Ever Wanted To Start Your Own Country? With Your Help, We Can Try It!
Have you ever wanted to start your own country? We’ve probably all had that thought, especially around election time when politics are at their worst. Plus, if you were in charge of your very own country, you could run it the right way instead of watching the clowns run it, right? If I know CleanTechnica’s readers at all, my guess is that you’d want that little country to be run on nothing but renewables. Plus, the country’s mission would be a lot like Tesla’s mission: to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
The sad reality is, we can’t really start our own country. The people who run the existing countries obviously wouldn’t be very happy about that, and we also don’t want them thinking we’re dangerous extremists or anything (we all love our dogs). But, there’s nothing stopping us from making a tongue-in-cheek “micronation” to prove a point! Plus, we could do some good in the world, and have some fun along the way.
So, I hereby declare independence for the Mobile Micronation of CleanTechnia!
What Micronation? Where Is CleanTechnia? Why The Weird Hexagon Font & Logo?
You’ll never see CleanTechnia on a map, and to be honest, I couldn’t give you a latitude and longitude right now, either. You see, uh, we haven’t built it yet. Plus, it’s going to be portable, so it won’t always be in the same spot, so we definitely can’t put it on a map unless it’s an internet map we can change and update when it moves (we will do that).
What we can tell you is what it will look like.
Envision these Shiftpod “Burning Man” shelters with some solar panels set beside them to charge battery banks inside. Image by Shiftpod.
Next to the shelters, we’d have 4 or 8 of these solar panels, charging a Jackery battery bank (which we already have) and inverter. Picture by Jennifer Sensiba
Our little mobile micronation will be inside several Shiftpods (portable, insulated hexagon-shaped shelters). If you’re into Burning Man, you’ve probably seen these before. They’re like a tent, but they have some insulation in their walls and they can be set up and taken down in just a few seconds. Plus, they’re a lot lighter than the ice fishing shelters that they look like.
Having a little bit of insulation will help these little shelters be efficient with the solar-powered heating and cooling systems I’m getting for them.
What Point Are You Trying To Prove? (or, Why Do This?)
First, our “micronation” will show that it’s possible to not only travel on renewables like we do now with EVs, but to power comfortable temporary living space with just a few solar panels and a small lithium battery bank. No propane or other fossil fuels will be used in the mobile micronation, so this will prove that we don’t need fossil fuels to glamp. Its minimal weight and folded-up size will also allow minimum emissions when moving it. Even the shower and toilet will be designed for minimum environmental impact without major inconvenience.
I’m sure it will take some trial and error to get this setup to work right, but once it’s done, others will be able to do it without going through the testing we’d go through to make sure it all works well together. Unfortunately, the needed items are currently expensive because there’s not much demand for them. If we could all help popularize them, low-impact travel and camping like this could become a lot cheaper.
Pioneering this would also help EV drivers a LOT. If you want comfortable quarters out in the backcountry, the only easy option right now is to pull a camper along. Once we get the guesswork and techniques figured out, anybody will be able to put a few items in the back of their EV to do this, and they won’t have to worry about whether a big travel trailer would kill their range and leave them stranded.
There are also many homeless people in the developed world, impoverished people in developing countries, and people who have faced disaster who would love to have the kind of security and energy independence that such a shelter would provide. We hope that our efforts will make it possible for them to enjoy the benefits of clean energy like this, too.
One Other Thing We’d Like To Do: Tell The Untold EV & CleanTech Stories
The mobile shelter will also be used to chase the EV and clean technology stories that just don’t get told because they’re too expensive to travel to. Sure, when a big company has big dollars to bring journalists in to tell their story, they make sure to take care of things like plane tickets, hotels, and even meals. When the little guy needs to tell their story, or the story isn’t obvious, nobody wants to take a chance on going out there to see what’s going on and share it with readers.
By taking advantage of cheap and free camping space in rural areas, we can more cheaply chase these important stories to make sure they actually get told.
Being able to practice what we preach through low-impact travel and low-impact shelter on the road would also be a big plus. There’s already too much room for people to criticize clean technology advocates, and we want to shut them up for good with this.
What We Need Help Getting
The $30,900 for this project (you can find our Kickstarter here) will be used to purchase the following:
- Money for 3 nights of paid camping space each month, for a year (other nights will be on public land or in free camping areas, up to 2 weeks per month)
- Money for gas or DC fast charging (depending on whether our Nissan LEAF can reach the destination)
- 12 months of Starlink service and the Starlink hardware
- Two Shiftpod portable quick-deploy insulated shelters, plus a “tunnel” to connect them.
- Efficient <250 watt low-power heating and cooling for the shelter (powered by our Jackery 1500 solar generator we already have, which needs two additional solar panels)
- A low-power electric cooktop, non-plastic mess kits, etc
- Fold-up camping furniture, solar shower bags, miscellaneous campsite items
- A composting toilet
- A small enclosed cargo trailer to carry all of this, plus two e-bikes we already have
If Our Readers Are Particularly Generous, & Overfund Us…
If we get overfunded, we have several flex goals:
At $40,000, we would add a third Shiftpod to our “micronation” complex for more room to work and record videos. This would require a second Jackery solar generator and more panels, another small HVAC unit, and another “tunnel.”
At $43,000, we would add one more mini shiftpod for bikepacking adventures in even more remote areas, with some related bikepacking gear. We already have the e-bikes to do this.
Our final flex goal ($130,000 max) would be to upgrade our Nissan LEAF to another electric vehicle with more range, so we could avoid burning gas on nearly all trips. Ideally, this would be a used Tesla Model X with a hitch to tow the small trailer mentioned above, but there are other EV options we could afford with less.
In other words, all donations, no matter how far above the goal we get, would be used to further the project.
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The man behind Jaguar’s radical new EV design, Gerry McGovern, was reportedly fired this week and “escorted out of the office.”
Jaguar design boss who led controversial EV was fired
After unveiling the Type 00 last year, an ultra-luxury two-door EV concept, and what Jaguar claimed to be a preview of its new design, the struggling British automaker almost broke the internet.
The radical, chunky-looking concept came under heavy fire online with comparisons to the Pink Panther and Barbie’s dream car.
Even Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, and EV maker Lucid Motors poked fun at the controversial concept. Musk responded to Jaguar’s post on X last year, “Do you sell cars?” mocking its bold attempt at a rebrand.
Jaguar describes the Type 00 as “an indicator of design philosophy and intent for the coming new vehicles.” The concept not only looks like it was created with Grok or some other AI, but it’s also expected to be pretty pricey.
During an interview with The Sunday Times last year, former CEO Adrian Mardell said Jaguar’s new luxury EV lineup would likely be priced around £150,000, or nearly $200,000.
According to sources from inside the company, Jaguar’s chief creative officer, Gerry McGovern, was fired on Monday.
The sources told Autocar and Autocar India that McGovern was “escorted out of the office” and that his position was eliminated immediately.
When asked for more details, a JLR spokesperson responded, “No comment,” while Tata Motors has yet to respond.
The sudden news comes just a week after PB Balaji, former Tata Motors’ CFO, took over as Jaguar Land Rover CEO amid the company’s struggling efforts to turn things around.
McGovern’s departure after 21 years at JLR signals that bigger changes are coming for the ailing British luxury brand.
The first model from Jag’s new EV lineup was expected to be an electric four-door GT, set for production in mid-2026, followed by at least two more luxury EVs. With McGovern out, those plans will likely change. We’ll keep you updated with the latest.
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Tesla’s registration numbers for November 2025 are starting to roll in for European markets, and they paint a stark picture: demand is still collapsing in nearly every major market, with one massive exception that is propping up the entire region.
According to registration data tracked by Electrek, Tesla’s volumes in key European markets are down 12.3% year-over-year.
At first glance, the 12% decline in November might sound like good news, given Tesla’s sales in Europe have been declining by 30% to 40% each month all year, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
If you exclude Norway, where a specific tax-incentive change is pushing demand forward, Tesla’s sales in the rest of Europe have plummeted by 36.3% – in line with the year-long decline.
The Norway anomaly vs. the reality
We have been tracking Tesla’s difficult year in Europe for months now, but November’s data shows an unprecedented divergence.
In Norway, Tesla registrations skyrocketed 175% year-over-year to 6,215 units. This massive surge is due to buyers rushing to beat new EV tax changes expected in 2026, which would eliminate tax benefits for more expensive EVs, including virtually all of Tesla’s vehicles.
Norway alone accounted for over 35% of the total tracked volume this month.
Everywhere else, however, the floor is falling out.
Major volume markets are seeing declines of 40-60%:
- France: Down 57.8% (1,593 units)
- Sweden: Down 59.3% (588 units)
- Netherlands: Down 43.5% (1,627 units)
- Germany: Down 20.2% (1,763 units)
Italy remains the only other bright spot with 58.5% growth, but the volume (1,281 units) is too small to offset the crashes in France and Germany. Unlike Norway, where sales are booming as incentives expire, Tesla’s sales in Italy surged due to a new EV incentive.
It sent Tesla’s sales surging 58%, compared with the broader EV industry, which rose 170% in November due to the new incentives.
Here is the full breakdown of the markets reporting so far:
| Market | Nov 2025 | Nov 2024 | Change (Vol) | Change (%) |
| Norway | 6,215 | 2,258 | +3,957 | +175.2% |
| Germany | 1,763 | 2,208 | -445 | -20.2% |
| Netherlands | 1,627 | 2,881 | -1,254 | -43.5% |
| France | 1,593 | 3,774 | -2,181 | -57.8% |
| Spain | 1,523 | 1,669 | -146 | -8.7% |
| Italy | 1,281 | 808 | +473 | +58.5% |
| Belgium | 998 | 1,691 | -693 | -41.0% |
| Sweden | 588 | 1,446 | -858 | -59.3% |
| Denmark | 534 | 1,054 | -520 | -49.3% |
| Portugal | 425 | 801 | -376 | -46.9% |
| Austria | 406 | 440 | -34 | -7.7% |
| Finland | 257 | 323 | -66 | -20.4% |
| Switzerland | 242 | 536 | -294 | -54.9% |
Electrek’s Take
A single market, Norway, is currently saving Tesla’s European sales, but that is clearly temporary. It simply pulled a lot of demand from Tesla’s sales in 2026.
When you strip out the Norway anomaly, a 36% drop in the rest of Europe shows that Tesla’s demand crisis is continuing in Europe.
We are seeing the compound effect of two problems we’ve discussed at length:
- Stale Lineup: The Model Y refresh is here, but it hasn’t been enough to stop buyers from defecting to newer, more competitively priced options from Chinese OEMs like BYD and legacy players who are starting to catch up with Tesla with increasingly more competitive offering.
- Brand Toxicity: As polls in Germany have shown, Elon Musk’s continued political polarization is actively driving away the core EV-buying demographic in Western Europe. You can see this most clearly in markets like France and Sweden, where the drop is nearly 60%.
Tesla needs more than just price cuts or minor refreshes to stop this bleeding. They need to address the brand issue, or 2026 will be a very long year for the company in Europe.
Keep in mind that those 2025 results are also being compared to Tesla’s 2024 performance, which was already down from 2023. This decline has been going on for 2 years now, it only accelerated in 2025.
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Environment
How families could get stuck with higher electric bills if the AI data center boom goes bust
Homes near a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, on Friday, July 25, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Data centers that haven’t been built yet are driving up electricity prices and could leave consumers on the hook for expensive power infrastructure if demand projections are wrong.
The race to build facilities that provide artificial intelligence has fueled a boom in data centers that train and run large language models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, upending a utility industry that grew used to 20 years of no increase in electricity demand.
But now, some investors and energy market analysts are questioning whether the AI race has turned into a bubble, one that would prove expensive to unravel as new transmission lines and power plants are built to support those data centers.
Consumers served by the largest electric grid in the U.S. will pay $16.6 billion to secure future power supplies just to meet demand from data centers from 2025 through 2027, according to a watchdog report published this month.
The grid is PJM Interconnection, serving more than 65 million people across 13 states, including the world’s largest data center hub in Virginia and fast-growing markets like northern Illinois and Ohio.
About 90% of that bill, or $15 billion, is to pay for future data center demand, according to Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor. This amounts to a “massive wealth transfer” from consumers to the data center industry, the watchdog told PJM in a Nov. 10 letter.
“A lot of us are very concerned that we are paying money today for a data center tomorrow,” said Abe Silverman, general counsel for the public utility board in New Jersey, one of the states served by PJM, from 2019 until 2023. “That’s a little bit scary if you don’t really have faith in the load forecast.”
Residential electricity prices in September rose 20% in Illinois, 12% in Ohio, and 9% in Virginia compared to the same period last year, according to data from the federal Energy Information Administration. Each of those states are among the top five markets for data centers in the U.S.
The costs associated with securing power for data centers is directly reflected in consumer’s utility bills, said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics. “When the wholesale power costs go up, people pay more, when it goes down people pay less,” he said.
Forecast uncertainty
PJM is forecasting 30 gigawatts of extra demand from data centers through 2030, but it’s unclear how much will actually materialize in the end. That’s the equivalent of the average annual power consumption of more than 24 million homes in the U.S.
Data center developers are shopping projects around in different locations before committing to a site, so there is likely duplication in the forecasts, said Cathy Kunkel, a consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
“We’re in a bit of a bubble,” Silverman, the New Jersey official, said. “There is no question that data center developers are coming out of the woodwork, putting in massive numbers of new requests. It’s impossible to say exactly how many of them are speculative versus real.”
Independent power producers such as Constellation Energy, the biggest owner of nuclear plants in the U.S., and Vistra Corp. warned earlier this year that data center demand forecasts are likely inflated.
“I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here,” Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said on the company’s earnings call in May.
Meanwhile, Vistra CEO James Burke also said in May that data center demand could be overstated by three to five times in some jurisdictions as developers scout their projects around the country.
‘Stranded cost’
The risk is that utilities invest in expensive infrastructure to meet data center demand, but not all those facilities are eventually built or they end up using less electricity than expected, said Kunkel, the consultant.
“It does tend to be consumers — residential, commercial, and other industrial ratepayers — that end up paying for overbuilt electrical infrastructure,” Kunkel said. The potential problem will come if capacity is built that isn’t needed, that “would tend to leave ratepayers holding the stranded cost bag.”
Data center demand forecasts have declined when utilities implement stricter rules.
In Ohio, for example, American Electric Power recently had requests for 30 gigawatts of electric connections from data centers.
AEP proposed stricter rules “to mitigate the risk that transmission infrastructure will be built for speculative data center projects,” according to a filing with the state utility commission in May 2024.
The AEP rules require data centers to pay for 85% of the energy they claim to need, even if they actually use less, to cover infrastructure costs. It also implemented an exit fee if data centers cancel their project or can’t meet the terms of their contract.
AEP’s data center requests in Ohio dropped by more than half, to 13 gigawatts after the utility commission approved the rules last July.
“When faced with potential financial commitments, the most speculative or uncertain data center projects did not submit load study requests — as was intended,” the Columbus, Ohio-based utility said in a statement.
The number of requests might decline further as the new rules force data centers to make binding contracts, it said.
The Data Center Coalition, a lobbying group for big tech companies, and other industry advocates have opposed AEP’s stricter rules as “discriminatory.”
Meeting demand
There is also a risk that the electrical grid grows less reliable as many large data center projects move forward. The 13 gigawatts of data center requests that AEP views as a more accurate figure, for example, is equivalent to about a dozen large nuclear plants. The infrastructure, in power plants and transmission lines, required to meet that demand is immense, the utility said.
The solution is for PJM to reject data centers’ requests for grid connection if there is not enough power to supply them, Bowring of Monitoring Analytics said. Data centers can either wait until there is enough power to supply them, or they can bring their own generation with them and jump the line, he said.
Monitoring Analytics filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week calling on PJM to adopt this approach.
“That will give data centers a clear incentive to bring their [own] generation,” Bowring said. That formula would also help clear up uncertainty over demand forecasts because data centers are unlikely to pay for infrastructure if they are not serious, he said.
Otherwise, the costs that consumers are bearing from data center demand will continue to grow, the watchdog warned FERC in its complaint.
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