What mattered this week

Now tyrants love clean energy. Because cheap power means… staying in power.

Huh? In the first month after Hormuz shut, 60 governments passed nearly 200 emergency energy measures. Expensive energy means unrest. 💣

Better than torture? Yup. Keep costs low & stable 😱.

Read more: Foreign Policy — "The Threat of Unrest Is Decarbonizing the Global South" (Razzouk & Purvis, 4 Jun); Carbon Brief — How 60 nations responded; £109 vs £59 (Dorfman)

Two records broke in May. They weren't on the same side.

Give me the bad. Britain's hottest-ever May day (~35°C 🤯), Austria's hottest in 200 years. Globally, the second-warmest May ever.

And the good? The same four weeks, northern Scotland's grid ran ~28 days straight on zero-carbon power.

So - verdict? Both. Heat is accelerating. And the fix is here. Same month, opposite directions.

Read more: Europe's record May heat dome (Severe Weather Europe); Second-warmest May globally (Copernicus/EU); Scotland 28-day run: Mark Tebbutt/NESO data

Batteries just kicked gas in the backside

What? Evening peak: the most profitable hours. For two decades, it was all gas. Lots of 🤑🤑🤑.

Who took it? Batteries. Now in GB storage sets the evening price. GB battery capacity hit 6.8GW in 2025, heading for ~9GW by year-end. Huge.

But what about longer term? Yes, today’s batteries shift hours - but wind can vanish for days, solar for months. That gap needs long-duration storage. And it’s coming, ig time (Energy Live News).

Read more: Modo Energy — GB battery buildout & peak pricing; "Batteries crashed the party in a year" (Chris Meder)

One thing to worry about

A super El Niño is forming. Forecasters expect it to rival or exceed the monsters of 1997-98 and 2015-16.

Who pays? Drought across India, Australia and southern Africa; floods in Peru and East Africa. Crops fail, food prices climb. Rice, pulses, sugar and oilseeds go first.

And who hurts? Farm labourers 35× more likely than others to die of heat on the job. Think of that while you dial up the AC next to your laptop.

Links: Super El Niño 2026 threat to India (Business Standard) · 2026 on track for second-warmest year (Carbon Brief) · the El Niño map (Gaurav Kochar)

One thing to be optimistic about

A Beta Technologies electric plane flew four passengers from East Hampton to JFK on about $8 of electricity. Range north of 300 miles, a 50-minute charge — and it recharges the battery on the way down.

A decade ago this was a slide deck. 💪

Links: Taking flight aboard the electric plane (ABC/GMA) · $8 vs $4,000 on a private jet (Compass Vermont)

If you’ve got more time…

Three this week, as your head is spinning and you need a sit-down:

1. The plan is no plan — Alex Steffen, Discontinuity is the Job. The discontinuity is everything. This isn't a disruption to the plan. Disruption is the plan.

2. Nobody Knows the Future of Energy - Andrew Dessler. Coal collapsed, renewables boomed, and almost every official forecast missed it. Worth reading before anyone tells you confidently how this ends.

3. The good news — Michael Liebreich, The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0. The numbers under the optimism: wind, solar, EVs and clean investment have roughly doubled since 2022 — and kept going, even against Washington.

We built a lifeboat: Batteries took the grid's best hours; an electric plane crossed New York for the price of a sandwich.

But the heat is rising faster than ever.

And not one of the forecasters who watched all this happen called it right — which should make us humble about what comes next.

We have a lifeboat.

Let’s row.