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New Jersey has become the sixth state in the last decade, and the second this year, to fully repeal its moratorium on building new nuclear power stations.
On a crisp Wednesday morning at the Hope Creek Generating Station in the southwestern corner of the state, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation lifting the de facto ban that barred construction of new reactors until the United States established a permanent solution for radioactive spent fuel. The Democrat, who campaigned last year on building new nuclear power capacity in the state, said the prohibitions had outlived any usefulness.
“For too long, outdated laws have kept us from even considering new nuclear facilities,” Sherrill said, as steam billowed from the station’s hyperboloid cooling tower behind her. “One law required any new projects to point to a method of disposal that, quite literally, does not exist. It was written in the 1970s, tied to a technological requirement that made sense then but not today.”
Located along a crook in the Delaware River, south of Wilmington, Delaware, and north of where the waterway widens into a bay, the single-reactor Hope Creek plant sits on an artificial island alongside the two-reactor Salem Nuclear Power Plant. Both stations are owned by the utility giant PSEG. Combined, the two generating facilities produce 40% of New Jersey’s electricity and 80% of its carbon-free power.
The Garden State enacted one of the nation’s earliest bans on new atomic power back in the 1970s, when the U.S. was still building out its fleet of reactors without any real plan for dealing with the long-lived radioactive waste piling up in glowing blue pools at plants around the country. At the time, state lawmakers amended the Coastal Area Facility Review Act to require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish methods for radioactive waste disposal before new construction permits could be issued. Sherrill called the condition “an outdated standard that cannot be met.”
In the 1980s, the federal government took possession of all nuclear waste, and it designated Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert as the first location for a permanent repository. Work finally began on the facility in the 2000s under then-President George W. Bush. But President Barack Obama then yanked support from the project shortly after taking office, in a move that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later determined was made for political, not technical, reasons. The U.S. effort to deal with waste has remained largely paralyzed since. The law stipulates that Yucca Mountain must be the first destination for nuclear waste, preventing the government from shifting focus to another location. But few, if any, lawmakers have mustered the political support to volunteer a site in their own states to replace it as the nation’s premier tomb for radioactive material.
Instead, federal efforts have recently pivoted toward recycling and reprocessing. Starting under the Biden administration and accelerated under Trump, a nascent industry of startups is forming around the promise to extract valuable medical isotopes from radioactive waste and turn the material into fresh reactor fuel. The Department of Energy just last week ended a contest for states to submit applications to host nuclear innovation campuses that include fuel enrichment and recycling facilities.
If banning nuclear plants made sense 49 years ago, when the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels weren’t yet fully understood, the availability of intermediate storage containers — many of which are produced in New Jersey, at manufacturer Holtec International’s factory in Camden — makes the point of the state law moot.
“It’s a textbook example of the kind of inefficient government I ran to change,” Sherrill said. “This bill requires projects to use safe, cutting-edge storage methods instead — methods that have been used thousands of times in over 35 states for the last 40 years with a 100% safety record.”
State lawmakers first tweaked the statute last year to open the door to development of small modular reactors, a type of as-yet-unbuilt machine that artificially caps the output per unit at 300 megawatts in a bid to spur developers to place bulk purchases. A failed bill first introduced in December aimed to both rescind the moratorium and establish a new tax credit for advanced nuclear power generation that would help finance construction of at least 1,100 megawatts of new capacity. That particular number matches the output from a Westinghouse AP1000, the leading U.S. reactor design and the only third-generation model in operation in the country.
The site where Hope Creek and Salem are located has room for at least one more large-scale reactor, said Samuel Roland, a research fellow who tracked New Jersey’s nuclear bill at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning Washington, D.C.–based think tank.
“My sense is that there’s a strong push toward another full AP1000-style reactor at Salem just because they already have the space cleared for it,” he said.
The structure of New Jersey’s electricity market makes building a nuclear reactor challenging. Like much of the U.S., New Jersey broke up its monopoly utilities in the late 1990s, allowing for more competition between generators within its statewide market, which is part of the nation’s largest grid operator, the 13-state PJM Interconnection. That system favors cheap, easily built power infrastructure. Unlike in the mid-20th century, when monopoly companies saw ever-expanding profits from growing electricity demand, today utilities’ balance sheets aren’t typically large enough to shoulder the risk of a multibillion-dollar reactor project. Nuclear construction flatlined in every state that liberalized its electricity market.
That makes tax credits with early or up-front payments a potential tool to encourage new reactors in New Jersey, Roland said. The risk with any major electrical infrastructure project like this, he said, is that the state’s Board of Public Utilities allows too much of the cost to be added to customers’ bills.
“The question just comes down to modeling here: What is the structure that’s most beneficial to New Jersey ratepayers?” Roland said. “Obviously, you have a lot of hyperscalers who are looking for energy and could be an anchor tenant and help pay for it.”
The bill Sherrill signed on Wednesday doesn’t answer that question. Instead, it simply eliminates the need for a permanent waste-disposal strategy to come before a new reactor. But she also signed an executive order establishing a task force to “convene leaders from government, industry, the environment, and labor” to study how to improve financing and supply chains, workforce training, permitting frameworks, and public trust.
“Safe nuclear can produce clean stable power at a predictable cost, protected from global price swings,” Sherrill said.
New Jersey isn’t alone. Across the Hudson River, New York has sought to leverage its state-owned New York Power Authority to help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear, part of a broader state plan to build 5 GW of reactors in the next two decades. California, which just won federal approval to keep its last nuclear station open for another two decades, is weighing a bill that would lift the state’s moratorium on building new ones. Minnesota is considering the same. While five New England states still restrict nuclear construction, all six signed a pact last month to explore the possibility.
Since 2016, five states — Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, and, most recently, in January, Illinois — have fully repealed their moratoria.
A clarification was made on April 10, 2026: This story has been updated to reflect that the New York Power Authority will help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear.
Balcony solar is one of the hottest ideas in renewable energy right now. Boosters say the systems — DIY kits that can be plugged right into a standard outlet — save users money without any need for subsidies, government incentives, or utility permission.
As Americans continue to struggle with soaring power prices, about half the states in the U.S. are considering legislation to pave the way for residents to adopt plug-in solar and start generating some of their own electricity from their own backyard or porch.
“It’s about energy affordability,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that promotes plug-in solar. “Every legislator wants their constituency to have less trouble meeting their energy demands.”
As these efforts work their way through the legislative process, we will be monitoring the action here, using information from Bright Saver and bill-tracking databases.
Latest action: Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) signed the state’s plug-in solar bill into law on April 6.
The Trump administration has often evoked the plight of whales in its efforts to undermine U.S. offshore wind development — despite there being no evidence that wind-farm activities are harming the giant mammals.
But those purported concerns didn’t stop federal officials last week from voting unanimously to override Endangered Species Act protections for imperiled whales in order to unleash oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive fossil-fuel production there is already known to hurt cetaceans through vessel strikes, oil spills, and noises that lead to chronic stress.
The dissonance isn’t surprising.
In recent years, the well-being of whales has become a potent political weapon for President Donald Trump, Republican politicians, and right-wing groups to wield against America’s fledgling offshore wind industry. Yet those same factions haven’t fought with similar fervor, if at all, to protect whales from the real leading threats: marine-gear entanglements, boat collisions, and the effects of climate change.
Last week’s decision only highlights that whales were never really the point, environmentalists argue.
“I think it’s pretty clear they don’t care about marine species,” Michael Jasny, director of marine mammals for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the Trump administration.
On March 31, a committee of Trump-appointed officials voted to exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf from protections under the Endangered Species Act. The God Squad, so named because of its power to decide whether a species lives or dies, has convened only three other times since the landmark law was enacted over 50 years ago to prevent plant and animal extinctions.
The decision may not actually change that much on the ground for oil and gas companies developing and exploring resources in the Gulf. Operators are still expected to comply with existing measures to avoid and minimize environmental risks. These measures were set by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is in charge of planning offshore drilling operations, and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which provides regulatory oversight.
“It’s not going to be like the wild, wild west under this order,” said Seth Barsky, a partner at the Bracewell law firm and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department.
He said that a key reason for lifting the Endangered Species Act requirements was to shield oil and gas developers from having to potentially meet new environmental regulations that could force them to shut down. Environmental groups last year sued the National Marine Fisheries Services over its latest biological opinion — a document the agency was required to issue under the ESA to analyze how oil and gas activities could affect wildlife in the Gulf. The groups argued that the opinion failed to require stringent measures to protect endangered species.
The God Squad decision gives drillers certainty that the status quo will stick, Barsky said.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chaired the seven-member committee, which also included the U.S. secretaries of defense, agriculture, and the Army, as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Council of Economic Advisors.
The group claimed its decision was a “national security imperative.” Global energy markets have been in disarray since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas supplies flow.
Oil production in the Gulf “provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during the committee’s brief meeting. He said the lawsuits brought by environmental groups risk “halting or severely compromising oil and gas activities in the Gulf.”
America’s offshore oil production has soared in recent years, even with endangered species protections in place.
Just a day after the meeting, Burgum announced that the U.S. produced over 714 million barrels in 2025 — the highest annual output on record. Some 3,500 oil and gas structures are spread across the Gulf, pumping out “beaucoup buckets of Texas tea,” as the journalist Craig Pittman recently put it.
The Interior Department also said last week that it is combining two of its bureaus in order to increase efficiency and accelerate permitting for offshore energy development, while still “maintaining all existing regulatory protections and rigorous safety standards,” according to the April 3 announcement.
Expanding offshore oil and gas development will likely only exacerbate the threats facing endangered whales, manatees, and five species of sea turtles in the Gulf, according to the fisheries agency’s biological opinion. Collisions with oil industry vessels in particular could “jeopardize the continued existence” of the endangered Rice’s whale, of which only 51 are estimated to remain.
The number of Rice’s whales has declined considerably since the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and subsequent cleanup efforts. Its tiny population size makes it harder for the species to bounce back from oil-industry disruptions.
The God Squad’s main argument — that energy security trumps all else — is similar to the “downside emphasis” tactic that fossil fuel companies use to delay climate action, said Alaina Kinol, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston who studies resistance to climate policy.
“It’s this idea that if we take climate action, it’s going to really hurt us, or it’s going to hurt marginalized people, or that [fossil fuels] are necessary for society,” she said.
She noted that even as the Trump administration pushes to boost fossil fuel production, it is undermining efforts to develop other domestic sources of energy like renewables. Since 2025, the GOP-led Congress has worked to repeal or scale back much of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars in federal incentives for wind and solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and other clean energy programs.
“That implies that this is really about supporting the oil and gas industry’s ability to extract fossil fuels from the Gulf,” Kinol said.
In the last year, the Interior Department has frozen almost all offshore wind development in the country, and Trump himself has regularly cited the health of whales as a key motivation for this. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy,” Trump said in January 2025, weeks before signing an executive order pausing federal permitting and new leasing for offshore wind farms.
More recent actions to stymie existing projects have used broad and ill-defined concerns about national security as the pretext.
The department has even tried — so far unsuccessfully — to halt construction of five in-progress offshore wind projects totaling nearly 6 gigawatts of capacity, even though those projects represent a crucial new energy source for densely populated and land-constrained East Coast states. Earlier this year, during a brutal cold snap, power plants fueled by fossil gas, oil, and coal were nearly pushed to the brink, a strain that existing offshore wind turbines helped alleviate in some places.
The double standard is a familiar move for the Trump administration, which has previously used the specter of bald eagle deaths to crack down on wind turbines while also easing the protections for the birds that could interfere with oil and gas production. The federal government has also quietly gutted key research programs meant to protect North Atlantic right whales and other marine mammals living in an increasingly industrialized ocean.
The God Squad decision is already facing legal challenges, and experts say it’s unclear whether this unprecedented maneuver will stand up in court. The Center for Biological Diversity, which initially sued to stop the meeting from happening, said it would amend its lawsuit to challenge last week’s outcome. The Natural Resources Defense Council also plans to take legal action, Jasny said.
The move to exempt Gulf oil and gas development from Endangered Species Act protections is likely a “test case” to see what the Trump administration can get away with, he added. The government is also looking to open up oil and gas operations off the coast of Alaska to flex America’s “energy dominance” and off California’s coast to protect Americans’ “energy security.”
“If the administration can allow the killing of [endangered] sea turtles and whales in the Gulf,” Jasny said, “then there’s no end to what this really dangerous development can lead to.”
If the U.S. is going to decarbonize, tens of millions of homes across the nation will need to make the switch from fossil fuel furnaces and boilers to all-electric heat pumps. California alone has set a goal to deploy 6 million of the superefficient appliances by 2030.
But such retrofits can be complicated to navigate and cost thousands of dollars more than purchasing new fossil fuel equipment.
That has some companies looking to design heat pumps that are easier and cheaper to install. Today, one of those firms, San Francisco–based Merino Energy, announced the launch of its flagship product, the Merino Mono.
The Merino heat pump is a single-room system, as opposed to the popular ducted and ductless whole-home systems. A key feature is that, unlike whole-home heat pumps, the Mono doesn’t require a large outdoor unit to move heat into or out of living spaces. Instead, it’s installed through the exterior of a building, and the portion that would normally live outdoors is tucked into the unit itself.
Merino is offering its heat pumps for a flat rate of $3,800, which — unusually — includes the cost of professional installation. A certified contractor can get the system up and running in under an hour, according to the company.
“The price tag to do regular ductless is just way too high. This really drops the cost,” said Owen Krebs Grimsich, founder and CEO of 1-888-Heat-Pumps, an installation partner with Merino Energy.
Krebs Grimsich’s company will soon deploy Merino heat pumps at a 10-unit building. “If we were to have done ductless, we would have had to open up a whole bunch of walls and put these outdoor units in really funky places. And then we would’ve had to run the electrical in really weird ways, because you have to connect the indoor and outdoor units,” he said. But with the Merino heat pumps, “it just immediately became a very quick and easy project.”
The Mono was born of necessity, said Merino co-founder and CEO Mary-Ann Rau.
In 2023, Rau, a former firmware engineer at tech giant Apple and ductless heat-pump startup Quilt, tried to get a heat pump system installed at her 1906 Victorian home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. But the complex job was quoted at $40,000. She couldn’t justify that price point, she said.
Soon after, Rau met up for coffee with her neighbor Brad Hall, a former hardware designer at financial platform Square and director of mechanical engineering at window heat-pump startup Gradient. His path to heat-pump ownership had dead-ended, too, thanks to high upfront costs and space constraints. So Rau and Hall decided to found Merino Energy in 2024 to create the product they both wanted.
Fast-forward to today. Each co-founder has at least one prototype Merino heat pump at home.
“We both are living on the product, which is how we know that it solves our pain points and validates that it can solve a lot of other homeowners’ pain points as well,” Rau said. She added that covering the majority of her home with the Mono would come out to less than half the $40,000 she was quoted for a ductless system.
The co-founders were largely inspired by an existing heat-pump design: packaged terminal heat pumps, Rau said. Commonly found in hotels and hospitals, these units combine all components in one container installed through a building’s wall.
Although this type of heat pump can cost less than $1,000 and is relatively simple to use in new construction, putting it in existing buildings typically requires cutting through load-bearing studs, Rau said. Contractors have to take special care to structurally reinforce the compromised wall, adding cost and complexity.
The geometry of the Mono leaves studs intact. Installers drill two vents, each 6 inches in diameter, between the studs of an exterior wall. These holes allow the Mono to exchange thermal energy with the ambient air. What’s visible indoors is a sleek, white air handler.
Like other room heat pumps, the Merino units plug into a standard 120-volt wall outlet. At max, it can pull 900 watts and serve a 350-square-foot space, Rau said. Installing a flock of them can allow a home to avoid an expensive electrical service upgrade that a ductless system might incur, she added.
The unit is particularly well-suited to urban buildings with limited outdoor space and restrictive property rules, Rau said, such as historic homes, condos, and accessory dwelling units. The product is designed for mild and moderate climates like California’s. New York City, by contrast, is using cold-climate window heat pumps from Gradient and Midea to decarbonize public housing. And last year, Boston also contracted Gradient, paying $5,450 per heat pump.
Rau said the Mono is being made in China but declined to name the manufacturer. She also punted on how much the two-person startup has raised from investors, though PitchBook put the figure at just under $1.8 million.
Merino already has its first retrofit project underway. Novin Development selected the startup to deploy its heat pumps in Civic Center Apartments, which will house low-income residents in Richmond, California, Rau said.
1-888-Heat-Pumps is outfitting the building’s 48 studio units with a heat pump each. His team is able to complete four to five installations per day, Krebs Grimsich said. He expects to finish the job by the end of this week.
So far, six contractors have partnered with Merino, according to the startup. It’s aiming to train many more in the coming months.
The company is first targeting California before expanding geographically, according to Rau. The Golden State could prove an especially fertile testing ground as it works to transform the market for room heat pumps.
Individuals who reserve a Merino Mono with a $38 deposit can get their heat pump as soon as this winter, Rau said. If demand materializes, the startup will be ready, she added: “This year alone, we could manufacture up to 50,000 units if we needed to.”
In western Illinois, ComEd is tapping a rarely used technique to fast-track community solar installations — working with, not against, environmental groups and solar project developers.
For years, utilities have explored the concept of flexible interconnection, in which solar projects are allowed to come online even when, by the books, there’s not enough space on the grid for these arrays. In return, these solar farms must promise to curtail output during the handful of hours each year when their production would overwhelm power lines and substations.
Flexible interconnection is a speedy way to get cheap new solar online without requiring utilities to spend even more on costly grid upgrades, which are a key driver of the nation’s fast-rising utility bills.
But U.S. utilities haven’t made use of the technique at any significant scale — until ComEd got its program off the ground late last year.
Since then, the utility has fast-tracked more than 50 megawatts of community solar projects using flexible interconnection, and more are likely to be approved before federal tax credits sunset in July.
That’s much faster than utilities in other states have been able to move on flexible interconnection, said Samantha Weaver, senior director of interconnection and grid integration policy at the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a trade group representing community solar developers. In fact, ComEd is “leading the country right now,” she said.
ComEd plans to accelerate that work, said Jessie Bauer, the utility’s senior manager of smart grid and innovation. “Our plan was to do 50 megawatts a year, and we’re hitting that cadence,” he said. “We’re proposing in our grid plan to go even faster, and do 100 megawatts a year, and get to 650 megawatts by 2031.”
The utility has previously committed to deploying 240 megawatts of distributed energy capacity by 2030 to meet its requirements under Illinois’ landmark 2021 climate law.
ComEd was able to succeed where other utilities haven’t thanks to a nudge from regulators that spurred it to collaborate with solar developers and environmental groups.
Historically, utilities and solar developers have struggled to establish the basic mutual trust required to move a flexible interconnection program forward, Weaver said. Utilities are often skeptical that solar farms will reliably cut back as promised during those key hours of potential grid overload. Meanwhile, solar developers suspect utilities will force them offline more than is absolutely necessary.
Illinois’ flexible interconnection process didn’t go that way.
Instead, in 2024 ComEd collaborated with environmental groups represented by the consultancy Eclipse on a flexible interconnection plan. Then, the utility worked out mutually agreeable solutions with those groups, solar developers, and the nonprofit collaborative the Charged Initiative, in a series of workshops that resulted in a program design that gave each side enough of what they needed to move ahead.
Both the utility and solar developers had to make some compromises, Weaver said. But that effort bore its first fruit last November, when 27 megawatts of community solar was green-lit in a region where it would have been excluded by traditional processes. Another 25 megawatts of projects were approved in February.
This coordinated approach is now gaining some momentum in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and other states where community solar is struggling, said Nikhil Balakumar, Eclipse’s CEO and founder.
“Now, more than ever, especially in this climate, we need unprecedented collaboration,” Balakumar said. We can’t just slog it out and fight and litigate every little thing till the end of time. There has to be a new way forward.”
ComEd’s push into flexible interconnection was less a choice than a necessity.
Since 2016, Illinois has created and expanded programs that offer lucrative incentives to build community solar projects, which are generally limited to no larger than 5 megawatts. Households can subscribe directly to these projects, which often allow them to lock in cheaper, cleaner energy. The state’s programs are explicitly meant to reduce utility rates for low-income customers.
In Illinois, developers have flooded into the programs over the years, snapping up the most suitable land for community solar arrays.
This posed a problem for ComEd: Everyone wanted to build their solar arrays in the same relatively concentrated geographic area — the rural western reaches of its territory — where there simply wasn’t enough space on the grid.
“We quickly saw all that grid capacity evaporate with the community solar being connected,” Bauer said.
In a situation like this, the standard utility playbook is to require community solar developers to shell out for grid improvements. In western Illinois, that would mean multimillion-dollar system upgrades, he said — a cost that few solar developers can afford.
However, the grid actually does have the space to accommodate those solar farms — at least, most of the time.
Distribution grids are built to serve the times when electricity demand is at its highest. These peaks in demand are relatively rare, happening only during a handful of hours per day, or days per year. That means for the vast majority of the year, there’s unused capacity sitting there.
Flexible interconnection takes advantage of this fact — and helps developers and consumers avoid exorbitant grid upgrade costs as a result.
“If you can give up some of your energy during times of system constraints, you can interconnect much more affordably,” Bauer said.
But this is easier said than done. Utilities can’t perfectly predict how often demand will peak. They need flexibility to handle unexpected changes and respond to emergencies. A major storm or flood could knock out an entire substation for months, leaving other parts of the grid straining to supply power until it’s repaired.
That uncertainty constrains utilities from setting guaranteed limits on how often they’ll ask solar projects to curtail their generation. But for solar developers, “projects aren’t financeable if curtailment is unpredictable,” Weaver said. “We need certain details to be able to literally take to the bank.”
To resolve this conundrum, ComEd and solar developers collaborated on a compromise.
Solar developers calculated that they — and their investors — could bear having about 5% of their annual solar production curtailed. They conceded that ComEd couldn’t guarantee it would stick to that curtailment limit. But if the utility was willing to share historical data on how often its grid was likely to face overloads, developers could use that to convince those investors that the risk was worth taking.
That wasn’t the solar industry’s initial ask, Balakumar noted. Solar developers started out asking for “some sort of fund that compensates us if you do go over 5%,’” he said. But ComEd pays for the power it purchases by passing those costs on to its customers — and the prospect of charging customers for power that didn’t actually get onto the grid was a nonstarter for consumer advocates and regulators.
“We went in wanting a guarantee,” Weaver said. “But we came to the understanding that that wasn’t realistic and that we needed to give up a degree of certainty.”
Nor was it easy for ComEd to agree to sharing confidential data on its substations. Bauer said that process was helped along by community solar developers limiting what data they needed and how they would use it.
Already, the real-world data coming in from ComEd’s flexible interconnection projects could allow it to tighten curtailment expectations for future rounds of development, Bauer said. That could make community solar projects more lucrative to financial backers — and given that the alternative was to not be able to build them at all, or to wait for years for utility grid upgrades to plug them in, that’s better than nothing.
Regulated utilities like ComEd earn profits from the investments they make to expand or upgrade their power grids, not from connecting third-party solar projects. If anything, flexible interconnection exposes them to grid instability risks. Meanwhile, sharing data on how efficiently they utilize their grids can weaken the case for investing in moneymaking upgrades.
But in Illinois, policymakers and regulators forced ComEd’s hand.
Under the 2021 Clean Energy Jobs Act, ComEd and fellow utility Ameren Illinois must invest in their grids to improve customer affordability and meet state climate and clean energy goals. In 2023, the Illinois Commerce Commission rejected the initial grid modernization plans filed by ComEd and Ameren Illinois, because of critiques including an absence of commitments to streamline interconnection of distributed energy resources like community solar systems.
That’s when Eclipse started working with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Vote Solar, and other groups to get ComEd to the planning table, Balakumar said. The following year, these groups agreed to a memorandum of understanding with ComEd, which led to the joint plan submitted to regulators in late 2024.
ComEd then set up that workshop series with solar developers and environmental advocates over the course of 2025. That’s where parties hashed out their positions and came up with compromises that they could live with, Weaver said.
“To give credit where credit is due, the utility came with a lot of information and proposals they’d developed in advance for developers,” she said.
That included detailed information on the capabilities — and limits — of the utility’s technologies to make flexible interconnection possible, Bauer said. For example, one solar developer asked for hour-ahead forecasts of when the utility would curtail projects, he said. “We can do that in the future — in fact we plan to,” he said. But if ComEd had been forced to wait until it could warn solar projects that they would be curtailed an hour in advance, “we wouldn’t have launched this year — we would have launched in a year or two.”
ComEd also chose not to immediately incorporate all the different distributed energy resources that state law requires it to eventually handle, he said. “We were deliberate and focused on community solar, because we recognized that those were not only where the need was, but because those are the most technically sophisticated customers.”
The flexible and collaborative approach that ComEd and solar developers have undertaken stands in contrast to some much slower processes in other states. In California, for example, it took nearly four years between regulators ordering utilities to make flexible interconnection possible and finalizing the rules that allow it to happen — and California still hasn’t created a workable community solar program to make use of those rules.
But speed is of the essence as community solar developers rush to start their projects before July. That’s the deadline for achieving “safe harbor” status for earning tax credits set by the massive tax and spending package passed by Republicans in Congress last year. “Because of these changes happening in the tax credits, we realized we needed to move faster,” Bauer said.
Balakumar agreed that “to go from March workshops to a full-blown program in November for a utility is lightning speed.” But regulators and utilities in states with clean-energy and climate goals that haven’t moved as quickly are setting themselves up for even greater costs — and arguments over who’s going to pay for them — once the window for securing federal tax credits has closed, he said.
That’s not to say that other states can’t still learn from Illinois, he said. Take New York and Massachusetts, two states where Eclipse is closely involved in flexible interconnection work.
“We were in workshops in New York with Avangrid and National Grid,” two utilities serving upstate regions with a lot of community solar and grid constraints, Balakumar said. There, solar developers are “talking to banks and thinking about how they can get much more creative.” In January, National Grid filed a proposal to enable flexible interconnection at seven substations, each potentially hosting 30 to 60 megawatts of new projects.
And in Massachusetts, where utilities have struggled for years to connect more community solar projects, Eclipse has been involved in a workshop jointly hosted with a state regulator–created interconnection working group, with the goal of jointly filing flexible interconnection proposals with National Grid and Eversource “as soon as possible this year,” he said.
Those utilities are actively expanding their grids to accommodate more community solar. But flexible interconnection could allow many projects to connect while deferring $239 million in proposed upgrades, Balakumar said in November 2025 testimony in a proceeding reviewing new grid investment proposals.
In March, ComEd engineers came to a Massachusetts flexible interconnection workshop to share their experience, according to Nick Burica, senior director of grid planning and interconnection engineering at community solar developer Nexamp.
Utilities have plenty of reasons to be leery of requests to operate their grids in this new and unfamiliar way, noted Burica, who previously led development of distributed energy engineering for ComEd. But when those kinds of objections arose, ComEd was “in the room,” able to say that “it will provide energy affordability, and you’ll be able to operate your system better,” Burica noted.
“I was so happy to see ComEd come out and champion what can be done with flexible interconnection,” he said. “Getting people together — industry, utilities, and outside consultants — we’re starting to see the fruits of this labor.”
At a recent city council meeting in Palo Alto, California, Erin Pei stepped up to the podium. Clad in an Arctic Circle sweatshirt, the 11th grader presented hair-raising facts about the health impacts of gas stoves and other appliances that burn fossil fuels.
The Bay Area Air District has found that gas water heaters and furnaces cause premature deaths and create hundreds of millions of dollars in health costs in the region each year. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis found that children living in homes with gas stoves face up to a 42% increased risk of asthma. And according to the Public Health Law Center, cooking with gas releases similar pollutants to smoking cigarettes, including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and the carcinogens benzene and formaldehyde.
“The city has an obligation to alert residents to these dangers,” Pei said.
Pei, who attends Henry M. Gunn High School, is an intern with the student-centered environmental and public health task force named Induction Rocks — a nod to the high-tech electric alternative to gas cooking. Sven Thesen, co-founder of the EV think tank National Charging Access Coalition and a Palo Alto resident, created the group last fall. He co-leads it with climate activist Avroh Shah, a junior at Palo Alto High School. Now, about a dozen middle and high school students in the Silicon Valley city volunteer or get paid $20 per hour as interns in the group.
In recent months, Induction Rocks has been pushing Palo Alto to hasten its transition to clean electric appliances — a move that supports the city’s goal to reduce planet-warming emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2030. The students have met with individual city leaders, participated in a December policy workshop, and provided a regular drumbeat of public comments on the health risks of gas appliances at council meetings.
Induction Rocks has focused on swapping out gas stoves in particular to combat decades of industry marketing that has hooked people on the appliances, Thesen said. In California, 70% of households used gas to cook in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — more than in any other state.
Gas stoves make up a relatively small slice of carbon emissions, but among appliances, they’re typically one of the biggest source of indoor air pollution. Local governments often don’t require them to vent outdoors, like they do other combustion equipment.
Patrick Burt, a former mayor of Palo Alto and current city council member, said the group’s advocacy has already spurred the city to reconsider how it talks about home electrification. The students “probably had a decisive impact in convincing our staff and our city council to make the health [effects] as important in our communications and our programs as the environmental impacts,” Burt noted.
Explaining the health harms of gas stoves could nudge households to finally break up with fossil fuels, Burt said.
“What we’ve seen is that the vast majority of people don’t know this information,” he said. “And when they do, they have a much stronger reaction and motivation to make changes than with just the environmental reasons.”
Last month, Induction Rocks saw a major win when the city launched rebates for those who replace gas stoves with induction ones as part of its 2026–2027 climate action plan. The students hope that the rebates will lower the barrier to entry for induction cooking, especially for the area’s low-income residents, who can receive $100 off a portable cooktop and $1,000 off a range. Others can get $50 and $500 off those items, respectively.
The incentives make induction cost-competitive. Wirecutter’s highest-rated induction range costs $1,499; the top gas equivalent, $849.
As soon as April 22, Earth Day, Palo Alto plans to launch a library lending program for portable induction cooktops to make it easy for people to try out the tech, Burt said.
The climate action committee has also directed the city’s staff to “really elevate the health impacts in all of our communications” in the coming months.
That’s already starting to happen. A recent mailer on Palo Alto’s Electrify My Home program, which helps people ditch gas appliances, reads: “Clean energy and air. Community health.”
I caught up with a few members of Induction Rocks on a recent Saturday to hear about what drives them and their approach. They all gravitate toward science, tech, engineering, and mathematics, and hope to pursue careers in those fields. Every month, the group nerds out at Thesen’s home for dinner and climate-related talks.
Kanami Taniguchi, a junior at Palo Alto Middle College High School, describes herself as introverted. But she loves being in a group of like-minded people learning together about the environmental science and the chemistry of gas-stove pollution, rather than studying it on her own, she said.
The students are also fully aware of the worsening climate crisis. “I’ve been really scared about what will happen [to] my future with climate change,” said Sarah Seeger, an eighth grader at Ellen Fletcher Middle School. “It’s just really terrifying to me.”
Seeger’s family already has an induction cooktop. During a December city council meeting, amid a presentation about the health imperatives of ditching gas, she showed off a side benefit of the appliance: Her cats can traipse across it. Because the stove cools quickly, “I don’t have to worry about their paws getting burned,” she said.
“And most importantly, I don’t need to worry about breathing in these harmful gases like benzene and oxides of nitrogen that I would be breathing in if I had a natural gas stove,” Seeger told the council.
Prisha Goel, a junior at Palo Alto Middle College High School, told me that the group’s strategy hinges on sharing science with the public, rather than dictating behavior. “We’re not telling people that they have to switch,” she said. “We’re giving them information about what a gas stove might be doing to you, even though you’re not aware of it.”
Utsav Gupta, who serves on the city’s Utilities Advisory Commission and founded the AI-and-spatial-computing startup Filarion, called the students “an incredible group.”
“It’s amazing to me, their level of advocacy at such a young age, educating and driving forward this issue,” he said. Their activism has galvanized Gupta to raise the health risks of gas stoves with his fellow commissioners, who are advising the city in its plans to decommission the gas system.
The group has also affected Gupta personally, causing him to realize that he and his partner should replace their gas stove with induction. For now, they’re opening the windows when they cook in order to get more ventilation.
“I’m way more aware of the risks,” he said, “thanks to these students.”
Tropical forests span 1.6 billion hectares (6.2 million square miles) of Earth. These ecosystems support a majority of the planet’s animal and plant species and contain plants that contribute to over a quarter of modern medicine. But over the past two decades, an average of 10 million hectares (nearly 40,000 square miles) of these forests—roughly the size of Kentucky—have been lost each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, affecting the ecosystems and communities that depend on them.
NASA scientists recently developed a new method for tracking tropical forest loss that delivers deforestation alerts more than three months faster than current methods. Although the technique was designed for the Amazon rainforest, data from a recently launched satellite are expected to expand its application globally.
July 22, 2020
Because tropical forests are so vast, local communities, conservationists, and policymakers rely on satellite data to manage them. Images acquired by satellites with optical sensors provide highly accurate alerts. For instance, the image above, acquired as part of the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project, shows newly cleared land in southwest Brazil in July 2020. Images from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites have revolutionized land management for over 50 years. In 1988, Brazil developed one of its first satellite-based monitoring systems using Landsat data, which remains in use today.
Though Landsat is an invaluable tool for Earth observation, it has a critical limitation: clouds. As an optical satellite, it relies on reflected light and cannot observe the ground through cloud cover. This creates data gaps that are especially limiting in tropical regions, which are cloudy most of the year. In some areas, months can pass without acquiring a cloud-free image, hindering efforts to track and curb unregulated forest clearing.
To address Landsat’s cloud challenge, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center tuned into a different wavelength. Led by Africa Flores-Anderson, associate program manager for NASA’s Ecosystem Conservation Program, the team piloted a system for the Amazon that combines existing satellite-based approaches with cutting-edge radar data. The approach builds upon a platform developed by the Cardille Lab at McGill University.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) doesn’t require daylight or clear skies. To generate an image, SAR instruments beam radar signals at a surface and measure the signals that bounce back. SAR satellites use various ranges of radar wavelengths, or “bands,” to measure features on Earth’s surface. Over forests, the shorter wavelengths of the C-band scatter off treetops, but the longer wavelengths of the L-band can make it down to the ground.
This L-band is central to Flores-Anderson’s approach. Similar efforts favored C-band because it was more readily available than other SAR data. But when felled trees—along with their branches and leaves—are not removed right away, C-band’s shorter wavelengths are scattered by remaining debris, obscuring evidence of destruction. In contrast, L-band’s longer wavelengths can penetrate this material and reveal the damage. The new method is the first of its kind to automatically combine the user-friendly, intuitive images from Landsat and the consistent, detailed insights from L-band SAR data.
These visuals show the benefit of combining optical images and L-band SAR data. The patch of deforested land in southwest Brazil (top row) is overlaid with colors that represent the month that deforestation was detected (bottom row).
The left map shows that SAR detected two patches of forest loss in January (purple), three months earlier than optical sensors (middle map). The patches appear small because deforestation happens gradually, Flores-Anderson explained. At that point in January, only those areas had been cleared.
By April (green), optical sensors had detected forest loss across a wider area, shown in the middle map. These sensors collect images every few days, while the SAR data used in this study captured the area only once or twice a month. In this case, the optical satellites observed the change during a break in the cloud cover.
The map on the right shows how the new algorithm combines information from both types of observations. To increase accuracy, this algorithm confirms deforestation only if there are multiple, consecutive observations of forest loss. This view confirms deforestation as early as February, up to two months earlier than optical-only, and with much more certainty than the optical- or SAR-only approaches.
On average, the new method for monitoring forests spots felled trees within 16 days with exceptional accuracy, nearly eliminating false alarms. These detections can identify deforestation in very cloudy regions up to 100 days sooner than optical-only systems.
“In the tropics, it’s important to detect deforestation as soon as it occurs,” Flores-Anderson said. “If an image of a cleared forest isn’t available until the following year, the area may already be regrown, and deforestation will be missing from our data.”
For experts like Sylvia Wilson, the chief forest and climate scientist at Wilpa Capacity Development with nearly 20 years of global forest monitoring experience with the U.S. Geological Survey, adding L-band SAR to optical is a scientific game changer. “L-band SAR gives us the opportunity to see what optical doesn’t,” Wilson said. “But it’s not one sensor versus the other; the future is SAR plus optical."
The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite, launched in July 2025, will drastically increase the feasibility of systems like Flores-Anderson’s by providing more frequent and comprehensive L-band SAR data. L-band data has been relatively scarce, with limited images only available in a few areas like the Brazilian Amazon. Once more NISAR data become publicly available, they will provide free, global L-band SAR every 12 days. Flores-Anderson’s system is already prepared to incorporate this data.
“It doesn’t matter which sensor we get data from—whether it’s optical or SAR—it automatically adds to our model,” Flores-Anderson explained. “As more NISAR data become available, we will have more accurate, faster detection of change.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) product, and model data provided by Flores-Anderson et al. Story by Lena Pransky (EarthRISE) with Jake Ramthun (EarthRISE) and Madeleine Gregory (Landsat Project Science Support).
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column.
The European Union is once again facing an energy crisis due to its reliance on imported fossil fuels — and is once again poised to lean into renewables to blunt the effects.
As the war in the Middle East upends global oil and gas markets, European Union energy chief Dan Jørgensen urged member states on Tuesday to build even more renewable energy, faster.
It’s an uncomfortable but familiar position for the EU. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the bloc rapidly reduced its reliance on Russian gas imports and swiftly built out new wind and solar power to cushion the blow to the region’s electricity sector.
The results speak for themselves. The European Union more than doubled its solar generation between 2021 and 2025. Wind grew at a more modest 24% over that time period, but it was already providing a higher share of the bloc’s electricity generation. Meanwhile, fossil fuel–generated electricity declined. For the first time ever, in 2025 the EU produced more electricity from wind and solar than it did from fossil fuels.
But the region has not ditched gas entirely. The EU got about 17% of its electricity from gas last year, and it imports almost all the natural gas it burns — 86% in 2024.
That means its energy system is still exposed to the historic disruption caused by the Iran war. The war has shut down liquefied natural gas production in Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter of the fuel, for the past month. Gas prices globally and in the EU have surged as a result.
This energy shock will be messy and play out in different stages. For Europe, the most immediate and acute effects are being felt in the availability of jet fuel and diesel. But electricity costs will rise too, as nations are forced to buy much-more-expensive natural gas. In certain countries, it will also get dirtier, at least for a time — some EU nations are relying more heavily on coal-fired electricity to get them through the immediate fallout.
But over the longer term, this energy shock is likely to produce the same outcome as the previous one: an even faster transition away from imported fossil fuels and to domestic wind and solar.
The Cow Palace arena, just south of San Francisco, has hosted Dwight Eisenhower, the Beatles, the San Jose Sharks NHL team, and an annual rodeo since it opened in 1941. But an even bigger act is setting up next door: an enormous battery that will perform a starring role in the Bay Area’s energy ecosystem.
Developer Arevon has begun construction of the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City. The battery facility will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.
Arevon has contracted the battery for 15 years of use by MCE, one of California’s biggest community choice aggregators — entities that purchase electricity on behalf of local residents as an alternative to Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities. The state requires MCE to buy grid capacity commensurate with its members’ usage, and the Cormorant project will fulfill 10% of this annual requirement, known as resource adequacy in California bureaucratese.
MCE has become a major force in the greater Bay Area: It now serves all of Marin and Napa counties, most of Contra Costa, and half of Solano. The aggregator can contract for power plants across California, but it looks for sites within or near its service territory when possible, said Jenna Tenney, MCE’s director of communications and community engagement.
“Having a storage project in a community is going to add to resiliency in that community,” she said. The battery will bring $73 million of property tax revenue to Daly City, she added, and Arevon will donate $1.5 million in community benefits.
Cities need power, but generating it within urban cores is a difficult feat. California effectively stopped building gas-fired power plants, but even if that were an option, sticking a smokestack in San Francisco wouldn’t fly. These days, California expands generation by building large-scale solar plants in wide-open spaces, but those plants need to ship their power over many miles of transmission lines to reach the cities where it gets consumed.
The Cormorant battery provides something new: a dense source of on-demand power that can slip into the urban fabric without any local air pollution, and which absorbs the far-off solar generation at midday to discharge later at night. Arevon CEO Justin Johnson estimated that the battery, fitting on the site of a former drive-in movie theater, could cover the electricity needs of some 321,000 homes for four hours straight.
“It couldn’t keep the whole city going, but it certainly, without a doubt, increases the reliability of the grid in that area in a substantial way,” he said.
Arevon didn’t jump to the highest echelon of energy storage development from nothing. The firm has invested $11 billion in projects and owns 6 gigawatts of solar and battery installations operating across 18 states.
The company launched in 2021 as a spinout of Capital Dynamics, a private equity fund that amassed an early portfolio of energy storage assets. Arevon is owned by the California State Teachers’ Retirement Fund, Dutch pension fund APG, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Those firms invest for steady, long-term growth, and their patience lends itself to Arevon building and owning batteries for the long haul, instead of building to flip to other buyers.
“When we’re in there developing assets in the community, we can tell them, hey, we’re going to be here a long time,” said Johnson, who stepped up from COO to CEO in March. “You’re incentivized to engineer it well, construct it well, operate it well.”
Arevon focused on the Daly City location because electricity price volatility tends to be highest in proximity to major consumption, Johnson said. Places like that — whether metro areas or large industrial hubs — see the greatest swings from peak to off-peak hours, and having battery facilities to arbitrage between those times should push prices down in the long run. But building within a city comes with obvious trade-offs.
“Siting any infrastructure, whether you’re putting in a Walmart or upgrading an intersection or doing anything in a high-density area, is tough … especially so for power plants or facilities like this,” he noted.
Tough but not impossible, as Arevon proved in San Diego’s Barrio Logan community with its Peregrine project (another entry in a portfolio of projects sporting avian nomenclature), which came online last year. There, the company squeezed 200 megawatts of batteries between a naval shipyard and a light-rail track, in the shadow of the Coronado Bridge. In Daly City, Arevon will need to carve through roughly a mile of streets to run high-voltage cable underground to the nearest substation.
Such projects “reduce your lifespan a little bit” from the stress, Johnson said, but once built, the intrinsic difficulty becomes a sort of strategic moat. If a competitor wanted to open up next door to Cow Palace, well, they probably couldn’t find a viable space.
“Those are assets I’m really proud to own, and I think they’ll become just more and more valuable over time, because they’re hard to replace,” Johnson said.
To achieve that longevity, the batteries need to survive, and that premise is not to be taken for granted, given their location 90 miles north of Moss Landing, where the largest battery fire combusted a little over a year ago. Safety concerns are understandably higher in dense urban areas, so assuring the community that a Moss Landing–style disaster won’t happen here was integral to securing permits.
Arevon’s choice of battery, Tesla’s Megapack 2 XL, addressed the safety question. The containerized storage product is filled with the lithium-ferrous phosphate cells, a battery chemistry known to be significantly less fire-prone than earlier lithium-ion varieties. The older Moss Landing facility packed a huge amount of batteries into a single legacy structure, where they became fuel for an immense conflagration. The Megapack containers, in contrast, will be spread out across the site in a design that will prevent a fire from spreading beyond a single metal box. If one unit ever did catch fire, it would damage only a fraction of 1 percent of the plant’s capacity.
Workers are grading the site and installing “geo piers,” columns of aggregate that extend about 30 feet underground to stabilize the site during earthquakes. This is not an idle threat — the Bay Area just experienced a 4.6 magnitude tremor in the wee hours of Thursday morning. After that work is complete, the 280 Megapacks will take their places so that Cormorant can make its debut.
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Renewable energy’s favorite season has arrived.
Spring is when everything comes together for clean power sources. Days get longer, boosting solar generation. Winter’s blustery winds keep blowing, propelling turbines to their max. And melting snow and heavy rains combine to drive hydropower generation.
Previous springs have shown us just what this wild weather is capable of. In the first week of March 2025, Texas’ power grid, known as ERCOT, set all-time records for wind and solar power production as well as battery storage discharge.
Now, just a few weeks into spring, and with plenty more renewable power generation added in the past year, Texas is once again reaching new heights. On March 14, ERCOT reached an all-time high of 28.7 gigawatts of wind power, according to GridStatus.io. Even more impressive is the state’s solar generation, which has already set multiple records so far this year.
And while Texas is the country’s clean power leader, it’s not the only region with renewable power victories to show. Solar records have been achieved across the Southwest Power Pool, PJM Interconnection, the Independent System Operator New England, and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator this spring. ISO-NE also hit a record level for wind power generation, while MISO reached its pinnacle for overall renewables generation.
And in California, batteries stored a ton of that clean energy, and then set record after record for dispatching it throughout March.
A lot of those records were only made possible thanks to the U.S. adding 26.5 GW of utility-scale solar power generation in 2025, and another 5.7 GW of wind generation. A massive 13 GW of grid battery installations last year helped make full use of those renewables.
There’s an added bonus to all these records happening as the weather starts to warm. Most of us are starting to turn down our furnaces and heat pumps, but haven’t yet turned on our air conditioners. That means overall power demand tends to be at its lowest in the spring, and with renewables at their peak, we need far less fossil-fueled power to pick up the difference.
That confluence resulted in something monumental in March 2025: For the first time ever, fossil fuels accounted for less than half of U.S. power production across a whole month, while clean sources generated the rest. Let’s see if the U.S. can repeat that feat this year.
A global energy crisis is in full swing
Continued conflict in the Middle East is highlighting the risks of relying on fossil fuels.
It’s been five weeks since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, sparking a conflict that has largely shut down oil and gas production and transportation in the region. Domestic natural gas supplies have blunted the blow in the U.S., but much of the world is facing a major energy crisis. Thailand has encouraged workers to ditch business suits to curb the use of air conditioning, while Sri Lanka has implemented a four-day workweek to limit fuel use.
The EU’s energy chief this week similarly urged residents to drive and fly less, and pushed countries to speed their transition to clean energy, saying fossil fuels’ price volatility won’t end even with a resolution in the Middle East. That’s been especially clear in the years since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which spurred the EU to cut off Russian gas supplies and turn its attention toward a solar and wind buildout instead.
Residential electricity price hikes aren’t slowing down, report finds
A new report offers a few explanations for why residential electricity prices are on the rise.
Across the U.S., average prices rose by 33% from 2019 through 2025, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group found. That’s a big jump, but it tracks with the rising cost of groceries, housing, and other everyday expenses.
Still, that average hides the fact that some parts of the U.S. are experiencing far more dramatic hikes than others. While 29 states actually saw inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices fall from 2019 to 2025, costs spiked in California, Illinois, New England, and some mid-Atlantic states.
The report credits rising fuel costs, growing power distribution expenses, and storm recovery as some of the biggest drivers behind the power price swell. And with utilities requesting rate increases at record levels, researchers anticipate customers won’t see much price relief anytime soon.
Electrify easier: A new study finds many households can adopt energy-efficient, bill-lowering electric appliances and heating without the need for expensive electric panel upgrades. (Canary Media)
Prepare for extinction: The rarely convened Endangered Species Committee rules that federal endangered species protections will no longer apply to oil and gas drilling projects off the Gulf Coast, exposing the Rice’s whale and other creatures to potential harms. (Houston Chronicle, E&E News)
Fossil fuels’ human toll: A Texas refinery explosion last week damaged homes in a neighboring, largely Black town, revealing the human impact of the Trump administration’s push to ramp up fossil fuel production. (Capital B)
Geothermal heats up: Next-generation geothermal projects have the potential to deliver tons of clean power around the clock, but a need for permitting and safety reforms could slow the industry’s progress. (Canary Media)
No resolution: The Ohio trial of two former FirstEnergy executives accused of bribing a former consultant, who went on to become the state’s top energy regulator, ends in a hung jury, with the state vowing to retry the case. (Signal Ohio)
Stuck in limbo: The fate of more than 300 clean energy projects remains unclear after the U.S. Energy Department announced their grants were canceled without officially de-obligating their funding. (Latitude Media)
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