Everyone to Your Balcony!

By now, most of us know about solar energy. Most of us live in states that have at least some solar energy production, in varying degrees, and a little under 10% of homeowners have installed their own solar panels. Still, though, many communities don’t want solar farms, and installing residential solar panels is expensive and requires permits and expert installation.

Fortunately, balcony solar is coming.

Talk about DIY - hello, balcony solar. Credit: Microsoft Designer

It seems like people have never thought about electricity as much as we have lately. Prices are skyrocketing, with no end in sight, especially with the plethora of energy-thirsty data centers being built. President Trump has steadfastly criticized, and tried to halt, most kinds of alternative energy that might help mitigate cost increases.

Despite the President’s opposition to alternative energy, last month solar overtook coal for electricity production for the first time, although that’s as much about coal’s portion dropping as solar’s rising – and both lag nuclear and, especially, natural gas. The U.S. solar industry is still growing, adding 7.8 gigawatts direct current in Q1 2026, but at declining rates, in part due to the expiration of the 30% tax credit for residential clean energy.

Balcony solar doesn’t need solar farms. Balcony solar doesn’t need big, expensive rooftop panels. Done right, balcony solar doesn’t need regulatory approval or expert installation. Just plug it in on your balcony or deck, and – voila! -- you’re generating your own electricity.

Sounds too good to be true? Tell that to the over one million homes in Germany already using them, at a cost of as low as $200. The U.S., units can be had for as little as $400.

Now, don’t get overly excited. They won’t power your whole house, only supplying an estimated 10-25% of your electricity. They’re not a backup generator. Unlike many rooftop panels, they don’t typically feed into the electric grid (which then gives you a credit on your bill); they instead just reduce the amount of electricity you draw from the grid. Proponents claim they pay off in just a few years, the time depending largely on how expensive electricity is in your area.

Currently, though, they’re not legal in most states, as laws and regulations generally don’t distinguish them from larger units. Plug-In Solar says there are 30 states with such legislation in 2026: 5 have passed, 5 have failed, 11 have stalled, and the rest are in other stages. Utah was the first state to pass enabling legislation, in 2025, with Colorado, Maryland, Maine, and Virginia joining it this year, while Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming have rejected them.

State of balcony solar legislation. Credit: Plug-In Solar USA

Things are not quite as simple as proponents maintain, according to Casey Crownhart, writing in MIT Technology Review. Joseph Bablo, manager of principal engineering, energy, and industrial automation at UL Solutions told him there are three main concerns: overloading the house’s electrical circuit, potential for an outlet’s ground fault circuit interruption (GFIC) to fail if current is going back in, and the risk of power continuing to run if the plug is disconnected.

UL Solutions is working on a framework to address those, which would likely include a special outlet that an electrician would have to install. “I know they want to say ‘No electrician, no permits’—we’re not there,” according to Mr. Bablo.

Tell that to all those Germans.

Raymond Ward, the Utah (Republican) state representative whose bill allowing them passed in Utah, made the point: “You look over there and say, ​‘Well, that’s working,’ So what is it that stops us from having it here?” Note, though: even the Utah law still requires compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories, neither of which is currently available.

So there is still work to be done. In Germany it took “relentless individuals” to make the necessary changes, according to Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. We’re going to need some of those too.

Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in praise of balcony solar: The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. He recognizes that they won’t replace the current grid and that there “are still some technical questions to resolve,” but I like his vision: “It will be bought off-the-shelf like a consumer product, not sold by a team, like a swimming pool; it can be installed by just about anyone, with no special training; and it requires minimal approval.”

His vision goes further than just the direct impacts:

But if I can dream for a second, I hope balcony solar’s charisma and low cost help us imagine the energy-abundant future we are so close to achieving. Americans and our government have a tendency to treat the current energy system, and the current set of technologies that enliven it, as finished and fixed. In reality, they are always changing. 

Plug-in solar demonstrates one version of the coming changes: With its small size, it makes balcony and backyard power production possible. But it’s only one messenger of many from that new world. As batteries continue to develop, larger and larger amounts of energy will be stored at ever-smaller sizes and scales, and that will enable innovations and technologies we cannot yet imagine — technologies that will change our world as much as the sextant, the bicycle or the jet engine. 

That’s a vision we should all buy into.

Indeed, balcony solar is already inspiring people to take other actions to help fulfill that kind of vision. "They are a gateway to other measures such as larger photovoltaic systems or the purchase of an electric car or a heat pump," says Christoph Kost, head of energy systems analysis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, a German research organization. 

As Mr. Meyer says: “Balcony solar is a small way that apartment- and condo-dwelling Americans can take ownership of their energy choices and cut down their pollution on the margins.”

Balcony solar won’t solve all of our issues with electricity, but it can help mitigate rising costs and perhaps, just perhaps, point us in the new directions Mr. Meyer is hoping for.

Oceans, Away

It probably didn’t show up on your calendar, but today is World Ocean Day. It’s a day meant to catalyze “collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate,” and has been around since 2002 (although the U.N. didn’t officially recognize it until 2008). Its website claims a network of over 2,000 organizations, in 180 countries.

I wish we had more to celebrate.

You'd think that with World Ocean Day that we'd treat them better. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Many have recognized the irony of humans calling our planet “Earth,” when, in fact, 71% of its surface is covered with water. Even more amazing, oceans account for 99% of the biosphere. We come from the ocean, and still owe much of our existence to it.

Unfortunately, these are not good times for oceans, and we’re to blame. The most recent World Ocean Assessment from the U.N. highlights:

• “The ocean matters to everyone, everywhere;
• The ocean is under intensifying stress;
• Climate change is transforming conditions;
• Biodiversity is declining across nearly every marine habitat;
• Pollution is widespread and increasing;
• Ocean food systems are threatened.”

The report concludes: “The coming decade is decisive: without rapid, coordinated global action, ocean health will continue to decline, threatening climate stability, biodiversity resilience, food security, livelihoods and the wellbeing of billions.”

I think about this in light of last month’s announcement by the National Science Foundation that it was “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Major Facility, beginning next week. That’s a $368 million deep-ocean observation system “that delivers real-time data from more than 900 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world's oceans.” Some 900 instruments will be removed, in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

OOI map. Credit: NSF/OOI

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, told Eric Niiler of The New York Times that the decision “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

In other words, we (the Trump Administration) didn’t invent it, and it relates to climate change, so we don’t want it.

Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the NOAA during the first Trump term, told Mr. Niiler: “This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit. By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

Scientists are aghast. Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System, told The Guardian: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system. Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.”  

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, called the move “penny-wise, pound foolish,” adding: “The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean. We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US.”

“Walking away from a $368-million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic,” Chris Robbins, the associate director of scientific initiatives for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group, complained to Mr. Niiler.

Democrats in Congress vow to fight the cuts, but lack the votes to do anything. The E.U. said it was stepping up its ocean monitoring efforts, independent of the U.S.’s action, with its OceanEye initiative, but that will be a long term process and won’t immediately offset the U.S. cuts.

Meanwhile, a new study has found that a “cold blob” in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may suggest big changes ahead: “a further weakening of Atlantic heat transport in future climate change could lead to serious impacts on climate and weather conditions in Europe and other parts of the world.”

Sure doesn’t seem like a great time to lose our ocean monitoring abilities.

Even worse are the Trump Administration’s gung-ho attitude towards deep sea mining. It is well known that the ocean’s floor has lots of valuable minerals, and some mining companies are delirious at the prospect of strip mining them. The NOAA has starting mapping some 30,000 square nautical miles off American Samoa, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is investigating several other offshore areas, both with the intent of allowing deep sea mining.

The U.S. may even issue permits for seabeds not owned by the U.S., or any country.

“No one has done commercial-scale deep-sea mining,” said Becca Loomis, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, ““This would be brand new, and they’re kind of forging ahead. Rushing ahead with this industry is really scary for the ocean, the ocean ecosystem, for people who rely on fisheries.” 

A new review of existing studies found how relatively little we understand about the impacts of such mining, but what little we do know suggest there are large and longstanding impacts on biodiversity.

Just this week, a Greenpeace study found thriving new-to-us ecosystems in the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge “We barely understand how these communities function, which environmental factors influence their distribution, or how sensitive they are to human disturbances. Likewise, our discovery of several sponge species that are potentially new to science highlights how little is known about Arctic ecosystems, said Dr Julio A. Diaz, deep-sea researchers, Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University.

“The deep sea mining industry has not yet started to tear up the seabed, and we therefore have the opportunity to stop an environmental disaster before it happens.” said Dr. Sandra Schöttner, Chief Scientist, Greenpeace International.

One can imagine how little the Trump Administration – whose mantra is “drill, baby, drill” – cares about such impacts.

I’m thrilled that there is such a thing as World Ocean Day, but it’s hard to celebrate it in the midst of all that is happening to degrade and disrupt our oceans. I’m quite certain that the oceans will be around long after humans will be, but it’s unfathomable about how much damage we’ll do to them while we are.

DuckDuckGo Goes Where No AI Can Go

It’s getting so you can’t avoid AI. If your 401k doesn’t have some AI-related stocks, forget about your investment returns. You can’t open a website without some AI chatbot trying to help you. If you use a Microsoft product, it really, really wants you to have CoPilot assist you. If you work, AI is either coming for your job, or your bosses are looking at how AI can assist you in that job. Google, long the king of search, thinks it has seen the future of search and that future is AI.

Credit: DuckDuckGo

Very exciting times, right? Golden opportunities ahead for sure. Well, not everyone is thrilled. The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled “The American Rebellion Against AI,” citing such examples about college commencement speakers getting booed when they mention AI, polls showing respondents’ concerns about AI, anger at the boom of data centers and the spillover effect on consumer utility bills, even Sam Altman’s house getting firebombed.

AI may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean people have to be happy about it, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is going along with it. DuckDuckGo is trying to help.

DuckDuckGo, in case you aren’t familiar, is a search engine that focuses on privacy. Its website brags: “We’re about data protection, not data collection,” and adding: “Search, browse, and use AI privately, keeping your information to yourself and away from hackers, scammers, and privacy-invasive companies.”  Its AI features are optional.

If you’ve never used DuckDuckGo, join the club. Let’s put it this way: reaching Bing’s levels of search is aspirational. But that may be changing, thanks to AI, or, rather, to AI backlash.

When Google made its May 19 I/O announcement about how it was further incorporating AI into its search, DuckDuckGo benefited.  The company claimed on Bluesky that visits to its “No AI” search page have tripled since Google’s announcement (“and still rising”).  TechCrunch reports “U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.”  Users can use the DuckDuckGo browser or download extensions for Chrome or Firefox.

“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott:

Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want. That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that. Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy. Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.

Mr. Thurrott notes: “Usage on iPhone and iPad was highest, with an average growth of 33 percent and peak growth of 69.9 percent on May 25.”

It’s not that DuckDuckGo is against AI per se. It offers Duck.ai, Search Assist, and an AI image filter. It just wants you to be in control. DuckDuckGo chief communications and policy officer Kamyl Bazbaz told Mr. Thurrott: “One of the most popular search features we’ve launched in years is a filter that removes AI images from image results. The other most popular feature? Search Assist, which uses AI to anonymously generate answers to search queries at the top of the search page. People just want a choice.” She noted that Google has such a monopoly that it can force AI on its users without fear of them leaving.

The flood of users to DuckDuckGo suggests that might not be true…yet.

The problem is that AI is coming at us too fast. It is evolving much faster than we can get used to it; we’re thinking up use cases for AI models that were valid several months ago, but now are woefully out of date. The future is coming at us too fast, and many of us don’t like it.

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted to The New York Times:

A.I. is viewed as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’s progressing at an extraordinary pace, and humans aren’t evolved to process that much change. People, rightfully so, are anxious about the future that this technology will bring. I understand; it feels natural with such a profound technological shift. 

We tiptoed into the internet, then gradually embraced it, making lots of mistakes along the way (remember Pets.com?). We thought it would democratize information, failing to anticipate that a few tech giants would control most of the traffic or that our information was the thing that became the commodity.

We rushed into smartphones even faster, loving their ubiquity and power but, again, failing to recognize the impact that ubiquity would have on us, especially our kids.

So forgive us if many think the AI gold rush isn’t for our benefit.

Dylan Patel, CEO of AI-infrastructure consulting firm SemiAnalysis, recently said on a podcast: “People hate AI. AI is less popular than [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. AI is less popular than politicians.” Those are pretty low bars.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that only 21% think they can trust AI aways or almost always, and only a third are at all excited about AI. Eighty percent are concerned about AI, and the levels of concern do not vary as much by generation as one might expect.

Still, 51% of respondents have used AI to research topics, up from 37% a year ago. About a quarter have used it for school or work, to write something, to analyze data, or to create an image. Ready or not, we’re starting to use it, and companies like Google think we’re going to use it, like it or not.

Credit: WSJ

I like the DuckDuckGo attitude; it should be our choice. Most of us will eventually get round to using AI, but that time doesn’t have to be now. Can we just take some time to get used to it?

Then again, why is DuckDuckGo’s attitude towards privacy so unique, and why do so few of us value privacy enough to use it? I don’t like what those say about the tech industry, or about us.  

So kudos to DuckDuckGo for its AI (and privacy) stand, and I hope that the result of the AI backlash isn’t so much slower evolution as it is smarter adoption.