In the world of fighting climate change

Coal Hits a Record High While India's Grid Batteries Grow 84-Fold

A Strait of Hormuz standoff is dragging the world back toward coal even as India's storage build-out, China's EV exports and a first-of-kind solar cell all post record numbers.

The week in 120 words

The IEA now expects global coal demand to hit a record 8.94 billion tonnes in 2026, reversing a decline it forecast just nine months ago, as Strait of Hormuz disruptions choke LNG supply and push Europe, Japan and South Korea back to coal power. That sits awkwardly next to real progress elsewhere: India added 8.2 GWh of battery storage in the first half of 2026, 84 times what it installed a year earlier; China's carmakers exported more vehicles in eight months than in all of 2025, most of them electric; and Delhi is weighing a rule requiring storage on every new solar and wind project. Indonesia's worst fire season since 2015 is the reminder that adaptation can't wait for the transition to finish.

Part 1 — India

A storage mandate is on the table. India's Central Electricity Authority is weighing a rule that would require co-located energy storage on every new ground-mounted solar and onshore wind project — a proposal, not yet a finalised rule, with no published compliance timeline. It follows a run of firm, round-the-clock renewable tenders that have already pushed storage from an add-on toward a baseline design assumption for developers. Whether it survives the consultation process as written is the thing to watch (Mercom India, September 8).

SECI tendered 700 MW of solar for a single buyer. The Solar Energy Corporation of India issued a tender for 700 MW of interstate-connected solar, in blocks of 50–700 MW, to supply one commercial and industrial customer inside an Odisha special economic zone under a 25-year power purchase agreement. Bids are due October 5 (online) and October 8 (offline); grid connection is required by December 2028. This is a tender: the buyer's identity and final tariff are still undisclosed (TaiyangNews/pv magazine, September 3–4).

Number of the week: 8.2 GWh. That's the battery storage capacity India added in the first half of 2026, per Mercom India Research — against just 98.4 MWh in the same period of 2025, an almost 84-fold jump. The absolute number is still modest (8.2 GWh would cover a few hours of one large city's evening peak), driven by a wave of firm-power and peak-shaving tenders from state utilities including Bihar and Maharashtra. The growth rate, not the base, is the story (Mercom India, September 11).

Cement makers are buying their way to cheaper power. India's cement industry plans to spend roughly ₹13,000 crore (about $1.35 billion) lifting captive green power capacity from around 4 GW to 6 GW by March 2028, per ratings agency ICRA. ICRA projects ₹6,200–6,700 crore (about $650–700 million) in annual savings within a 1.8–2.2 year payback — a cost play built on solar, wind, waste-heat recovery and alternative fuels rather than any single technology breakthrough. ICRA did not identify which companies are furthest along (Business Standard, September 10).

Two funding signals. Bengaluru-based Leanwatts closed a roughly $2 million seed round for energy-management software, and Ola Electric's board approved a plan to raise up to ₹1,500 crore (about $156 million), part of which is earmarked for battery and vehicle manufacturing. Ola's raise is a board approval, still short of a closed round. Both point to continued investor interest in Indian clean-tech even as the broader solar module manufacturing sector wrestles with oversupply (Mercom India, September 8).

A quieter deal on climate data for farmers. NABARD and the India Meteorological Department signed an agreement to feed district- and block-level forecasts, agromet advisories and seasonal risk data into NABARD's DiCRA climate-resilient-agriculture platform, intended to help both farmers and the bank's own credit officers price climate risk into lending decisions. It's infrastructure, not a subsidy scheme, so its effects will show up slowly — but agricultural credit is one of the more underrated levers in Indian climate adaptation (APAC News Network; MoU signed September 1).

Part 2 — The World

The IEA's coal forecast flipped. Global coal demand is now projected to hit a record 8.94 billion tonnes in 2026, up 1.2% and reversing a decline the agency had forecast as recently as nine months ago. China and India together account for roughly 70% of that consumption, but this year's swing is coming from elsewhere: Strait of Hormuz disruptions pushed Europe's TTF gas benchmark toward €70, and utilities in Europe, Japan and South Korea responded by burning more coal. Whether 2027 looks better depends largely on whether the strait reopens to normal LNG shipping — a geopolitical variable, not an energy-transition one (IEA, via BusinessToday, September 11).

California moved on climate policy; Washington moved against it. California's legislature passed clean-energy legislation covering data-centre power accountability, building electrification and utility cost oversight, part of a broader run of state-level action even as the same week brought a federal rollback of Clean Water Act wetland protections and continued fallout from cancelled offshore wind leases. US climate policy increasingly runs through statehouses rather than Washington (League of Conservation Voters, September 11).

Germany is fighting to keep the EU's carbon price intact. Germany is publicly opposing a European Commission proposal to weaken the EU Emissions Trading System's Market Stability Reserve, the mechanism that pulls surplus permits off the market to support prices; Berlin wants only a temporary suspension of the reserve's invalidation rule through 2030, not a permanent change. The European Parliament has confirmed a vote on the broader ETS package for December — a fight over market plumbing that will quietly shape the cost of emitting in Europe for years (Carbon Pulse, September 4–6).

China's carmakers are exporting faster than ever. Chinese manufacturers exported 6.2 million passenger vehicles in the first eight months of 2026, already surpassing the 6.1 million exported in all of 2025. New-energy vehicles (battery-electric plus plug-in hybrid) made up 58.4% of August's exports and grew 154.7% year-on-year. Export value is climbing too, having passed $100 billion last year. Japan, the next-largest exporter, shipped 5.1 million vehicles in all of 2025 — China's current pace dwarfs it (Electrek, September 10).

A small solar cell set a real record. Chinese manufacturer RenShine Solar achieved a certified 26.4% conversion efficiency on an all-perovskite tandem module at 809 cm², a genuine scale-up record for a technology that has mostly proven itself only in lab-sized cells. It's a small-scale result, worth watching rather than banking on — the real test is how fast perovskite-silicon tandems move from record cells to gigawatt-scale factories (TaiyangNews, September 10).

Africa's climate finance gap is not closing. Africa received about $43.7 billion a year in climate finance in 2021–2022, roughly 23% of what the continent needs, according to analysis highlighted at this month's Africa Climate Finance Conference. Distribution is uneven — the ten most climate-vulnerable African countries get just 11% of the continent's climate finance, while ten others capture 76% of private investment — and renewable energy projects there face financing costs two to three times higher than in rich countries. Africa holds an estimated 30% of the world's critical mineral reserves but attracts less than 3% of global energy investment (satradedesk, citing conference proceedings, September 7).

The hard part

India's own coal consumption is on track to grow about 4.2% in 2026, even as the country adds renewables at a record pace. The arithmetic is straightforward: electricity demand from households, industry and data-adjacent load is growing faster than clean capacity plus storage can reliably cover baseload. This week's two India numbers — battery storage up 84-fold, coal demand up 4.2% — are two halves of the same transition, running at very different speeds. For that to change, dispatchable renewable tenders (round-the-clock, peak-power, storage-mandated) would need to scale from the low gigawatts they're at today to tens of gigawatts within a few years, and grid operators and regulators would need enough flexibility — and political tolerance for higher near-term tariffs — to actually retire coal capacity rather than merely slow its growth (Business News This Week, citing government data).

In the US, the offshore wind industry that was meant to anchor East Coast decarbonization is unwinding in real time. Since spring 2026 the federal government has issued a stop-work order and cancelled 12 offshore wind leases; BloombergNEF has cut its 2035 forecast for US offshore wind from 39 GW to 6 GW. Only a handful of projects already under construction — including Dominion Energy's 2.6 GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm off Virginia Beach — remain on track to finish this year. Behind the capacity numbers are real losses: trade unions in Massachusetts and New Jersey sank $10,000–30,000 per worker into specialized training that now has nowhere to go, a planned Massachusetts port project lost a $34 million grant, and workers who were earning double or triple onshore wages are returning to lower-paying jobs. Reversing this would require a change in federal permitting policy, which looks unlikely under the current administration — so for now, the industry's near-term future runs entirely through the five projects already under construction, not through anything new (Inside Climate News, September 8; Canary Media).

Separately, Indonesia's 2026 fire season is tracking toward its worst since 2015: by September 7, fires had released 76 million tonnes of carbon, putting the year on course to approach 2015's total of 333 MtC. Some regions, particularly Papua, are burning at rates researchers say they haven't seen before. An intense El Niño beginning in June 2026 and expected to last through 2027 is the main amplifier, via hotter, drier conditions — which means the fires won't meaningfully ease until that El Niño breaks (Carbon Brief DeBriefed, September 11, citing Wageningen University research).

Worth watching

• Climate Week NYC, September 20–27 — the largest annual gathering of corporate and finance climate announcements; watch for how many are backed by capital versus intent.

• SECI's 700 MW Odisha solar tender — bids due October 5 (online) / October 8 (offline).

• Bihar State Power Generation Company's 125 MW/500 MWh battery storage tender — bids due September 23.

• Alberta's ban on landfilling solar panels takes effect October 1 — North America's first such rule.

• NTPC's sodium-ion battery pilot expression of interest closes October 15.