This story was first published by Energy News Network . Maine is considering new kinds of electric rates to encourage more widespread home adoption of electric-vehicle chargers and heat pumps while easing the strain these technologies add to the power grid. Central Maine Power, t … | Continue reading
A powerful new electric vehicle recently started roaming the leaf-strewn streets of Portland, Oregon. Between its tires sits a hefty 400-kilowatt-hour battery pack. Inside its body is the daily detritus discarded by residents of downtown Portland. The battery-powered garbage truc … | Continue reading
The biggest near-term barrier to U.S. clean energy goals isn’t the cost of clean energy technologies or getting the permits to build them. It’s the massive backlog of new clean energy projects already waiting to connect to the grid that’s threatening to put the country’s decarbon … | Continue reading
Flow batteries, a long-promised solution to the vicissitudes of renewable energy production, boast an outsize ratio of hype to actual performance. These batteries, which store electricity in a liquid electrolyte pumped through tanks, have been kicking around in labs for ages and … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. To deal with the climate crisis, the world needs to build a lot of carbon-free energy. And to build a lot of carbon-free energy, the world needs to spend money — a ton … | Continue reading
There's no doubt that the threat of wildfires is growing more and more dire as greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the planet. The evidence? Five of the 10 worst wildfire events in U.S. history occurred in the last 10 years. Eight of the 10 largest fires in California’ … | Continue reading
A controversial, high-stakes project that was arguably the most promising attempt to connect a small nuclear reactor to the U.S. electrical grid has been scrapped. The Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems’ project using NuScale Power’s small modular reactor (SMR) design has be … | Continue reading
For the first time in the United States, a commercial plant is capturing carbon dioxide directly from the sky and locking away the planet-warming gas. On Thursday, the startup Heirloom unveiled its “direct air capture” facility in Tracy, California, which the company says has so … | Continue reading
Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature has passed a package of clean energy bills that includes one of the most aggressive state-level clean energy targets in the nation. Senate Bill 271 , which requires the state’s major utilities to achieve 100 percent carbon-free energy by … | Continue reading
We are an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering the transition to clean energy and solutions to the climate crisis. We report on how the world is decarbonizing — from electricity to transportation, buildings and industry — with a critical focus on finding out what works and wh … | Continue reading
This story was first published by Grist . The Komati coal-fired power plant, located about 100 miles east of Johannesburg in South Africa’s coal heartland , has been called the flagship of the country’s budding energy transition. At its peak, the facility, which came online in 19 … | Continue reading
Maine voters had a chance Tuesday to fundamentally reshape their energy system by taking over their two for-profit electric utilities and creating a new community-owned energy company. But more than two-thirds of voters said no to that proposal in the off-year election. The Assoc … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s Electrified Life column shares real-world tales, tips and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power. Say you’re in the market for a home. You pop by an open house and marvel at the high ceilings, the granit … | Continue reading
Sometime in the next few weeks, a government agency that most Americans know little about could approve a new fossil-fuel project that would have lasting consequences for the climate. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to give Venture Global the green light to b … | Continue reading
LIHUE, Hawaii — It’s hard to find anywhere in the United States that has greened its electricity supply as quickly as verdant Kauai. And the people of Kauai achieved that on their own, through collective ownership of the electricity grid, not by hoping profit-maximizing utilities … | Continue reading
This story was first published by Grist . For car buyers considering whether to go electric, one trade-off they must weigh is whether to give up the convenience of finding a gas station almost anywhere and being able to refuel in minutes. Fast-charging an EV can take 20 to 30 mi … | Continue reading
Making the batteries to run electric vehicles and store solar power requires a lot of minerals, and mining those minerals imposes an environmental cost. I joined the Weather Channel’s climate-focused weekday show Pattrn to help weigh the pros and cons of this aspect of the clean … | Continue reading
Canary Media recently took a deep dive into the world’s top three emitting industries: steel, cement and chemicals. In a week of special coverage, we explored the outsize challenges and promising solutions involved in cleaning up these dirty, vital corners of the global economy. … | Continue reading
Electricity is taking over the transportation sector, with batteries replacing fossil-fuel engines in a growing number of passenger cars, big-rig trucks, school buses , delivery vans, speedboats and ferries. Yet one category in particular is only just starting to get on board wit … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed into law last August, both domestic and foreign companies have rushed to set up shop or expand operations in the U.S. to take … | Continue reading
Up and down the U.S. Northeast coast, the once-promising prospect of a burgeoning offshore wind power industry is facing a moment of reckoning. A wave of project cancellations, caused by periods of skyrocketing inflation, high interest rates, choked supply chains and financial tr … | Continue reading
This story was first published by Grist . When Matt McFadden came of age in southwestern Virginia in the early 2000s, he wasn’t planning on working for a clean energy outfit. He grew up playing in a high school garage band, part of his increasingly Republican county’s small punk … | Continue reading
We are an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering the transition to clean energy and solutions to the climate crisis. We report on how the world is decarbonizing — from electricity to transportation, buildings and industry — with a critical focus on finding out what works and wh … | Continue reading
The Inflation Reduction Act will create a lot of new construction jobs for people building the electric-vehicle and battery factories and the wind and solar manufacturing and generation projects spurred by the law’s hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives. P … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s Charging Up column chronicles gender diversity in the climatetech sector. Part one is a short Q&A with an industry role model about their career path. Part two features updates on career transitions, plus data points on workplace trends and diversity. Please send f … | Continue reading
This webinar brought together experts on the world’s three highest-emitting industries — steel, cement and chemicals — to explore why these sectors are so difficult to decarbonize and what types of policy solutions and technical innovations are needed to curb emissions from produ … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s Electrified Life column shares real-world tales, tips and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power. Canary thanks Lunar Energy for its support of the column. Last year, Dan Fulop faced a problem. The 46-ye … | Continue reading
The rooftop solar industry is booming, but far too few lower-income Americans are benefiting as a result. It’s a “modern version of redlining,” according to Joe Evans of the Kresge Foundation. Now an increasing number of charitable foundations are stepping up to redress that inju … | Continue reading
The Biden administration has a multifaceted plan to speed construction of the transmission lines needed to decarbonize the U.S. grid. Part of that plan: offering loans to bridge the gap between securing financing to build transmission projects and lining up the buyers of the clea … | Continue reading
The industries that produce the building blocks of modern society — steel, cement and chemicals — are incredibly carbon-intensive. And since we’ll always be dependent on at least some amount of these materials, we need to figure out how to produce them without sending staggering … | Continue reading
Many people, and not just climate advocates, have wished they could make their utility company disappear. On November 7, the people of Maine may actually do that. A ballot initiative will offer voters an unprecedented chance to revoke the license to operate held by the state’s t … | Continue reading
Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. Steelmaking is the most carbon-intensive heavy industry in the world; it alone accounts for as much as 9 percent of all human-caused CO 2 emissions each year. And whil … | Continue reading
American consumers are used to making informed purchasing choices. We like to compare our options before opening our wallets. We want to know what ingredients are in our shampoo and how many calories are in our ice cream. It took many years of work to establish the federal consum … | Continue reading
Chemelot is a vast industrial park of petrochemical plants and research labs in the Netherlands. Inside one of its facilities, a group of companies is working to solve a thorny problem vexing the global chemicals industry: how to make one of the world’s most important compounds — … | Continue reading
You’d be hard-pressed to find an object within arm’s reach that didn’t require a carbon-intensive chemical process or oil-refining step on its path to appearing in your home, car or office. Petrochemicals are the building blocks of our packaged, coated, molded, lubricated, stretc … | Continue reading
You can’t build something out of nothing, and this immutable fact poses a challenge for the essential heavy industries whose decarbonization plans depend on cleanly produced hydrogen. The steel industry is betting on clean hydrogen to replace coal in the making of its key input, … | Continue reading
OSCEOLA, Arkansas — On a hot, dry morning in mid-October, dozens of visitors gathered in a former cotton field turned dusty compound, before a cluster of blue rectangular buildings. In the far distance, an earthen levee snaked along the banks of the drought-stricken Mississippi R … | Continue reading
For the past 150 years, steelmaking has been a big, hot business centered around enormous blast furnaces that burn metallurgical coal to melt iron. Those furnaces are the chief driver of the industry’s enormous carbon footprint; it’s responsible for 7 to 9 percent of human-caused … | Continue reading
Holcim Group, the largest cement manufacturer outside of China, has a dilemma. On the one hand, its line of business couldn’t be more solid — cement is, after all, one of the building blocks of the modern world. But producing the material emits enormous amounts of planet-warming … | Continue reading
BROOKLYN, New York — Jeff Hansen climbs up onto a narrow metal platform and stands beside three towering mixers, which are stirring up concrete with the texture of wet sand. In the bustling warehouse below, tall machines press the concrete into molds like giant Play-Doh sets, chu … | Continue reading
One of the first batches of modern cement was cooked up in a kitchen. In 1824, the British bricklayer Joseph Aspdin began experimenting with clay and limestone, mixing the ingredients with water and heating them in a furnace. After grinding the fusion into a fine powder and addin … | Continue reading
Three essential materials — steel, cement and chemicals — fortify and infuse our modern world. Though we may not think about them much, they are everywhere: in the walls that surround us, the roads we travel on and most of the everyday products we use. To meet our insatiable dema … | Continue reading
A new report draws on 10 years of detailed data to chart charger use patterns, as well as how they can work as home backup and grid-balancing tools. | Continue reading
My experience as a landlord illustrates the challenge of electrifying everything — and points to ways to improve the system. | Continue reading
Climavores podcast hosts Michael Grunwald and Tamar Haspel serve up some hot takes. | Continue reading
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