Current conditions: New York City is bracing for triple-digit heat in some parts of the five boroughs this week • The warm-up along the East Coast could worsen the drought parching the country’s southeastern shores • After Sunday reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the war-ravaged G … | Continue reading
Certainty, certainty, certainty — three things that are of paramount importance for anyone making an investment decision. There’s little of it to be found in the renewable energy business these days.The main vectors of uncertainty are obvious enough — whipsawing trade policy, pro … | Continue reading
The Department of Energy has an enviable problem: It has more money than it can spend.DOE disbursed just 2% of its total budgetary resources in fiscal year 2025, according to a report released earlier this year from the EFI Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks innovations in energ … | Continue reading
The Trump administration is trying to ease data centers’ power permitting burden. It’s likely to speed things up. Whether it’ll kick up more dust for the industry is literally up in the air.On Tuesday, the EPA proposed a rule change that would let developers of all stripes start … | Continue reading
1. Berkeley County, South Carolina – Forget about Richland County, Ohio. All eyes in Solar World should be on this county where officials are trying to lift a solar moratorium.Berkeley County instituted a solar moratorium in 2023. Now RWE is asking the county to lift the moratori … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Utah state senator Nate Blouin – a candidate for the Democratic nomination to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Salt Lake City. I reached out to Blouin amidst the outpouring of public attention on the Box Elder Count … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Winds topping 60 miles per hour are howling through the mountains in Montana and the Dakotas • An early heatwave in the Central United States is driving temperatures in Texas and Oklahoma as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit • Though it’s still early in the seaso … | Continue reading
The Beijing Auto Show is now the world’s largest auto show — and its most important. It’s where China’s automakers show off their new innovations and newest models to a huge audience of domestic consumers and global influencers. As one attendee observed, there were more EV models … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:[00:47] Hello, it’s … | Continue reading
The electrification of semi trucks started with baby steps. First came EV semis for short-haul routes, those where the vehicle can do all its business on a single charge. We’re talking big rigs that make drayage runs to ferry shipping containers between ports and nearby warehouse … | Continue reading
Up until last September, Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission had gone 14 years without approving a large-scale wind project. But when they met to review the 456 public comments submitted for Badger Hollow, a 118-megawatt project that would straddle Iowa and Grant counties, they … | Continue reading
Current conditions: It’s pouring in Boston today, with temperatures that could feel as low as 47 degrees Fahrenheit • Severe flooding in Turkey’s Samsun province has sent a dozen people to the hospital • Bear season in Yellowstone has started earlier than usual, raising the risk … | Continue reading
Even in its frontier days, when it was a camp for General Zachary Taylor’s forces defending the border of newly annexed Texas, there was barely enough water in Corpus Christi to go around. The Tejanos, Americanos, and old Spanish ranchers crazy (or unlucky) enough to settle on th … | Continue reading
Just three years ago, enthusiasm for geothermal energy was lukewarm at best. In a sign of just how marginal it seemed, the firehose of federal money directed at clean energy investments under the Biden administration contained just $84 million for geothermal, specifically for nex … | Continue reading
The Trump administration is not backing down from its discriminatory policies for approving wind and solar projects. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified to Congress on Wednesday that his agency would appeal a recent district court ruling blocking it from enforcing these poli … | Continue reading
The Trump administration is not backing down from its discriminatory policies for approving wind and solar projects. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified to Congress on Wednesday that his agency would appeal a recent district court ruling blocking it from enforcing these poli … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The heat wave driving temperatures into the triple digits in the Southwest is moving northward to the Mountain West • Temperatures in Timbuktu are forecast to hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit as Mali devolves into a civil war between the government and Islamist mili … | Continue reading
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for months. Yet oil is trading — at least as of late Tuesday — at under $110 a barrel. Why haven’t the markets responded more to the biggest supply disruption of all time? Is it a credit to President Trump, and does it give us any clues to how … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:[0:47] Hello, it’s W … | Continue reading
We’re about to find out whether progressive energy populism can flip control of Congress. Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Maine, released an energy plan on Friday calling for a “national electricity rate freeze” to deal with high power … | Continue reading
Somewhere in Virginia, Texas, or Arizona, a data center is being commissioned this month that will draw more power than a small city. The server racks inside will train and run artificial intelligence models for years to come. And the electrons feeding it will, in all likelihood, … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A wildfire dubbed the Max Road Fire in the Everglades has torched more than 5,000 acres of the treasured Florida wetlands • Contrary to its name, Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego is bracing for light snow today at the southern tip of the Americas • An unseasonable … | Continue reading
When Trump won a second term, nobody quite knew exactly what havoc he would wreak on the climate tech industry — only that its prospects looked deeply unstable. After all, he’d alternately derided and praised electric vehicles, accused offshore wind turbines of killing whales, an … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas as a heat wave settles over the Southwest • In India’s northwest Gujarat state, thermometers are soaring as high as 112 degrees • Fire season in the U.S. state of Oregon has officially begun, wee … | Continue reading
When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, researchers estimated it would cut U.S. carbon pollution by more than 40% by the mid-2030s. Then President Trump and a GOP majority partially repealed the law, and many of those emissions declines looked doubtful. What wil … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:[0:46] Hello, it’s M … | Continue reading
Microsoft celebrated a “milestone achievement” earlier this year, when it announced that it had successfully matched 100% of its 2025 electricity usage with renewable energy. This past week, however, Bloomberg reported that the company was considering delaying or abandoning its n … | Continue reading
We’ve already talked this week about Pennsylvania asking whether the modern “regulatory compact,” which grants utilities monopoly geographical franchises and regulated returns from their capital investments, is still suitable in this era of rising prices and data-center-driven lo … | Continue reading
Following a quiet week for new deals, the industry is back at it with a bunch of capital flowing into some of the industry’s most active areas. My colleague Alexander C. Kaufman already told you about one of the more buzzworthy announcements from data center-land in Wednesday’s A … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A series of tornadoes has flattened entire neighborhoods in central and southern Mississippi, causing what one pastor called “just total devastation” • The heat index across the northern half of the Philippines’ main island of Luzon could feel as high as 122 d … | Continue reading
1. Benton County, Washington – The bellwether for Trump’s apparent freeze on new wind might just be a single project in Washington State: the Horse Heaven wind farm. Intrepid Fight readers should remember that late last year Rep. Dan Newhouse, an influential Republican in the U.S … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Nick Loris, head of the conservative policy organization C3 Solutions. I wanted to chat with Loris about how he and others in the so-called “eco right” are approaching the data center boom. For years, groups like C3 have occupied a mercurial, infl … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump is now effectively blocking any new wind projects in the United States, according to the main renewables trade group, using the federal government’s power over all things air and sky to grind a routine approval process to a screeching halt.So far, almost ev … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Colorado is digging out of its biggest snowstorm of the season, which dumped another six inches on Denver yesterday • Heavy rain and mudflows in Tajikistan have killed at least four people this week • Spring showers are drenching the Croatian island of Ugljan … | Continue reading
Electricity prices continued to climb higher in April, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. Prices in April 2026 were 6.7% higher, on average, than the same month the previous year. The 12-month trailing average, a measure that smooths out seasonal fluctuations i … | Continue reading
Data centers are getting larger and larger. But even so, few are as large as the Sentinel Grove Technology Park, a proposed data center near Port St. Lucie, Florida.The proposed facility — which became known as Project Jarvis — was set to be built on old agricultural land. It wou … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The East Coast’s Acela corridor is cooling down this week, with temperatures dropping from 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Philadelphia yesterday to the 60s for the rest of the week • Cape Agulhas is under one of South Africa’s Orange Level 6 warnings for damaging wi … | Continue reading
If you work around climate or clean energy, you probably know about John Arnold. Although he began his career as a natural gas trader, Arnold has since become one of the country’s most important clean energy investors. He’s the chairman of Grid United, a transmission development … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer: Hello, it's Wednesd … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer: Hello, it's Wednesd … | Continue reading
What are utilities anyway? And what are they supposed to do? Elected officials, regulators, utility executives, and scholars are asking fundamental questions about the so-called “regulatory compact” that has governed electric utilities for — depending on who you ask — decades or … | Continue reading
Two thousand miles from Detroit, just across the road from the runways of Long Beach Airport, the future of Ford is taking shape. What that shape is, however, the company isn’t quite ready to share yet.Last week, the automaker invited some members of the car press inside the secr … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are drenching the American South from New Orleans to Virginia Beach • Mount Mayon has forced thousands to evacuate within the Philippines’ Bicol peninsula • Temperatures in Denver are poised to plunge from about 75 degrees Fahrenheit yeste … | Continue reading
The chemicals industry, which accounts for about 5% of global emissions, can seem like a black box. Fossil fuel-based feedstocks go in and out pop plastic toys or agricultural fertilizer or laundry detergent. But most of us don’t understand what happens in between. That’s the par … | Continue reading
It is a cliché that everyone in the insurance industry believes in climate change. But the same can certainly be said of those in the mountain-guiding business. May marks the beginning of the recreational mountaineering season on Washington’s Mount Rainier, the most popular techn … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The weekend’s polar vortex chill in New York City is over as temperatures are set to hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit today, your humble correspondent’s birthday • A winter storm blanketing the Sierra Nevadas with as much as four feet of snow on Interstate 80’s Donne … | Continue reading
From beaming solar power down from space to shooting storm clouds full of particles to make it rain, this week featured progress across a range of seemingly sci-fi technologies that have actually been researched — and in some cases deployed — for decades. There were, however, few … | Continue reading
The need for desalination has long been clear in water-scarce regions of the planet. But with roughly a quarter of the global population now facing extreme water stress and drought conditions only projected to intensify, the technology is becoming an increasingly necessary tool f … | Continue reading