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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 could pay about $10 more on their…
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 , according to U.S. Census Bureau data .…
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 fulfillment of the president’s agenda. “That’s…
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 on-demand clean electricity. The novel…
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 get what are known as cells. “The…
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 techniques to produce power wherever…
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 day, starting with low-income families.…
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 pollution. Two major data center bills…
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 2024, but the case has since been bogged…
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 Efficiency Team, or HEET, a Boston-based…
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 the topic would reshape the 2026…
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 question in return: Because building an EV…
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. Federal tax credits for residential…
America’s aluminum sector is growing again after years of decline, spurred by tariffs and a push to revive domestic manufacturing. But the voracious power needs of aluminum smelters and communities’ concerns about pollution still pose major hurdles to scaling up production. Globally, a deficit in aluminum supply is…
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 replacing old turbines with…
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 measuring the reliability of programs…
Krzysztof Wasowicz, mayor of Justice, Illinois, has some concerns about solar: that it takes up farmland and enriches China. But he’s all-in on the community solar array that was recently deployed at a Public Storage facility in his village, a suburb of Chicago. The panels are located on otherwise unused roof space…
The Department of Energy is backing a major battery project to bolster Puerto Rico’s fragile electric grid — even as the Trump administration axes funding for key clean energy initiatives across the U.S. territory. Last week, the DOE said it closed a nearly $490 million loan to a subsidiary of Pattern Energy to…
California lawmakers are once again contending with how to curb the state’s high energy costs as they hurtle toward the end of this year’s legislative session on Aug. 31. So what’s on the table for utility rate reform in the final stretch? Enter Senate Bill 905 , a complicated package of proposals that are likely to…
Illinois had big plans to turn a bunch of old coal plant sites into solar and battery farms. But the program has turned out to be kind of a bust. The state created its Coal to Solar and Energy Storage Initiative five years ago, hoping it would speed clean energy deployment by making use of the grid infrastructure…
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. When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in…
Stew Miller, who launched his North Carolina rooftop solar company in the 2000s, says there’s “a lot of negativity” in his industry right now — and it’s easy to see why. A year ago, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminating the 30% federal tax credit for households who buy rooftop panels. That…
In many ways the world's oldest cheddar-maker hews to tradition. Since 1833, Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers has operated from the rolling green pastures of southwest England, milking grass-fed cows and fermenting the milk with microbial starters passed down for generations. That heritage has led to award-winning…
A far-reaching new tariff on solar imports promises to both raise the cost of installing the clean energy source and strengthen efforts to reshore solar manufacturing. The White House announced the new tariffs Thursday on imported polysilicon and related products, including silicon-based solar panels and their…
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. Ford’s first all-electric pickup truck didn’t exactly fly off the lot. The automaker is hoping a lower-cost model will fare better. On Thursday, the automaker rolled out a first look at its forthcoming…
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . This story and map will be regularly updated with the latest on the Trump administration’s orders forcing coal plants to stay open. It was shocking back in May 2025 when the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of forcing an old coal plant to…
The U.S. Department of Defense has for months refused to conduct routine military evaluations of proposed onshore wind farms, creating a de facto moratorium on the clean energy source at a time of exploding electricity demand. On Thursday, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump ordered the agency to…
When the Trump administration issued stop-work orders on all five offshore wind projects under construction late last year, it offered one justification: The turbines could compromise national security. Experts were immediately critical of this assertion , not least because it came after months of unrelenting…
Oklo , a publicly traded small-modular-reactor firm backed by OpenAI chief Sam Altman, has become one of the highest-profile companies working on next-generation nuclear energy technologies. Two years ago, it debuted on the stock market and became retail investors’ go-to for betting on America’s atomic renaissance. …
In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it. In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded…
Steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was supposed to use up to $500 million from a Biden administration grant to usher in cleaner steelmaking in southwestern Ohio. Now, the company plans to instead put those funds toward a project that locks in old coal-based tech for decades and amps up local air pollution. In a July 23…
Signs of the momentum behind virtual power plants (VPPs) are everywhere. States including New Jersey, Virginia, and Illinois are advancing legislation and regulations designed to accelerate VPP adoption, hoping to seize the potential of aggregated and managed distributed energy resources (DERs) to simultaneously meet…
PJM Interconnection, the biggest grid operator in the U.S., has finally settled on a plan to prevent data centers from causing other customers’ utility bills to soar further in its 13-state territory. That plan relies heavily on states themselves, and the utilities they regulate, to force data centers to secure…
Home battery startup Base Power seems constitutionally incapable of standing still. After raising $1 billion last October, the Texas company has raised another $1 billion, and upped its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion. The latest investment, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and…
A federal appeals court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency acted improperly in terminating billions of dollars of “green bank” financing last year, setting up a potential showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court over one of the Trump administration's earliest attacks on a key Biden-era climate program.…
Valar Atomics, the three-year-old microreactor developer that has a forged a close relationship with the Trump administration, has raised $1 billion in its Series B funding round as investors increasingly bet that the White House’s overhaul of nuclear regulations will clear the way for the country’s first big atomic…
A year ago, most Wisconsin residents thought little about data centers, according to local leaders and journalists. But today, the computing facilities — and where they get their energy — are a key issue in the hotly contested Aug. 11 Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. At a lively town hall last week in…
When Marsha Gleason and her husband decided it was time to downsize from the 2,000-square-foot bungalow where they’d lived for the past 40 years, they didn’t head to Florida or research local retirement communities. Instead, they looked to their own backyard. The pair sold their house in Northborough, Massachusetts,…
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Geothermal company Zanskar bought a New Mexico power plant in 2024 that appeared from the outside to be failing. The shallow wells had been rapidly losing heat, and the plant was having trouble…
Any time, day or night, parents experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, or other emergencies can drop their young kids off at the Crisis Nursery in Urbana, Illinois, and know they’ll be safe and cared for. Funding is a constant challenge for the 45-year-old nonprofit organization. But it was able to create a…
As the world’s data center capital, Virginia faces a surge in energy demand that could spike power costs and lead to more polluting fossil fuel plants. At the same time, the state is seeing its farmland disappear at one of the fastest rates in the United States. The two problems may seem unrelated, but Old Dominion…
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. In rural areas across the U.S., solar power opponents keep leaning on the argument that utility-scale arrays are gobbling up valuable farmland. But plenty of evidence proves that’s just not true, and now,…
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . While the Trump administration is busy pointing out that the sun doesn’t shine at night , solar is breaking records around the world, including in sunny California. Solar panels produced 51% of California’s electricity in May, the first time the clean…
The startup Antora Energy just raised $550 million to build and deploy more of its heat-storing batteries for powering data centers and cleaning up factories. On Thursday, San Jose, California–based Antora said it closed a Series C funding round co-led by climatetech investor G2 Venture Partners and the VC firm…
Construction is underway on a $1.7 billion solar and battery storage project in Texas that will turn existing coal mining land into a hub of clean energy generation. Panamint Capital announced last week that it broke ground on the 1.2-gigawatt Big Rooter Power solar farm in Bremond, about halfway between Dallas and…
Almost every station on the factory floor of Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ northeast Massachusetts headquarters was bustling on a steamy Friday morning in June. Hard-hatted workers ferried along the components for the company’s first fusion reactor, including giant slabs of magnets that will eventually be joined…
Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration has banned the import and domestic use of new power inverters made outside the United States. The move could throw sand in the gears of gigawatts’ worth of planned solar, wind, and battery installations — projects that make up the vast majority of new…
Just northeast of Columbus, Ohio, the leafy Main Street of New Albany gives way to lush green fields and agrarian ponds — but soon the countryside transitions into mile after mile of enormous white boxes that emit a low hum. This patch of former farmland has become one of the densest clusters of AI computing in the…
So, how’s that clean energy transition going? It’s the essential inquiry that drives anyone reporting on climate solutions, and it got considerably more difficult to answer after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. He’s done everything in his power (and some things that legally aren’t ) to undercut…
Indiana — a state with a long history of coal mining and coal-fired power — has started undergoing a clean energy transition in recent years. It was among the top three states for solar installation last year, and more than a dozen coal plants have closed since 2010. But the state government’s eager embrace of data…