Daily Brief — April 17: Blue Origin, Solar Crossover, Fedimint

Blue Origin just won the right to negotiate a lease on Vandenberg Space Force Base's SLC-14, the only heavy-lift launch site on the West Coast. This is not small. Right now, every military satellite heavy enough to matter launches from Florida. New Glenn — 320 feet tall, seven BE-4 engines, already flying from Cape Canaveral — will be able to reach polar orbits without the suboptimal trajectory penalty that keeps the Space Force's largest spy satellites tethered to Cape launches. The Space Force said this is about deploying 'larger, more capable military satellites and facilitating rapid response missions during national security emergencies.' Construction and safety work will take roughly two years. Watch for the environmental impact statement.

On the energy side, something quiet became very loud this week: the IEA's flagship *Energy Technology Perspectives 2026* confirmed that 80% of global solar PV and wind generation now costs less than coal or gas. Battery prices have fallen 75% over the past decade. The EIA is now forecasting 43.4 GW of new solar capacity in the U.S. in 2026 alone — a 60% jump from last year. Alongside that, utility-scale battery storage is projected to hit 24 GW of new additions, up from a previous record of 15 GW in 2025. The IEA's warning, though, is sharp: China controls 60–85% of production capacity for key renewable supply chains, and over 95% for some steps. A month of halted battery exports from China would cost the global EV industry USD 17 billion in lost output. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz disruptions — Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain shut in 9.1 million barrels per day in April — are already reshaping clean tech demand. China, despite buying Iranian oil, will likely be the primary beneficiary: it leads in battery, solar, and EV exports, and demand for those products is climbing.

Fedimint released v0.11.0 today, and it matters. The federated ecash protocol just shipped a new Gateway UI and Iroh-based NAT traversal, meaning you can now self-host a Fedimint gateway behind any firewall, with a Docker container, without domain setup or firewall rules. All `gateway-cli` output is now JSON, making it trivial to script and integrate. Fedimint is an open-source protocol for communities to manage Bitcoin collectively through blind-signed digital cash notes — instant, free, private transfers within a federation, with no single guardian holding complete control. It ships today against the backdrop of Google's March 2026 quantum threat research, which showed that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could crack a Bitcoin private key in about nine minutes once the public key is exposed. Bearer ecash that does not expose public keys in the same way as standard transactions is increasingly discussed as part of Bitcoin's broader privacy and resilience posture.