70 years ago right about now. Who knows what these three fellas are up to?

70 years ago today in the The New York Times:

Happy 70th birthday to the photovoltaic cell, demonstrated on April 25, 1954.

NYT: 'the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind's most cherished dreams - the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun' nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/…

Combined capex spending of META/MSFT/GOOGL:

FY 2007: $4.6 billion
FY 2021: $63.9 billion
FY 2024 (projected): $122.9 billion

Some notable stats on the Chinese auto industry:

100+ with capacity to manufacture ~40 million ICE cars/year
Gasoline-fueld car sales fell from 28.3M in 2017 to 17.7M in 2023, equivalent to the entire EU market, and to US annual car and truck production nytimes.com/2024/04/23/bus…

Renewables are currently providing 153% of load on
California ISO grid. Insane.

gridstatus.io/live/caiso?dat…

Hello world. Something I am incredibly excited to announce: Halcyon. The world is awash in unstructured information on climate, energy transition, decarbonization - structuring it is imperative. And that's what bruce falck J Lewis Alexander Huras are building to solve. Check it!

Solar manufacturing is one example of how incredibly automated some parts of the clean tech industry is. Here's the manufacturing process at Jinko, one of the largest Chinese solar firms, where parts are just passed along from one robot to the next--by other robots.

A morning scoop on Nat Bullard's AI energy re data search startup Halcyon, from my colleague Alan Neuhauser on Axios Axios Pro axios.com/pro/climate-de…

EXCLUSIVE: Nat Bullard's startup, Halcyon, has raised a $10.8m seed round.

It's not a 'Nat Bullard chatbot,' as one source described, but rather a Nat Bullard SaaS: an AI search service to sort through reams of energy regulatory data

axios.com/pro/climate-de… Axios Pro

Hello world. Something I am incredibly excited to announce: Halcyon. The world is awash in unstructured information on climate, energy transition, decarbonization - structuring it is imperative. And that's what bruce falck J Lewis Alexander Huras are building to solve. Check it!

For every degree C that Earth’s atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%.

A warmer world is a one with heavier precipitation events, even in places where average rainfall may remain unchanged. carbonbrief.org/explainer-what…

Love seeing Jigar Shah on TIME's list of 100 most influential people of 2024. Jigar has been such an important force in the growth of clean energy over the last 20 years, and he's getting due recognition. bit.ly/49ImSen

Big moment: Batteries all built in just the last 3 years were providing 3 Diablo Canyons worth of power last night, and were the main source for the CA grid.

(DC is the West coast’s last large nuke, irreplaceable in decades, with replacement cost easily in the 10s of billions)

Great deep dive here on Mike Cannon-Brookes 👨🏼‍💻🧢🇦🇺. Molecules versus electrons; industry versus technology, Willy Wonka versus Iron Man...though IMO Willy Wonka is a pretty deft technologist and Iron Man a pretty adept industrialist, so not sure who's who here bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Lots of new climate-focused funds out there, but as far as I know Nico Rosberg is the only former Formula 1 champion climate investor tech.eu/2024/04/16/nic…

This is maybe the most important thing that happened today.

California will be going into summer drought free for the second straight year!

The state's drought severity index is at its lowest level in 13 years, with only 2.6% of CA experiencing abnormally dry conditions, the lowest since 2011.

#CAwx

I've updated my charts showing the progress of electrification of India's vehicles.
Three-wheelers are doing extremely well, but they're a fairly small share of the market.
robbieandrew.github.io/india/index.ht…

China’s economy may be struggling to grow, but its electricity industry is not. Power consumption rose by 6.7% in 2023, marking the fourth straight year that electricity use grew faster than GDP. And China is well on its way to becoming the most electrified economy in the world.