Ohio’s utilities just can’t seem to pass muster when it comes to preventing power outages and getting the lights back on quickly. In 2025, four of the state’s six regulated electric utilities failed to provide the level of reliable service expected by regulators — marking the 10 … | Continue reading
The Texas sun keeps rising, as Texas coal wanes. For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are addin … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. As the war in Iran spikes gasoline prices around the globe, drivers in many countries have headed for an obvious emergency exit: EVs. But buyers in the U.S. aren’t foll … | Continue reading
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License . Elon Musk's data center company, xAI, has more than doubled the number of unchecked natural gas generators at its Southav … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . First came the solar. Now, the batteries have arrived. Installations of grid batteries, which can store solar and other energy for later use, surged by 48% in 2025 from the year prior, per new data from BloombergNEF . … | Continue reading
Photography by Neeta R. Satam JASPER COUNTY, Indiana—Barb Deardorff loves her living room’s wide picture windows. She can gaze out at the cornfields, where sandhill cranes warble and graze, and in the evening, she can unwind from her hectic job as a teachers’ union organizer by … | Continue reading
Last month, North Carolina’s top utility regulator abruptly halted Duke Energy’s solar farm investments for the year — an unforeseen blow to an industry already reeling from tariffs and a hostile federal government. Now, clean energy businesses and advocates have filed a motion … | Continue reading
Fervo Energy , a startup that has pioneered new ways to produce electricity from the earth’s heat, is officially a publicly traded company. It’s the first next-generation geothermal firm to go public. Today’s initial public offering netted the Houston-based Fervo about $1.9 bill … | Continue reading
Amazon has signed a deal for a novel kind of rooftop heat pump that will provide all-electric heating, superefficient cooling, and cheaper energy bills at an undisclosed number of the company’s commercial buildings. After a successful 6-month field trial at an Amazon logistics f … | Continue reading
Pennsylvania needs more energy. Data centers are pushing demand skyward, utilities can't build new capacity fast enough, and electric bills are on the rise. Medium-sized solar installations — smaller than utility-scale farms but larger than home rooftop arrays — could help ease t … | Continue reading
Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States , the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratch … | Continue reading
New York City’s biggest buildings face a huge change: By 2050, they must reduce their planet-warming pollution to net-zero, thanks to the metropolis’s Local Law 97 . In other words, tens of thousands of structures will need to yank out fossil-fueled systems that heat water and sp … | Continue reading
Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week. An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its … | Continue reading
Lawmakers backing an Illinois bill that would clear the way for balcony solar have ended their push to pass the measure this year. With three weeks still to go in the legislative session, they hit a stalemate as opponents, including the state’s powerful electrical workers union, … | Continue reading
For the past 15 years, onshore wind projects have followed the same process to get the Department of Defense’s permission to build. Now, that familiar route has been closed off, jeopardizing effectively all new wind projects on private land — more than 250 nationwide — and threat … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Quick — ignore the map above and take a guess: Which three states get the highest share of their power from wind and solar? If you said Iowa, South Dakota, and New Mexico, well done. If you had Texas or California in t … | Continue reading
For years, community solar in Maine grew at a breakneck pace, elevating the state to the top of the list for most capacity per capita in the U.S. Now, however, development has slowed to a standstill, and the industry faces an uncertain future. “What we saw was a very swift rise, … | Continue reading
In 1872, while on a trip to Europe, Andrew Carnegie met with an engineer and inventor named Henry Bessemer. During the Crimean War, Bessemer had accidentally discovered an efficient (for the time) new method of making steel, which involved blowing air through molten iron to remov … | Continue reading
Steel and sweatshirts. Trucks and smartphones. Snickers and beer. The stuff in modern life requires huge amounts of dirty fossil fuel to make. And lately, that’s been a liability for industries battered by the global energy shocks of the 2020s . First, the Russian invasion of U … | Continue reading
Residents in Richland County, Ohio, voted narrowly Tuesday to keep a ban on utility-scale solar and wind across much of the community — a setback for those who hoped the referendum could serve as a blueprint for overcoming local restrictions on renewables nationwide. The vote wa … | Continue reading
Back in 2017, Tesla promised to bring an all-electric semitruck to market that would have a longer range and lower cost than its competitors. Then, the trucking industry waited — and waited. The initial production target of 2019 came and went, as did each newly announced date ove … | Continue reading
The developer Ocean Winds cut controversial deals with the Trump administration last week to abandon two U.S. offshore wind developments. But across the Atlantic, it’s making big strides — especially with floating wind. On Monday, Ocean Winds said its 30-megawatt project in the … | Continue reading
This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here . Abigail Spanberger won a landslide victory in the Virginia governor’s race last November with a platform that focused on reining in rising electricity costs . Virginia is home to the … | Continue reading
March 1, 2024, marked a bittersweet milestone in the American nuclear industry’s modern history. Exactly 3,755 days after construction started on the second of two new state-of-the-art Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Station in easte … | Continue reading
The United States has taken one of its biggest steps yet to encourage the construction of commercial microreactors — the latest move in its broader push to overhaul the country’s nuclear regulatory processes. In late April, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission released its dra … | Continue reading
In the face of soaring energy demand and electric rates, battery developers across the U.S. are stepping in with massive, multihundred-megawatt systems that can cheaply dispatch power when it’s needed most. Virginia — the world’s data center capital — is starting to catch on to … | Continue reading
California regulators have denied utility Southern California Gas permission to collect $266 million from its customers to fund a sprawling hydrogen pipeline network it hopes to build across Southern and Central California. Environmental and consumer advocates are cheering the de … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. America’s hydropower systems are in hot water — but the federal government may soon unclog a stream of funding to help them out. We’ve been using water to generate ele … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . When it comes to electric vehicles, old is gold. In the U.S., sales of new EVs are slumping — but more used EVs are being driven off the lot than ever, per Cox Automotive data . With hundreds of thousands of battery-po … | Continue reading
U.S. Steel says it will invest $1.9 billion to build a modern and lower-carbon ironmaking plant in Arkansas — marking a key expansion beyond the company’s coal-based steel mills. The new “direct reduced iron” plant will sit alongside the sprawling Big River Steel Works, in the t … | Continue reading
The Middle East crisis is straining global supplies of aluminum — a metal that’s key to making everything from fighter jets and soda cans to clean-energy technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. Iran’s strikes on two Gulf aluminum smelters and the monthslong blockade … | Continue reading
New electric rates for heat pump owners helped more than 140,000 Massachusetts households save money on their heating bills this winter. Massachusetts consumers with home heat pumps saved some $37 million on their power bills — an average of more than $250 per customer — for the … | Continue reading
Could California’s major utilities control their rapidly rising electricity rates by using their power grids more efficiently? State lawmakers want to find out. A set of bills introduced this year would order Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas … | Continue reading
Battery startup EnerVenue is planning an iconoclastic comeback. After failed plans to build a U.S. factory for its NASA-inspired tech, the firm announced $300 million in fresh funding to execute a manufacturing strategy that flies in the face of broader trends in the American bat … | Continue reading
Policies to transition buildings off polluting fossil gas are holding up in federal courts across the U.S. That’s a big win for local governments looking to spur electrification, given that these types of regulations suffered a major setback just a few years ago. In 2023, the 9t … | Continue reading
A bill advancing through California’s legislature would create pathways for virtual power plants to compete with fossil-fueled peaker plants — a move that could help the state curb its fast-rising utility rates. Virtual power plants are aggregations of small-scale batteries, ele … | Continue reading
A handful of Democratic-led states are targeting energy-efficiency programs in an attempt to provide relief on soaring utility bills. It’s surprising, given the broad support energy-efficiency programs have among Democrats — and the fact that these incentives produce energy savi … | Continue reading
As data centers drive electricity demand to new heights and consumers struggle with rising energy costs, cheap, clean power remains out of reach in much of Virginia: Nearly two-thirds of counties outright ban or severely restrict large solar farms. But that’s about to change. V … | Continue reading
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the cases of the only two people who have served prison time related to the largest utility corruption scandal in Ohio’s history. Ohio’s House Bill 6 saga arose out of efforts by the utility FirstEnergy to obtain more than $1 billion in … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump has dealt blow after blow to the Rural Energy for America Program, which has helped farmers save on their energy bills by going solar for nearly two decades. Now, REAP’s proponents see a chance to undo some of the damage. Last year, within a matter of mont … | Continue reading
A group fighting to uphold an Ohio county’s ban on renewable energy has significant financial ties to individuals and organizations that promote fossil fuels, as a campaign finance report filed this week reveals. Last summer, Richland County became one of the more than three doz … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. Last year was a huge one for renewable energy around the globe — but nothing showed up quite like solar power. This week, energy think tank Ember released its review o … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Nuclear energy is experiencing a global resurgence. In the U.S. and Europe, a long-wary public has started to warm once again to the sector. Taiwan, which shuttered its last nuclear power plant last May, is looking t … | Continue reading
A narrow complaint to a federal energy commission could have wide implications for the solar industry and the electric grid — both in North Carolina, where it originated, as well as nationwide. At issue is a unique planning scheme that’s been years in the making. Duke Energy, th … | Continue reading
A second French energy firm is pursuing a refund on its U.S. offshore wind leases — and analysts say the trend could spread further, despite major legal questions about the Trump administration’s approach. Engie , which had been planning three U.S. projects, is in talks with the … | Continue reading
In January, Lerned Zint’s gas water heater croaked. It would have been an inconvenience for anyone. For Zint, a Spanish-speaking mother who runs Corazones Daycare out of her San Francisco home, it was an emergency. Zint takes care of about 10 children, 6 months to 4 years old. … | Continue reading
Ohio is a notoriously difficult state for building renewable energy. Many counties ban wind and solar outright, but even in those that don’t, state regulators often rely on local opposition to deny permits for developers. Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, do not face the … | Continue reading
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter. Maryland lawmakers’ new solution for rising utility bills reduces a surcharge funding an effect … | Continue reading