This is California Wire , a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Thursday via Substack. Welcome back to California Wire! Today’s topic is public EV chargers and California’s long and winding road to make them reliable. In 2023, I wrote a …
PJM Interconnection is finally taking steps that could let a lot of new battery capacity connect to its grid without eons of delay. PJM is the biggest grid operator in the U.S., serving customers across 13 mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and Southern states. Its grid is notoriously bogged down and congested, especially…
Re-creating polar habitats in Michigan is no small feat. Just ask the Detroit Zoo, where the polar bear and penguin centers require producing industrial levels of cooling from energy-intensive equipment. For the zoo, figuring out how to keep animals comfortable using less, and cleaner, energy is key to meeting its…
The pro-nuclear Trump administration continues to put its money where its mouth is. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a conditional loan commitment of up to $5 billion to boost the output of 15 reactors at eight nuclear power plants in Illinois, Maryland, and Pennsylvania by a combined 1.1…
The Trump administration loves coal plants. The rest of us are paying the price in higher electricity bills, poorer health, and worsening climate change. That’s the takeaway of an analysis out today from the Environmental Defense Fund. It finds the Trump administration is directly or indirectly propping up nearly…
Heat pumps, superefficient sources of electric heating and cooling, are winners for the climate , air quality , and typically a household’s energy bills. But a common claim cautioning against their widespread adoption in the U.S. is that the electrical grid is too strained to handle all the extra demand they would…
Electric vehicles can serve as home backup batteries. But so far, most EVs have needed expensive bidirectional chargers to do that — a tough sell for customers. Ford aims to remove this cost obstacle with its forthcoming Ford Fathom electric pickup truck . On Tuesday, the U.S. automaker revealed that the Fathom,…
Before a utility can raise electricity rates, it must get approval from regulators. In Ohio, some groups are looking to step into that process to make sure FirstEnergy, whose utilities supply power to over 2 million customers in the state, uses some of the money it will receive from ratepayers to equitably enable the…
Just outside Boston, a developer is getting set to build a 700-megawatt storage facility that is expected to dwarf every other battery project in New England. One town over, another energy company just closed on $850 million in financing to build a 250-MW battery. Down near the Rhode Island border, ground has been…
Word is getting out about electric induction ranges. More and more chefs say the appliances cook just as well as or better than their gas counterparts. The stoves don’t burn climate-warming fossil fuels or release harmful indoor air pollutants like gas ones do. And because they’re vastly more efficient, they also…
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. It’s been years in the making, but the U.S. Senate finally has a bipartisan permitting bill on the table that could speed up the construction of much-needed energy and grid projects. That is, if the Trump…
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Battery fires are like shark attacks: frightening events that loom cinematically large in the American psyche and almost never actually happen. As batteries have become America’s top choice for new on-demand grid power, community concern about their fire…
This is California Wire , a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Thursday via Substack. Hello, everybody! Welcome back to California Wire. This week, I’m going to be talking about virtual power plants again — but not the ones set up by utilities…
Google just upped the ante on its plans to leverage the energy use of thousands of homes and businesses to free up space on the grid for data centers. The tech giant and the California-based firm Voltus announced Thursday that they are going after a gigawatt of virtual-power-plant capacity in PJM Interconnection,…
Massachusetts has made meaningful strides in recent years to get its robust energy-efficiency incentives into the hands of lower-income households who need them most. Now, a provision tucked into a pending energy bill could undermine that progress, environmental justice advocates say, by making certain benefits more…
Balcony solar legislation has finally arrived on Capitol Hill. On Monday, U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, introduced the first federal bill aimed at legalizing solar panels that simply plug into an outlet. The legislation would require all state public utility commissions to consider rules that would…
The Trump administration is widening its attacks on U.S. offshore wind development, this time by siding with anti-wind groups that are seeking to strip projects of existing federal approvals. Its latest target is New England Wind, a 2-gigawatt development proposed off the coast of Massachusetts. On Tuesday, the…
For the past four years, the UpgradeNY coalition of clean energy, environmental, and labor groups has been pushing New York regulators to approve projects that could switch entire neighborhoods from fossil gas to clean electric heating — and to do it without undermining fossil gas utility jobs and investments. The…
New Mexico boasts stark landscapes unlike anywhere else, a clearly defined regional cuisine built around fiery Hatch chiles, and cultural centers that predate the United States by several centuries. It’s unusual in another way, too: As many states struggle to advance on their path to a 100% clean electricity system,…
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here . Picture a buoyant triangular steel or concrete platform roughly the dimensions of a baseball field. Now place a wind turbine…
Nathaniel Eisen, Inside Climate News
1 hour 9 minutes ago
The leading newsroom covering the transition to clean energy, electrification and climate solutions. We report on how the world is decarbonizing with a critical focus on finding out what works and what doesn't.
