This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. Solar is beating coal in China. Sorta. But also not at all. Let me explain. An eye-popping new chart made the rounds this week. It shows a line representing solar ene … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Solar and storage. Some things just go together, and that’s why investors around the world are pouring more and more money into projects that pair rows of solar panels with box … | Continue reading
Michael Skelly knows it’s hard to build a huge transmission line that connects different regions of the grid. He has spent a decade trying to get one up and running. But Skelly, now CEO of Grid United , thinks his current attempt to build a first-of-its-kind transmission line is … | Continue reading
Hyundai is set to break ground in southern Louisiana this week on a nearly $6 billion steel mill , which may become the lowest-carbon facility of its kind in the U.S. On Friday, the Korean industrial giant will hold a ceremony at the project site, where the fields of a former su … | Continue reading
When Gov. Kathy Hochul took office in 2021, New York was in the middle of a complicated energy transition. Albany had passed one of the nation’s most ambitious decarbonization laws only two years earlier, yet the state had just shuttered its single largest source of carbon-free p … | Continue reading
The troubled reelection campaign of Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is facing a new obstacle: a super PAC determined to take down foes of clean energy. The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has declared McKee its first Democratic target, following campaigns against three Republican prima … | Continue reading
WISHEK, N.D. — George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his bro … | Continue reading
There’s never been a better time to build energy storage in the U.S. than right now. Grid batteries — which sop up power when it’s abundant and discharge that energy when it’s needed — have been ascendant for a decade, as the price of the underlying lithium-ion cells fell precip … | Continue reading
Fervo Energy inked a landmark deal to supply Google with nearly 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the startup’s geothermal project in southwest Utah. The agreement is the largest of its kind for a next-generation geothermal system — an emerging technology that involves dri … | Continue reading
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has blocked an effort to keep the state’s most successful virtual power plant program funded through next year. State budget language finalized last week does not authorize additional money for the Demand Side Grid Support program , … | Continue reading
The Obama Presidential Center , which opened on Chicago’s South Side in June, features a museum full of mementos to democracy and the famous family, native prairie landscaping, an indoor basketball court, and other amenities. It will also be powered entirely by clean energy. Sola … | Continue reading
The Trump administration has agreed to fork over nearly $4 billion in taxpayer dollars since the spring to get major energy firms to abandon a dozen leases for U.S. offshore wind projects. The controversial maneuver to return lease payments to developers — often in exchange for … | Continue reading
Last summer, when the Republican-controlled Congress took a wrecking ball to the Inflation Reduction Act, Tom Matzzie was pissed. Though some Republican members of Congress had written letters trying to save wind and solar tax credits, when it came time to vote, they nearly all f … | Continue reading
Last month, Virginia became the first state in the country to launch a bulk-purchasing campaign for rooftop solar — a move that promises to bring down the cost of installing panels for households across Old Dominion. The idea behind the program, called Switch Together , is simpl … | Continue reading
Stephen Mays was left without power for 12 days after violent storms and tornadoes struck northwest Indiana this month. Lori Latham for 13. Thousands of other residents of Gary, Indiana, where both Mays and Latham live and work, went without power for as long as two full weeks fo … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. Glass half-empty or glass half-full? The classic question is now gripping the policy wonks who are trying to measure the damage President Donald Trump has inflicted on … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Developers are planning to build an enormous amount of natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S., fueled in large part by the AI boom. The expansion is a serious threat to the nation’s decarbonization efforts — but be … | Continue reading
Europe’s increasingly hot summers come with a worrying trend. The air conditioning that the continent long eschewed as an American indulgence is becoming a necessity, and some of the nuclear reactors needed to run those cooling units are tapping out right as thermometers spike. T … | Continue reading
Last November, Jonathan Cohen needed a new water heater for the house he and his wife had recently purchased. The labor economist at Amazon was keen to get a heat-pump water heater , a superefficient electric technology that could save him money on his utility bills. Thorough by … | Continue reading
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 . NEW YORK—When nearly 10,000 people in Southeast Queens lost power during a July heatwav … | Continue reading
Californians could soon put solar panel kits on balconies and in backyards to lower their electric bills — without utility approval. On Wednesday, state lawmakers passed the Plug and Play Solar Act (Senate Bill 868) to legalize balcony solar , a form of DIY clean energy that’s t … | Continue reading
Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a slate of bills meant to expand virtual power plants that could offset the state’s fast-rising electricity costs. Will he do the same this year? Earlier this month, two virtual power plant bills made it through a key legislative hu … | Continue reading
Thousands of feet beneath the desert valley of southwest Utah, a slender tool tucked inside a drill pipe is barreling through hot granite. The rod-shaped device, built by the startup Hephae Energy Technology , is a tracker of sorts, wirelessly sending data to help operators above … | Continue reading
For nearly two decades, Maine has tried to build utility-scale wind in the northern reaches of the state. On Tuesday morning, utility regulators brought that vision a little closer to reality, choosing an 800-megawatt wind farm proposal and a 1.2-gigawatt transmission line plan f … | Continue reading
This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s newsletter. Repeated record-breaking heat waves cooked the European continent this summer, delivering the region’s hottest June on record. A simultaneous, though possibly related , drought shriveled rivers to … | Continue reading
A troubling trend has shown up in some communities around the U.S.: Public officials are being inundated with seemingly fake public feedback that aims to block renewable energy and promote fossil fuels. In Ohio, one of the states grappling with this issue, regulators have done l … | Continue reading
A thousand solar roofs per week. That was the pace Elon Musk predicted Tesla would install its electricity-generating roof tiles in 2020, more than three years after he unveiled the product to great fanfare on the set of the TV show Desperate Housewives. That estimate fell flat. … | Continue reading
The country’s biggest energy market has a problem: It can’t build enough power plants to keep up with electricity demand. For PJM Interconnection’s 67 million customers across 13 states, the consequences are ever-higher utility bills. For PJM itself, it’s unrelenting political p … | Continue reading
California and Texas have led the charge on America's grid battery revolution . Now, a third state is racing to catch up: Arizona. The Grand Canyon State installed more battery capacity than every state besides Texas over the first half of 2026, per a Canary Media analysis of U.S … | Continue reading
A $500 million Biden-era grant to decarbonize steelmaking has been refashioned by the Trump administration to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio. On Friday, Cleveland-Cliffs confirmed that the U.S. Department of Energy had changed the scope of the previously aw … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. The U.S. depends on hydroelectric power — and ever-worsening drought is threatening its supply. The western half of the country has faced a water crisis for years, and … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . It’s a tough time to build renewable energy in the U.S. In 2026 alone, the Trump administration has phased out tax credits , frozen clean-energy permitting , and issued tariffs certain to raise the cost of solar — whi … | Continue reading
Last month, grid operator PJM Interconnection unveiled a long-awaited proposal to prevent data centers from spiking power prices — but the plan largely relies on states to give it teeth . Pennsylvania, one of the biggest states in PJM’s 13-state territory, is taking up that chal … | Continue reading
Heat pumps are a key way to get fossil fuels out of buildings — and the tech recently notched a win in the U.S. housing market. 2025 marked the first year that over half the apartment buildings constructed nationwide came equipped with the überefficient electric appliances , acc … | Continue reading
For the better part of the year, Duke Energy’s bid to jack up electric rates in North Carolina has been hotly contested by politicians, consumer advocates, and the public at large. Under the utility’s latest proposal before state regulators, the average Duke residential customer … | Continue reading
LANSING, Mich. — The Trump administration has made clear its disdain for electric vehicles and clean energy. Yet at the grand opening of South Korea–based LG Energy Solution’s latest battery manufacturing facility, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cheered the factory as a fulfillme … | Continue reading
Sage Geosystems has hit a big milestone out on a rugged tract near San Antonio: The startup is producing power from its first next-generation geothermal plant. The system is just the third of its kind to come online in the U.S. as the sector races to commercialize the source of o … | Continue reading
This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here. Inside the vast Qcells factory in Cartersville, Georgia, workers — and a bevy of robots — move ultrathin slices of polysilicon through a lengthy series of machines and chemical baths to … | Continue reading
Next-generation geothermal energy has massive potential in the western United States, but it won’t be realized unless developers can overcome the big economic barriers these novel systems face. Unlike traditional geothermal plants, next-gen projects use innovative underground te … | Continue reading
California, with its sky-high electricity prices, isn’t facing the same influx of data centers that many other states are. But the massive facilities are still being built and proposed in California — and legislators are racing to stop them from pushing up utility rates and pollu … | Continue reading
California’s Democratic candidate for governor, Xavier Becerra, is borrowing a page from Australia with a new plan to give state residents free electricity during certain parts of the day. Last week, Becerra unveiled a proposal to offer up to two free hours of electricity per da … | Continue reading
The waters of Boston Harbor, most famous for the crates of tea hurled rebelliously into them more than 250 years ago, could soon be the site of a whole new kind of disruption. “We’re launching a thermal revolution,” said Zeyneb Magavi, executive director of the Home Energy Effic … | Continue reading
Following a key legal deadline last Friday, the stage is now set for the Ohio Power Siting Board to make a final decision about whether the state’s largest solar and energy storage project to date can move ahead. The OPSB initially approved the Oak Run Solar Project in March 202 … | Continue reading
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. The data center elections are officially upon us. Public frustration with data centers has been simmering, and in recent months it has become increasingly clear that t … | Continue reading
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Last fall, as generous federal incentives for consumer cleantech were set to expire, people raced to lock in good deals on EVs and rooftop solar . Then, this year, sales cratered. But home batteries bucked the trend. … | Continue reading
This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter. A few years ago, environmental scientist Elliot Campbell went around asking people why they would, or would not, switch to an electric vehicle. A surprising number of them asked him a questi … | Continue reading
A recent ruling from federal regulators will let virtual power plants help meet surging energy demand in the county’s biggest energy market. Late last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered PJM Interconnection to accept statistical sampling as a valid method for … | Continue reading
It's almost an ironclad law: Over time, wind turbines get taller, better, and more cost-effective. A new proposed project in the U.K. demonstrates that. ScottishPower recently announced its intention to repower the U.K.’s largest onshore wind farm, a process that will involve re … | Continue reading