From the Editor
Two years ago this digest opened with an ending: the United Kingdom switching off its last coal plant. This fall brings the sequel: a major industrial economy publishing, for the first time, a complete plan for life after fossil fuels. Between those bookends sits the sentence these pages keep returning to: endings can be legislated, but transformations have to be engineered, financed, and made fair. This issue is about who is doing that work: a government with a roadmap, a market that stopped waiting for one, and the communities now deciding what the AI boom owes them.
Chaofeng Wang, Editor
Since September 2024, this digest has recorded the UK retiring coal after 142 years; Baku pricing climate finance at $300 billion a year; 2024 becoming the first full year above 1.5°C even as renewables set a record; Belém moving money while dropping the words “fossil fuels”; the US leaving Paris as renewables reached 49% of world capacity; and fifty-seven nations meeting in a coal port to design the phase-out themselves. That is the run-up to this quarter's lead story.
Germany Writes the Playbook
On September 23, Germany published a roadmap for the gradual phase-out of fossil fuels across its economy by 2045, the first comprehensive national plan of its kind from a major industrial economy. Where the UK's coal exit retired one fuel from one sector, Germany's plan takes on all of them, everywhere, on a legislated clock. It leans on a massive renewables buildout: 80% renewable electricity, with some 215 GW of solar and 12 GW of onshore wind targeted by 2030.
The significance is in what the roadmap must solve along the way. Germany is Europe's manufacturing heartland; a 2045 phase-out is, in practice, a schedule for transforming steel, cement, and chemicals (the hard-to-decarbonize sectors these pages have tracked since the US demonstration program in Issue No. 1) and for carrying industrial regions and their workforces through the change. Every unsolved problem in the transition has a line item somewhere in this plan: industrial heat, firm capacity, hydrogen logistics, regional employment, and the politics of keeping a nineteen-year promise through five elections.
Whether the route survives contact with engineering and economics is precisely the kind of question use-inspired research exists to answer, and a published national roadmap is a rare gift to the field: a falsifiable, dated, line-by-line hypothesis about how a transformation works. Expect it to anchor comparisons for years, the way the UK's coal phase-out has anchored them here.
The Quiet American Buildout
In the United States, the transition's center of gravity has moved to markets and states, and the numbers show it moving fast. Between February 2025 and July 2026, US renewable and utility-scale battery storage capacity grew by more than 88 GW: renewables expanded by roughly 62 GW, about 14.6%, while grid battery storage doubled. All of this against the federal reversals chronicled in our last three issues: the Paris exit, the tax credit phase-out, the safe-harbor scramble. The natural experiment we proposed watching in Issue No. 2 is returning data, and so far the answer is that market momentum carries further than the policy pessimists expected.
The doubling of storage is the detail worth dwelling on. Batteries change what solar and wind are worth, when communities can rely on them, and how fast fossil peakers retire, and their economics are increasingly set by state policy, utility procurement, and data-center demand rather than federal incentive. A grid with twice the batteries is a different machine: the research questions shift from generation to orchestration (market design, dispatch, the value of flexibility), and it is being built in real time, by procurement officers rather than legislators.
The Grid Meets AI, Part II: Who Pays, Who Decides
A year after we first covered AI's new demand curve, the bill has arrived. Global data-center electricity consumption is on track to nearly double from 2025 levels to some 950 TWh by 2030, and the strain is showing where grids meet ratepayers. In the PJM region, capacity market prices have spiked nearly tenfold, pushing retail electricity bills up more than 15% in some service territories. On September 30, the US Senate rejected, 57–43, a bill that would have required state regulators to consider making data centers and other large loads bear the cost of the infrastructure built to serve them, leaving the who-pays question to be fought state by state, rate case by rate case.
Communities are not waiting for the doctrine to settle. By mid-2026, local resistance had blocked an estimated $130 billion of proposed AI data centers in the US, and the backlash is spreading to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The industry's response has been to shop for its own power: hyperscalers signed nuclear agreements approaching 10 GW this year alone. This is the equitable-transition question in its newest form: data centers are built in two to five years while transmission takes ten, and whether host communities get jobs, revenue, and stable bills, or just the load, turns on exactly the cost-allocation, siting, and engagement questions that research can inform before the precedents harden.
September 30 also marked two years since Ratcliffe-on-Soar ran its final shift and the UK became the first G7 economy to end coal-fired power, the story that opened this digest. Two full years, two winters, no coal. What began as a milestone is now simply how the grid works; the open questions have moved, as we predicted, from the control room to the community: the site, the workforce, and the town around them. Germany's 2045 roadmap is, in one sense, that experience scaled up by an order of magnitude.
Looking Ahead: COP31 in Antalya
Climate diplomacy reconvenes November 9–20 in Antalya, Türkiye, under the unprecedented shared arrangement agreed in Belém: Türkiye hosts and holds the formal presidency, while Australia presides over the negotiations, with the Pacific at the center of the agenda. The substantive docket (updated national climate plans, Article 6 carbon market rules, and capitalizing the Loss and Damage Fund) will test whether the finance commitments made in Belém begin to translate into delivery, and whether the Santa Marta coalition can carry its phase-out agenda back into the formal process. Finance is once again where ambition meets arithmetic.
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