Solar panels over an irrigation canal do not fail on physics. They fail on accounting. The pilot Two Bit da Vinci visited in California's Central Valley makes 1.6 megawatts and keeps water in the channel underneath it, and the most useful minute of the video is about neither of those things. It is about the fact that the water saved belongs to the irrigation district and the electricity sold belongs to the utility, and almost everywhere in America those are two organizations with two budgets and no reason to sign one contract together.
Turlock is the exception. It is an irrigation district that also runs its own electricity utility, so both halves of the benefit land in the same ledger. The engineering here is portable to any of California's hundred-plus other districts. The ownership structure is not, and that is the part the video is honest about.
The Walmart charging network is what it looks like when that alignment is a starting condition rather than a lucky accident. Walmart already owns the parking lot, the electrical service, the restrooms and the reason a driver was going to stop for twenty minutes anyway. Each of those is a line item a standalone charging company has to buy on land it does not control. July brought 27 openings and the hundredth site, and the number worth sitting with is the one State of Charge added to its tracker this month: under 2 percent of Walmart stores have a first-party charger. Almost the entire asset base is still untouched.
A used ID.3 is the consumer-scale version of the same bargain. The first owner absorbed the depreciation and the worst three years of the software, and Volkswagen absorbed the cost of fixing an infotainment system Electrifying describes as crash-prone at launch. What is left on a forecourt in 2026 is a car with most of its problems already paid for by other people. The counterweight sits in the July UK registration figures, where the hosts count 167 DS registrations this year against a brand that still carries a UK dealer network. Owning the asset only helps when it is something people were already walking past.
What to watch. Whether the low-profile retractable panels the video says Project Nexus is prototyping actually solve canal maintenance access, because that is the line between a demonstration and a design that survives 4,000 miles. Whether the Walmart buildout holds the pace State of Charge is projecting toward 200 sites by year end, once the easy metro locations are gone. And in the battery comparison, whether the pattern generalizes: Will Prowse reports the cells in all three packs staying cool through the hardest test, with a fuse, a breaker and the position of the management board separating them instead. That is roughly what a category looks like when it matures. The expensive part stops being the technology and becomes the arrangement wrapped around it.
The Canal Solar Problem Is Not Engineering, It Is Who Gets Paid
Project Nexus is a $20 million pilot funded by the California Department of Water Resources, hosted by the Turlock Irrigation District, project managed by Solar AquaGrid and monitored by UC Merced. Two Bit da Vinci reports two prototypes, a narrow span over a 20 foot stretch of canal finished in March 2025 and a wide span across 110 feet commissioned at the end of August 2025, together making 1.6 megawatts with a 75 kilowatt iron flow battery on site. The case for scaling up rests on a March 2021 paper in Nature Sustainability, which the video says found that shading all 4,000 miles of California's exposed canals would stop 63 billion gallons evaporating a year, cut evaporation under the panels by up to 82 percent, and generate 13 gigawatts.
The catch is cost. The video puts conventional utility-scale solar at roughly $0.95 to $1.23 per watt and canal-top solar at about double that, because spanning moving water needs heavier steel and every site is a different width. That math only works if the co-benefits are priced in, which requires the water saving and the electricity revenue to reach the same balance sheet. It is the split-incentive problem landlords and tenants have with insulation, transposed onto public infrastructure. California is also not first: the video reports the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona energized a 1.31 megawatt array over the Casa Blanca Canal near Sacaton in October 2024, roughly a year ahead of the California pilot.
The Used VW ID.3 Is Cheap Now, and the Screen Is the Spec That Matters
Electrifying's used buyer's guide opens with the naming, which is the real obstacle. The ID.3 arrived in 2020 as a First Edition on a 58 kWh pack, then split into a 45 kWh Pure, a 58 kWh Pro and Pro Performance, and a 77 kWh Pro S, none of which mention the battery in the name. Layered on top are eight trim names, from Life and City to Max and Tour. Her advice is to ignore the lot and shop by range. Real-world figures: about 170 miles from the 45, roughly 220 from the 58 against an official 261, and around 250 from the 77. The video puts early cars at up to 100 kW, or 125 kW on the biggest pack, rising to 120, 170 and 185 kW after the 2024 facelift.
The spec to check on a listing is the screen. Electrifying says the early 10 inch infotainment system was crash-prone, that most of those faults were resolved in later updates, and that the 12.9 inch unit is worth holding out for. Also worth checking is the 12 volt battery, which the video says drained on some cars through an electrical fault even when parked, which an update should have addressed. Battery health looks unremarkable in a good way. Of the cars they sampled from their own listings, only one sat below 90 percent capacity, a five year old car on 97,000 miles, with most losing 1 to 2 percent a year. Electrifying puts insurance at group 18 for the entry car, with servicing every two years.
One in Four New UK Cars in July Was Electric
July's registration figures are the first read on the second half of the year, and the Kilowatt Half Hour team reports more than 43,500 pure electric cars registered in the month, up from around 29,000 in July 2025, for a 27.4 percent share of the market. Year to date the podcast puts the total above 336,000, a quarter of all new car sales. The Renault 5 led again, less than 200 units clear of the Kia EV3, with the Skoda Enyaq and the Vauxhall Frontera also inside the top five. The hosts credit the Frontera's placing partly to lease deals that ran as low as £125 a month through brokers at points this year. Renault has also shipped 100 left-hand-drive Twingos to dealerships so buyers can see the car ahead of right-hand-drive order books opening later this year. At the other end of the chart, the hosts note DS has registered 167 cars this year and argue the brand has never found a British audience.
Walmart Hit 100 Charging Sites, and 98 Percent of Its Stores Still Do Not Have One
State of Charge's monthly tracker reports 27 new Walmart locations in July, a network record, after 25 in May and 12 in June. That took the first-party network to exactly 100 sites as of July 31, with 838 stalls after adding 226 in a single month, and theoretical output up 22.6 megawatts to 83.8. Hardware is split evenly, 50 sites on Alpitronic hyperchargers and 50 on ABB A400s. Pricing barely moved: an average of 47 cents per kWh on peak, 30 cents off peak, 42 cents for Walmart Plus members and an effective average of 37 cents. Texas leads with 24 sites, Oklahoma, Utah and Florida sit on nine, and Arizona on eight. The next milestone the video tracks is 200 sites, which it expects by year end at the current pace of one opening every 5.1 days.
The figure that frames all of that is 1.92 percent, the share of Walmart stores with first-party Walmart charging, counted separately from the Electrify America and EVgo units that have sat in these lots for years. Set against the size of the chain, it means the company has barely started on land it already owns. August's site of the month is Supercenter 2803 in Edmond, Oklahoma: four Alpitronic units, no credit card readers, at 46 cents peak and 32 cents overnight.
Three 300 Pound Batteries, and a Fuse Decided the Winner
Will Prowse tested three oversized 48 volt packs, each around 300 pounds and holding roughly what three server rack batteries hold. Two are UL listed, the EG4 Power Pro and the Ruixu, and the cheaper Yixiang is not. He is blunt about what the listing buys: the video says a system built on non-listed batteries cannot be legally permitted, and that a home insurer may have grounds to dispute a claim after a fire. Capacity held up across the board. Two packs are three years old, one cycled hard enough to put 12 megawatt hours through it, and he measured about 0.6 percent difference between them, which he reads as evidence that calendar aging matters far more than cycling.
The separation came at 200 amps continuous. Prowse reports the Yixiang tripping out early and says a thermal camera found its internal fuse running near 220 F and shutting down the management board. Bypassing that fuse fixed it, and at 198 amps he says it matched the Ruixu. The EG4 ran longest, which he puts down to a larger internal compartment keeping the board away from the cells and the breaker. He adds that all three are rated for 140 amps continuous and stay cool there, with MOSFETs under 40 C, so this is a stress test of the electronics rather than the cells.
Bottom line: If you are actually buying something out of this edition, buy the thing sitting on top of a cost somebody else already ate. The used ID.3 is the cleanest example, because the depreciation and the software pain are sunk costs belonging to the first owner, and the health data suggests the one expensive component is fine. Canal solar is the one to watch rather than cheer. It only pencils where a single organization owns both the water and the wires, and that is a governance problem no amount of cheaper steel is going to solve.
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.