Sunlight is now the cheapest power on Earth. Everything downstream of it, the hardware, the factories, the tariffs and the rulebooks, is still scarce.
nexusEVnews · Aug 8, 2026
There is one sentence in Bill McKibben's TED talk worth reading twice. We live on a planet, he says, where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. He backs it with numbers that are hard to argue with: roughly 90% of the world's new electricity generation last year came from sun and wind, and Australians are about to be handed three hours of free electricity every afternoon. If the defining economic question of the last century was what fuel costs, that question is quietly closing.
Which is why the other four stories are so interesting. Not one is about the price of energy. The Silent 62 pulls 50 to 60 kilowatt hours a day out of the sky at sea and pays nothing for it. The vessel wrapped around those panels is a 62 foot catamaran with a 340 kW motor and a proprietary control stack on its eighth revision in 18 months. The sun is the free part. Everything else on that boat is the expensive part.
The DAF XF Electric makes the same point from the opposite direction, and its regulatory subplot is the sharpest thing on this page. An electric truck reaches its overnight stop with a nearly empty pack. The driver can sleep at the charger and block a high power stall for seven to nine hours, or move afterward and register a rest period violation, because the tachograph rules were written for vehicles that refuel in ten minutes. According to the video, the German transport ministry took that to the European Commission in 2025 and was told no action was needed. Nothing there is a technology problem. The truck works. The rulebook does not know it exists.
Then the supply stories. BMW has more than 100,000 pre-orders for the new i3, the most it has ever taken for any car, and pulled the launch forward because it cannot meet demand. Waymo is paying tariffs that, on Forbes' arithmetic, turn a $39,000 Chinese-built van into a nearly $89,000 one, and importing them by the thousand anyway. Neither is constrained by the cost of electrons. One is constrained by factory throughput, the other by a customs schedule.
What to watch. McKibben names this problem himself without framing it as the thread. Americans, he says, pay about three times what Europeans and Australians pay for solar, and he puts most of that gap down to state and local bureaucracy rather than the cost of panels. That is the truck driver's tachograph in a different domain. The panel got cheap in about a decade. The permission has not moved nearly as fast, and over the next six months the numbers worth tracking are not cents per kilowatt hour but permitting queues, factory ramp rates, and tariff schedules.
Bottom line: The energy transition has stopped being an argument about whether clean power is affordable and become an argument about logistics and paperwork. That is a less inspiring fight and a much more winnable one. If you want to be useful over the next few years, the leverage is not in convincing anyone that solar is cheap. It is in the planning office, the customs schedule, and the EU regulation that still assumes every truck refuels in ten minutes.
Solar & Renewables
Bill McKibben: The Cheapest Way to Make Power Is Now a Sheet of Glass
TED
McKibben's case is that solar crossed an economic line earlier this decade and most people missed it. He tells TED that Australians will soon get three hours of free electricity every afternoon, and that California now runs past 100% renewable on most days. His sharpest example is not from a rich country: he says Pakistani farmers are using 30% less diesel for irrigation than two years ago, largely by importing cheap Chinese panels, watching YouTube to wire them up, and laying them flat on the ground because they cannot afford mounting frames.
The framing is more arguable than the figures, and he closes on beauty rather than economics. For American readers the actionable detail sits mid-talk: he says Americans pay around three times what Europeans and Australians pay for solar, mostly down to state and local bureaucracy, and notes Utah legalizing small-scale plug-in solar with Maine and Virginia following last week. If you priced balcony solar and found it was not permitted where you live, that may have changed recently.
Review
The Solar Catamaran That Publishes Its Own Numbers
itBoat
Nikita Gorchakov and Rocco Siliotto keep returning to one claim: the Silent 62 is natively solar rather than converted. Not a diesel hull with panels bolted on, not a repurposed sailing design, and built in series rather than as a one-off. The reported specification is 42 rigid glass high voltage panels, up to 100 kilowatt hours a day in ideal sun and 50 to 60 on a realistic day at sea, a liquid cooled battery rated for 5,000 cycles, a 340 kW direct drive motor, and a generator kept only as backup.
What separates this from the usual solar boat pitch is disclosure. Vice chairman Steve Bell reads live energy in and out off the dashboard on camera, and Silent streamed full data across an Atlantic crossing from Gibraltar to Antigua, roughly 3,800 miles. For a category long on renderings and short on measured passages, that is the argument. Price is never mentioned, which is the obvious gap. For scale: 50 to 60 kilowatt hours is an excellent free day for a yacht, and roughly an eighth of the usable pack in the truck below.
Charging
A Truck Battery That Ran a Rally Paddock, and the Rulebook That Cannot Cope
Electric Trucker
The truck is a DAF XF Electric with a 525 kWh LFP pack, 462 usable, fitted with a custom electric power takeoff the dealer had reportedly never installed before. The chain runs 800 volt DC into an inverter, out through a circuit breaker to a 63 amp three-phase socket. At an Opel Mokka GSE rally paddock that socket feeds a mobile storage unit, which feeds eight rally car chargers. He reads roughly 43 kW leaving the truck and 37 kW arriving in the buffer, standard efficiency across two conversion steps.
Before that, the mountain. With a 350 kW motor, at the lower end of what is available, the climb takes him to 1% with 650 metres left. He clears the summit and recovers around 50 kilowatt hours on the descent. Then the part that has nothing to do with engineering. He moved off seconds too early after a stop and interrupted his mandatory rest, and describes the trap as two bad options: sleep at the charger and block a high power stall for seven to nine hours, or move afterward and take a violation. He says he proposed adapting the ferry-crossing exception, and that the German ministry replied it had raised this with the European Commission in 2025 and been told current rules were suitable. Fleet operators should watch that thread more closely than the range figures.
News
BMW Pulled the i3 Launch Forward Because It Sold Out First
The Electric Viking
According to the video, BMW has taken more than 100,000 pre-orders for the new i3, more than for any car in its history, and pulled the launch forward because it cannot meet demand. First Edition orders opened in Germany and the UK on 18 June, with the standard car at the end of September. The reported specification: a 108.7 kWh usable pack of 4695 cylindrical NMC cells, dual motors making 345 kW, 0 to 100 km/h in 4.7 seconds, 912 km WLTP and 710 km EPA, on 800 volts accepting up to 400 kW. BMW claims ten minutes adds 423 km.
The number that matters is not on the spec sheet. He reports BMW built 50,000 iX3s in nine months at its new Debrecen plant in Hungary, the fastest new-factory ramp in company history, and it is still not enough. The presenter, open about having criticised BMW repeatedly, treats this as the moment the slow-to-electrify narrative stops holding. That is his view. The honest reading is narrower: BMW has shown it can design a competitive electric car. Whether it can build them fast enough is unresolved, and a pre-order queue this long does not answer it.
News
Waymo Is Paying the Tariff and Importing Chinese Vans Anyway
Forbes
Forbes reports tariffs on Chinese-built EVs sit at 127.5%, stacking a 100% EV tariff, a 2.5% duty and a 25% strategic-products fee. The market assumed that made Waymo's Zeekr-built van a dead end. Bills of lading compiled by Import Genius suggest otherwise: more than 3,200 units through the port of Los Angeles since 2024, over 2,600 this year. Waymo is not named as recipient, but Forbes notes Zeekr has no other US partner. At the model's Chinese market price of $39,000, the piece calculates landed cost near $89,000 before autonomous hardware likely exceeding $10,000.
Two sourced caveats. Import Genius research director William George told Forbes that 3,200 is an "at least" figure, since customs documents identify the vehicle but not declared value. MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Morton said his firm had also assumed a dead end and was surprised, estimating roughly 300 imports a month. Waymo declined to confirm, saying only that it runs over 300 across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Against a fleet Forbes puts near 3,900, mostly discontinued Jaguar I-Paces, the math reads as arithmetic rather than defiance: Waymo books over 500,000 paid rides a week, wants a million by year end, and has no cheaper vehicle available.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.