The Wordsmith's Forge

Fossil fuels made up less than half of the U.S. electricity mix in March for the first month on record

In March 2025, fossil fuels accounted for 49.2% of electricity generated in the U.S. — beating the previous monthly record low of 51% set last year in April.

This also means that renewable sources reached all-time highs — accounting for 50.8% of U.S. electricity for the first month on record. Nearly half of that came from wind and solar alone, which have been seeing (and will continue to see) exponential growth.

Well, it's progress.

Old Coal-Fired Power Plant Found the Key to Solving America’s Biggest Clean Energy Challenge

Researchers at the Berkeley National Labs have determined that oil, coal, and gas power plants still have a major role to play in America’s energy economy—as electrical sockets.

There are years of red tape needed for renewable energy projects to connect fully with the grid, but because coal and gas plants already negotiated that process long ago, one of their best uses for Americans in the future will be to act like a home electrical socket that the renewables could “plug” into.


This is a good idea. However, if we want to avoid dying out, we should look at all that red tape and figure out how much of it can be discarded in the interests of scaling up green energy for survival needs.

For the first time, fusion has produced more energy than expended to make it.  \o/  It's a really huge jump, too.  Far as I know, previous experiments didn't even approach the break-even point.  This one returned about half again as much as went into it.  That's impressive.  Still tiny in scale, but sailing past the break-even point is epic.

This article raises an interesting vulnerability of electric vehicles, then goes on to talk about something else. Mostly it focuses on whether the grid could handle a huge increase in demand. But what really interests me is the first bit: what happens when the power goes out. Sometimes blackout conditions can last for days, or much longer in a large-scale disaster. Right now, it's pretty straightforward for people to leave if that happens. With electric vehicles, though, a simple blackout would quickly paralyze travel. That seems like a very bad idea. It's an even worse idea if the ban is total and even emergency vehicles are trapped in electric power.

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Amazingly, an oil company realized that creating a new oil sand mine would be a bad investment and cancelled the project.  

Remember: they may not care about the planet or people, but they definitely do care about money.  If you want to make people stop doing something bad, make it unprofitable.  That means every fossil-fuel thing you don't buy or buy less of is picking their pocket, which they don't like, which drives them to look for other options.

"We are the thorn in the foot."

The Blue Lake Rancheria has developed a microgrid of solar power that can operate with or without the wider commercial grid. If the main grid goes down, the microgrid automaticallly switches to "island mode" and runs independently. During a recent outage, it enabled tribal services to continue uninterrupted and provided a refuge for nearby people with special needs. This has already saved at least 4 lives.

I am so excited!  I've been saying for years that tribal nations should build their own systems of green energy.  This shows how that can work -- and it's a rancheria, not even a full-size reservation.  Bigger will be better, more powerful.  \o/  Lots of reservations are in places ideal  for green energy: solar again in Nevada, wind in Nebraska, etc.  Aho!

Passive solar is not new, it's very old.

A new discovery regarding paramagnons paves the way for harvesting energy from previously wasted sources.  \o/ 

Not mentioned in the article is that this deeper understanding of electromagnetism is also a step toward understanding the unity of energy.  Right now people tend to sort it into different types, but the whole universe is really just one thing -- little whizzing bits of energy with really good imaginations.  The closer you get to the core of that concept, the more power you can obtain.

 A massive wind and solar installation across the Sahara Desert and neighboring Sahel could increase heat, precipitation, and plants.  Fascinating.

 If you've been following the solar-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2 just completed its flight around the world.  \o/