Tristan Rayner

been awhile since you posted this, but hang in there!

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.

www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Base Power hauls in $1 billion to take its distributed home battery model beyond Texas - Energy Storage The two-year-old power company has deployed more than 100 MWh of residential battery capacity across Texas, pooling thousands of installs in homes into a grid resource as a virtual power plant. It wil...

Batteries can earn money for people or for business. And this model sorta kinda does it for both:

www.ess-news.com/2025/10/09/b...

Interestingly, I did meet a startup in Germany that wanted to do similar but at zero cost, and where you got paid to operate a small battery even in your apartment.

The banning of X links in sports (and others) subreddits, and starter packs featuring reporters for those niches is another massive moment for Bluesky. Awesome stuff!

I hope Re.green is legit! I like the long-term nature rather than dumping the cash for it to be used in badly incentivized ways. Only criticism is $200M over 25 years is still only $8 million annually which isn't enough to really "restore" much.

It's good snappy coverage! I wonder if bullet points might make it easier for ya if you have to keep up with 21 new small developments.

❤️

Marton filmed me enjoying my new Microsoft Surface Laptop 7! It's in our new Friday Checkout video ...for about 3 seconds! youtu.be/H6KuIvwmkGA?...

go.bsky.app/HwjoWF1
I made a starter pack for viewers of The Friday Checkout/TechAltar :)

It's a fine piece that makes sense, and also a really really great chance for Xbox to do ...something? Anything?

I had such fun running ESS News as a stand-in Editor for my pal Marija last week - the storage industry is absolutely booming on all fronts www.ess-news.com

Arm China being mentioned 142 times mostly as risk factors, alongside words like "Arm China’s payments due to us are determined based on the financial information that Arm China provides to us" and "In the past, we have had issues obtaining timely and accurate information from Arm China"... ouch

I saw this Huawei IP event being promoted over on X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/Huawei/status/1686209616584245248) and realised I'd missed that Huawei just went and published its IP rates: $1.5 for 4G, $2.50 for 5G devices. Hm. https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2023/7/ipr-innovation-horizon

Airalo is used by a surprising number of people I know, mostly without a hitch, though the capped data model might not last as competitors (Holafly, Nomad etc) offer unlimited data. Still, the shift to eSIM is a win for consumers beating home telco roaming charges @techmeme.com

Fascinating when the original story (online sales first! nimble! smart!) needs to become the old story as Xiaomi pushes into retail stores to recapture market share.