The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That'll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there's been a concerted effort to reduce the US's reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That's enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. More than three dozen California legislators are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom to exempt the state's film and TV production incentive program from a recently approved cap on corporate tax credits, warning that without action it will be "significantly kneecapped."

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Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Carmaker exceeded Wall Street's expectations with more than $26bn in revenue, but saw a 37% drop in profits Despite record vehicle sales, Tesla saw a precipitous drop in profit in its most recent quarter. A rush to buy electric vehicles before a US tax credit for them disappears had boosted Tesla's flagging sales, leading to the automaker exceeding some of Wall Street's projections in its most recent financial quarter. Yet the company failed to meet earnings expectations and its stock fell in after-hours trading.

The electric vehicle tax credit is gone, and Tesla's new, more affordable models don't quite close the gap. For nearly two decades, CEO Elon Musk has promised Tesla would make a more affordable electric vehicle, to, as he put it in 2006, "help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy." On Tuesday, Tesla announced a new Model Y and Model 3 Standard, versions of its popular compact SUV and sedan stripped of a few higher-end touches and features to bring the price down to $39,990 and $36,990, respectively. They're both about $5,000 cheaper than the Premium variants, which goes a ways--but not all the way--toward recouping the $7,500 tax credit canceled by the GOP-led Congress this past summer . The price point also puts Tesla's newest models firmly in the "more affordable" EV camp.

EV tax credits are dead in the US. Federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end yesterday. Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They've been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong. The tax credits' demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter.

Can AI file your taxes? Not yet. Calculating US personal income taxes is a task that requires building an understanding of vast amounts of English text and using that knowledge to carefully compute results. We propose TaxCalcBench, a benchmark for determining models' abilities to calculate personal income tax returns given all of the necessary information. Our experiment shows that state-of-the-art models succeed in calculating less than a third of federal income tax returns even on this simplified sample set. Our analysis concludes that models consistently misuse tax tables, make errors in tax calculation, and incorrectly determine eligibility. Our findings point to the need for additional infrastructure to apply LLMs to the personal income tax calculation task.

After more than a day of continuous debate, the US Senate passed its version of the budget megabill Tuesday afternoon--with potentially disastrous implications for the future of renewable energy in the country. The bill ends credits for projects placed in service--a term meaning, essentially, that a project is ready to provide power to the grid--after 2027, putting hundreds of planned projects around the country in jeopardy. "This is a bill to punish renewables," says Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a real need to add clean energy supply to the grid--electrifying our cars, electrifying our homes, electrifying our buildings, electrifying our factories, and the demands from AI are all going to require new clean energy. What this bill does is make it harder and more expensive."

It only took a few hours to wipe 152 billion of value from Tesla's market cap and more than 100 million in value from TrumpCoin. The end of the bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has been brewing for weeks, but on Thursday, the breakup went nuclear. Musk took to the platform he owns, X, to lambast Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill," which includes provisions that restrict immigration, limit green energy subsidies, and is estimated to increase the US deficit by 2.4 trillion. Trump shot back on Truth Social, the platform he owns, to say that Musk was only against the bill because it would take away electric vehicle tax credits that Musk's company, Tesla, benefits from. It quickly devolved into dozens of posts, most of them from Musk, who claimed Trump is in the Epstein Files--which is, he claims, why they haven't been made public. Tesla's stock is now down roughly 14 percent at the time of writing, which is the biggest single-day hit to its market cap in years.