Tag: clean energy

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Turkey’s EV Boom: 1 in 5 New Cars Now Electric

How it happened

Three drivers did the heavy lifting. First, a 2023 tax relief cut the registration tax on electric vehicles, shrinking the price gap between EVs and combustion cars at exactly the moment buyers were ready to consider the switch. Policy matters, and this was policy done right: a targeted, well-timed incentive that changed real purchasing decisions.

Second came the launch of Togg, Turkey's first domestic EV maker. The company didn't just enter the market — it leads it. Togg sold 13,240 vehicles in the first four months of 2026, taking 24.3 percent of the country's EV sales. And in August 2026, the Togg T10X did something historic: with 2,939 sales, it topped Turkey's entire car market — not just the EV segment, but everything. A homegrown electric car outselling every imported model on the lot. That had never happened before.

Third, cheaper Chinese EV imports arrived and intensified competition, which pushed prices down and gave buyers more choices. More options, lower prices, stronger incentives — the flywheel spun up fast.

The numbers back it up. BEV sales in Turkey nearly doubled in 2025 to 191,960 units, good for a 17.7 percent market share, according to ODMD data. That pace has carried into 2026, with Togg holding the lead.

Why this is a bigger deal than it looks

Turkey's story is a template, and the rest of the world should be paying attention. The recipe is not mysterious: cut the taxes that penalize EVs, support a domestic champion without closing the market to competition, and let falling battery prices do the rest. Other mid-size economies are watching this experiment with great interest.

There's an industrial dimension too. Togg is not just selling cars; it is building an ecosystem — factories, suppliers, charging networks, engineering jobs. When a country builds its own EV industry rather than importing one, the benefits stay local: manufacturing employment, technical expertise, export potential. The T10X topping the August market wasn't just a sales milestone. It was proof that the strategy worked.

And the environmental math follows automatically. Every percentage point of EV share displaces gasoline burned in Istanbul traffic — and anyone who has sat in Istanbul traffic knows what a difference that makes. Cleaner air in a megacity of 16 million people is not a small prize.

The global backdrop is electric

Turkey is riding a wave, not swimming alone. Clean energy keeps racking up wins: Ford and DTE just brought a 100 MW solar park online in Michigan, feeding clean power into the grid. Aviation is electrifying too — Heart Aerospace flew the world's largest electric plane this week. Even buildings are getting in on it, with wallpaper that generates power from room humidity making its debut.

Put together, the pattern is unmistakable. The electrification of everything — cars, planes, buildings, grids — is no longer a forecast. It is the news.

What this means for the industry

For automakers, Turkey is a case study in how quickly a market can flip. Legacy brands that assumed they had years to plan their EV transitions are discovering that consumer adoption, once it starts, can move faster than corporate strategy. The companies winning in Turkey are the ones that showed up with compelling electric products at fair prices. That lesson applies everywhere.

For policymakers elsewhere, the message is simpler: incentives work, and they work fastest when paired with domestic industry. Turkey didn't just subsidize imports. It built a national car company, opened the market, and let competition sharpen everybody.

For drivers, the takeaway is the most practical of all. When one in five new cars is electric, the charging network stops being speculative and becomes a business. Range anxiety fades when the cars — and the chargers — are everywhere. Turkey's buyers aren't early adopters anymore. They're just buyers.

The road ahead

A 20-fold jump in three years doesn't guarantee a straight line to 100 percent. The early majority is always harder to win than the early adopters, and Turkey will need to keep expanding charging infrastructure, especially beyond the big cities. But momentum this strong has a way of solving its own problems — investment follows demand, and demand is now undeniable.

Good news in economics is rare enough to celebrate. A country that quadrupled its EV share in three years, built a domestic champion that outsells imports, and did it all while the market was shrinking 20 percent? That's not just good news. It's a blueprint.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Ford-DTE 100-MW Solar Park Goes Live in Michigan

On September 30, a patch of Michigan farmland started doing something new: powering the grid. DTE Energy’s 100-megawatt Cold Creek Solar Park began generating electricity, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 1 attended by DTE’s Ryan Thomas and Ford’s Amir Mirshahi. It’s the first project to go live under Ford and DTE’s agreement to add up to 650 megawatts of new solar capacity in Michigan — and it’s only the beginning.

One hundred megawatts is real power. Enough for tens of thousands of homes. And this is project one of many.

How it got built

Ground broke in April 2025, and the build was a genuine community effort: three townships coordinated the project across leased farmland — 50 megawatts on 347.6 acres in Quincy Township, 43 megawatts on 252.6 acres in Coldwater Township. That’s the unglamorous reality of the energy transition: it happens one township meeting, one land lease, one interconnection agreement at a time. Cold Creek is proof the process works.

A 75-megawatt battery storage system at the site comes online next year, which will let the park store midday sunshine for the evening peak — the moment solar earns its keep. Generation plus storage, on the same site, is the template utilities are converging on everywhere.

Ford’s end of the bargain

For Ford, this is about the factory as much as the grid. The automaker aims to assemble every Michigan-made vehicle with 100% carbon-free electricity by the end of 2027, on the way to carbon neutrality across vehicles, operations, and supply chain by 2050. When your product is increasingly electric, the carbon math of how you build it matters as much as how it drives. A Michigan-built EV charged on Michigan solar is the whole thesis in one sentence.

The project runs through DTE’s MIGreenPower program, one of the largest voluntary renewable energy programs in the country — and the pitch to participants goes beyond electrons. Clean energy, local tax revenue, construction and operations jobs: the ribbon-cutting talking points, but also the actual economics of rural solar.

The 650-megawatt horizon

Cold Creek is the first of up to 650 megawatts under the Ford-DTE agreement. That’s more than six Cold Creeks still to come. From Utah’s geothermal breakthrough this week to Michigan’s solar fields, the clean-energy buildout keeps hitting milestones that would have sounded optimistic five years ago. The panels are up, the meter is spinning, and the next 550 megawatts are already on the drawing board.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Wallpaper That Generates Power From Room Humidity Debuts

Your walls could soon charge your keyboard. Researchers at Binghamton University have built wallpaper that generates electricity from the humidity in ordinary room air — and in a demonstration announced October 1, a panel of it successfully powered a wireless keyboard. The work is published in Advanced Energy Materials, and it’s one of those ideas that sounds like science fiction until you see the numbers.

The numbers: an array of 1,596 miniature moisture electric generators — MEGs — assembled into a single panel. At 80% relative humidity, each unit produced about 0.34 volts, with a power density of 2.2 microwatts per square centimeter. Wired in series and parallel, that’s enough to run ultra-low-power electronics. A keyboard today; wireless sensors, climate monitors, and smart-home components tomorrow.

How wallpaper becomes a power plant

The mechanism is elegant. Led by Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, the team built paper sections that absorb water in some zones and evaporate it in others, driving a one-way flow of ions — and moving ions are electricity. The edges are treated with glycerin, a polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) layer sits midway, and a wax core regulates how the moisture releases. It’s chemistry doing the work that a solar panel’s silicon does, except the fuel is the air in your living room.

And here’s the delightful bonus: the wallpaper doubles as a passive dehumidifier. In lab tests it pulled room humidity from 38% down to 32%. Anyone who’s run a dehumidifier through a muggy August knows what that means — less load on the AC, drier air, and now a trickle of electricity as a side effect. It’s doing two jobs while hanging on the wall looking decorative.

Why this matters more than a keyboard

Be realistic about the scale: this won’t power your house. The target is the exploding universe of tiny devices — the wireless sensors, thermostats, and monitors that make up the smart home and the industrial Internet of Things. Those devices currently run on batteries that need replacing, or wires that need running. A wall that powers them passively, forever, from air moisture, removes one of the great annoyances of connected living.

And unlike solar, it needs no light. Indoor humidity is continuous — every breath, every shower, every pot of pasta adds moisture to the air. The fuel never runs out and never needs refueling. The team envisions future production printing the paper with wiring hidden on the backside, so the whole thing installs like ordinary wallpaper.

The bigger picture

Energy harvesting has been a field of clever demos for years. What makes this one stick is the form factor: nobody has to buy a gadget, charge a device, or change a habit. You hang wallpaper. The physics does the rest. Clean energy keeps finding new surfaces to live on — from Utah’s geothermal fields to, now, your living room wall. The future of power isn’t just bigger plants. It’s every surface quietly pulling its weight.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Geothermal Breakthrough: Fervo’s Cape Station Goes Live

Geothermal energy has always been the quiet kid in the clean-energy classroom: reliable, carbon-free, and almost entirely ignored next to solar and wind. This week it got a lot louder. Fervo Energy announced that its Cape Station plant in Beaver County, Utah, has reached commercial operation, the first greenfield enhanced geothermal development anywhere in the world to do so. The plant’s first block is producing 33 megawatts of net power and is already selling electricity under a power purchase agreement.

What “enhanced” actually means

Classic geothermal only works where nature did the plumbing: volcanic hotspots like Iceland or California’s Geysers, where heat, water, and permeable rock all happen to coincide. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, refuse to wait for luck. Engineers drill deep wells, fracture hot dry rock, and circulate water through the cracks to harvest heat that exists almost everywhere, miles beneath our feet.

Fervo’s twist is borrowed from the shale revolution: horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing, refined over decades in oil and gas, aimed at heat instead of hydrocarbons. The result is a power source with solar’s cleanliness and none of its intermittency. Geothermal runs 24 hours a day, in any weather, which makes grid operators very happy indeed.

The numbers behind Cape Station are striking. The first block synchronized to the grid on September 24 and declared commercial operation just six days later, a day ahead of its contractual date. Fervo built and commissioned the facility in 23 months, remarkable for a first-of-its-kind project, and the company says it is targeting an 18-month build for future blocks as lessons compound.

Why this milestone matters

Energy nerds have talked about EGS potential for decades, usually with a wistful “someday.” The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that enhanced geothermal could eventually supply a double-digit share of American electricity. But potential doesn’t keep the lights on; operating plants do. Cape Station is the proof that the drilling economics, the reservoir engineering, and the financing can all line up at once.

“No team has ever built a project like this anywhere in the world, and we did it ahead of schedule,” said CEO and co-founder Tim Latimer. In an industry where big infrastructure projects routinely slip by years, finishing early is its own kind of headline.

The always-on problem it solves

To appreciate what 33 megawatts of geothermal means, consider the grid’s hardest problem. Solar floods the system at noon and vanishes at dusk; wind blows when it wants to. Grid planners call the missing piece “firm” power, electricity that shows up on demand, and until now the clean options were basically limited to hydro dams and very large batteries. Geothermal is firm power that can be built in far more places than a dam.

That matters more every year because demand is climbing again after two decades of flat U.S. electricity use. Data centers, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are all pulling load upward at once. A resource that runs at 90-plus percent capacity factor, rain or shine, is exactly the kind of backbone a renewables-heavy grid needs. Fervo’s pipeline, if it scales the way the company plans, could put gigawatts of that backbone on the map within a few years.

The heat beneath our feet

There is a pleasing symmetry in geothermal’s rise. Humanity spent a century and a half drilling the planet for things to burn. Now the same rigs, the same crews, and much of the same know-how are being pointed at the heat that has been sitting there all along, untouched. It is the rare energy transition story that doesn’t require abandoning old skills, just redirecting them. Geologists who once mapped oil reservoirs are now mapping heat; roughnecks who ran casing for gas wells are running it for steam.

What should the rest of us take from this? Mostly, that the clean-energy menu is getting longer. Solar and wind have carried the transition so far, and batteries are filling the gaps, but a grid that runs on sunshine alone still needs a backbone for cloudy weeks. Geothermal can be that backbone in far more places than anyone used to think.

And if the idea of harnessing the Earth’s inner furnace makes you crave heat of a more immediate kind, the city has you covered. New York’s spicy tofu spots and hot chicken joints deliver their own controlled burns, no drilling required. Some heat you generate. Some heat you just enjoy.