TheChek News Flow

A meaningful minority uses AI for more technical tasks. Roughly a third of respondents who use AI say they use it to build tools, scripts and agents for task automation (32%) and to write or debug code (29%). Because fewer workers regularly perform these tasks to begin with, the results suggest relatively strong adoption among those who would ever consider using AI this way.

Of course, all survey respondents are subscribers to a technology publication, so they’re more likely to code—and to use AI in general—than the average person.

Some everyday tasks, like managing calendars, remain less touched by AI—perhaps because of limited integration, low trust or both.

In their personal lives, respondents again turn to AI primarily for research. Many treat chatbots as generalist assistants, substituting them for travel blogs or WebMD. More than half say they have sought medical or health information from a chatbot, and an equal share say they have used one to plan a vacation. Nearly half use AI to learn new skills or subjects.

>

A small share—from a quarter to a third of respondents who use AI—uses it for building creative content such as code for personal projects, creative writing, art and videos. Notably, an equal share uses AI coding at work as for personal projects, suggesting respondents are engaging in more experimentation and creative use beyond professional tasks.

Around one in five use AI for budgeting and finance or for managing tasks and calendars.

Chatbots are not replacing friends, at least not yet. Only 5% of respondents who used AI say they seek companionship and emotional support from an AI service.

Still, a minority uses chatbots for other emotional or social purposes: 14% for relationship or social advice, 13% for journaling and 12% for mental health questions or therapy. To put that in context, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2024 that 14% of U.S. adults had received counseling or therapy from a mental health professional in the prior year.

Kids are using AI, too. Two in three respondents with kids say their children use AI services. Of these parents, around a quarter say they use AI to help their children with homework.

Each month, The Information also asks readers about their outlook for the tech industry in the coming six months. In November, 52% of respondents say they expect conditions for tech to improve, 19% say they expect them to worsen and 29% think they will stay the same—a brighter outlook than last month.

Readers’ expectations for the 14 companies we follow in our Tech Sentiment Tracker have fluctuated since last month. Readers are much more pessimistic about Coinbase’s and Palantir’s near future but more optimistic about Airbnb and Google.

Political consensus is cracking, industry is hobbled and high-profile projects are being postponed thanks to some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world

European politicians pitched the continent’s green transition to voters as a win-win: Citizens would benefit from green jobs and cheap, abundant solar and wind energy alongside a sharp reduction in carbon emissions.

Nearly two decades on, the promise has largely proved costly for consumers and damaging for the economy.

Europe has succeeded in slashing carbon emissions more than any other region—by 30% from 2005 levels, compared with a 17% drop for the U.S. But along the way, the rush to renewables has helped drive up electricity prices in much of the continent.

Germany now has the highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world, while the U.K. has the highest industrial electricity rates, according to a basket of 28 major economies analyzed by the International Energy Agency. Italy isn’t far behind. Average electricity prices for heavy industries in the European Union remain roughly twice those in the U.S. and 50% above China. Energy prices have also grown more volatile as the share of renewables increased.

It is crippling industry and hobbling Europe’s ability to attract key economic drivers like artificial intelligence, which requires cheap and abundant electricity. The shift is also adding to a cost-of-living shock for consumers that is fueling support for antiestablishment parties, which portray the green transition as an elite project that harms workers, most consumers and regions.

Energy analysts say it makes strategic sense for a continent that lacks the abundant oil and gas riches enjoyed by the U.S. and some other regions to diversify its energy sources. In some cases like Spain, blessed with lots of sunshine, or Nordic countries, with abundant hydro power to provide energy when its wind farms fall silent, the transition looks promising. France’s reliance on nuclear energy is helping it keep costs down.

But in much of the region the transition is at risk of backfiring, adding to economic stagnation.

“We are hemorrhaging industry,” said Dieter Helm, an economic policy professor at Oxford University who has advised U.K. governments on energy policy.

British chemical company Ineos said in October it would close two plants in western Germany because of high energy costs. In recent days, Exxon-Mobil said it would close its chemical plant in Scotland and threatened to exit Europe’s chemicals industry, saying green policies made it uncompetitive.

In Ireland, the state grid operator imposed an effective moratorium on new data centers—which underpin cloud computing and AI—until 2028, after existing data centers drained over a fifth of the country’s electricity supply last year.

Jerome Evans, the CEO of a German data-center operator, sought to expand his two data centers in Frankfurt, Germany’s internet crossroads. The local power provider told him he would have to wait a decade, until 2035, for the energy to power them.

Some of Europe’s high energy prices aren’t the fault of policymakers or the green transition. Prices for natural gas surged after the pandemic and again after Europe heavily reduced imports of gas from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

But a good chunk of the increase is thanks to the shift to renewables, say business executives and some economists.

While sunlight and wind are free, harnessing them entails significant infrastructure investments, including in battery storage for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind blowing, and vast redundant capacity. These additional costs, obscured by subsidies and carbon taxes, mean energy prices in places like Germany and the U.K. are likely to remain higher than other countries for years to come, some economists say. The stubbornly high prices, Helm said, suggest it’s the overall system cost driving prices.

Aurora Energy Research, a consulting firm, estimates a “clean power” system in the U.K. would only start saving bill payers money from 2044. It’s a similar story in Germany. By that point, the economic damage done to Europe could be severe.

In some places, the political consensus on the energy transition—once driven by dire climate warnings—is starting to crack.

Even with broad support on the continent for mitigating climate change, right-wing populist parties in France, Germany and the U.K. that are opposed to renewable energy targets and subsidies are gaining support. Germany’s government recently decided to build new gas-fired power plants. Diplomatic disputes between European countries have erupted over energy policy in recent months, while Norway’s coalition government collapsed after a revolt over the adoption of proposed EU rules to increase renewable energy.

High-profile net-zero projects are being postponed or scrapped, notably those involving green hydrogen, which the EU placed at the heart of its green plans as a possible fuel for heavy industry and means of energy storage.

“You can’t afford, in top global competition, to be ideologically driven in the way you decide the energy system,” said Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and energy minister. Busch has criticized Germany for relying too heavily on solar and wind power, which means it sucks up energy from nearby countries on dull days, driving up prices.

“Without energy we have no industry, and without industry we have no defense,” she said.

The ‘or’ strategy

Europe has pursued a different strategy in its green transition than any other region. The U.S., China, India, Brazil and others took an “and” strategy: They are aggressively rolling out renewables and simultaneously building fossil-fuel power plants on a grand scale.

Europe largely took an “or” strategy: It raced to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind and biomass by taxing carbon heavily, subsidizing renewables and closing scores of fossil-fuel power plants.

Britain, which pioneered the use of coal for energy, last year became the first large industrialized country to shut all of its coal-fired power plants. It has also banned new offshore oil-and-gas drilling. Denmark plans to eliminate gas for home heating by 2035. Around one-fifth of Germany’s municipal utilities plan to shut down their gas networks in coming years, according to an October survey by the utilities’ trade association.

The effect was to cut back on a major source of energy before any other is fully up and running.

Many European consumers and businesses are now stuck in the worst of both worlds. They are still at the mercy of electricity prices linked to the cost of imported fossil fuels while also shouldering big upfront costs to overhaul grids to handle the intermittent renewable power.

In the U.K., the cost of procuring and delivering electricity accounts for just over half of domestic electricity bills, with the rest made up of an array of levies and carbon taxes, including subsidies to pay for renewables and grid upgrades. These levies have risen faster than wholesale energy costs like natural gas in the past decade, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think tank.

Polls show half of British consumers are planning to ration energy use this winter as they struggle with wholesale electricity costs that are 80% higher than the U.S.

Dina Ingram, an office administrator in London, used to turn on the central heating in her four-room house for long stretches. Now in winter she can only afford to have it on for three hours a day. She doesn’t heat her bedroom at all.

“I get angry,” said the 62-year-old, who attributes the high prices to corporate greed.

Europe’s decision to slash fossil-fuel use is unusual historically, economists say. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, or coal to oil—countries continued to use the outgoing fuel while adding the new fuel on top. Worldwide, wood and coal are being burned in larger quantities than ever, thanks mostly to China.

The policies could even unintentionally result in higher emissions globally, some economists and chemical industry executives say. If European factories close as a result of high energy costs, their production is likely to be replaced by imports from places like China, where the carbon footprint for those products is far higher—even before shipping is calculated, according to Oxford Economics.

Broken promises

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Former U.K. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised in 2020 that the country would become the “Saudi Arabia of wind,” producing clean power that he said would be cheaper than coal and gas.

Britain’s Labour Party has stayed the course, vowing that household energy bills will fall £300 a year, or around $400 annually, by 2030. But energy executives recently testified to Parliament that electricity bills would likely rise a further 20% in real terms by that date—even if the price of inputs like natural gas were to fall. Executives cited “noncommodity factors” like the cost of the new grid.

To try to shield consumers, the U.K. government announced last week it will pay a pricey renewable subsidy with general taxation rather than loading it onto people’s bills. Britain is also racing to expand its nuclear capacity. It last opened a nuclear reactor in 1995.

Parts of the green transition have proved unexpectedly costly. When Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm opened in 2023, it was feted as a symbol of Britain’s push into a new era of cheap low-emissions energy. But today, British taxpayers spend tens of millions of pounds a year for the Seagreen wind farm to not produce electricity.

Why? If the wind farm was left constantly on, it would send big pulses of energy from northern Scotland to southern England that would fry the U.K.’s aging grid.

Last year, the farm’s 114 turbines in the North Sea were disconnected more than 70% of the time; a gas plant in southern England fired up instead to meet local electricity demand. The tab British consumers paid to “balance” the grid totaled £2.7 billion last year—a cost expected to rise to £8 billion by 2030. Borrowing costs have also risen, making capital-intensive offshore wind far more expensive.

“Very clearly the cost of the transition has never been admitted or recognized,” said Gordon Hughes, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and a former adviser on energy to the World Bank. “There is a massive dishonesty involved.”

The continent’s cash-strapped governments now face a difficult choice: Press ahead with a rapid transition, or slow it down to save money but risk prolonging the pain.

Goldman Sachs Research expects Europe will have to invest up to €3 trillion, or $3.48 trillion, in power generation and infrastructure over the coming 10 years—roughly double what European countries spent in the past decade. That’s a big ask for governments already facing tighter budgets due to an aging population, higher military spending and higher interest bills on debt.

Waiting for a tipping point

Proponents of renewable energy argue that high prices will prove transitional. Since sunshine and wind are free and abundant, renewables will ultimately be cheaper once the new infrastructure is built, they say, while it will continue to cost money to dig oil and gas out of the ground. If enough renewable energy and battery storage is brought onstream, fossil fuels will no longer set the price of electricity and costs will fall away.

“Energy costs in the future will be a lot lower,” once Europe’s renewable system is up and running, said Jacob Kirkegaard, an economist in Brussels with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The problem is getting to that point, Kirkegaard said.

Some green entrepreneurs in the U.K. have started pushing politicians to ensure the oil-and-gas industry can help ease the transition. Greg Jackson, founder of Octopus Energy, which has championed wind farms, called on the U.K. to renew offshore oil-and-gas exploration in the North Sea, so that it doesn’t have to ship gas in from across the globe. Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and a climate activist who used to fund the protest group Just Stop Oil, wants lower taxes for existing oil-and-gas projects in the North Sea.

“I think the outlook is poor if we don’t get bold and reform our energy market,” said Vince. He believes the green transition will pay off but says more needs to be done to stop companies building the new green grid from price gouging.

The Tony Blair Institute, the think tank founded by the former British Labour leader, is calling for carbon taxes on natural gas in the U.K. to be suspended for five years to help lower electricity costs.

Some prominent economists and industry executives have recently cast doubt on whether renewables will ever be cheaper in places like Germany and the U.K. that aren’t blessed with abundant sunshine and have bet big on wind. Onshore wind turbines in Germany produce around one-fifth of their total theoretical output. Solar panels in Germany and the U.K. use only around 10% of their total theoretical output.

“I have not seen any plan that facilitates green electricity in central Europe at competitive costs,” said Miguel López, CEO of German industrial giant Thyssenkrupp.

Helm, the Oxford professor, argues renewable energy will remain more expensive than fossil fuels because the overall system is more cumbersome. The U.K. used to meet its electricity demand with 60-70 gigawatts of power capacity. Now, the country requires twice as much capacity, 120 gigawatts, to meet slightly lower demand—not to mention the additional storage facilities and interconnector supplies to and from continental Europe.

Twenty years ago, the U.K. was the most competitive location globally for Huntsman, a Texas-based chemicals manufacturer, thanks to cheap North Sea energy, said CEO Peter Huntsman. Over the past decade, the company sold off most of its U.K. assets, reducing its staff there from more than 2,000 to around 70.

“The whole value chain has gone,” Huntsman said.

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Chinese solar groups take on the battery market

Why Chinese solar groups are expanding into batteries

China’s major solar-panel makers have driven astonishing growth of solar power around the world in recent years.

Companies such as Longi, Trinasolar and JinkoSolar have pushed down costs and manufactured at huge scale, helping global solar capacity climb from about 1.6 terawatts at the end of 2023 to 2.25TW at the end of 2024.

But many in the sector have suffered heavy losses as they fight to maintain market share: the International Energy Agency estimates the largest manufacturers have made cumulative losses of almost $5bn since the start of 2024.

Some companies in China have started to expand into battery storage over the past few years, helping to smooth out customers’ electricity supplies and diversify their revenues.

Trinasolar and JinkoSolar pushed into batteries earlier this decade. They have now been joined by Shanghai-listed Longi, reinforcing a trend likely to accelerate the rapid adoption of batteries. 

Longi, one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, has just taken majority control of Canada-headquartered battery developer PotisEdge, and plans to sell combined solar and battery systems in international markets.

At a launch event for their new energy storage business in London last week, Dennis She, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at Longi, told Energy Source that storage was critical for a “new energy system with solar at its core”.

He added: “Solar energy [now] has much greater penetration in the grid, but we need to add more storage to stabilise the grid.”

In some countries, solar power has grown so quickly that system operators have to contend with a huge surge in power in the middle of the day, while prices turn negative.

That has created huge demand for batteries to help store power and catch up with the growth of solar farms.

She said storage would likely grow faster than solar in the coming years, predicting potential growth of 30 per cent or 40 per cent every year.

Selling combined solar and storage units should push down costs further, he noted, as work such as installation and service procedures would be combined.

Falling costs have pushed the commercial limits of batteries, meaning new installations can typically discharge at full output for longer periods of time.

“We started at two hours; now I think the average is three to four hours. We can even see eight hours,” added She.

In its latest results, published last week, Longi reported losses for the first nine months of 2025 of almost $600mn, which was an improvement on the losses reported in the same period a year earlier.

The company said it sold 63 gigawatts worth of cells and modules during the first nine months of the year, along with 38.15GW of silicon wafers, used to make solar panels.

It comes as the chair of rival Trinasolar said energy storage will help his company “reach a turning point in its performance” before its peers, Bloomberg reported this week.

Longi’s She said he expected the majority of the customers for the company’s new storage business to be utility-scale solar farms, with industrial sites also key customers.

Longi’s expansion into batteries comes as Chinese manufacturers are under pressure from tariffs in the US, while Europe is also planning to tighten foreign investment rules to try to make sure investment delivers jobs and other benefits for local communities.

CATL, the Chinese battery maker, is building a factory in Spain and wants to bring 2,000 Chinese workers to the Zaragoza region, along with using about 3,000 mostly Spanish workers to run the plant.

PotisEdge, Longi’s battery subsidiary, has about 30GW of battery manufacturing capacity in China. Longi has an office in Poland while PotisEdge has “centers of excellence” in Poland and elsewhere in Europe to supply services and training. But Longi has no plans to set up manufacturing in Europe.

She said Europe and China should “work together” on the energy transition, but cautioned Europe needed to put the right policies in place if it wanted more solar panels to be made in the continent.