1 month 1 week ago
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…
Ysabelle Kempe
1 month 1 week ago
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…
Brian Martucci
1 month 1 week ago
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…
Julian Spector
1 month 1 week ago
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…
Maria Gallucci
1 month 1 week ago
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…
Austin Corona, Grist
1 month 1 week ago
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…
Sarah Shemkus
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Dan McCarthy, Wendy Becktold, Sarah Shemkus
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Ysabelle Kempe
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Jeff St. John
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Julian Spector
1 month 2 weeks ago
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,…
Alison F. Takemura
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Jeff St. John
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Maria Gallucci
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Jeff St. John
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Maria Gallucci
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Brian Martucci
1 month 2 weeks ago
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…
Jeff St. John
1 month 2 weeks ago
It’s already hard to build grid batteries in New York City. But now, an increasingly hostile dispute between the utility Con Edison and energy-storage developers is making it even harder. The two sides agree that “ community-scale battery projects " — bigger than those that back up a home but smaller than most…
Jeff St. John
1 month 2 weeks ago
Ohio’s largest solar and battery project can finally move forward after years of slogging through legal and regulatory challenges. The Ohio Power Siting Board on Thursday approved a permit for Oak Run Solar, which will combine 800 megawatts of solar with 300 MW of battery storage. The Madison County development will…
Kathiann M. Kowalski
1 month 2 weeks ago
North Carolina regulators on Friday rejected a bid from Duke Energy to build a gas power plant — a rare denial from a panel that frequently defers to the state’s predominant utility. Duke first proposed the 255-megawatt facility in Richmond County last fall. Designed to produce electricity when the grid is strained,…
Elizabeth Ouzts
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