Your Weekly Dose of Climate Hope: June 29, 2025
Our Sunday feature shares good news on climate action & resilience!
Clean Energy
China installed 93 GW (93,000 MW) of new solar power in May 2025, four times more than in May 2024 and a new all-time monthly record. That’s more solar installed in one month than any one other country installed in all of 2024. This brought China’s total cumulative installed solar capacity to over 1 terawatt (1 TW equals 1,000 GW or 1,000,000 MW), out of a total 3.61 TW of electricity-generating capacity from all sources. (The U.S. total is just over 1.3 TW). China has installed more than 1 GW (1,000 MW) of solar every day for the first five months of 2025. Absolutely astounding!
China is rapidly converting disused coal mines to solar farms, with a new report identifying 90 solar farms on former coal mines generating 14 GW (14,000 MW!) of power, as well as 46 more solar farms totaling 9 GW in planning stages. Great news!
UGT Renewables, a U.S. developer, has signed a deal with the government of Iraq to build 3 GW (3,000 MW) of solar power, 500 GWh of energy storage, and 1,000 kilometers of high-voltage power lines! This would be a transformative mass clean electrification upgrade - Iraq had 42 MW of solar power in 2024. Excellent work!
As South Africa weathers dangerous floods and droughts, it’s also seeing an epic electrification boom! The country built a record-high 1.1 GW of solar in 2024, and lots more is on the way as the once-stagnant grid is dynamized by new contenders.
Indonesia has signed a deal with Singapore to create a new integrated green industrial zone in its Riau Islands province, between Singapore, Sumatra and Borneo. It will focus on building out a solar manufacturing supply chain and methods of decarbonizing heavy industry. Great work!
On June 20, 2025, Ireland closed its last coal plant, becoming the 15th coal-free country in Europe! Wind power now generates 37% of Irish electricity, and though fossil gas is still a majority, solar growth is just beginning. Spain is also planning to close its last coal plants later in 2025! Great news.
California just approved a gigantic new solar and battery storage project, set to be built on no-longer-productive former agricultural land in Fresno County. The Darden Clean Energy Project will be built in 1.5 to 3 years, and when complete will include 1.1 GW (1,100 MW) of solar power plus an immense 4.6 GW (4,600 MW) grid-scale battery storage complex, enough to power 850,000 homes for 4 hours. As of 2025, that would make Darden the largest grid-scale battery project on Earth, though bigger ones may be built soon! Furthermore, Darden is the first-ever project approved under California’s brand-new and much-needed fast-track permitting process. Superb work!
Wildlife
For the first time in over 500 years, a wild beaver is living in Portugal! The last Portuguese beavers were likely hunted out in the late 1400s, but a camera trap now confirms that a young adult has dispersed from Spain’s growing beaver population into Portugal in 2025. Another milestone in the epic rewilding of Europe! Great news.
Years of dedicated conservation work have brought about a renaissance for the Florida grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus), America’s most endangered songbird. A captive breeding and reintroduction program is underway, and the wild population has increased to around 200 today (up from a nadir of 50-60 in 2017) thanks in part to proactive interventions to protect nests from flooding and fire ants. The broader Florida dry prairie ecosystem also benefits from this great work!
It’s a record-high breeding season for endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys kempii) on the beaches of Texas, with 383 nests found on the state’s coast as of June 13, 2025 — breaking the previous record of 353 nests in 2017. Awesome!
Community conservationists in Indonesia are planting forest corridors in central Java to reconnect the fragmented habitat of the endangered Javan gibbon (Hylobates moloch), which has only an estimated 4,000 individuals left in the wild. Great work!
A new study in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesian-ruled New Guinea used camera traps and indigenous knowledge to confirm the 2023 rediscovery of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi, aka “payangko”), one of only five monotreme egg-laying mammal species known to humanity. Spectacular work!
Innovations
At the recent UN Ocean Conference in Nice, the governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, two island polities in Melanesia announced their commitment to create the Melanesian Ocean Reserve, which would protect all of their territorial waters plus - if they agree - those of Papua New Guinea and the French territory New Caledonia. If successful, this would supercharge indigenous-led efforts to protect an area of life-rich ocean more than three times the size of Alaska from illegal fishing. Amazing!
A private preserve in South Africa is testing a brand-new AI-powered animal-identifying “smart gate” to increase habitat connectivity for elephants, with the hope of someday creating human-manageable extended elephant migration routes. Wow!
Massachusetts startup Factorial has unveiled Gammatron, a historic new AI digital twin simulation platform built to accelerate battery cell technology progress. It’s already being used in EV development, and the potential is incredible! Superb work.
Fast-advancing startup Windfall Bio has successfully concluded a trial in which its commercial methane-eating microbes (“mems”) removed 85% of methane emissions from the manure lagoon of a dairy farm in California and transformed it into organic fertilizer. An epic new scalable intervention to reduce harmful methane emissions!
Electric Transport
JFK Airport, serving New York City, recently saw its first-ever landing of an electric aircraft! The Alia CX300 aircraft, made by Vermont startup Beta Technologies, carried 4 passengers for 45 minutes from Long Island to Queens with an energy cost of just $7, compared to $160 in fuel costs for a helicopter making the same trip. Beta is also developing an eVTOL model, Alia 250, which won’t need a runway to take off or land. Quiet, clean, and efficient all-electric “air taxis” are on the way! Great work.
BYD’s new ultra-fast EV chargers that provide hundreds of kilometers of range in just five (5) minutes (that’s more than one kilometer per second plugged in!) were recently demoed at an auto show in Beijing. It will likely roll out very fast.
Volkswagen has partnered with Uber on plans to roll out all-electric autonomous taxis in Los Angeles with a full fleet available by 2026, forming a new rival to Waymo, Tesla, and Amazon’s Zoox. Volkswagen’s new fully autonomous ID.Buzz EV comes with 13 cameras, 9 lidars, and 5 radars, carries four passengers, and unlike its rivals it includes “Mobility as a Service” software that empowers anyone who buys it to immediately operate their own turnkey driverless-car business. Fascinating potential!