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In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has antagonized the clean energy industry, putting crucial federal funding on ice, rolling back key regulations, and even coming after state climate laws.
This week, Democrat-led states took to the courts to begin fighting back.
On Monday, attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit aimed at protecting the clean energy sector that’s caught most of Trump’s ire: wind.
Trump’s Day 1 executive order paused the approval of new federal leases, permits, and loans for wind farms, and his EPA and Interior Department have gone on to revoke existing permits from one offshore project and order work to stop on another that had already begun at-sea construction.
The suit alleges the president doesn’t have the authority to single-handedly shut down the permitting process — and that his moves threaten thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in investments, and the country’s clean energy transition.
In an interview with Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said Trump’s anti-wind orders fly in the face of his “energy dominance” goals, on top of being carried out unconstitutionally.
“This is a time when we’re dealing with rising costs, when everyone agrees we should be increasing domestic energy production,” Platkin said. “It’s flagrantly illegal, but it also just makes no sense.”
Environmental advocate and renewable energy professor Chris Powicki speculated to Massachusetts local news station CAI that Republican-led states may become quiet backers of the suit, given that Trump’s order also targets onshore wind farms, which many of them have benefited from.
A similar coalition of 16 states and D.C. hit the courts again on Wednesday, this time suing the U.S. Transportation Department for withholding billions of dollars for a national electric-vehicle charger buildout. The attorneys general alleged the administration’s move is illegal since the funding was allocated as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, meaning only Congress has the power to pull it back. A rollback would jeopardize hundreds of charging stations that haven’t yet been built.
Energy Star is Trump’s latest target
President Trump’s attacks on energy efficiency reached new heights this week, as the U.S. EPA reportedly told staffers it’s planning to shut down its Climate Protection Partnerships division and the Energy Star program it houses. If there’s one EPA program you know, it’s probably Energy Star, which uses its signature blue sticker to indicate how much energy — and money — an appliance can save consumers.
Republicans in Congress have also made several moves against energy efficiency in the past few weeks, passing resolutions to undo Biden-era regulations governing commercial refrigerators, water heaters, and other appliances, and to repeal a rule affecting efficiency labeling and certification. More cuts could be on the way as the Trump administration and Congress work to roll back Inflation Reduction Act tax credits — some of which reduce the cost of home efficiency upgrades.
This offshore wind farm is a win for sea life
A new in-depth study of the South Fork offshore wind farm shows fish have nothing to fear when it comes to turbines. Scientists surveyed the seafloor off the Long Island coast before, during, and after the array’s construction and found it had no negative impact on the area’s biological communities. The wind farm also became a makeshift reef for marine invertebrates to latch onto, attracting dozens of fish and shellfish species to feast.
The study is further proof that the installations don’t necessarily pose serious threats to marine life — something President Trump and other offshore wind opponents have repeatedly alleged. And despite ongoing federal animosity toward offshore wind, two developers recently said they’ll continue building. Danish energy company Ørsted said it will move forward with its New York and Rhode Island wind farms, while Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reported this week that Dominion Energy is pressing on in the waters off Virginia.
Manufacturing at risk: The Trump administration looks to gut the Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstrations Program, putting 26 U.S. manufacturing projects and thousands of jobs at risk. (Canary Media)
IRA uncertainty continues: A Republican Congress member says there’s “a lot of disagreement” in his party over whether to preserve, edit, or repeal Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. (E&E News)
A cleaner rebuild: A new report makes the case that it could be cheaper and quicker to replace Los Angeles buildings destroyed in January’s wildfires with all-electric structures, even after Mayor Karen Bass exempted rebuilds from all-electric building codes. (Canary Media)
Unfair share: As congressional Republicans look to tax EV drivers to make up for lost gas-tax revenue, an analysis shows EV and hybrid-vehicle owners would pay far more under those fees than drivers of gas-powered cars pay in fuel taxes. (Washington Post)
What’s the holdup? Energy analytics firm Enverus finds Texas has some of the shortest wait times for solar and wind projects looking to interconnect to the power grid, while California’s wait times are among the longest. (Forbes)
Oversight, out of mind: The U.S. EPA hasn’t filed any new cases against major polluters under President Trump, and has significantly scaled back minor criminal and civil enforcement cases. (Grist)
The grid’s growing pains: Grid operator PJM Interconnection selects 51 projects, mostly gas-fueled power plants and battery storage facilities, to jump to the head of its interconnection queue as part of an effort to get power online faster. Opponents to a similar plan in the Midwest say it could worsen grid bottlenecks while discouraging cheaper and clean energy. (E&E News, Canary Media)
A salty development: Startup Inlyte Energy looks to commercialize iron-salt battery technology invented in the 1980s, and is launching its first large-scale test with Southern Co., one of the biggest utilities in the U.S. South. (Canary Media)
Lots of costly and dangerous things can go wrong with high-voltage transmission lines.
Strong winds or equipment failures can cause individual lines on a tower to contact one another and short-circuit, or even break entirely. Lines can sag hazardously near trees or the ground, either due to overheating or being caked in ice. They can be damaged by wildfire smoke, windblown debris, or the simple wear and tear of time.
Sensors can help detect such threats. But it’s expensive and time-consuming to install, connect, and maintain those devices along power lines crossing remote plains, forests, and mountains.
It would be a lot cheaper and faster for utilities if they could simply use existing infrastructure to detect these issues instead of tacking on new sensors. That’s the route that Prisma Photonics has taken.
The Israel-based company has plugged its technology into the fiber-optic communications cables strung alongside thousands of miles of transmission lines in Israel, Europe, and the U.S.
That technology has been able to identify the precise locations of problems causing power outages, including ice buildup on power lines and nearby wildfires, all by “using the fiber as a microphone, or as an array of thousands of small microphones,” Eran Inbar, Prisma Photonics’ CEO, explained. The firm’s product has even picked up on the explosion of a meteor in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
For decades, utilities have strung “optical ground wire” fiber-optic cables atop transmission towers, both to protect high-voltage wires from lightning strikes and to provide telecommunications for internal or third-party use. Across the world and the U.S., more than half of the transmission system is outfitted with these cables, Inbar said — and that coverage is only growing as more power lines are built.
That opens up a huge market for Prisma Photonics, as long as it can prove its technology is accurate enough to replace purpose-built sensors for a growing number of tasks. The more jobs Prisma’s technology can do, the more money it could potentially save transmission grid operators, Inbar said.
Finding ways to do more things with less money and less time is important for transmission owners striving to solve multiple challenges at once. Climate change-driven heat waves and winter freezes are causing more grid emergencies, both by increasing demand for electricity for air conditioning and heating and by subjecting transmission networks to increased stress.
“The grid is a very important market — but it was also a blue ocean. There were no other companies playing in this field,” said Inbar, a physicist by training who spent 20 years in the field of lasers for semiconductor and mobile technology markets before selling his company in 2014 and launching Prisma Photonics in 2017. “Can we detect short circuits? Can we detect partial discharge? Can we detect wildfire? Can we detect wind for dynamic line rating?”
Prisma’s “optical interrogator” devices plug into substations, where multiple transmission lines and the fiber-optic cables that run atop them converge. From these central points, its devices send pulses of light down an optical fiber, then capture and analyze infinitesimal reflections cast back from points along the fiber.
This is one of several methods to use fiber-optics as sensors to detect shifts in temperature, pressure, strain on the cables, and other signals, Inbar said. “It’s a very small change — but if you’re using a precise optical method, you can measure it.”
Connecting these nearly imperceptible variations to changes in the surrounding environment takes a ton of data, some complicated machine-learning algorithms to convert it into usable information, and a lot of real-world cross-checking, he said. One of Prisma’s first tasks was to eliminate the false positives — alerts of events that didn’t actually happen — that have stymied earlier efforts to use already-deployed fiber-optic cables to sense environmental conditions.
“You have to be highly committed to data collection,” he said. “There’s no way to do it in the lab — you have to go to the grid and collect data over months or, in our case, years.”
But the more Prisma’s systems are used in the real world, the more confident customers can be in correlating their measurements with real-world events. After a yearslong deployment with Prisma investor Israel Electric Corp. and other pilot projects with the New York Power Authority and as-yet-unnamed European grid operators, “we don’t have to do months and years of data collection” when deploying with its next utility partners, Inbar said. “We can go to work immediately.”
That’s the goal of Prisma’s latest project with Great River Energy, a rural electric cooperative operating transmission lines across Minnesota and Wisconsin. The initial project is targeting about 90 miles of power lines, all being monitored from computers operating inside substations.
“There is a huge impetus for reliability on the electric system,” said Michael Craig, Great River Energy’s manager of energy management systems. At the same time, “every time we’re looking to spend money, we have to justify that it’s going to be worth it to everybody in our membership. With Prisma, there were a couple of things that made it easier for us.”
“First, it’s using existing assets,” he said, referring to the fiber-optic cables already deployed on the 90 miles of line the co-op is monitoring. “We didn’t have to do this big buildout. It’s just going into the substation and doing the work” to connect Prisma’s equipment to the fiber-optic system.
Second, Prisma’s technology could offer a lower-cost way to deal with grid faults, Craig said. A bewildering array of technologies and techniques go into determining just where and how power flows have been interrupted along high-voltage power lines. Generally speaking, more precise approaches require more costly technologies, including sensors installed on transmission lines themselves.
Being able to tap into the continuous sensor of a fiber-optic line could help. “If there is an outage, maybe we’ll be able to detect what happened before we get out there,” he said. “Hopefully we can detect things more quickly. We hope it can allow us to be preventative, rather than reactive.”
Third, Prisma’s technology can potentially do many things at once, Craig said. One option is to use it for “dynamic line rating” — determining how much power transmission lines are able to safely carry under different temperatures and wind speeds, a process which can expand the capacity of existing grids without costly upgrades. Great River Energy is already testing dynamic line rating sensors installed on power lines but is eager to explore other approaches, he said.
At the same time, Craig said, Great River Energy is exploring the use of cameras in remote areas to detect wildfires — another pressing concern for power grid operators. With Prisma, “instead of installing cameras and having this one system, we can use the existing fiber as a sensor. That’s a cool way to do it.”
Inbar stressed that Prisma Photonics is still in the process of gaining real-world experience to prove how useful it can be for different tasks. Utilities must wait for bad things like faults or wildfires to happen to be able to check the technology’s accuracy, for example. Inbar added that Prisma plans to evaluate its dynamic line rating capabilities through tests hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit power-sector research group considered the gold standard for utilities.
Whatever the use case, “one of the benefits of our solution is that it’s a platform,” he said. “It’s not like we’re developing a sensor for dynamic line rating or wildfire detection. It’s a platform that can collect very sensitive data on the grid, and eventually we can improve it over time — and build additional use cases.”
Antonio Baclig spent eight years as a researcher at Stanford University scouring as many battery designs as he could find in search of something cheap enough to transform the grid. He honed in on one from the 1980s that stores energy with iron and table salt, and founded the startup Inlyte Energy in 2021 to commercialize it anew.
“Our goal is solar-plus-storage baseload power that costs less than fossil fuels,” Baclig said.
Now Inlyte has secured its first major utility contract, a crucial step in proving the viability of the technology.
Southern Co., which owns the biggest utilities in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, has agreed to install an 80-kilowatt/1.5-megawatt-hour Inlyte demonstration project near Birmingham, Alabama, by the end of the year. Utilities need to see new technologies work in the field before they take a chance on large-scale installations, so this project marks a necessary, but still early, stage in Inlyte’s commercialization.
New types of batteries are notoriously difficult to bring from the lab to large-scale production. Many startups have toiled at this task for years, pitching anyone who will listen about the superiority of their technology. None have come close to unseating the dominant lithium-ion battery designs that have plummeted in cost over the last decade as China massively scaled up production. But researchers have concluded that lithium-ion batteries can never get cheap enough for the mass deployments of storage that will be needed to run a grid dominated by renewable energy.
The onus is on Inlyte, then, to avoid the lackluster fate of its peers and prove its exceptionality among the ragtag camp of lithium-ion alternatives. The company has three important things going for it: dirt-cheap cost of materials, a simpler-than-usual manufacturing process, and system-level round-trip efficiency on par with lithium-ion battery systems. (Round-trip efficiency is a metric for how much of the electricity stored in a battery can later be recovered. The technologies challenging lithium-ion tend to fare poorly on this front.) Plus, the work of researchers in prior decades has already helped speed Inlyte’s path to market.
Some battery-startup founders have spent years toiling away in a lab on a favored chemistry, only to spend more years figuring out how to turn it into a viable product. Baclig, a materials scientist, surveyed the annals of battery science and plucked something off the proverbial shelf that had almost hit the big time but not quite.
He landed upon the family of sodium metal halide batteries, first developed in the late 1970s. A British firm called Beta Research explored iron-sodium batteries but in 1987 pivoted to nickel-sodium because its superior energy density made it more promising for electric vehicles.
The sodium-nickel-chloride chemistry became known in battery industry lore as the ZEBRA battery, because it was developed by a group called Zeolite Battery Research Africa. It got some traction in the 1990s: Daimler Benz built cars with this kind of battery and test-drove them for more than 60,000 miles. A European company called Horien still manufactures the battery for specialized uses, like a NATO rescue submarine and uninterruptible power supply at industrial facilities that can’t afford to go dark for even an instant.
Baclig contends that the historical abandonment of iron-salt chemistries did not reflect an intrinsic failing in the technology, just a different set of needs at the time. Today, with record solar panel installations reshaping electricity systems around the globe, there’s growing interest in cheap, long-term energy storage. And power plants don’t need to cram as much energy into a confined space as electric vehicles do.
“We have to focus this on cost now. It’s not [primarily] about energy density,” Baclig said. With those new parameters, putting the iron back into the battery might just work.
Baclig reached out to the company that had pioneered the technology in the first place: Beta Research. That firm was looking for a new project to focus on as the Covid pandemic receded, Baclig said; after a year of conversations, he and Beta Research decided to join forces in 2022. Inlyte thus pulled off a rare feat among climatetech startups, or any kind of startup: successfully conducting an international acquisition before it had even raised seed funding. The startup subsequently closed an $8 million seed round in 2023.
Since then, the team has worked at a steady clip to dial in the best iron cathode for the grid storage job. They also scaled up the size of each cell, which, unlike in lithium-ion batteries, takes the form of a ceramic tube that gets filled with powdered iron and salt. The new tubes hold 20 times the energy of the previous, EV-oriented cells.
From there, Inlyte set about testing its new battery cells, culminating in a recent third-party engineering test of a 100-cell module. Engineers typically have to tinker and improve a newfangled battery to unlock the desired level of performance. In this case, Baclig said, “That was our first module, and it just worked. We’re building on something that has a long track record, so we don’t have to reinvent.”
The chance to innovate on a legacy design attracted the firm’s chief commercial officer, Ben Kaun, who spent many years analyzing alternative grid storage concepts for the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research arm of the U.S. utility industry.
“It takes a long time to take a technology from the lab to deployment — there’s a lot of layers of scale-up and integration,” Kaun said. “It was appealing to me how much of that had been worked out with [Inlyte’s battery].”
Southern Co. will install and operate the first large-scale Inlyte battery system for at least a year as part of its ongoing efforts to test emergent long-duration storage technologies in a real-world environment.
The utility company was attracted to Inlyte’s low fire risk (it does not use flammable electrolytes like conventional lithium-ion batteries) and its ability to be sourced domestically, Southern Co. R&D manager Steve Baxley noted in an email.
“This system has the potential to be cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries, particularly for longer durations,” he said.
The company’s subsidiary Georgia Power previously signed a landmark deal to test out another iron-based long-duration battery, from Form Energy, starting in 2026. (Baxley confirmed that project is still being developed.)
Researchers from the Electric Power Research Institute, Kaun’s former employer, will document the results of the Inlyte installation and share them with utilities around the country.
“A lot of companies will share the same learnings, so we don’t have to do the same pilot over and over again in every service territory,” Kaun said.
Of course, habitually risk-averse utilities often prefer to test-drive new technologies in their own backyard, even if that duplicates efforts elsewhere. Many utilities continued to tiptoe into lithium-ion battery installations even after the batteries had been operating for years on a massive scale in other parts of the country.
Baclig, for his part, hinted at many more trial runs in the works for next year. These projects will be doable because Inlyte gained possession of a pilot-scale factory in the U.K. as part of the Beta Research acquisition. That facility can pump out megawatt-hour-sized volumes for early test projects, but it won’t keep up if Inlyte starts closing commercial deals.
Baclig has begun seeking a location for a factory in the U.S. Building a first-of-a-kind factory can be risky, but he stressed that four factories have been set up around the world for essentially the same technology, and the Beta Research team advised on all of them. The plan is to build at the same scale as those previous facilities, to minimize uncertainty around factory economics.
“It’s not quite Intel’s ‘copy exact,’” Kaun said, referring to the pioneering microchip firm’s famous approach to replicating its factory designs. “But it’s ‘copy very similar.’”
Filling ceramic tubes with metal powders doesn’t require the same pinpoint precision as a lithium-ion battery factory. When companies construct lithium-ion factories in the U.S., they have tended to cost at least $1 billion; the capital cost for a full-scale Inlyte factory should be multiples lower than that, Kaun noted.
Furthermore, the machinery to manufacture this unique battery does not come from China’s dominant battery sector, a boon at a time when the Trump administration’s tariffs are driving up prices on Chinese imports (even the equipment needed to build factories in America).
Going forward, Inlyte will need to move from field demonstration to customer contracts, and the company is focused on buyers who need power every day but also have occasional long-term backup requirements.
Inlyte is pursuing utilities like Southern Co., which must deliver power to a fast-growing region while surviving hurricanes and other extreme weather. The startup also has a dedicated pitch for providing data centers with backup energy: The long-lasting iron-sodium batteries can ostensibly replace both the instant response from uninterruptible power supply systems and the diesel generators that would kick in until power is restored. And the batteries could run every day to lower a data center’s demand from the grid.
Convincing data center owners to adopt Inlyte’s product will not be trivial, but that sector is struggling to find the power capacity to fuel its growth, not to mention maintain corporate commitments to sourcing clean electricity. If Inlyte can really deliver clean, long-lasting power that’s cheaper than fossil-fueled alternatives, it would almost certainly find willing takers with the ability to pay.
The wildfires that ravaged parts of Los Angeles County in January were the most catastrophic in its history. Made worse by climate change, the disaster caused as much as $131 billion worth of damage and destroyed more than 16,000 homes and other properties.
In the name of a speedy recovery, LA Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, issued a broad executive order that same month, exempting replacement structures from a city ordinance that requires new buildings to be all-electric. (The waived code only applies to communities within the city boundaries, not to the entirety of LA County.)
The order effectively swept aside one of the city’s most important tools for eliminating its reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels, the continued use of which makes such climate-related disasters more likely in the future. Buildings accounted for more than 40% of LA’s carbon pollution in 2022 — more than any other sector — and are estimated to contribute a quarter of California’s total emissions.
The mayor’s move reflects a tacit assumption that has been echoed even in the State Assembly: that rebuilding with gas, which many of the affected buildings had used, must be the easiest path for recovering communities.
But a new report flips that premise on its head. Citing available research and expert interviews, a team at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment argues that all-electric construction is likely to be the fastest and most cost-effective way to rebuild after the LA fires.
A key reason is that two systems are more complicated to rebuild than one. “We’re going to install electricity infrastructure in all buildings regardless,” said Kasia Kosmala-Dahlbeck, climate research fellow at the UC Berkeley center. “So it’s really about whether you also install a second system” that delivers fracked gas, also commonly known as natural gas.
Such dual-fuel construction has historically been the norm in California, but all-electric construction avoids the added time and cost of hooking up gas infrastructure. That often requires property owners to submit a separate service request to the gas utility; install gas meters, pipes, and ductwork; and coordinate gas safety checks, according to the authors.
The team expects all-electric rebuilds to not only deliver better indoor air quality for occupants but to be easier on people’s wallets. Their report cites a 2019 study that estimates building a new all-electric home in most parts of California costs about $3,000 to $10,000 less than building a home that’s also equipped with gas. The UC Berkeley team notes, though, that potential savings for LA County’s wildfire-hit neighborhoods are likely lower since existing gas infrastructure, much of it underground, was largely unscathed.
All-electric new homes in California that skip gas-burning appliances for much more efficient electric heat-pump heaters and ACs, water heaters, and clothes dryers, as well as induction stoves, are also likely to slash energy bills, per the report. An April analysis by climate think tank RMI provides support, finding that single-family households switching from gas furnaces and conventional air conditioners to heat pumps would save about $300 per year on average in LA County.
Kosmala-Dahlbeck points out that people going the all-electric route now will be able to avoid costly and complex retrofits in the future.
“We’ve seen repeatedly that retrofitting later down the line is more expensive than constructing all-electric to begin with,” she said. Upgrading a home’s electrical service alone can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000 and take two months to two years, according to California-based all-electric home developer Redwood Energy.
In the near future, installing a new gas appliance when the old one conks out could be less of an option. Air regulators for the state are developing standards that could bar the sale of new gas furnaces and water heaters starting in 2030. Regulators covering LA County are poised to adopt rules that would discourage new installations of these polluting appliances as soon as 2027.
The report authors recommend that policymakers — including city council members, county supervisors, the mayor’s office, and state legislators and agencies — support an all-electric recovery.
Mayor Bass has already moved in that direction. While her office confirmed that the first executive order waiving all-electric standards remains in effect, she issued another directive on March 21: By later this month, LA departments must develop suggestions to streamline permitting for owners who rebuild with all-electric equipment.
Construction has begun in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, one of the areas hit hardest by the wildfires. According to the mayor’s office, 20 addresses in the Palisades have been issued permits for rebuilding efforts. Staff noted that the permits don’t have to specify whether a project is all-electric. But some affected residents do plan to rebuild without gas appliances, NPR recently reported.
All-electric new buildings are on the rise across California, according to the California Energy Commission. In 2023, 80% of line extension requests by builders to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric were electric-only.
In general, outside of the fire recovery process, the financial case for building all-electric homes in the state is getting stronger. “We’ve heard from California builders that recent updates to infrastructure rules — combined with a statewide energy code that strongly encourages heat pumps — have shifted the economics of building all-electric new construction,” said Will Vicent, deputy director of the Energy Commission’s building standards efficiency division.
The UC Berkeley team is also encouraging policymakers to bolster incentives and resources that make all-electric rebuilding more affordable. That could look like expanding the Rebuilding Incentives for Sustainable Electric Homes program and the electrification resource and rebate hub The Switch is On. Such investments would line up with LA County and the state’s climate goals to become carbon neutral by 2045.
Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of LA-based nonprofit Climate Resolve and an appointed member of a county commission focused on rebuilding sustainably after the fires, said the report’s findings are important for policymakers to consider as they help people who lost their homes navigate the potentially yearslong process of recovery.
“It’s an enormously traumatic experience, and the first impulse that you have after that terrible loss is a return to normalcy” by trying to rebuild what you once had, said Parfrey, who reviewed the UC Berkeley report before it was publicly released. But “it’s impossible to recapture that home once it’s gone.”
Instead, “there’s the possibility for creating something even superior to what you had before.”
Around the world, farmers are retooling their land to harvest the hottest new commodity: sunlight. As the price of renewable energy technology has plummeted and water has gotten more scarce, growers are fallowing acreage and installing solar panels. Some are even growing crops beneath them, which is great for plants stressed by too many rays. Still others are letting that shaded land go wild, providing habitat for pollinators and fodder for grazing livestock.
According to a new study, this practice of agrisolar has been quite lucrative for farmers in California’s Central Valley over the last 25 years — and for the environment. Researchers looked at producers who had idled land and installed solar, using the electricity to run equipment like water pumps and selling the excess power to utilities.
On average, that energy savings and revenue added up to $124,000 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) each year, 25 times the value of using the land to grow crops. Collectively, the juice generated in the Central Valley could power around 500,000 households while saving enough water to hydrate 27 million people annually. “If a farmer owns 10 acres of land, and they choose to convert 1 or 2 acres to a solar array, that could produce enough income for them to feel security for their whole operation,” said Jake Stid, a renewable energy landscape scientist at Michigan State University and lead author of the paper, published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The Central Valley is among the most productive agricultural regions in the world: It makes up just 1% of all farmland acreage in the United States yet generates a third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. But it’s also extremely water-stressed as California whiplashes between years of significant rainfall and drought. To irrigate all those crops, farmers have drawn so much groundwater that aquifers collapse like empty water bottles, making the earth itself sink by many feet.
Farmers can’t make their crops less thirsty, so many have been converting some of their acreage to solar. The Central Valley is ideal for this, being mostly flat and very sunny, hence the agricultural productivity. At the same time, farmers have been getting good rates for the electricity that they offset and that they send back to the grid.
Now, though, California has adopted standards that reduce those rates by 75% on average. For a farmer investing in panels, the investment looks less enticing. “The algebra or calculus — or whatever math discipline you want to reference — it just doesn’t work out the same way,” said Karen Norene Mills, vice president of legal advocacy at the California Farm Bureau, which promotes the state’s agricultural community.
Also, the study found that by fallowing land for solar panels, food production in the Central Valley dropped by enough calories to feed 86,000 people a year. But, Stid said, markets can adjust, as crops are grown elsewhere to make up the deficit. By tapping the sun instead, Stid added, growers can simultaneously help California reach its goals of deploying renewable and reducing groundwater usage.
The tension, though, is meeting those objectives while still producing incredible quantities of food. “That is always our concern about some of these pressures,” Mills said.
But this isn’t an either-or proposition: Many farmers are finding ways to grow some crops, like leafy greens and berries, under the panels. The shade reduces evaporation from the soil, allowing growers to water less often. In turn, a wetted landscape cools the panels, which improves their efficiency. “This is the compromise that’s going to allow for both energy independence and food security,” said horticulturalist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies agrisolar at Colorado State University but wasn’t involved in the new study.
Farmers are also turning livestock loose to graze under their panels. Their droppings fertilize the soil, leading to more plant growth and more flowers that support native pollinators. “The grass, it’s so much more lush under the panels, it’s amazing,” said Ryan Romack, founder of Virginia-based AgriSolar Ranch, which provides grazing services. “Especially when the sheep have been on site long-term, you can really see the added benefits of the manure load.”
Then, if a farmer decides not to replace the solar panels at the end of their lifespan — usually around 25 or 30 years — the soil will be refreshed with nutrients and ready to grow more crops. Even if a grower simply lets them sit for decades without any management, the fallowing can restore the soil’s health. “We really see solar as a collective landscape,” Stid said, “that can be sited, managed, and designed in a way to benefit both people and the planet and ecosystems as well.”
Clean energy is the most popular form of energy in the world. By a long shot.
More than 90% of the new energy capacity built worldwide last year was clean, per data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). That’s a new high watermark for solar, wind, and other renewable energy resources.
Due to plummeting costs and global decarbonization policies, clean energy has accounted for most of the world’s new energy resources for several years now. Since 2012, renewables have consistently made up more than half of new energy generation added to global grids.
But the trend has accelerated significantly, the result of a simultaneous slowdown in fossil-fuel power plant construction and a rapid buildout of carbon-free installations. Last year, over 585 gigawatts of new clean energy were built, per IRENA, more than three-quarters of which were solar. Meanwhile, just 47 GW of non-renewable power generation were added.
Overall, renewable resources produced around 32% of global electricity in 2024. If you add in nuclear, carbon-free sources accounted for 40% — a record-high figure.
Nevertheless, emissions from the global power sector have not declined. In fact, they rose by 1.7% last year compared with 2023, per International Energy Agency data shared with Canary Media. There are a few reasons for this.
For one, although renewables dominate new construction, the world still has a massive fleet of fossil-fired power plants, and those continue to tear through huge volumes of coal, gas, and oil to keep the lights on. Also, the amount of fossil fuels the world burns, and the amount of fossil-fueled power plants it builds, are both still climbing, albeit at a slower rate.
The problem is particularly acute in China and India, very large countries in which coal generates a disproportionately high percentage of electricity compared to the rest of the world. The U.S., which has cumulatively emitted more CO2 than any country and is currently the second-biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world, has seen power sector emissions fall over the last 15 years thanks to cheap fracked gas and even cheaper renewables.
Rising power demand is also a thorn in the side of decarbonization efforts. As hotter summers drive up the use of air-conditioning and large industrial power customers like data centers expand, new clean electrons are often simply meeting new demand rather than enabling old polluting power plants to shutter.
Still, there’s no arguing with the fact that the global power system is moving toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels. The problem is that this shift is happening too slowly. And when it comes to averting the worst of the climate crisis, pace matters just as much as direction.
The largest solar farm east of the Mississippi River now provides 100% of the electricity powering Loyola University in Chicago, and starting next fall the solar array will also be part of the university’s lesson plans.
The power purchase agreements that made the Double Black Diamond solar farm possible include “unique” components that promise Loyola access to the sprawling site and real-time data on its power generation, plus guest lectures from leaders at Swift Current Energy, the firm that operates the project, said Matt Birchby, Swift Current’s president. The Boston-based renewables developer owns several other Illinois solar and wind farms in addition to Double Black Diamond.
“It offers a lot of opportunities for faculty and students on campus,” said Loyola assistant professor of environmental policy Gilbert Michaud, who attended a ribbon-cutting for the solar farm on April 30, though the project has been producing energy since last year. “It’s good for me; it’s good for the students. We’ll write some papers.”
The 593-megawatt array also provides about 70% of the electricity used by the city of Chicago for municipal operations, including the city’s two airports. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson joined Loyola faculty and local elected officials at the ribbon-cutting, which took place amid farmland a three-hour drive south of Chicago.
The solar farm is crucial to Chicago meeting its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025, Chicago Department of Environment spokesperson Kathleen O’Shea said. “This project demonstrates how climate action and economic investment can go hand in hand and benefit both our planet and people,” O’Shea said.
Swift Current is exploring ways to invest in Chicago-based workforce training programs to prepare residents for careers in the clean energy sector, Birchby said, as part of a community benefits agreement with the city, since Chicago is too far away to reap tax and employment benefits from the solar farm.
The $779 million project was built by union workers, mostly with modules produced domestically by Arizona-based First Solar — a boon during the post-Covid global supply chain crunch, Birchby said.
Electricity supplier Constellation Energy Corp., which also owns Illinois’ fleet of nuclear power plants, purchases the energy from the solar farm and passes the renewable energy credits on to Chicago, Loyola, CVS, and other customers. Chicago has a 300-MW allotment from the project, and Loyola claims 38 MW. That helps Loyola meet its 2025 goal of being carbon neutral, which is part of the Jesuit university’s larger faith-based commitment to sustainability, as officials told Canary Media in 2023 when the solar farm deal was announced.
Michaud, an economist and data analyst by training, looks forward to using data from Double Black Diamond in his courses and bringing students to the solar farm and surrounding area for fieldwork.
Michaud and his graduate students have studied the impact of large solar farms on property values and public attitudes toward utility-scale solar around the Midwest and in Europe. He has found that while people often fear solar farms will decrease their property values, that rarely happens. Instead, solar farms may actually increase property values, perhaps because of amenities facilitated by an influx of funding.
Sangamon and Morgan counties, which host the 4,100-acre array, are expected to receive about $100 million in tax revenue thanks to the project, according to Swift Current, which will also donate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to local civic causes.
“We looked at how we could become a long-term resident of that community,” said Birchby. “At first, that’s done with proper siting. So with property values and other dynamics at play, you’re making sure you’re not adversely affecting landowners. We’re saying, ‘Hey we’re a corporate sponsor, and we are people who work and live in your community now. How do we give back and become true members of the community?’”
Michaud said he’s eager to study the economic and social ripple effects of Double Black Diamond.
“Can we talk to adjacent landowners? Can we look at the performance of the system? Will there be agrivoltaics?” Michaud said. “There’s obviously energy research we can do, and it might open up other doors — for soil science, water runoff, how does this impact the local bird or rodent population?”
Birchby said Double Black Diamond could be a place to experiment with agrivoltaics, wherein farming coexists with solar production. He said the land under and around the panels is currently planted with native, pollinator-friendly vegetation, and he’s interested in grazing sheep “as an alternative to seasonal mowing … further supporting the broader farming community.”
Birchby said the economies of scale for the large solar farm allow Swift Current to offer lower rates in 12-year contracts with buyers like Loyola and Chicago that are “almost like a marriage.”
“We struck up relationships and partnerships where we’ve been able to navigate hand in hand,” said Birchby. “I’m thrilled with the outcome the collective teams were able to bring together.”
California is a trendsetter when it comes to cleaning up transportation. But the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to put an end to that, albeit through dubious legal means.
For years, the state’s various clean vehicle rules have gone well beyond federal emissions standards. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program requires that all new passenger cars sold in the state must be zero-emissions by 2035; Advanced Clean Trucks mandates that manufacturers scale up their sales of zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
Eleven other states and Washington, D.C., have adopted California’s latest zero-emissions cars rules, and 10 have adopted its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations.
But to be enforceable, those rules needed waivers from the U.S. EPA. The waivers are what the U.S. House targeted this week, voting on Wednesday to repeal Advanced Clean Trucks and on Thursday to rescind Advanced Clean Cars II, with support from major automakers. The House votes came even after the Government Accountability Office — the nation’s top legislative auditor — said Congress doesn’t have the authority to revoke the waivers via the Congressional Review Act. The repeals still face an uphill battle in the Senate, where the body’s parliamentarian similarly said the waivers aren’t subject to such congressional oversight.
But advocates in some of the states that have followed California’s lead don’t want to let the potential repeal derail their EV progress.
More than 60 environmental, business, and housing groups sent letters to Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey last week, calling on her to preserve the state’s EV goals. Healey has already postponed enforcement of similar rules encouraging zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales last month, but this coalition says the remaining regulations are critical to meeting the state’s net-zero goals, Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus reports.
Illinois advocates are meanwhile still pushing their state to adopt Advanced Clean Trucks and Advanced Clean Cars II, they told Canary Media’s Kari Lydersen last month. Places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood have become overrun with heavy-duty trucks as warehouses crop up, bringing excessive diesel pollution with them. Replacing those trucks with zero-emissions vehicles would improve air quality, especially in frontline communities that face higher pollution burdens.
Back in California, concrete progress on electrifying heavy-duty trucks is still happening, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports. Two all-electric charging depots just opened last month — infrastructure that will allow electric trucking to keep on growing, despite all the potholes ahead.
Community solar is winning over Republicans
Community solar is building a surprising fan base. Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio have sponsored bills this year to encourage construction of solar arrays that multiple households can tap into, Alison Takemura reports for Canary Media. Pairing community solar with agricultural land is even at the heart of a model policy from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
Advocates say community solar is in line with the conservative principles of free markets and individual property rights — and a recent survey out of deep-red Texas seems to agree. The poll, commissioned by Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, found more than 90% support protecting property owners’ rights to produce electricity on their land, including with wind turbines or solar panels, and say they should be allowed to lease their land out for power generation too.
Could Spain’s massive blackouts happen in the U.S.?
Spain and Portugal suffered one of Europe’s worst power outages ever on Monday. About 55 million people lost power, sidelining hospitals, disrupting cell signals, and halting digital payments. The massive outage on a usually stable grid stirred up accusations — including from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — that renewable power was to blame.
Spain’s grid operator hasn’t yet disclosed what caused the outages, but the country’s environmental minister said Wednesday that renewables weren’t responsible. Nearly 55% of Spain’s electricity on Monday came from solar, with another 10% each from wind, nuclear, and hydropower — a similar mix to what’s powered the country’s grid in the past, without problems. Still, experts say the outages highlight stability challenges that renewables can pose during power disruptions, and show that grid operators need to implement new technologies to better manage increasing amounts of wind and solar.
Tesla turmoil: Elon Musk and Tesla’s board chair deny a report suggesting the EV maker is seeking a new CEO amid Musk’s increasing political activity and the company’s sinking finances. (Axios, Wall Street Journal)
Gutting grants: The U.S. EPA indicates in a court filing that it intends to cancel 781 grants issued under the Biden administration, most of them tied to environmental justice, and has already notified about half of those recipients of the looming cuts. (Washington Post)
100 days of climate demolition: President Donald Trump has signed 20 climate-related executive orders in his first 100 days in office, and his term has so far been marked by stock market uncertainty, clean-manufacturing project cancellations, and tariffs that are set to hurt the fossil-fuel industry. (Heatmap)
Burgum’s energy pivot: Now largely focused on oil and gas development, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken a sharp turn since supporting an “all of the above” energy strategy that included clean energy while serving as North Dakota’s governor. (E&E News)
A second life for coal plants: Former coal-fired power plants are becoming in-demand properties as developers look to re-use the facilities’ existing power lines for gas-fired power plants, battery storage sites, or offshore wind connections. (Associated Press)
First Solar’s fortunes fall: American manufacturer First Solar, which saw a stock bump in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, has since reported lower-than-expected first quarter earnings and reduced its expected revenue and profit for the rest of the year. (Heatmap)
EV education at risk: Programs that train students to work in EV manufacturing, which arose to supply the growing industry with workers, could peter out amid the Trump administration’s continued attacks on the sector. (Hechinger Report)
Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesn’t understand why that isn’t happening.
The technology couldn’t be easier to use — simply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. They’re popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the country’s utility regulator as of December. They’ve installed millions more without telling the government.
Here in the U.S., though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. “You look over there and say, ‘Well, that’s working,’” he said. “So what is it that stops us from having it here?”
His colleagues agree. Earlier this year, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed it. HB 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other “soft costs” like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar.
Utah’s law marks the nation’s first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solar — but bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoption — including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still can’t install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements.
The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters’ right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use.
Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. U.S. electrical guidelines don’t account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germany’s rules. The U.S. grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that country’s grid operates at 230 volts.
Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards.
One concern is a phenomenon called breaker masking. Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker can’t detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloaded — imagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and you’re charging your laptop, all in the same room — the circuit breaker might fail to activate.
This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hairdryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the country’s oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there haven’t been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said.
Another issue in the U.S. is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. They’re designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hairdryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the U.S. designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germany’s equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar.
Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverter — which converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the home — shut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any U.S. standard will likely need to formalize that requirement.
The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, “every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the U.S. usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed.” This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock.
While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the U.S. without a UL listing, the company’s seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utah’s new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products.
Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard.
GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesn’t need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. “We’re basically taking rooftop solar to the next level” by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilities — a time-consuming and sometimes costly process.
GismoPower’s product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasn’t been easy. “We have found so many roadblocks,” he said.
One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis.
The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solar — and every one of them was rejected in October.
Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Association’s staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, said that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once that’s available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar.
Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes.
Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isn’t going away, and decision-makers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, “It’s just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.”
Illinois is going to need a whole lot more workers to realize its clean energy aspirations.
The state has some of the nation’s most ambitious climate laws, with a target of transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2050. In 2030 — just five years from now — it aims to achieve 40% renewable energy.
The shift away from fossil fuels could create more than 150,000 jobs in Illinois by mid-century, according to a 2022 study commissioned by ComEd, the state’s largest utility.
Since 2012, ComEd has offered a suite of what it calls “Academy” training programs that are helping to meet that need, preparing a diverse pool of more than 1,000 residents from in and around Chicago for entry-level positions in the construction, utility, and clean energy fields.
“We are delivering clean energy 24/7, 365 [days a year] — reliable power to 9 million people across Northern Illinois,” Laticia Holbert, senior workforce development manager for ComEd, told Canary Media. “And so it’s our duty to make sure that we are working with our communities to get a talent pipeline. We are proud of the legacy that we have done throughout our training programs, and we continue to expand.”
The goal of the programs is two-fold — not only to increase the size of the workforce but also to provide employment opportunities for members of environmental justice communities, who for decades have borne the brunt of adverse effects from fossil-fuel extraction. Training programs aimed at these groups, advocates point out, help to ensure that the clean energy transition does not perpetuate the injustices of the fossil-fuel economy.
“We are partnering with the community to make sure that we’re bringing in a diverse talent pipeline, by delivering targeted programs to ensure that more local residents are prepared for, I like to say, good-paying jobs [with] family-sustaining wages,” Holbert said. “We know that is really critical for our communities. We know, with the current climate [and] how clean energy is really revolutionizing, how we need to look at the demand for jobs.”
In mid-April, ComEd and a coalition of companies, labor organizations, and community groups celebrated 73 new graduates from two of the utility’s job training programs, Construct Infrastructure Academy and Craft Academy, at the University of Illinois Chicago Forum. U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D) spoke at the event, as did the CEO of ComEd and representatives of the company United Scrap Metal and the nonprofit Chicago Urban League.
Britney Evans, a 2025 graduate of ComEd’s Construct program who spoke at the ceremony, said that the training she received sets her up to succeed in the trades.
“From the build day to the job shadows and coursework, the Construct program gave me the boost I needed to build my professional network, be challenged, and find new opportunities,” Evans said. “It really helped me understand the daily realities and benefits of the construction industry, and now my classmates and I will be able to break through all the glass ceilings and advance further in our lives and careers.”
Another of ComEd’s Academy training programs, which was not represented at the event, is the Power Up Academy, which provides participants the opportunity to earn design and engineering industry-required certifications for careers related to the clean energy sector. Launched in 2023 in partnership with the City Colleges of Chicago, the 14-week Power Up Academy program is designed to remove barriers to entry for local residents pursuing engineering-related careers. The program attained accreditation in 2024, enabling past and future participants to qualify for up to 13 credit hours toward future degree programs.
Each of ComEd’s three programs provides training at no charge to participants, along with a stipend during the program and ongoing career guidance and financial support after completion, Holbert said.
Approximately 70% of graduates across all of ComEd’s Academy programs land in entry-level positions with the utility or its more than 40 partner employers, taking on roles such as project coordinators, construction workers, lineworkers, design technicians, and underground locators, who help identify where infrastructure is buried.
Historically, more than 95% of program participants have been people of color, and 25% have been women. This year’s class of graduates is comprised of more than 90% people of color and nearly 20% women, according to ComEd.
Participants must be at least 18 years old, have earned either a high school diploma or GED certificate, demonstrate 10th-grade-level math and reading skills, and hold a valid driver’s license, Holbert said.
ComEd also requires potential students to complete an admissions interview along with a drug test and background check. However, individuals with past drug use or who were formerly incarcerated are not automatically disqualified. Consideration is made on a case-by-case basis, Holbert said.
“So, for returning citizens, we welcome them in the program,” Holbert said.
Of the 73 participants who graduated in April, 64 had taken part in the Construct Infrastructure Academy. During the 11-week program, participants learned basic construction skills and earned industry certifications such as a commercial driver’s license and Occupational Safety and Health Administration training. They also learned about heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels.
Participants also had the opportunity to shadow and learn from industry partners. For instance, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity of Chicago, this year’s Construct students helped build homes across Chicagoland’s South and Southwest Sides as part of their training curriculum. During a recent Habitat for Humanity Chicago Build Day, they tiled bathrooms, hung kitchen cabinets, added trim and molding, and painted walls. The project allowed participants to apply their newfound knowledge on safety techniques, handling basic hand tools, and working as a team.
Meanwhile, the nine Craft Academy graduates completed a physically demanding six-week training program that requires utility-pole climbing, a prerequisite experience for an apprenticeship to become an overhead lineworker. Overhead lineworkers play a critical role in maintaining and modernizing the power grid. That task is essential for meeting rising electricity demands as people purchase more EVs and electrify their homes and businesses. These graduates are now eligible for scholarships to the Dawson Technical Institute Overhead Electrical Line Worker program of the City Colleges of Chicago, which will enable them to pursue careers in the electric utility industry.
“We are honored to have joined forces with ComEd over the last 13 years in connecting members of our communities to training opportunities that can change the trajectory of their lives,” said Chicago Urban League CEO Karen Freeman-Wilson during the graduation ceremony. “The Construct and Craft programs represent a gateway to lucrative jobs that can provide the chance to build lasting careers and generational wealth.”
ComEd uses money from its own budget to run the training programs, Holbert said. No federal funds are involved.
“I don’t think [the present political climate] has any impact at all because we have to hire people to work on our grid, our system,” she said. “So we need talented people. That’s just what our mission is. So nothing’s changed about how we’re doing and what we’re doing.”
A clarification was made on May 1, 2025: This story originally stated that Construct students learn about installing heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels. The students learn about this equipment generally but are not trained in installation. The story also originally said that about 70% of graduates from ComEd’s training programs are employed by the utility and its partners. It has been updated to clarify that this figure is for ComEd’s Academy programs specifically, not all of its training programs.
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