It's Monday. Solar farms throw away power every sunny afternoon because the grid has nowhere to put it. One startup's answer is to truck the customer out to the panels.
In today's edition:
☀️ Big Story: Data centers that plug straight into solar
⚡ Quick Hits: PJM's first capacity advisory, a 765 kV solar link in India, an organic PV trick, EV charging prices
💰 Capital: nuclear's cost gap, Tesla's Arizona offtake
📋 Policy Watch: Duke's tariff gap, Austria's battery pivot
📊 Chart of the Day: Australia's rooftop solar record
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The Big Story
Rune plugs modular data centers straight into stranded solar
San Francisco-based Rune Energy builds RELIC modules, container-sized compute units that draw up to 100 kW directly from a solar array's DC output, with batteries built in and no backup grid connection, IEEE Spectrum reported. Rune signs power purchase agreements with solar-farm owners and is operating in California, Texas and Massachusetts.
"It's our estimate that there's 50,000 gigawatt hours of energy wasted by utility-scale solar every year." William Layden, co-founder and CEO, Rune Energy
Each module weighs about 2,000 pounds and holds anywhere from 128 to more than 2,000 Nvidia B300 GPUs.
DC-to-DC converters step down utility-scale solar's roughly 1,500 V, skipping the inverter; Rune says it recently brought a data center online within a week.
Rune plans to scale to 100 MW of compute over the next 12 months.
Georgia Tech's Constance Crozier notes DC-to-AC conversion is already 95% to 97% efficient, so she expects the main gain to be lower component cost.
Source: IEEE Spectrum
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Four items, from a shoulder-season crunch to a cavity full of photons.
PJM issued its first-ever Capacity Advisory, covering Oct. 12-13, forecasting peaks of about 102,000 MW Monday and 104,000 MW Tuesday against roughly 70,000 MW of scheduled generation outages; PJM says capacity issues now arise in milder weather. PJM Inside Lines
POWERGRID commissioned the transmission system for the 2,500 MW Bidar solar energy zone in Karnataka on Oct. 5, including a 765 kV double-circuit line to Maheshwaram, eight months after its original February target. Mercom India
ICFO researchers placed an organic solar cell inside an optical cavity that suppresses high-angle photon emission to cut Boltzmann losses, an approach they say could in principle push single-junction efficiency toward 43%, above the 33.16% conventional limit. pv magazine
Rivian says its owners do 80% to 90% of their charging at home and that it is partnering with utilities on demand-responsive charging, while Tesla's Los Angeles Superchargers swing from about $0.60/kWh midday to about $0.35 overnight, Heatmap reported. Heatmap
The Capital Stack
A global think tank prices new nuclear by country
The Energy Transitions Commission's new report, "The Role of Nuclear in the Energy Transition: Complementary but Limited," puts early US small modular reactor cost estimates at about US$140 to US$270 per MWh, against US$40 to US$190 for large reactors, RenewEconomy reported. Similar designs can cost 4 to 9 times more to build in the US and Europe than in China and South Korea. The report expects China, South Korea and India to deliver nuclear below US$50/MWh by 2035, while France, the UK and the US are unlikely to get below about US$125/MWh. In renewables-rich markets like Australia, it says nuclear's share should stay close to 0%.
Source: RenewEconomy
Also in the capital stack:
ContourGlobal broke ground Oct. 6 on Project Sterling in Mohave County, Arizona, a privately financed 450 MWac solar plant with about 1.4 GWh of storage, with Tesla contracted for around 1 TWh a year, roughly 90% of expected output. Electrek
Policy Watch
North Carolina: Duke Energy's final large-load tariff requires 10- to 15-year contracts and letters of credit for transmission upgrades but leaves out the clean transition tariff Duke said in May 2024 it was developing with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nucor; CEBA asked regulators to order one within six months. Latitude Media
Austria issued about 43,300 solar subsidy tickets within 10 minutes in its third 2026 round, up from 24,900 in the summer round, and the energy ministry proposed a 2027 overhaul that would prioritize batteries linked to smart energy management and take applications year-round; the changes need a two-thirds parliamentary majority. pv magazine
Chart of the Day
Australia's rooftop solar hits a 17,488 MW record
NEM rooftop PV output reached 17,488 MW at noon AEST on Oct. 11, up 495 MW in three weeks, as solar met a record 72.29% of NEM consumption, Global Power Energy's Geoff Eldridge wrote. About 82.3 GWh of renewable output was curtailed that day, 87.9% of it during negative-price intervals.
Source: RenewEconomy, data from GPE NEMLog · October 12, 2026
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