Technology & Innovation Active Updated Aug 1, 2026
Solar power and storage are crossing milestones that reorder the grid, even against policy headwinds.
Aug 1, 2026 Latest
Good News Network reported that 46 percent of new US homes built last year came with a heat pump already installed, with heat pump sales now outpacing older gas furnace systems by 32 percent.
Jul 27, 2026
Highview Power is building a liquid-air storage facility on a former coal plant site in Trafford, near Manchester, that will deliver 300 megawatt-hours and power roughly half a million homes for six hours, while a separate Nevada project stores heat by raising industrial salt to 1,040 degrees Fahrenheit; neither needs cobalt, nickel or lithium.
Jul 17, 2026
US heat pump sales outpaced natural-gas furnace sales by 32 percent in the first quarter of 2026, even after the federal tax credit of up to 2,000 dollars for installing one expired at the start of the year. Energy economist Lucas Davis at UC Berkeley said shipments stayed flat through winter and have climbed gradually since.
Jul 11, 2026
Chinese researchers built a quasi-solid gel electrolyte, nicknamed Sn-FB QSE, that physically blocks the dendrite growth that has long made fast-charging sodium batteries unsafe, letting a cell charge from empty to full in four minutes while holding 80.1 milliampere-hours per gram, and retain 90 percent of its capacity over 2,000 cycles at a gentler 20-minute charge, matching the ceiling of today's lithium-ion cells.
Jul 9, 2026
Four nuclear microreactor companies, three of them founded in 2023, achieved criticality under the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program on or before July 4, a striking pace for an industry known for decade-long delays [190]. California's SB 1350 qualified green hydrogen as a renewable source under the state's Renewables Portfolio Standard, clearing the commercial path for the Lancaster Clean Energy Center, the largest planned green hydrogen facility in the country, set to open in 2028 [243]. And Saskatchewan geologists drilled 1.2 miles into Precambrian bedrock targeting geological hydrogen and struck a 28 percent concentration on the first well ever drilled for it in Canada [223].
Jul 6, 2026
Solar panels built over California irrigation canals were shown to generate power while also cutting water loss to evaporation.
Jun 28, 2026
California brought online its first grid battery able to discharge for a full eight hours.
Jun 20, 2026
Solar generated more US electricity than coal for the first time in the country's history, in May 2026.
The checkable promises in this story, tracked until they are kept or broken.
California's largest planned green hydrogen facility, the Lancaster Clean Energy Center, is set to open in 2028 after SB 1350 made green hydrogen power commercially viable in the state.
Reporting in the Today Got Better brief
The Lancaster Clean Energy Center in Southern California, the country's largest planned green hydrogen facility, is set to open in 2028.
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