“ENTRA1’s website is a cyber Potemkin village, all façade with no reality. The site has buttons bragging: ‘drawing on 45+ years of experience’ … ‘portfolio experience of ~6B$ in energy and infrastructure projects’, … ‘delivering on a ~30GW SMR project pipeline.’ Click on those boxed claims for further information and the result is literally nothing.”

When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6,000 MW (6 GW) of purchased power from a wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching.

What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not an easy question to answer, although online sleuthing provides some useful details. The name first surfaced in the fall of 2023, when NuScale announced a sketchy deal with an Ohio data center developer with ENTRA1 described as NuScale’s partner with exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.…

“Maybe ending dues to the Solar Energy Industries Association is part of the ‘soft costs’ that need to go. After all, other solar executives, including David Bergeron of  SunDanzer Development, never joined SEIA for this reason.”

An adage of political economy is that the market picks winners, leaving losers for government. Residential solar is no exception. The grim news continues with PosiGen, a company “making solar panel leasing accessible and affordable for all homeowners, regardless of their credit score or income level.”

The story is told by Ryan Kennedy in pv magazine USA, Residential Solar Installer PosiGen Ceases “most of its operations” (August 26, 2025).

Residential solar installer Posigen announced it will cease most of its operations through the United States, effective immediately. The company cited “significant financial difficulties” in a WARN Act termination notice to its employees.

“And yes, there is empirical, peer-reviewed support for the conclusion that climate deniers, in general, are truly awful human beings.” (- Michael Mann, below)

Michael “Climategate” Mann cannot get out of his own way. His arrogant, condescending social tweets speak for themselves–just as the words, sentences, and paragraphs of the East Anglia emails did. He is not the kind of person you would want in just about any endeavor, much less as a climate scientist trying to present a case.

This post traces Mann’s angst on X and then at BlueSky, his successor to X.

This is my final post on this platform (aside from my social media team’s pro forma posts noted below) until it is no longer owned by Elon Musk. “But on X, my social media team is reposting things” [Joe Romm?].

Solar is hardly an infant industry, as documented here and here. And ‘Big Oil’ tried to make it economic a half century ago–and failed. A six-year-old article, “How Big Oil Of The Past Helped Launch The Solar Industry Of Today, by Andrea Hsu tells the story, one that is pertinent today given the bust of the industry (see tomorrow’s post). She begins:

Renewable energy has gotten so cheap that even oil giant Exxon Mobil, which reported $20.8 billion in earnings in 2018, is getting in on the savings. Over the next couple of years, Exxon Mobil will begin purchasing wind and solar power in West Texas, part of a 12-year agreement signed late last year with the Danish energy company Orsted. The plan is to use cheap, clean electricity to power Exxon Mobil’s expanding operations in the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil fields.