AI may unintentionally become the economic engine that finally modernizes America’s aging grid. California is experiencing a massive AI data center boom, ranking 3rd in the U.S. with 227 operating centers and 54 more in development as of April 2026, according to Stanford.

AI is triggering a new energy panic in America. Across the US states of California, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, residents are pushing back against the explosive growth of data centers powering artificial intelligence. People are worried about rising electricity bills, water use, backup diesel generators, massive transmission lines, and entire landscapes being transformed into server farms. They worry about the expansion and the business around it and believe that AI data centers will exploit the land, and give back little to the people in the communities.

The energy demand from AI is unlike anything the internet economy has seen before. Goldman Sachs estimates data center electricity demand could rise more than 160% by 2030. Utilities that spent years planning for flat electricity growth are suddenly scrambling to build power generation again. In places like Northern Virginia, now nicknamed “Data Center Alley,” local resistance has become fierce. Residents complain about noise, visual pollution, water consumption, and fears that ordinary households will subsidize the AI boom through higher utility costs.

But there’s another side to the story that should be getting attention instead of fear. Renewable energy projects like SunZia — the giant new wind and transmission project connecting New Mexico wind power to California — may show how the AI boom could also accelerate the renewable energy transition.

SunZia is enormous:

• 3.5 gigawatts of wind energy
• a 550-mile high-voltage transmission line
• enough electricity for roughly 3 million people
• one of the largest renewable infrastructure projects in North American history.

And it’s arriving at exactly the right moment. The question is how does it scale without becoming an out of date boondoggle like the Ivanpah solar energy project? We interviewed Moshe Luz, one of the executives and founders of the company who has ideas up for grabs.

California already produces huge amounts of daytime solar energy, but AI workloads continue around the clock. Solar fades in the evening just as electricity demand rises. So the innovation doesn’t need to come in adding more solar panels, it’s the need for better battery storage and nighttime renewables. Wind, wave, and geothermal might help.

SunZia’s New Mexico wind profile helps solve that problem because wind often strengthens later in the day and overnight. Instead of relying entirely on natural gas plants after sunset, California can increasingly balance its grid using distant wind resources combined with battery storage.

The project is already beginning to send electricity into California while final testing continues. SunZia is not alone.

Across the American West, a quiet clean-energy arms race is emerging around AI infrastructure.

In California’s Kern County, the Edwards & Sanborn project combines nearly 900 megawatts of solar with one of the world’s largest battery systems. In Nevada, the Gemini Solar project near Las Vegas pairs utility-scale solar with giant batteries designed to stabilize evening demand.

Texas has become perhaps the most radical experiment of all. Massive wind farms, sprawling solar installations, and grid-scale batteries are now increasingly handling short demand spikes that were once served by gas “peaker” plants. Texas leads America in wind energy, boasting over 30,000 MW of capacity from over 150 wind farms as of 2020, often supplying over 20% of the state’s electricity.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft are investing in enhanced geothermal energy projects in Nevada and Utah. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal can run 24 hours a day, making it attractive for AI-driven electricity demand that never sleeps.

The bigger shift underway is that AI may unintentionally become the economic engine that finally modernizes America’s aging grid.

For decades, utilities hesitated to build large transmission systems because electricity demand grew slowly. Now AI companies, cloud providers, and electrification trends are forcing states to rethink energy infrastructure entirely.

Ironically, the same technology many fear could overheat the planet may also become one of the biggest drivers of renewable energy investment in modern history.

There are tradeoffs.

Projects like SunZia still face lawsuits from Indigenous groups who argue transmission corridors damage sacred landscapes and fragile ecosystems. It’s difficult to get ecological assessments across state lines. Renewable energy itself is now colliding with difficult questions about land use, mining prime materials, water, and who benefits from “green growth.”

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A vast and largely untapped lithium reserve may be hiding beneath one of North America’s oldest landscapes, the Appalachian Mountains, offering a surprising twist in the global race for clean energy materials. According to new findings from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as much as 2.5 million tons of lithium could be buried across the region, stretching from the Carolinas up through New England.

For a world scrambling to electrify everything from cars to power grids, that number is staggering. At current consumption levels, this reserve could replace more than 300 years of US lithium imports, which is used in the energy sector for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, future Tesla freight trucks, in battery storage systems and in laptops.

Scientists estimate it could supply enough material for millions of grid-scale batteries or tens of millions of electric vehicles; these are technologies essential for transitioning away from fossil fuels.

What makes this discovery particularly compelling is its origin story. The Appalachian Mountains formed roughly 480 million years ago during ancient continental collisions that created intense heat and pressure deep underground. These conditions gave rise to pegmatites which are coarse-grained rocks known to host lithium-rich minerals such as spodumene and lepidolite, widely used in modern battery production.

Researchers have identified up to 18 lithium-rich districts along the mountain chain. Some areas are already known, like the Carolina tin-spodumene belt, while others such as deposits in Maine, contain massive crystals and show strong potential for future extraction. The study also divided the region into three “domains,” with one standing out as especially promising due to its high likelihood of undiscovered deposits.

But while the scale of the resource is exciting, the path forward we know will not be simple. It took Sunzia years to get approvals for their wind turbines mapped out. Indiginous tribes, animal rights organisations, ecologists.  Mining lithium, especially in ecologically sensitive and densely populated regions like the Appalachians, raises serious environmental questions. No one wants mining in their backyard or running close to their streams or groundwater. Water use, land disruption, and the impact on local communities will all need to be weighed carefully against the benefits of domestic supply.

Lithium is entering our food chain with untold future consequences. Lithium batteries are a growing source of pollution in the US.

There’s also a broader geopolitical angle. Today, China dominates much of the global lithium processing and battery supply chain. A significant US discovery could shift that balance once and for all, strengthening domestic energy security and reducing reliance on foreign sources.

Up until now this is just a promise and a bargaining card the US can wager in future car manufacturing and energy negotiations. For now, the Appalachian Mountains, the ones John Denver sang about, and known for coal and timber, may be quietly holding the keys to a cleaner energy future.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is holding a large reserve of lithium.

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Unlike solar power on Earth, which is limited by night cycles, weather, and seasons, the Moon offers something close to uninterrupted exposure to the Sun. By placing solar infrastructure in orbit or along the lunar surface, engineers could generate continuous clean energy at a scale that may exceed global electricity demand,  the Japanese scientists say.

The concept relies on wireless power transmission, converting solar energy into microwaves or lasers and beaming it to receiving stations on Earth. While this might sound like science fiction, the underlying technologies are already being tested in smaller applications.

If successful, a lunar solar ring could solve one of renewable energy’s biggest challenges: intermittency. Instead of relying on storage systems or backup fossil fuels, power would flow steadily, day and night.

Related: America’s biggest renewable energy station SunZia just went online

But the challenges are immense. Building infrastructure on the Moon would require breakthroughs in space transport, robotics, and materials engineering. Costs would be astronomical, and questions remain about efficiency, safety, and geopolitical control of such a system.

Still, the proposal reflects a growing shift in thinking. As energy demand rises and climate pressures intensify, researchers are beginning to look beyond Earth-bound solutions. Space-based solar power, once dismissed as impractical, is being reconsidered as part of a long-term energy strategy.

The Moon, long a symbol of exploration, could become something else entirely: a power station for a planet in transition.

Whether this vision becomes reality or remains speculative, it signals something important. The future of clean energy may not just be about improving what we have on Earth—but about expanding where we look for it.

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Professor Ji-Soo Jang, in collaboration with Professor Taekwang Yoon of Ajou University and Professor Hansel Kim of Chungbuk National University, has developed a novel energy device that generates electricity during the process of capturing greenhouse gases.

The research team introduced a new concept device termed the Gas Capture and Electricity Generator (GCEG), which produces electrical power as greenhouse gases are adsorbed from the atmosphere. This innovation goes beyond conventional approaches that merely capture greenhouse gases, transforming them into a usable energy resource.

Professor Ji-Soo Jang stated, “This research demonstrates that greenhouse gases are not merely pollutants to be managed, but can serve as a new energy resource. We aim to further develop this technology into an environmental platform that not only achieves carbon neutrality but also generates energy.”

Amid growing global efforts to address climate change, carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies have gained attention. However, existing CCUS systems typically require substantial energy input for gas collection and processing.

To overcome this limitation, the research team proposed a fundamentally new mechanism that directly converts the physicochemical energy generated during gas adsorption on electrode surfaces into electrical energy.

The developed GCEG device consists of an asymmetric structure combining carbon-based electrodes with hydrogel materials. When greenhouse gases such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) or carbon dioxide (CO₂) are adsorbed, charge redistribution and ion migration occur within the device, enabling continuous direct current (DC) power generation without any external power source. In essence, atmospheric pollutants act as the “fuel” for electricity generation, simultaneously purifying the environment while supplying energy.

This technology is expected to be widely applicable in self-powered smart environmental sensors, battery-free IoT systems, and industrial facilities where large volumes of emissions are generated. In such settings, it could enable simultaneous energy harvesting and carbon reduction. In particular, its integration into distributed energy systems is anticipated to accelerate the realization of carbon neutrality.

The research findings were published in Energy & Environmental Science, one of the world’s leading journals in materials science.

There are a few adjacent spaces and players working toward similar goals, though not always in exactly the same way.

Carbon capture and utilization startups like CarbonCure, Climeworks, and LanzaTech are not generating electricity from CO₂, but they are treating emissions as a resource, turning them into concrete, fuels, or chemicals. The philosophy is similar: carbon is not just waste.

Several academic groups, including teams at MIT, Stanford, and across Europe, are working on electrochemical carbon capture using electro-swing adsorption. These systems use electricity to capture and release CO₂ more efficiently, though they are not fully self-powered like GCEG.

There is also a growing field of micro-energy harvesting—technologies that generate small amounts of power from heat differences, humidity, motion, or chemical gradients. The GCEG fits into this category, but with a twist: the “fuel” is pollution itself.

Other experimental systems generate electricity from moisture in the air or from ion movement. These rely on similar physical principles, using natural gradients, but are not specifically designed to capture greenhouse gases.

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After nearly two decades of planning, delays, and persistence, the largest renewable energy project in America’s history has begun generating electricity. (Ivanpah could have been a success were it not for politics). The SunZia Wind project is now sending vast amounts of wind power from New Mexico to California, marking a major milestone in the country’s transition to clean energy.

At full scale, SunZia is enormous. The project includes 916 wind turbines and a 3.5-gigawatt capacity, enough to supply electricity to around 3 million people across California and Arizona. Power travels along a 550-mile transmission line, which is an essential piece of infrastructure that connects remote wind resources to urban demand.

The impact is already being felt. California has broken its wind generation record multiple times in recent weeks as SunZia begins feeding electricity into the grid. It’s a glimpse of what a renewable-powered future could look like when large-scale infrastructure finally comes online. Can we start saying goodbye to Saudi Aramco and Arabian Gulf oil?

Related: There are the major wind farms in the Middle East

Probably not for a while. As much as we create, the gurd eats more. Electricity demand in the western United States is surging, driven by population growth, electrification, and the rapid expansion of data centers used for crypto currency mining and artificial intelligence. SunZia arrives at a moment when utilities are under pressure to deliver more power, without increasing emissions.

SunZia not only cuts carbon pollution but it also help replace natural gas plants, particularly in communities already burdened by pollution.

One of SunZia’s unique advantages is when it generates power. Unlike solar, which peaks during the day, wind production often increases at night, precisely when California relies more heavily on fossil fuels. That makes SunZia a strategic complement to the state’s existing renewable mix.

The road to completion has not been simple. First proposed in 2006, the project faced years of permitting challenges, including concerns from environmental groups, Native American tribes, and the US military. Routing changes and ongoing legal discussions reflect the complexity of building infrastructure at this scale.

Still, SunZia represents something bigger than a single project. It shows that the United States is entering a new phase of the energy transition, one where renewable energy is not just about generation, but about moving power across long distances at scale.

About SunZia

SunZia Wind and Transmission is owned and developed by Pattern Energy, one of the largest renewable energy companies in the United States, led by CEO Hunter Armistead and President Kristina Lund, who oversee the project’s strategy, execution, and integration into the US grid.

Originally advanced by SouthWestern Power Group and New Mexico’s Renewable Energy Transmission Authority, the project has grown into the largest clean energy infrastructure build in US history, with total costs estimated between $8.8 billion and $11 billion.

Financing was secured through a major green loan syndicate including global banks such as BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, ING, Natixis, Société Générale, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Wells Fargo, with key administrative roles held by Deutsche Bank.

Industrial partners and suppliers include turbine manufacturers GE Vernova and Vestas, which delivered and installed hundreds of turbines across the project. SunZia has created thousands of construction and engineering jobs across New Mexico and Arizona, while generating long-term economic benefits through land leases, tax revenues, and infrastructure investment, positioning it as a cornerstone project in scaling renewable energy across the American West.

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As missiles fly and oil traders panic, one thing is becoming brutally clear: a world powered by more renewables is a world less exposed to political violence, fuel blackmail by Iran and Saudi Aramco, and petro-instability that have long haunted the Middle East.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), a UN-like energy body based in Abu Dhabi, the world added a record 692 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power capacity in 2025, bringing the global total to 5,149 GW.

Renewables made up 85.6% of all new power capacity added worldwide, while fossil fuel and other non-renewable additions continued to shrink in relative importance. That matters far beyond climate, I believe.

When countries generate more of their own electricity from solar, wind, hydro and bioenergy, they become less vulnerable to oil and gas chokepoints, tanker wars, Red Sea Houthi pirates, Iranian mullahs, price spikes, and the geopolitics of regimes and armed movements that have historically benefited from fossil fuel dependence. Renewables do not solve extremism on their own, but they do weaken the leverage of fuel-dependent systems that have helped finance instability across the region.

“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”

IRENA, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, is the world’s leading intergovernmental agency for the renewable energy transition. It has 171 members and additional countries in accession, and serves as a technical and policy hub for governments trying to decarbonize while improving energy security. Abu Dhabi is its permanent headquarters.

The biggest gains in 2025 came from solar power, which added 511 GW, followed by wind at 159 GW. Together, those two technologies accounted for 96.8% of all new renewable additions globally.

Asia dominated, contributing 74.2% of all new renewable capacity, with 513.3 GW added. China remained the giant, especially in solar, wind, and hydropower, according to IRENA. This doesn’t mean they are a green economy however, because as China grows so does its dependence on fossil fuels. They are not regulated in any way for carbon emissions and tend to do what they want while the rest of the world plants trees and trades carbon credits.

India also posted strong wind and hydro gains. In Africa, renewable capacity rose by 15.9%, its fastest jump yet, led by Ethiopia, South Africa, and Egypt. The Middle East recorded its highest annual growth too, rising 28.9%, led by Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud knows they cannot survive on oil alone in the future. They have also been investing in green hydrogen.

The map is wildly uneven. Europe now holds 934 GW in total renewable capacity, while Central America and the Caribbean remain stuck at just 21 GW. That imbalance is not just unfair; it is also dangerous. Countries with low renewable penetration remain more exposed to imported fuel shocks, debt, and fragile grids.

The world’s next focus should be obvious: grid expansion, battery storage solutions, off-grid solar, and finance for poorer countries. It is not enough to install panels in China as its economy keeps building endless factories and call it a transition.

“This not only indicates market preference but also makes a strong case for renewable energy resilience with brutal clarity,” La Camera said. And in a world where oil routes can still trigger global panic overnight, resilience is no longer a climate luxury, it is national security.

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For centuries people living in hot climates have tried to cool buildings without electricity. Long before air conditioning, architecture itself acted as the cooling system. It’s called using passive energy. In Iran, for example, traditional homes used wind catchers, known as badgirs, tall towers that captured breezes and funneled cooler air down into homes. These passive ventilation systems have been used for thousands of years across the Middle East and can naturally cool buildings by directing airflow and expelling hot air.

In hot climates like the Middle East and North Africa, homes were also designed around inner courtyards with pools and shaded gardens, allowing for privacy, but also for cool air to circulate through thick mud-brick walls and shaded spaces during the day. In some cases, underground spaces connected to aqueducts or water channels were used to further cool incoming air before it entered the building.

Modern sustainable architecture has tried to rediscover these ancient ideas. Over the years we have covered everything from white roof paint that reflects sunlight to experimental passive cooling materials designed to reduce air-conditioning demand.

Now an Israeli startup says it may have taken the idea a step further: cooling surfaces using sunlight itself.

SolCold, a climate-tech company based in Ness Ziona, Israel, has developed a nanotechnology coating that actively cools surfaces when exposed to sunlight. The company was founded in 2016 by Yaron Shenhav and Dr. Yaron Shenhav (co-founder and CEO), based on research originating at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The coating can be applied to buildings, vehicles, shipping containers and even fabrics. When sunlight hits the material, it triggers a physical process that reflects most solar radiation, converts absorbed heat energy into light, and releases heat through radiative cooling. Sort of the way you cool down after you pop into the water and then stand in the air.

Unlike traditional reflective coatings or “cool roof” paints, which simply bounce sunlight away, SolCold’s technology actively removes heat from the surface. In direct sunlight, coated objects can become cooler than the surrounding air.

The hotter the environment and the stronger the sun, the stronger the cooling effect. In laboratory tests the coating has demonstrated temperature reductions of up to about 20°C below ambient conditions.

The company says the technology could significantly reduce air-conditioning demand in buildings, cut energy use in refrigerated shipping containers, and help lower the urban heat island effect that traps heat in cities.

SolCold has raised several million dollars in venture funding, with investors including the Israel Innovation Authority and private climate-tech investors, and has conducted dozens of pilot projects with global automotive and industrial companies, testing the coating on vehicles and equipment exposed to intense sunlight. Major global manufacturers have reportedly tested the technology for use on vehicles and industrial equipment exposed to heat.

The company is entering a growing field of passive cooling and reflective materials, competing with technologies such as cool roof coatings from companies like Cool Roof Rating Council partners, radiative cooling materials developed at Stanford and MIT, and reflective paints such as those commercialized by PPG and other building-materials manufacturers.

Its first product named “Glacier 110,” is an opaque, white solid film with a thickness of 350 µm, an area density of 0.3 kg/m_2, and is highly durable, lasting for ten years in high-performance applications. The material’s optimal cooling power is 70W/m₂ – 170 W/m₂ at noon in summertime. It can be used on buses to keep occupants cool, for instance.

Glacier 110 has four layers: a smart filter that lets 1% of heat pass through it, an anti-stokes layer, a radiative cooling layer, and a mirror layer. The coating maintains a low ambient temperature throughout its entire architecture.

The main benefits of the company’s innovative products include zero electricity and fuel consumption and zero carbon emissions. Used in clothing, it protects the health of the wearer.

If the technology scales commercially, coatings that turn sunlight into cooling power could offer a modern, high-tech counterpart to the ancient passive cooling systems that shaped desert architecture for centuries.

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When I was a kid my Grade 4 teacher said that in the future energy will be free. We’ll have found a way to make energy from water and salt, with no byproducts. Fast forward 40 years: news in the last year suggests we are closer to both hydrogen fusion and storing energy with salt.

Batteries made from salt which can store energy from renewable energy plants may sound like science fiction, but a new grid-scale deployment in the United States suggests the technology is moving closer to reality. It solves a major problem when harvesting solar, wind or geothermal energy. When the grid can’t use the excess energy it needs to be stored, or go to waste. The holy grail in renewable energy are robust batteries that can work without expensive and rare earth metals like lithium.

The news hook comes from a recent announcement by US energy storage company Peak Energy, which is working with RWE Americas to deploy a new sodium-ion battery system for grid storage. The project is designed to store renewable electricity from solar and wind and release it when demand rises.

Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries use sodium, or salt, one of the most abundant elements on Earth and a key component of common salt. Instead of lithium ions moving between electrodes during charging and discharging, sodium ions perform the same function.

The chemistry is similar to lithium batteries, but the materials are far cheaper and easier to source. In its announcement, the company highlighted the cost advantage of the technology.

“Peak Energy’s sodium-ion battery system uses a passively cooled architecture that eliminates the need for complex thermal management systems.”

The design of the system also removes some of the most expensive components found in conventional battery installations.

Energy storage has become one of the biggest bottlenecks for renewable power. Solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when conditions are right, which means grids need large batteries to store excess power for later use.

Today most large storage projects rely on lithium batteries, which depend on global supply chains for lithium, cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries could reduce those costs dramatically because sodium is widely available in seawater and common minerals.

For utilities trying to scale renewable power, the difference could be significant. If sodium-ion systems prove reliable at grid scale, they could provide cheaper, safer storage for solar and wind, making renewable electricity more affordable for power systems around the world.

Peak Energy has raised about $65 million in venture funding since launching in 2023. The company was founded by Landon Mossburg, former president of Northvolt North America and a Tesla manufacturing veteran, together with Liam Maddock, a former operations executive at Zipline who previously held supply-chain roles at Tesla, Apple and Lyft.

Their team includes engineers and battery specialists from companies such as Tesla, Northvolt and SunPower. The company’s $10 million seed round was led by US venture firm Eclipse Ventures with participation from TDK Ventures in Japan, while its $55 million Series A was led by Xora Innovation, a Singapore-based deep-tech fund backed by Temasek.

Additional investors include Doral Energy-Tech Ventures in Israel, Tishman Speyer in the United States and other global energy-tech funds.

The company is entering a rapidly emerging sodium-ion battery race, competing with major Chinese manufacturers such as CATL, BYD, and HiNa Battery, as well as Western players including Northvolt in Sweden, Faradion in the United Kingdom and US grid-storage developer Natron Energy. Unlike lithium batteries, sodium-ion systems rely on abundant salt-based materials, which could make large-scale renewable energy storage significantly cheaper if the technology scales successfully.

Looking to invest in our sustainable future? Check out Peak Energy.

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Morocco’s proposed 1,000 MW offshore wind project near Essaouira promises climate leadership and renewable energy for this Magreb country, but along this stretch of Atlantic coast, wind is more than energy. The coastline is culture, economy, and identity. Essaouira is a historic, windy port city on Morocco’s Atlantic coast known for its UNESCO-listed 18th-century Medina, white-and-blue architecture, and the backdrop used in Game of Thrones.

The Essaouira wind project represents a major step for renewable energy in Africa. Scheduled to begin construction in 2029, this project on the Atlantic coast leverages strong, consistent winds of roughly 11 m/s to support the country’s goal of over 52% renewable energy by 2030.

While specific financiers have not yet been fully announced, the project is expected to attract a blend of public and private capital, drawing on several common sources used for large-scale renewable infrastructure in North Africa and Europe.

Essaouira is Morocco’s wind capital. Surfers and kitesurfers rely on its steady trade winds; local schools, rentals, and guesthouses depend on them. Offshore turbines are typically placed several kilometers out at sea, beyond surf breaks, meaning wave formation itself is unlikely to be directly affected. However, construction phases from vessel traffic, cable laying, temporary exclusion zones, all these could disrupt access during key seasons.

Then there is the view: Essaouira’s wide Atlantic horizon is part of its aesthetic appeal, especially during the internationally known Gnaoua World Music Festival, when thousands gather along the seafront. Studies from Europe suggest that visual impact can influence tourism perception, particularly in heritage or festival cities. Developers often mitigate this by pushing turbines farther offshore, reducing skyline dominance.

Coastal ecosystems present a more complex issue. Offshore wind foundations can alter seabed habitats but may also create artificial reef effects that increase marine biodiversity over time. The greater concern often involves bird migration and collision risks.

Scotland offers useful lessons. In projects such as Hywind Scotland, environmental monitoring has shown that careful siting by avoiding major migratory corridors does significantly reduces bird mortality. Developers there use radar tracking, seasonal curtailment (temporarily slowing turbines during peak migration), and pre-construction avian studies to protect seabirds and raptors.

Morocco sits along critical migratory flyways between Europe and West Africa. Baseline ornithological data will be essential before construction begins. Noise during pile-driving can also disturb marine mammals; mitigation measures used in the North Sea, such as bubble curtains to dampen underwater sound, could be adapted.

Related: travel with teens to the Kasbah in Morocco

The question is not whether offshore wind and coastal culture can coexist. In Scotland, Denmark, and Portugal, surfers now share horizons with turbines. The question is whether Morocco designs this project with local identity at the table. If done thoughtfully, Essaouira could become a symbol of how renewable energy integrates with living coastlines rather than erasing them.

International best practice increasingly requires community consultation and free, prior, and informed consent processes, particularly when projects affect cultural landscapes. While Morocco does not have the same legal frameworks as some countries with formally recognized Indigenous status regimes, global lenders and European partners often require social impact assessments that include cultural stakeholders.

If the offshore wind project proceeds, inclusive consultation will be critical:

• Festival organizers and cultural leaders

• Local fishermen’s cooperatives

• Tourism operators and surf communities

• Environmental NGOs and bird conservation groups

In Canada, energy projects also pay restitution to indigenous people. In Essaouira, the Amazigh (Berber), especially the Chiadma and Haha tribes, are the original inhabitants of the Essaouira region, with Tamazight language and traditions still rooted in the surrounding countryside.

The Gnaoua, descendants of West Africans brought through historic trans-Saharan trade, are not indigenous in origin but are a deeply embedded spiritual and cultural community whose music defines the city’s global identity. Essaouira also once hosted one of Morocco’s most significant Jewish communities, whose legacy remains visible in the historic Mellah despite large-scale emigration in the 20th century after they were persecuted.

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In a nondescript facility in Denver, a small team of physicist-engineers is attempting something that sounds like science fiction: igniting a miniature star on Earth. (See how China came close to making an artificial sun).

If they pull it off, the consequences would ripple across every corner of the global economy, and nowhere more dramatically than Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich kingdoms of the Middle East.

Xcimer Energy, founded in 2022 by Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys, is betting that powerful ultraviolet lasers can crack the fusion puzzle that have eluded scientists for 70 years. Green Prophet’s scientist Brian explains fusion and what makes it so hard here.

The premise behind Xcimer is simple even if the physics is anything but: fuse light atoms together the way the sun does, release enormous amounts of energy, and do it without carbon emissions, without meltdown risk, and without the mountains of radioactive waste that plague conventional nuclear power. Clean, dense, effectively limitless energy which is the holy grail of human civilization. With fusion we could run air conditioners all day and all night. We could live well on the equator or run our heaters in the arctic and enjoy limitless travels to space.

What makes Xcimer genuinely different from the fusion experiments that have come before is its choice of laser technology. Rather than the expensive solid-state systems used at the US National Ignition Facility, which achieved a landmark ignition milestone in 2022 but at staggering cost, Xcimer uses krypton-fluoride excimer lasers, borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing.

These deliver high-efficiency ultraviolet pulses at a fraction of the price, and in 2025 the company completed the first privately funded excimer fusion laser of its kind built in over two decades. That’s not a press release milestone. That’s real hardware.

“We’ve already begun using Xcimer’s LPK experimental testbed to validate laser models and inform the design of our future systems,” said Conner Galloway, CEO and Chief Science Officer of Xcimer. “This milestone also sends the strongest signal yet that the private sector can build on decades of public investment to turn transformative research into commercially viable systems. We’ve seen this transition before in industries like space—and we’re beginning to see it happen in fusion.”

The roadmap is ambitious but structured. A Phoenix laser system in 2026 will validate the core physics. A Vulcan facility around 2030 aims to cross the holy grail of breakeven, which is producing more energy from fusion than was put in.

Xcimer is already taking proposals on prospective new sites nationwide to house Vulcan, which would directly employ hundreds of people in a large variety of jobs, including physicists, technicians, and support staff.

Vulcan’s location could pave the way for a future regional source of zero-carbon energy expertise, making the location attractive to more emerging businesses such as artificial intelligence and software companies, robotics manufacturers, and medical research facilities. 

By the mid-2030s, Xcimer envisions a prototype power plant delivering electricity to the grid at roughly $40 per megawatt-hour, competitive with natural gas and cheaper than most new coal. That’s when things start to get fun. Just like in solar. Every year the cost for producing solar goes down.

The US Department of Energy has already selected Xcimer as one of eight companies in its fusion commercialization program, lending the venture both credibility and critical public-private backing.

Now consider what this means for Saudi Arabia, and by extension the entire OPEC architecture that has shaped global geopolitics and which has supported a whole lot of evil and terrorism for half a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Saudi Arabia and Iran-mullahs run on oil feeding terror operatives money in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Unlike the UAE which has diversified, the Saudi economy runs on one thing: the world’s insatiable need for oil.

Renewable energy has already begun chipping at that foundation, and oil prices are dowb, but OPEC countries know that solar and wind have an Achilles heel because they are intermittent energy sources.

“We use the same approach as America’s National Ignition Facility – the only system in the world to demonstrate fusion ignition. We don’t need to spend time and money to demonstrate unproven plasma confinement physics; we combine NIF’s proven inertial confinement fusion approach with breakthrough laser technology. We’re driving down cost and complexity so we can deliver electricity on a pragmatic timeline and business model.”

Batteries help, but not enough. Fusion has no such weakness. It runs continuously, day and night, in any weather, in any country. A fusion-powered world wouldn’t just reduce demand for oil; it would collapse it entirely.

The leverage that petrostates have wielded for decades, over energy prices, over foreign policy, over global inflation, over terrorism, evaporates the moment civilization has access to a cheaper, cleaner, inexhaustible alternative.

Xcimer has raised just over $111 million from leading energy investors since its founding in 2022. It’s part of the DOE Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, a highly competitive public-private partnership program designed to accelerate the development of fusion energy on the power grid. Xcimer was awarded $9 million, one of the most significant awards under the program’s first budget period.

Xcimer also collaborates with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Savannah River National Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, General Atomics and Westinghouse. 

::Xcimer

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