The U.S. Senate energy permitting bill unveiled Wednesday could streamline the buildout of high-voltage power lines across the country, potentially delivering billions of dollars in electricity cost savings and dramatically improving the power system’s reliability over the coming decade — if Congress manages to pass…
This is California Wire , a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Wednesday via Substack. Hello, everyone! We’re back today to talk about trucks — the big and dirty ones — and what to do about them. California has around 1.8 million commercial…
The top U.S. nuclear regulator wants to make it easier to build and operate nuclear power plants in this country — without compromising public health or safety. That’s the TL;DR of a proposed rule that would reduce reporting requirements for nonemergency events, eliminate the expiration date for standard design…
On a sunny September day in New York City, I followed a throng of people off the subway and into Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The crowds were there for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, but I wasn’t — I’d come to see a novel experiment to wean the city’s iconic food carts off dirty generators. Street vendors…
The company behind America’s first new iron ore mine in 50 years has unveiled plans for a massive, $15 billion steel plant in southeast Iowa, bringing the firm closer to realizing its ambitious vision for low-carbon steelmaking. Mesabi Metallics , which is owned by India’s Essar Group, announced the project on…
New York set an ambitious goal to eliminate fossil-fueled electricity by 2040. Doing so will almost certainly require widespread adoption of batteries to store renewable generation and make it available on demand, thereby reducing the need for fossil-fueled “peaker” plants. Yet the state has seen hardly any…
The geothermal startup Fervo Energy is now selling power to the grid from its Cape Station project in Utah — marking the first time a utility-scale, next-generation geothermal facility has achieved such a feat worldwide. The Houston-based firm turned on an initial 33-megawatt unit late last week and has been testing…
This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter. Senators are looking toward the Capitol doors as they prepare to head home and campaign for the midterms. Meanwhile, a group of them has been scrambling to reach a deal that some analysts believe is critical to meet the…
The TruSolar20, all straight lines and right angles, was not the sleekest vessel on the Charles River when I visited at the end of August. Once I climbed aboard with inventor James Worden and we pulled away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sailing pavilion, it quickly became clear that the boat’s…
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. The U.S. energy transition runs through rural America: As of last year, 87% of U.S. clean energy generation happened in areas far outside the country’s urban centers, per a Rural Climate Partnership…
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Have you ever gazed up at power lines and wondered how clean the electrons passing along them are? The answer is very different depending on where you are. Just look at the spectrum of blues in the map above. It charts the carbon intensity of power…
For years now, grid experts have been trying to get utilities to deploy advanced transmission technologies that can squeeze more capacity out of overstressed U.S. power grids. On Thursday, the Trump administration put a $1.9 billion down payment on 31 projects that will help greatly scale up these underutilized…
Tim Pawlenty was a two-term Republican governor of Minnesota and made a run in the 2012 presidential primary, which ultimately went to Mitt Romney. Now, Pawlenty has reemerged on the national political scene as the leading evangelist for solar energy, while the industry seeks to recover from a stinging political…
On Thursday, Copper , creator of the first induction stove with a built-in battery, launched the next generation of its superefficient electric range: the Charlie 2.0. The plug-and-play appliance is designed to make it easier to ditch fossil-fueled cooking, and the Charlie 2.0 is more powerful than its predecessor,…
Denise Abdul-Rahman, founder and CEO of nonprofit Black Sun Light Sustainability, can list in detail the harms that the Trump administration’s shutdown of the $7 billion Solar for All program has caused the Indiana communities she serves. About 1,000 low-income households have been denied access to low-cost solar…
NEW YORK CITY — The enormous blades and hubs of offshore wind turbines are sprawled across a waterfront lot in Brooklyn, as a yellow lifting crane named Big Benny looms overhead. The energy firm Equinor is storing components here before shipping them out to Empire Wind , a 810-megawatt installation that is set to…
This is California Wire , a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Wednesday via Substack. Hi, everyone! Let’s pick up a theme from last week’s newsletter: how California has yet to take full advantage of rooftop solar, backup batteries, and other…
NEW YORK CITY — School districts nationwide are grappling with record diesel prices this fall as they resume shuttling students back and forth. But filling up isn’t a problem for some of the newest buses in New York City. That’s because these 10 long, yellow vehicles plug into the electric grid. On a clear, sunny…
The federal government has thrown its weight into reviving America’s long-stagnant nuclear industry, and X-energy’s first-of-a-kind reactor project is among the biggest beneficiaries so far. The U.S. Department of Energy last month said it would award $1 billion to X-energy , an Amazon-backed advanced nuclear startup…
The biggest U.S. utilities are doing worse on shifting from fossil fuels to clean power than they were at the start of this decade — and more than four in 10 have backtracked on their climate goals since the start of the second Trump administration. That’s the dire, if predictable, news from the Sierra Club’s latest…
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