This Week in Cleantech covers five stories: Massachusetts now requires large data centers to bring their own clean power or pay into a ratepayer fund; a new UN report finds carbon capture is falling far short of what's needed to meet climate targets; California weighs extending Diablo Canyon and lifting its nuclear moratorium; and China's cleantech exports keep widening its global energy lead. Semafor's Tim McDonnell joins to unpack his story on China's solar capacity surpassing coal, plus record global coal demand. The episode closes with Kofi Asante of Bluecore Energy as Cleantecher of the Week.

Episode 147: Featuring Tim McDonnell of Semafor

1. Massachusetts Will Require New Data Centers to Use Clean Energy — Bloomberg

2. Carbon Capture Won’t Save Us Anytime Soon — The New Republic
3. Why California Is Reconsidering Its Decision to Shun Nuclear Power — The New York Times
4. China’s cleantech exports are widening the “energy dominance” gap — Latitude Media
5. China's solar beats coal — Semafor
   

Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026. We have a returning guest in waiting. Tim McDonnell of Semafor will be joining the show shortly. If you don't know me by now, I'm Factor This content director Paul Gerke. Typically joined on the program by cleantech commentator Mike Casey of Tigercomm, but he had to go see a guy about a horse or something. Won't be joining us today, so it'll just be my dulcet tones blasting through your AirPods. We do appreciate hearing from the viewers and listeners of this program. You guys have been hitting up our inboxes en masse lately. I'm not complaining about that. It's a good thing. We like to make your opinions part of the show. If you've got a story you'd like to see covered or two cents to share, you can email us anytime. The address is twic@tigercomm.us with two Ms. That stuff gets sent right to my work inbox. I've learned that the hard way.

As always, we've got five cleantech stories on tap. Let's get into them.

Massachusetts Will Require New Data Centers to Use Clean Energy

The first story this week from Greg Ryan and Mark Chediak from Bloomberg. It's titled Massachusetts Will Require New Data Centers to Use Clean Energy. So, the story here is about Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, who signed an executive order Tuesday requiring new data center developers to procure their own clean energy generation. They also have to get local approval before they can even apply for state construction permits. If a developer cannot meet its power needs with renewables, it'll have to pay into a new fund, and that fund will benefit Massachusetts ratepayers.

The rules kick in for any data center with peak demand larger than 25 megawatts. Massachusetts hasn't seen as much data center buildout as some other states have, particularly as you work your way south, thanks to high energy and real estate costs, but Healey says she wants guardrails in place before that changes.

This puts Massachusetts alongside some other states, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, which have all paused or pushed back with new limits on data center development amid local backlash. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro ordered something pretty similar last month, requiring developers to bring their own power with an increasingly significant share of it having to be clean. Even Healey's Republican opponent in the governor's race, former medical device executive Mike Minogue, says the state should not be trying to attract data center development at all and wants existing facilities required to provide energy support and water purification for their communities. It's worth remembering Healey's own record is mixed on this. She paused a data center sales exemption she'd signed back into law in 2024. And now she's essentially converting the voluntary framework she floated in June into a mandate.

Carbon Capture Won't Save Us Anytime Soon

Story number two this week. It's by Kate Aronoff from the New Republic titled Carbon Capture Won't Save Us Anytime Soon. A new UN environment program found that the world is on track to blow way past that 1.5° C warming threshold that they'd set in the 2015 Paris Accord. And it's going to happen in the next few years without any major changes. Looks like we're headed closer to 2.6° of warming, and that's in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. To stabilize temperatures back at that 1.5° range over a 20-year rolling average after we overshoot it, the report said we're not only going to have to get off of fossil fuels, but we're going to have to figure out carbon capture in a big way, capturing between 15 and 24 gigatons of CO2 per year by the year 2100.

Right now, total carbon removal sits at 2.2 gigatons a year. So, we're not close, but there's something there. 99.95% of that comes from conventional methods, things like tree planting and forest management, not the engineered sort of carbon capture that we're going to need. In this instance, a new paper looked at all 28 permanent geological carbon storage projects that are or have been operational, and it's ugly. On average, these projects hit just 59% of their projected injection rates. The biggest one that they studied was Shell's Gorgon plant in Australia. It currently captures 4 megatons of carbon per year. That is way below the 3 1/2 megatons that Shell projected when they launched this project back in 2019. The average across all commercial scale projects was just .19 megatons per year.

A separate Princeton study on US net zero found we need to capture 2 and a half gigatons per year, mostly for industries like steel and concrete that don't have zero-carbon alternatives that are easy to get to. Hitting that at Gorgon scale would mean building 250 similar-sized facilities every single year through 2050. I don't need to be the one to tell you that that's not going to happen. For context on how far off we are, the researchers note that the US had just 581 active drilling rigs as of mid 2026. And they argue the drilling needed to hit those sequestration targets — sequestration, sequestion, it's like some weird equestrian, sorry guys, it's early in the morning for me — would be larger than the entire existing oil and gas industry. This is where Mike would make fun of me, but since he's not here, I've got to tease myself.

Why California Is Reconsidering Its Decision to Shun Nuclear Power

We go to story number three. This one by Ivan Penn, former guest on the show from New York Times. It's titled Why California Is Reconsidering Its Decision to Shun Nuclear Power. The nuclear novo very much in vogue lately. We've been seeing it all over the headlines. California in this story is weighing extending the life of Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear plant, and lifting a 50-year moratorium on new reactors. Driven less by old spent fuel storage concerns and more by a push to hit that 2045 goal, that albatross of 100% clean electricity that California has been working toward. The legislature passed a bill last month to study partly lifting that ban, and Governor Newsom has also voiced some support. This is a notable shift for a state where nuclear has long been unpopular with lawmakers and environmental groups.

Diablo's reactors generated more than 8% of California's power last year, and the federal government is stepping up to back it, too. 271 million bucks from the DOE in August. Up to $1.1 billion more available. Some groups still argue renewables and batteries are the cheapest, fastest option. California and Texas, but that's another conversation, are really proving that out. Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal accounted for 70% of instate generation in California last year, up from just 49% in 2020. Big leap there. The tension here, of course, is cost. California has the second highest electricity prices in the country. Depending on where you live, it might be the priciest. Critics say new reactors, which routinely blow past budget — look no further than Plant Vogtle — would push rates higher.

Existing plants like Diablo are the exception. They tend to produce relatively cheap power, which is why even some skeptics support running it longer without building a new one. PG&E says Diablo cuts pollution equal to removing 1.6 million gas cars from the road annually, and it became the state's only nuclear plant after the other one closed in 2013. Utilities also co-owned the Palo Verde plant in Arizona, which does feed some power back to California. I was caught in the middle of this, too. You may have seen NextEra just handed a $1.9 billion federal loan to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center. Writing about that today on factorthis.com. It's been dark for 6 years, aiming to bring it back online by early 2029.

China's Cleantech Exports Are Widening the Energy Dominance Gap

Our fourth story and the last one before we welcome our guest into the fold is by Maeve Allsup from Latitude Media. It's titled China's Cleantech Exports Are Widening the Energy Dominance Gap. This one covers a new report from energy think tank Ember which found that China's cleantech exports hit 6.6% of all of its exports in the first half of this year. It amounts for about $140 billion. It's closing in on the scale of China's traditional exports, things like garments, furniture, appliances, the stuff you might think of that's made in China. And China's power demand is growing, too. It jumped up 5% last year. All of that growth met with clean power, pushing coal generation down slightly, even as total consumption did hit a record 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours. Just last week, solar passed coal in installed capacity in China for the first time. We'll talk more about that in just a second.

Coal generation has also slowed there, flattened, or is actively declining across 17 of the 26 regions that Ember tracks. Together, that accounts for more than half the country's total coal power capacity. US tariffs don't seem to be slowing China down, just redirecting where those exports are headed. Solar shipments to sub-Saharan Africa are up 37% year-over-year. Brazil's EV registrations about tripled on a wave of Chinese imports. Pakistan alone imported more than 50 gigawatts of Chinese solar to protect itself from swings in fossil fuel import costs. Meanwhile, back here in the US, 2025 was the first year of net negative clean energy investment since at least 2012, a $22 billion drop from 2024. The back and forth federal policy stuff, one of the main reasons long-term manufacturing investment continues to stall out. China's approach has been to add clean generation before they retire fossil fuel plants. The US is doing the opposite. You hear about it all the time on this show. Blocking wind and solar projects, tariffing imports, and leaning harder into oil and LNG exports.

China's Solar Beats Coal

Our last story this week, courtesy Tim McDonnell. He wrote a piece called China's Solar Beats Coal. Tim, welcome back to the program. Always great to have you here, and even better considering I can bring in a second voice. Finally, for those of you listening or watching who haven't read China's Solar Beats Coal, and we do want you to read the piece, please, Tim, give us a preview — what's in it?

Tim McDonnell: Well, so thank you, Paul. I'm always happy to join you here. And, you know, sort of just building on the last piece that you were speaking about with China's kind of amazing global dominance in clean tech exports. And then, you know, you kind of look inside the country and see what's happening there under the hood. And you know, it's important to note that this milestone with solar in China is about installed capacity. So it's not the same thing as generation. So it's a great milestone for them to hit that they now have more gigawatts of solar installed than they do of coal in China, which is kind of huge and surprising. I don't — they're not quite to the point of consistently outperforming on generation yet. So that'll be sort of the next thing to watch.

And you know, there's an interesting new development in this story just this morning. The International Energy Agency had its latest kind of outlook on global coal demand. And what we see is that this year, 2026, we're going to hit another all-time record high for global coal demand — close to 9 billion metric tons this year — of which China's increasing consumption is a part of that. Also see consumption growing in India, Southeast Asia, and you know, this is really again sort of tying into the Iran war and everything happening in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.

I think we've probably talked on this program before about the advantage that China has had during this crisis, in being able to, you know, increase these clean tech exports just like you were just speaking about — it's been kind of a geopolitical win for them. But when it comes to the parts of their economy that are still relying on coal to some degree, or on gas — they're importing gas, LNG, from the Middle East, that price has gone up — and so you see this kind of return to coal in China and across Southeast Asia. So it's a sort of a balance story where the Strait of Hormuz on the one hand is driving clean energy adoption in some corners, but then at the same time also pushing up coal to a new record high. And I'll just close by saying, you know, the IEA pointed out in this report that on this question of have we reached peak coal finally — I mean, we keep waiting for peak global coal demand to come around, and you know, I thought it was going to be here or sooner, but it's not yet. Each year, I mean, it should have gone down this year prior to the war, that was the expectation, but yeah, it's gone back up again. So the real criteria for whether we've actually hit peak coal or not, next year again, is going to come back to what's the situation with Qatar and the Strait of Hormuz and LNG exports from that region, and if that is still very constrained, I think it's likely that we'll see coal continue to rise.

Paul Gerke: Tim, you were thinking exactly what I was thinking here, and that's that we've written the obituary on peak coal a few times now, and it seems like we've turned that corner, and yet, not just in China, and not just because of the Strait of Hormuz, here in the United States, we're talking about extending the life of coal plants. Even the ones that had bipartisan support to shut down. I don't want to lead you anywhere, but what does that tell us about the predicament that we're in globally right now and the demand for electricity?

Tim McDonnell: Well, one thing with China to just remember is that, of course, the power sector where coal is competing with renewables or gas — I mean that's the predominant source of demand for coal, right? But actually the IEA report very interestingly points out that China's power sector alone consumes 1/3 of total global coal consumption. So that just gives you a sense of how important that sector is. But in China there are other sectors that also consume coal that are harder to decarbonize. Coal to chemicals, the petrochemical sector is still relying on coal. We still have coal use and coking coal use in steelmaking and other sectors. So, you know, if we're thinking about the energy transition, it's great to see renewables start to edge out coal in the power sector. But there's other areas that are also very emissions intensive where the cleaner solutions are not always so evident.

And in the US, you know, it's a different story because, as you just mentioned, we're kind of in this situation right now where there's a lot of political support from the Trump administration to keep these coal plants operational that probably should be reaching the end of their life. And so it kind of distorts the market signal a little bit, because in the US, unlike China or unlike Southeast Asian countries, for example, that have to turn to coal because gas is becoming more expensive for their power plants, in the US we still have extremely cheap natural gas. So you don't have the same kind of competition between gas and coal. I mean, if you know, on a purely economic basis, gas should be winning in most cases. But we're sort of seeing instead this sort of artificial extension of the life of these coal plants, and that's obviously going to make it harder for renewables to compete there as well.

So, you know, I think Javier Blas at Bloomberg, who we all know and love and follow, is one of the people who's — every time somebody has an obituary for coal, he's always the first one to say, "Not yet. I promise it's not done yet." And there's a lot of corners of the economy that it's going to be harder to dig coal out of in the future. So, are we at the peak or not? Who knows? But I think we're definitely not anywhere near a sort of sudden drop-off in coal as much as some of us may wish to see that.

Paul Gerke: Tim, we talk about China and their clean energy economy an awful lot on this program, often comparing their gains to how meager they are here stateside. But I've been hearing some things lately about a bit of a slowdown in China as a result of losing out on some credits for building generation in particular. What's your takeaway on what's happening over there in general, and is there something to be learned about the way they've sort of set up their grid, different to ours, in that there's just a surplus of generation everywhere and waiting for opportunities to satisfy that, other than the way that we've done things classically?

Tim McDonnell: Well, I mean, you know, China has this huge problem of overproduction, right? And so I think what they've had to do — in order to reach the point where you get to this world-leading export market, as we were talking about earlier on the program — they've had to pour a lot of state resources into standing up a very extensive manufacturing sector that by now has gone way beyond what domestic power generation demand is actually asking for, or is capable of supporting in the existing grid that they have. So, I think that's why you've seen some of these credits pull back — because the solar industry, for example, was just totally cannibalizing itself, and you had companies going bankrupt left and right because they were in these brutal price wars, and it just became a totally unviable corner of the market.

And this one analyst that I was speaking to was telling me, in China they have this great expression about cabbage — when you have a commodity that's just totally undifferentiated and there's way too much of it and it's super cheap, they call that like being like cabbage, and solar has basically become cabbage. So they have to have some way of keeping this industry profitable so that they get more kind of innovation and investment in new manufacturing to stay competitive against other manufacturers in Europe and the US, and not somehow lose this advantage that they have.

But to your point, I think now the challenge — it's almost like a kind of California situation where you have, you know, certain times of day you have way more solar power than the grid can handle. And so you need to have some better combination of transmission and storage and these other things to kind of start to bend the curve on power generation, because we don't really care that much about solar capacity installation — the main thing is generation. How do you kind of bend that curve? And this is where again, you know, there's another structural advantage that China has, which is that when you have a centrally planned state economy, they don't have to worry about the same kind of issues with permitting reform that we have in the US, and they can make decisions in a more centralized way, move quickly on things like long-distance transmission than maybe we are able to do in the US. So there's a policy dynamic to this, and that'll be all the stuff to watch going forward. But I think there's no question that, especially on some of these other clean technologies — offshore wind and batteries and EVs and all this stuff — I mean, China's, and stationary batteries, China is pushing ahead very rapidly. So there's still more growth to go there.

Paul Gerke: You don't want to let your solar get like cabbage though. Not cabbage-type growth. Tim, thank you so much. I think it is — it is cabbage.

Tim McDonnell: So now we have to turn it into like reverse cabbage.

Paul Gerke: Yeah, bring the reel back.

Tim McDonnell: You have to un-cabbage.

Paul Gerke: Yeah, making it good. All right, Tim, I could chat with you all day, but we do have to roll to our Cleantecher of the Week.

Cleantecher of the Week

This week's Cleantecher of the Week is Kofi Asante, founder and CEO of Bluecore Energy. Just two months after that company launched out of stealth, Asante's startup closed an oversubscribed $50 million seed round this week. I actually saw that press release come down. They're building small nuclear reactors, mounted on floating barges, generating clean power for ports and nearby infrastructure without needing a fixed ground site. Pretty cool stuff — we talk about the nuclear comeback. Shout out to Kofi Asante, our Cleantecher of the Week.

One last shout out to everyone involved with the show. Our terrific producer Brian Mendez, who joined me here this morning, Alex Petersen, Clare Quirin for helping identify the stories and put an outline together each week. And a shout out to Casey, even though he's not around to give me grief this week for always being a stalwart on this show.

Yeah, right. And thank you Tim for joining us for another episode of This Week in Cleantech. Always great to have you here. If you haven't read his latest piece in Semafor, go check it out. Please subscribe, give a little feedback, share a story suggestion if you enjoyed the program. Remember, you can check out every article we talk about each week. There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where this thing lives on factorthis.com. Until next time, be good people.