-breaking pilot project has been operating in the City of Calistoga in the Napa wine country. (8) Devastated by fires, which were not only sparked by electric lines and grid failure for days, a backup system has been put in place. “Coupling hydrogen fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries, the 293MWh system is designed to provide 48 hours of continuous energy, and a peak instantaneous power output of 8.5MW during regional Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events. When Calistoga's local microgrid is islanded from the regional electrical network during a PSPS event, the CRC will utilize clean hydrogen in fuel cells to generate electricity, providing power to the local community.” This is the future, whether for small microgrids or large solar and wind systems, Hydrogen backing up the intermittent aspect of renewable electricity. It makes so much common cents!

I’m running out of energy, with so much more to say about everything. Ever the optimist, I believe in most of my fellow humans, and they will eventually react in the right direction. Climate Change will be the driving force battering our global economic systems. (9) (10) The world will not end! However, it will change, and many people will suffer due to the lack of forethought and action by the few. It’s too bad the US is being set back many decades, just so the few super-rich can maximize their greed and power.

Let the sun shine, and the wind blow!!!!!

While mainstream media does not really cover what is going on, here are a few of my favorite websites printing “real” news.

www.insideclimatenews.org

www.dailyclimate.org

https://energynews.biz/news/

www.electrek.co

Just a few notes for more information on the above.

1. https://electrek.co/2025/11/13/solar-and-wind-are-covering-all-new-power-demand-in-2025/

2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/04/australia-free-solar-power-scheme-how-when-houshold-bills

3. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/texas-solar-battery-records

4. https://www.instapaper.com/read/1877620486

5. https://www.instapaper.com/read/1933979059