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Each time a hurricane batters Florida, the country’s second-largest market for solar energy, broken panels pile up in landfills.
OnePlanet Solar Recycling has a plan to tackle that problem. The Jacksonville, Florida-based startup, led by a former steel executive who worked on the industry’s efforts to reuse scrap, just raised $7 million to start developing a first-of-its-kind solar recycling plant. The facility would break down busted panels and turn the waste stream into a new domestic source of metals such as copper and aluminum at a moment when tariffs are set to hike the price of imported materials.
The company plans to build its $90 million facility, dubbed the River City project, in Green Cove Springs — just south of Jacksonville, Florida’s most populous city. In 2027, OnePlanet aims to complete the first of three phases of construction on the plant and open the debut disassembly line capable of deconstructing 2 million solar modules per year. The firm set a deadline to triple capacity to 6 million panels by 2030.
At peak output, the company expects the facility to be among the largest solar recycling plants in the nation.
OnePlanet’s ambitious plans rest on its unique solar recycling process. The company uses existing technologies but developed a proprietary workflow for divvying panels by shape, model, and physical integrity before crushing, grinding, and chemically treating the hardware to extract raw materials.
“We’re doing a lot of work before we actually feed the panels into the recycling line,” said André Pujadas, OnePlanet’s chief executive. “We batch panels together so we can run campaigns to extract different types of materials, thereby optimizing the process and optimizing production and efficiency.”
Employing artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art sensors, OnePlanet can recover not just the panels’ glass, plastic, and silicon but up to 97% of metal concentrates of aluminum and copper, Pujadas said.
“You can recover the glass and still leave a fairly large amount of impurities in the remaining elements that complicate any further separation process,” he said. “That increases costs for recycling; then you don’t have as pure a product.”
Pujadas previously worked at the steelmaker Nucor, which led the U.S. industry’s adoption of electric arc furnaces. The technology turns scrap metal into new steel using electricity, offering a lower-carbon alternative to fresh steel generated from iron ore in a coal-based blast furnace. That experience taught Pujadas about where costs can mount in a supply chain and how much value a firm can create by freeing feedstock from contaminants.
Compared to that of other recyclers, OnePlanet’s approach will save the company money on maintenance since the pre-disassembly separation process avoids unnecessary wear on the machines, he said, basing the claims on the success of the firm’s pilot plant in Jacksonville.
The financing round announced Tuesday will “be used for final engineering, environmental permits, master recycling agreements, and long–lead time items,” Pujadas said.
The funding “reflects our belief that solar module recycling is not only necessary — it is investable at scale, with durable tailwinds driven by regulation, economics, and resource security,” Ashlynn Horras, partner at the climate-focused venture firm Khasma Capital, said in a statement. Khasma Capital led OnePlanet’s recent seed round.
Among the biggest challenges for recycling is finding cheap methods to transport panels to the processing facility. Shipping busted equipment from Texas, Pujadas said, is more expensive than hauling in panels from Puerto Rico. The location near Jacksonville not only has access to a Class I railroad and a port, he said, but to a lot of local material from within the state itself.
OnePlanet is also getting some help from the Inflation Reduction Act. The company’s facility will be funded in part by a $14.5 million investment from the Department of Energy’s competitive 48C tax credit awarded last year.
Pujadas said “the jury is still out” on whether President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will revoke the program.
“At the end of the day, I’m happy for the vote of confidence from the Department of Energy that this project presented some level of viability and can have a positive effect on domestic value chains,” he said. “Whether or not 48C comes to fruition or not, it’s not going to prevent us from continuing with the River City project.”
While he said tariffs may negatively impact the broader economy, the trade levies are expected to raise the price of key raw materials like aluminum, copper, and silicon, for which OnePlanet can offer a new domestic source.
“There’s a lot of unknowns on the tariff side,” Pujadas said. “But overall if there’s upward pricing pressure, the aluminum we produce will go up, the silicon will go up, and the copper will go up.”
A correction was made on April 22, 2025: The final quote in this piece initially read “the aluminum we procure will go up,” when it should have read “the aluminum we produce will go up.”
The Chicago Teachers Union expects its new, hard-fought contract to help drive clean energy investments and train the next generation of clean energy workers, even as the Trump administration attacks such priorities.
The contract approved by 97% of union members this month represents the first time the union has bargained with school officials specifically around climate change and energy, said union Vice President Jackson Potter. The deal still needs to be approved by the Chicago Board of Education.
If approved, the contract will result in new programs that prepare students for clean energy jobs, developed in collaboration with local labor unions. It mandates that district officials work with the teachers union to seek funding for clean energy investments and update a climate action plan by 2026. And it calls for installing heat pumps and outfitting 30 schools with solar panels — if funding can be secured.
During almost a year of contentious negotiations, the more than 25,000-member union had also demanded paid climate-educator positions, an all-electric school bus fleet, and that all newly constructed schools be carbon-free. While those provisions did not end up in the final agreement, leaders say the four-year contract is a “transformative” victory that sets the stage for more ambitious demands next time.
“This contract is setting the floor of what we hope we can accomplish,” said Lauren Bianchi, who taught social studies at George Washington High School on the city’s South Side for six years before becoming green schools organizer for the union. “It shows we can win on climate, even despite Trump.”
The climate-related provisions are part of what the Chicago Teachers Union and an increasing number of unions nationwide refer to as “common good” demands, meant to benefit not only their members in the workplace but the entire community. In this and its 2019 contract, the Chicago union also won “common good” items such as protections for immigrant students and teachers, and affordable housing–related measures. The new contract also guarantees teachers academic freedom at a time when the federal government is trying to limit schools from teaching materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Black history, Indigenous history, climate science — that’s protected instruction now,” said Potter.
Chicago Public Schools did not respond to emailed questions for this story, except to forward a press release that did not mention clean energy provisions.
The union crafted its proposals based on discussions with three environmental and community organizations, Bianchi said — the Southeast Environmental Task Force, People for Community Recovery, and ONE Northside.
The Southeast Environmental Task Force led the successful fight to ban new petcoke storage in Chicago, and the group’s co-executive director Olga Bautista is also vice president of the 21-member school board. People for Community Recovery was founded by Hazel Johnson, who is often known as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” And ONE Northside emphasizes the link between clean energy and affordable housing.
Clean energy job training was a priority for all three of the organizations, Potter said.
Under the contract, the union and district officials will work with other labor unions to create pre-apprenticeship programs for students, which are crucial to entering the union-dominated building trades to install solar, do energy-efficiency overhauls, and electrify homes with heat pumps and other technology. The contract demands the district create one specific new clean energy jobs pathway program during each year of the four-year contract.
It also mandates renovating schools for energy efficiency and installing modern HVAC systems, and orders the school district to work with trade unions to create opportunities for Chicago Public Schools students and graduates to be hired for such work.
“The people in the community have identified jobs and economic justice as being essential for environmental justice,” said Bianchi. “I’ve mostly taught juniors and seniors; a lot expressed frustration that college is not their plan. They wish they could learn job skills to enter a trade.”
Installing solar could help the district meet its clean energy goals, which include sourcing 100% of its electricity from renewables by this year.
The district has invested more than $6 million in energy efficiency and efficient lighting since 2018, and cut its carbon dioxide emissions by more than 27,000 metric tons, school district spokesperson Evan Moore told Canary Media last fall as contract negotiations were proceeding.
The schools are eligible for subsidized solar panels under the state Illinois Shines program, and they can tap the federal 30% investment tax credit for solar arrays, with a new direct-pay option tailored to tax-exempt organizations like schools.
The union contract’s climate stance represents a “reversal of what’s happening at the federal level,” said Potter. “It’s decreasing dependency on fossil fuels, ensuring the district is moving toward more environmentally efficient practices.”
While the future of federal clean-energy tax credits is in doubt under the Trump administration, Illinois elected officials and advocates say the state’s clean energy transition will continue thanks to ambitious state laws — including a major new energy bill before the legislature.
“As [Chicago Public Schools] is facing many financial woes, we see solar and lowering energy costs as a way we can actually save money that we can then use to prevent layoffs and staff programs,” said Bianchi.
The contract also calls for upgraded windows and HVAC in all schools, as funding permits, which would boost energy efficiency, union leaders said. And it mandates more transparency from the district about the progress of building work orders, which Potter said will help the community track energy-efficiency investments. With school buildings that are 83 years old on average, such overhauls are crucial both to saving money on energy bills and keeping conditions adequate for learning. In 2012, the teachers union went on strike and ultimately won guarantees for air conditioning in all schools, where students and teachers had been sweltering in aging buildings without functioning AC.
Moore said the district is committed to another program that the teachers had demanded, though it did not end up in the contract: the creation of community resiliency centers at schools, where residents can stay warm or cool during extreme weather. Moore noted that Chicago Public Schools received a federal Renew America’s Schools grant in 2024 that will help prepare 20 schools for that role.
The district also received federal funds last year to purchase 50 electric buses under the Clean School Bus program. The city said it worked closely with the union on the application, and Potter added that contract provisions, including formation of a joint Green Schools and Climate Change Preparedness Committee, ensure the union can work with the district to seek additional funds for electric buses.
In recent years the teachers union was deeply involved in a successful fight to prevent a polluting metal shredder’s move from a wealthy North Side neighborhood to the low-income community where George Washington High School is located. The campaign, led in part by now–school board Vice President Bautista, resulted in an agreement between the state and federal government meant to prevent development of new polluting sources in environmental justice communities.
“We’re treated as the city’s dumping ground, but with the community’s organizing power, history, and legacy of resistance, ultimately the community won,” said George Washington High teacher Kevin Moore, who talks about environmental justice and climate change in his courses, including human geography.
The union demanded during bargaining that George Washington High and at least two other schools be replaced with new carbon-free buildings. The contract ultimately has no such promises but says any new school buildings should “aspire to be carbon-free.”
Other unions nationwide have also included climate provisions in their demands, including under the “common good” banner. The Los Angeles teachers union UTLA has for several years made climate justice a successful plank in its contract negotiations, building on its common good advocacy for racial justice and citing blistering heat and wildfire smoke that affect local schools.
In February 2020, 4,000 janitors who were members of Minneapolis’ SEIU Local 26 union held a one-day “climate strike” — joined by students and other community groups — demanding greener cleaning practices and action by banks and other companies to reduce emissions in corporate buildings. After walking off the job, the janitors succeeded in enshrining some climate-related measures in their contract.
“Helping both the larger community and our members to see the union as a vehicle to win on other issues is critical to the survival of organized labor,” wrote two SEIU Local 26 officials and a high school student in a joint essay in Labor Notes, highlighting that more than 40% of the union’s members reported that climate change has impacted their families.
The United Auto Workers union has supported Environmental Protection Agency vehicle emissions limits and the electric vehicle transition.
“A lot of people see this as a new thing we’re doing,” Bianchi said of the Chicago Teachers Union’s focus on energy and climate. “However, as a history teacher, I want to point out that health and safety is something that unions have always fought for. The farmworkers were fighting against toxic chemicals. Mineworkers were fighting for safety. This isn’t just an issue that intersects with our working conditions and the broader public good. It really is both.”
Californians face steep up-front costs if they want to install solar panels to produce clean power and batteries to back up their homes in outages. A new state program will cover those costs for low-income homeowners, but they still have to pay up to tens of thousands of dollars initially and then wait months for the rebate to come through.
Now a startup called Haven Energy is going to take on the task of filing that paperwork, giving homeowners something that sounds too good to be true: a solar and battery system with no out-of-pocket cost.
It’s the latest riff on the evolving market for virtual power plants, which aggregate thousands of small energy systems into a meaningful tool to meet the energy needs of utilities or competitive electricity markets. The grid needs more energy just about everywhere in the U.S., but large-scale infrastructure construction runs into persistent delays and challenges. Adding generation and storage capacity in homes is relatively quick, and with the right incentives, can add up to a substantial tool to meet the grid’s needs.
If Haven successfully implements those incentives, it thinks it will be able to install 10 megawatts of dispatchable battery capacity across thousands of homes in the next two years. The (non-paying) customers will benefit from bill savings and backup power; to qualify for the state-funded rebate, they just need to make their batteries discharge regularly when the grid is stressed, namely in the evening hours when solar production dips and demand surges.
Haven launched in 2023 to streamline the home battery purchase experience and has overseen installations at hundreds of homes in California. But after a couple of years, cofounder and CEO Vinnie Campo determined the company needed a new strategic approach.
“We thought if you were able to remove all the friction from the process, that you could dramatically increase the adoption,” he explained. “That’s only fractionally true. The reason most people don’t get a battery is that they’re incredibly expensive.”
At the same time, utilities have begun grappling with a sudden uptick in electricity demand to supply AI computing, industry, and electrification. Utilities increasingly recognize the value of fleets of aggregated batteries to help meet peak demand, Campo said, but they’re much more comfortable contracting for large assets than thousands of small ones.
Putting these threads together, Campo decided Haven should own the batteries it installs at customer homes, so it can control them to serve utilities’ grid needs, and pull together different revenue streams to lower the cost for consumers.
“We’re seeing from the utilities and the retail companies, they just want that fixed, firm capacity every day,” Campo said. “That’s part of the gap that we’re trying to play into.”
Now Haven can tap into a new tranche of state funds to make this a reality.
Batteries don’t generate power, but for arcane bureaucratic reasons California has long funded its desired battery expansion with the Self-Generation Incentive Program. This legacy program has shifted with the times, and its newest evolution opened up $280 million to pay for batteries (and optional paired solar panels) for low-income households.
Technically, those homeowners can apply for the funds themselves. But this is a rebate program, so they would have to front the cost — which can easily tally up to $30,000 or $40,000 — then wait to get paid back by SGIP, which can take three or four months, Campo said. That’s an obvious nonstarter for many households.
Haven, though, has raised a debt facility and studied up on the necessary details. It can fund the cost of installation and wait for the rebate without sweating. Then it’s on the hook to make sure the installed battery system meets the program requirements for lowering demand in the evenings over 10 years. (Haven routes the installations to local installers and partnered with an undisclosed software company to handle the distributed energy management system)
The customer, meanwhile, doesn’t have to pay Haven any money, but benefits from the backup power and from lowering their electricity demand during peak pricing hours. Customers who use the SGIP funds to pair solar with their batteries will further lower their energy bills by producing their own clean power. And after a decade, Haven will transfer ownership to the homeowners.
Haven has already signed up a few hundred households for this program; the new rebates for solar-battery systems will open up on May 20, when the state rolls out updates to its online system for processing them.
“The biggest objection we get is, people don’t think it’s real,” Campo said. “They’ve always been sold ‘free solar,’ right? And this is the first time it actually is free solar — it’s not ‘no money down,’ it’s no money ever.”
Customers could be forgiven for not believing this program is real, because up until now, it hasn’t been.
State legislators originally allocated $900 million for a new branch of the long-running SGIP bureaucracy back in the Budget Act of 2022. At that time, the state was revising its policies for rooftop solar compensation to encourage more battery adoption; a flagship, broadly accessible home battery rebate could bolster that market in its time of transition. Originally, 70% of that funding was for low-income households, and the rest was open to the general populace. Rather than raising the money by charging people’s utility bills, as SGIP had previously, the Legislature pulled the new funds from the state’s cap-and-trade revenue.
But instead of quickly establishing the rules and moving the money out the door, the California Public Utilities Commission oversaw a yearslong process of laborious updates to the SGIP handbook and the backend database.
“It’s taken forever to go live,” said Joshua Buswell-Charkow, deputy director at the California Solar and Storage Association, a trade group.
While that cumbersome process was underway, the Legislature pared down most of the allocation, leaving just $280 million for low-income households. Updating the necessary web infrastructure has proven time-consuming. The commission also allowed the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the state’s largest municipal utility, to delay launching the solar-battery rebate program for Angelenos until late December, because the utility wasn’t ready to administer it on time.
The funds still need to be claimed by June 30, 2026. As the money finally starts to flow, Buswell-Charkow is most concerned about the practicality of meeting the new requirement that state-funded batteries enroll in demand response.
SGIP-funded batteries already had cycling requirements, meaning they couldn’t just sit in backup mode and not provide more value to the grid, he noted.
Going forward, the batteries have to be enrolled in a “qualified demand response program.” But, so far, the commission has only qualified two types of programs: critical peak pricing rates, which are only available to Californians who buy power from the three big investor-owned utilities, and the capacity bidding program, which currently only serves commercial customers, according to the California Solar and Storage Association’s survey of the market.
Other demand response programs include home batteries, like the Demand-Side Grid Support and Emergency Load Reduction programs, but the commission hasn’t approved them for the SGIP requirement.
The commission did grant an exemption for customers of municipal utilities who don’t have access to any qualified demand response programs, Buswell-Charkow said. But the regulators denied an exemption to the millions of customers of community choice aggregators, locally organized power-purchasing organizations that similarly lack access to the small number of approved demand response programs. Haven has encouraged utility regulators to approve demand response programs for customers of community choice aggregators, so those millions of Californians can access the SGIP funds, too.
The demand response requirement “makes the program needlessly more complicated than it needs to be,” Buswell-Charkow said.
Given those layers of complexity, it’s hard to imagine homeowners wading into the morass themselves. Even local solar installers struggle with the administrative burden of meeting SGIP’s bureaucratic requirements, Buswell-Charkow noted. This could give companies like Haven an opening: If they get good at filing the necessary paperwork and executing on the dense program requirements, they can make money and give households free clean energy at the same time.
The future of the U.S. electric vehicle transition is murky — but at least through the first three months of 2025, the data tells a clear story.
Almost 300,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter of the year, according to a new report from Cox Automotive. That’s 11% more than over the same period in 2024.
Over the last few years, two trends have defined the U.S. EV market: somber headlines and slow-but-steady growth.
In late 2023, analysts began warning EV sales were not increasing as fast as once projected as concerns about cost, range, and charger availability persisted. Some even forecast sales would decline in 2024. Major automakers began walking back their 100% electric commitments. Ultimately, new EV sales rose by just 7% last year — enough to push the sector to an annual record-high of 1.3 million vehicles sold, but far slower growth than the 49% surge in 2023.
After Republicans swept the November elections, the market’s outlook grew even gloomier. That’s because federal policies supporting EV adoption are likely to disappear or at least be severely watered down.
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has already moved to kill the strict tailpipe emissions rules supported by legacy U.S. automakers. Congressional Republicans are on a (potentially doomed) crusade to revoke waivers that have allowed states like California and New York to ban the sale of new gas vehicles after 2035. They’re also reportedly looking to gut the consumer EV tax credit, an action that would hobble EV sales. Trump’s tariffs, such as they are, present yet another hurdle: The U.S. relies heavily on China for key battery components and minerals.
But at least in Q1, EV sales were still ticking up. And that’s despite Tesla’s big decline. The U.S. market leader saw its sales drop by 9% year-over-year, the result of a stagnant product lineup and, according to some analysts, public distaste for CEO Elon Musk’s political persona. Meanwhile, General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, and BMW all saw their sales continue to rise.
The fact that the industry managed to grow despite the struggles of its overwhelming leader — Tesla accounted for 44% of the market in Q1 — speaks to the increasing vibrancy and resilience of the U.S. EV market. The question now is whether it is vibrant and resilient enough to keep growing despite federal policy headwinds.
A correction was made on April 18, 2025: The chart and image for this story were originally incorrectly labeled with 2024. The year has been changed to 2025.
Aubrey Gunnels, CEO of 3V Infrastructure, understands the risks involved in installing and owning EV chargers in thousands of apartment building garages and condominium parking lots. She also sees the opportunity.
Just look at the statistics. By 2030, EVs are expected to make up close to half of all new U.S. car sales. Today, roughly 80% of EV charging takes place at home, and roughly one-third of Americans live in multifamily housing. But only 5% of U.S. multifamily housing offers on-site EV charging, according to CBRE, one of the world’s largest property management companies and a 3V Infrastructure partner.
“People really prefer to charge at home,” Gunnels said — and they’ll want to live in apartments or condos that offer that option.
Tenants don’t pay to install EV charging, though — property owners do, and they aren’t in the business of financing, installing, or operating complex EV charging projects.
That’s where 3V Infrastructure comes in, Gunnels said. Since launching last year, the New York–based startup has raised up to $40 million from an affiliate of Greenbacker Capital Management to finance charging installations in properties across the country. With big-name customers like Camden Property Trust and Bridge Investment Group, 3V is installing chargers at hundreds of sites in 17 states, and hopes to expand to thousands by 2030, she said.
Getting big is key to 3V’s business model, Gunnels said. Many “charging-as-a-service” offerings for multifamily properties already cover the cost of chargers in exchange for monthly fees or other payback structures. But 3V isn’t asking property owners for any money at all, she explained — just a 10-year contract to let it build chargers on the site and charge customers for using them.
That means it’s up to 3V to pick the right properties, install the right number of chargers in the right locations, keep them in good working order, and decide how much it needs to charge users to make its money back.
“We’re taking early risk with the EV driver adoption rate at each site,” Gunnels said. “And once we’re profitable, we share the profits with the property owner — and that helps allow us to maintain the chargers.”
In that sense, 3V’s business model more closely resembles that of the public charging operators that rely on electricity sales to earn back their up-front costs. That’s inherently riskier than getting someone to pay you to install and operate EV chargers — and so far it’s a rarity in the world of multifamily EV charging developers.
It is, after all, still early days for the EV charging industry. The first public charger deployments were boosted by significant government or utility incentives to make up for the fact that there weren’t enough EVs on the road to reliably finance their costs.
But up-front incentives aren’t a good mechanism to ensure that chargers keep performing over the long haul. In fact, EV chargers have a long and troubled history of not working when drivers need them to. This is a well-publicized problem with public chargers, but it’s affected multifamily properties as well.
“As we all know, the statistics about EV charger uptime are not great. A lot of those chargers may be not functioning,” said Mark Kerstens, vice president of EV charging solutions at CBRE. That’s certainly true for the earliest rollouts of multifamily charging, many of them undertaken by property owners themselves.
CBRE manages and advises multifamily property owners around the world, and works with a number of chargepoint operators, including 3V, for those looking to install EV charging, Kerstens said. Some property owners have taken on charging installations and operations on their own, he said. But most are simply looking for a way to not be left behind in a market that’s constantly seeking out new amenities to draw in tenants and residents.
How badly property owners feel they need EV chargers depends on where they are and what type of tenant they want to attract, he said. He sees the overall market as shifting to the point where it could be “a negative differentiator, if you’re the only multifamily property that does not have an EV charger.” And for many property owners, “it’s just like a vending machine in the rec room — they don’t want to do it themselves, they’d rather have a service provider.”
CBRE’s EV charging partners run the gamut from all-in risk-takers like 3V to a range of “as-a-service” models that charge monthly fees or arrange cost- and revenue-sharing agreements with property owners, he said. What’s paramount, he said, is that the chargers work properly — and “there’s quite a bad track record for those who’ve tried to do it on their own.”
The same concern applies to charging provided by a third party, said Clark Longhurst, president of commercial markets at SitelogIQ, the company working with 3V on its projects with Bridge Investment Group. SitelogIQ has decades of experience installing LED lighting, building controls, and other energy-efficiency projects in multifamily housing. EV charging is a relatively new addition to that roster — and “there’s a longer list of people who will do it ‘as a service,’” he said.
But EV charging for multifamily properties has had some serious problems. Early projects were plagued by chargers that couldn’t receive wireless control signals in concrete parking garages, low-cost chargers that companies failed to repair promptly when they broke, and other issues, he said.
“I don’t want to hand this over to someone who will provide a bad experience – that’s bad for me as a property owner,” Longhurst said. Any provider of charging as a service “needs to have the same incentives — or maybe more incentives — than you have as an owner to ensure the charging works, that it’s done without friction, and if there’s a problem it’s handled quickly.”
Multifamily property owners also have to consider the risks of taking responsibility for charging infrastructure that could end up being abandoned as companies exit various markets, said Larsen Burack, EV charging product manager at analysis firm Ohm Analytics. His company’s latest report on the U.S. multifamily charging space indicates how many choices exist, from multifamily specialists such as Swtch and EverCharge to large-scale public charging providers like ChargePoint and Tesla. But those choices have also included companies like Enel X Way that abruptly exited the market and stopped supporting customers.
“Options like the 3V model are intriguing for property managers because there is no up-front capital cost and can be seen as relatively low risk,” Burack said. At the same time, “this is still a volatile industry, and if a company shutters, you risk having another Enel X situation on your hands.”
Gunnels conceded that 3V’s customers will need to have faith in its ability to execute on its 10-year contracts. She also highlighted that the company doesn’t rely on government subsidies for its projects to be profitable, and takes a conservative approach to forecasting utilization — the critical metric of how often chargers are used, and thus how quickly they can pay back their costs and earn profits.
That’s important for aligning the long-term incentives of the charging business, she believes. “Many of the stranded chargers we have across the nation are not a product of hardware or software [issues] — it’s really the economics,” she said. “If someone’s not incentivized to make sure the chargers work, they’re not going to work.”
3V’s conservative approach may limit the scope of markets and properties that the company goes after. ”We don’t believe every multifamily building has to have an EV charger in the next five years,” she said, even if most will eventually need them. 3V will also limit how many chargers it installs at each property during its initial deployment phases, as the company tests its utilization forecasts against reality.
The key to success, Gunnels said, is scale and diversity. Each individual project may be relatively small — costing, say, between $30,000 to $100,000 to install up to 14 Level 2 chargers per property.
Luckily for 3V, it’s easier to predict utilization for multifamily properties than roadside and public charging. So said Quinn Pasloske, a managing director of the Greenbacker investment fund that supplied 3V with up to $40 million going into its first round of investments.
“Historically we’ve been very averse to taking utilization risk. This has been the third rail” for investors in the charging sector, he said. Roadside charging, for instance, runs the risk of too few EVs showing up to pay back its up-front or ongoing costs — or the risk that another charging station will open across the street and steal its business.
“But when there’s charging at home, people charge at home,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, you have captive demand. Even though you are taking utilization risk, you can measure and modulate that so much more carefully.”
To be clear, that dilution of utilization risk works best at large scales, he said.
“You cannot be doing this on a property-by-property basis,” Pasloske said. “You need scale — it needs to be over $100 million, and to get to really attractive costs of capital, over $500 million. And you need a lot of diversification.”
“But once we have scale, the cost of capital comes down dramatically,” he said. That’s because these kinds of projects can be bundled into portfolios and sold as asset-backed securities — a class of investment that can include anything from home mortgages and credit card debt to residential solar projects.
“The market is very good at understanding the risk of distributed assets, even if these assets are high risk,” Pasloske said.
3V’s eventual success relies on achieving that level of scale, Gunnels said. It’s not there yet: “We are using equity to invest in this, so the cost of capital is high. But we have enough data to show that utilization is dependable,” she said — and “we know we have to be at thousands of properties to make this model work.”
Ohio consumer and environmental advocates are calling on state regulators to address disparities within FirstEnergy’s grid after a recent report found disadvantaged communities are more likely to rely on older, more outage-prone equipment.
Areas defined as disadvantaged under the Biden administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool were twice as likely to have low-voltage circuits compared to other parts of FirstEnergy’s Ohio territory, according to the study by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Equipment was also generally older and had less capacity for normal and overload situations.
The results reflect historical patterns of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities, the report says, but the full scope of the problem — including across Ohio’s other utilities — is unclear due to the lack of information from utilities and regulators.
“The public availability of any utility data is very, very limited in Ohio,” said report author Shay Banton, a regulatory program engineer and energy justice policy advocate for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
The Ohio Environmental Council submitted the report as part of FirstEnergy’s pending rate case before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and is asking regulators to address the topic in an evidentiary hearing set for May 5.
The state of the local grid matters when it comes to the reliability of customers’ electric service, their ability to add distributed renewable energy resources like rooftop solar, and a community’s potential to attract business investments that could improve its economic conditions.
Regulated electric utilities file reliability reports each spring that focus on two commonly used metrics. The system average interruption frequency index, or SAIFI, shows how many outages occurred per customer. The customer average interruption duration index, or CAIDI, measures the average length of time for restoring service to customers who lose power.
The annual reports also list factors involved in outages, with breakouts for transmission-related service problems and major events. Major events such as severe weather are considered statistical outliers that don’t count for calculating whether utilities meet their company-specific standards for CAIDI and SAIFI.
While weather accounted for the majority of time Ohioans went without power last year, equipment failures also triggered thousands of outages. For the ninth year in a row, at least one Ohio utility company failed to meet reliability standards, reports filed this month show. Both AEP Ohio and FirstEnergy’s Toledo Edison missed their marks for the average time before power is restored for customers who experience outages.
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio also collects data on the worst-performing circuits. Individual circuits serve anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand customers. However, the state doesn’t post these reports online or disclose the circuit’s exact locations, which could be used to show whether they are concentrated in disadvantaged communities.
The SAIFI and CAIDI metrics used by state regulators did not show significant disparities between disadvantaged neighborhoods and other areas in FirstEnergy’s territory. But Banton said those reliability metrics rely on averages for large groups, which can obscure disparities. They said that utilities should also be required to publicly report the number of customers experiencing frequent service interruptions and the number of customers who faced long outages.
Utilities in Ohio tend to be reactive in dealing with circuit problems, Banton said. Communities can face longer outages if utilities wait for equipment to fail before replacing it. Instead, Banton wants utilities’ capital investments to address current disparities and then prevent them from recurring in the future.
“The bottom line is that consumers should get reliable service, and utilities are obligated to provide reliable service,” said Merrilee Embs, a spokesperson for the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, which did not work on the report. The group is concerned about whether utilities’ capital improvement spending directly benefits customers — an issue that relates to grid disparities.
“FirstEnergy’s (and other Ohio utilities’) failure to implement grid modernization plans in a way that benefits residential consumers likely contributes to grid disparities such as those described in the [study],” Embs wrote via email after reviewing the report.
FirstEnergy has challenged the Ohio Environmental Council’s objections about grid disparities in its rate case. Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is due to consider revisions to the annual reliability reporting requirements by Sept. 30, 2026. The commission will likely start accepting comments on the rules later this year, said spokesperson Matt Schilling.
The quality of a neighborhood’s grid influences more than whether residents’ lights stay on.
“These inequities can have serious consequences for customer access to distributed energy resources, which can save money,” said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer for the Ohio Environmental Council.
Rooftop solar or other distributed clean energy can add to traffic on local grid circuits, posing a challenge for equipment that’s older or has lower voltages or capacity. Those circuits generally can handle less grid traffic, Banton said. In contrast, newer, high-voltage circuits tend to have “less bumps and less potholes [along with] better on-ramps.”
The grid’s quality and capacity also impact an area’s economic development. Historically, utilities have focused capital investment on places where people are moving or where they expect new industrial demand. That approach exacerbates inequity, Banton said. Even if businesses otherwise wanted to move to disadvantaged areas, poor electrical infrastructure may lead them to go elsewhere to avoid huge costs for upgrading the local grid, they said.
“The energy transition is in full effect, but many of the communities that suffer first and worst from climate change are not able to make the transition due to underinvestment in infrastructure,” said Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, who did not work on the new report. He served at the U.S. Department of Energy as deputy director for energy justice and principal deputy director for state and community energy programs during the Biden administration.
Because utilities have failed to invest in and maintain the grid evenly throughout their service territories, an equity-based approach to infrastructure modernization should make sure resources now go to areas that were left behind, Reames said.
He supports the report’s call for more granular data, including details on customers with repeated or prolonged outages. The report also calls on utilities to publish maps showing grid capacity, and information about which census tracts are served by each circuit and substation transformers.
“I often say, ‘The data you don’t have is the problem you don’t see,’” Reames noted. “Difficulties accessing data or the lack of certain data availability are sometimes a result of entities not wanting to confirm issues that are anecdotally known.”
The “Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
NEW YORK — Our food system generates one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions, and the human race has made almost no progress reducing them. Except in New York City’s public hospitals.
Before the city deployed an innovative new strategy two years ago to shrink its “carbon foodprint,” 99% of its patient meals included meat. Now more than half are vegetarian, generating 36% fewer emissions. While vegan activists have mostly failed to get us to ditch meat through education campaigns and yelling, and biotech entrepreneurs have mostly failed to convert us to plant-based substitutes designed to mimic meat, bureaucrats working for embattled Mayor Eric Adams have engineered a radical dietary shift.
Sitting in her bed in the surgical ward at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital, pointing at a clean plate that minutes earlier was covered with mushroom stroganoff, 60-year-old Pamela Sumlin-Gambil revealed the secret of the city’s success.
“I normally take what they offer me, you know?” she said with a shrug.
That’s the strategy. Food service associates in the city’s 11 public hospitals are trained to tell patients the chef recommends the sweet potato burrito, the red curry vegetable stew, or another plant-based meal. If the patient doesn’t bite, the associate offers a three-bean chili, a black-eyed pea casserole, or another meatless dish. If the patient says no twice, then the associate suggests a meat option. But 51% of patients don’t say no twice.
In behavioral science, this kind of nudge is known as making the preferred option the “default,” and it’s a weirdly powerful hack. When employees are automatically defaulted into a 401(k) plan, they tend to stay in it and save more for retirement; when consumers buy new TVs with a low-power default setting, they tend to leave them that way and use less power. We’re an inertial species, predisposed to accept the status quo, so “choice architecture” really matters. As Sumlin-Gambil said, we normally take what’s offered to us — and when what’s offered is better for the climate, we inadvertently reduce our impact on the planet.
The one caveat with food is that we stop taking what’s offered to us when we don’t enjoy it. That’s why New York has paired its default strategy with a conscious effort to serve delicious, nutritious, and culturally resonant plant-based meals with clean ingredient lists. And it’s working; the food service giant Sodexo, which has now served the city’s patients more than 2 million plant-based meals, reports a 98% satisfaction rate. The average vegetarian meal costs 59 cents less than meat, so the program has also saved the city more than $1 million.
In fact, the program has worked so well that Sodexo plans to expand plant-based defaults to all 400 U.S. hospitals it serves. At a time when humans already use one-third of the earth’s habitable land to raise livestock, and we’re expected to eat 50% more meat by 2050, the New York hospital experience offers hope that vegetarian defaults at universities, corporate cafeterias, and other institutional settings could help us eat less. Officials from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and several other countries have already visited to learn how they could reduce their food emissions through defaults of their own.
“What’s so exciting is the way this retains freedom of choice. Nobody’s forced to go vegan,” said Katie Cantrell, cofounder and CEO of Greener by Default, a nonprofit that has advised New York City and Sodexo on their behavioral approach. “The idea is to make the sustainable choice the path of least resistance, without getting into the big political and cultural fights.”
Feeding the world without frying it will be one of the 21st century’s most daunting challenges. We’ll have to eat less meat, waste less food, stop clearing wilderness for new farmland, and make more food on existing farmland. I’ve written Canary columns about several promising solutions — fake meat, more efficient ranches, a super-tree called pongamia — and a bunch more appear in my upcoming book about our eating of the earth. But none of those solutions are really moving the needle yet, which is why we’re currently on track to deforest another dozen Californias worth of land by 2050.
Offering black bean enchiladas to hospital patients actually does seem to move the needle.
These days, Mayor Adams is best known as the trash-talking rogue who quit the Democratic Party after the Trump administration made his corruption charges disappear. But his main claim to fame used to be his plant-based diet, which he credited with helping him lose 35 pounds and cure his diabetes in a book titled “Healthy at Last.” Even his veganism has attracted media skepticism — he confessed to occasional lapses after reporters caught him eating fish — but he’s been a consistent advocate for plant-based eating, and his administration has pushed more plant-based protein into the city’s schools, jails, and homeless shelters.
The hospital initiative is the centerpiece of New York’s efforts to reduce meat-eating, and Kate MacKenzie, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, says the default strategy is the key to driving change without provoking backlash. Most people like meat. They don’t want to be told to give it up to save the earth or even their health. But they’re not necessarily committed to eating it all the time, either. They’ll try what’s offered, if it sounds good, especially when they’re confined to a hospital bed.
“It’s not plant-based or bust. It’s not giving the food a label, so people say it’s not for them because they’re not that,” MacKenzie said. “We nudge you towards choices that are better for you and the planet, but if you really want meat, you can still get it.”
When Sodexo Chef Phil DeMaiolo created the recipes for the city’s plant-based hospital meals, his top priorities were to make them tasty and reminiscent of home, because patients who don’t eat don’t get well. The dishes are prepared in a central “culinary center” in Brooklyn with culture and demographics in mind — a stew called sancocho in Latin neighborhoods, featuring root vegetables instead of chicken or pork; red curry tofu for Indian communities; a penne pesto like the ones he ate as an Italian-American kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Asian patients didn’t love a pad thai without fish sauce, so DeMaiolo yanked it off the menu.
He doesn’t serve Impossible or Beyond burgers — not because he thinks there’s anything wrong with fake meat, just because he wants to serve more natural and recognizable vegetarian dishes.
“It’s gotta be authentic, and it’s gotta have flavor — not ‘hospital food,’ just good food,” DeMaiolo said. “Then you gotta advertise it right, and do some education.”
There’s behavioral science behind the advertising, too; studies show that calling dishes “vegan” or “vegetarian” is a turnoff to omnivores, while adjectives like “zesty” or “hearty” are much more enticing than “healthy” or “sustainable.” Even though plant-based meals are almost always better for the climate than chicken or pork, and dramatically better than beef or lamb, describing their climate benefits is apparently counterproductive. Most people prefer to associate food with comfort, joy, and their grandmother’s kitchen, not the boiling of the planet. In general, it helps to focus on the appeal of the meals, rather than their lack of meat; people want to feel like they’re getting something, not being denied something.
DeMaiolo says the education component is even more important to the program’s success. He began by taking field trips to all 11 hospitals, providing samples to CEOs, doctors, nurses, and janitors, getting their input as well as their buy-in. Then the real education is done by trained food service associates who not only recommend plant-based options to the patients but let them know about the nutritional benefits of each dish and eventually send them home with green and healthy recipes they can cook themselves.
At Kings County Hospital, a nearly 200-year-old institution in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, a Moroccan-born food service associate named Hassan Ouhassi took his iPad to Sumlin-Gambil’s bed to make sure she had liked her mushroom stroganoff. She had; she said it tasted just like beef. He agreed; he tries every dish himself.
“I tell them it’s healthy food, I tell them they’ll like it, and they do!” Ouhassi said. “They clean their plates. Sometimes they ask for meat, which is fine. Not usually, though.”
This is the power of defaults: We’re much more likely to register to vote, sign up to be an organ donor, or renew our Netflix subscription when we have to opt out rather than opt in. Changing behaviors is hard, and we’ll have to change quite a few to maintain a habitable planet, so New York’s nudges could be a powerful model.
Mayor Adams embarked on his plant-based journey for health reasons, after he went nearly blind in one eye and his doctors told him he’d need diabetes drugs the rest of his life, so hospitals were the perfect venue to try to deploy his plant-based vision. But his food policy team is just as focused on climate. It’s set a goal of reducing the city’s food-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and shifting from meat to plants is the best way to do that. The team is expanding plant-based meals in schools and other city-run institutions while securing commitments from private institutions like Columbia University, the Bronx Zoo, and The Rockefeller Foundation to reduce their own food-related emissions by one-fourth.
MacKenzie, the director of the food policy office, says her strategy is simple: Buy less beef, offer more plants, focus on taste, and don’t guilt anyone. The city government’s emissions from food purchases are down 29%. That’s quite an achievement, because global food emissions are rising fast, mainly because global meat consumption rises just about every year.
To meet the 2050 emissions targets in the Paris climate accord, consumers in rich countries will have to reduce their consumption of meat, especially ruminant meats like beef and lamb, by about half. The problem is, our ancestors began eating meat 2 million years ago, and it literally helped make us who we are; we evolved bigger brains to help us find meat, and smaller stomachs because we didn’t need to digest as many plants. Animal flesh will be an extremely hard habit to break, which is why the default strategy that relies on our mindless willingness to outsource our dietary choices holds such promise.
“People are overwhelmed, there’s a cacophony of information thrown at them, they’ve got too many decisions to make — sometimes they just want to be told what to do,” said Eve Turow-Paul, executive director of the nonprofit Food for Climate League, which helped design the messaging for the default program. “If you can make the good choice the easy choice, without getting into the political bickering of ‘you’re taking away my burger,’ you can help people and the planet.”
The animal rights movement has tried to turn Americans against meat by exposing the cruelty of factory farms, throwing blood at models wearing fur, and holding a lot of noisy demonstrations. Biotech startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have tried to stop the expansion of animal agriculture by offering meat substitutes that tasted, smelled, and seared like the real thing. But if anything, Americans are even more committed to eating animals, as “meatfluencers” get rich on the internet and “carnivore diets” trend on Instagram.
There are plenty of exciting potential food and climate solutions, but none of them are reducing many emissions yet. My family no longer wastes food at home, because we’ve got a food waste dehydrator that converts our kitchen scraps into chicken feed, but less than 0.1% of American households have one. Pongamia trees produce more food than soybean plants on much worse land, but so far they’ve only been planted on about 0.01% of American farmland.
But plant-based defaults seem easy to implement, easy to scale, and remarkably effective. And unlike Meatless Mondays or plastic-straw bans, they don’t seem to induce defensiveness or hostility.
“We’re living in such depressing and polarizing times,” said Cantrell, the Greener by Default cofounder. “Well, this is something uncontroversial that actually works!”
Nearly 3 million Massachusetts households will have the chance to start saving money on heating next winter under new seasonal heat-pump rates from the state’s three major electric utilities.
Regulators have approved plans from Unitil and National Grid to reduce electricity rates for heat pump owners during the region’s often-frigid winter months, and Eversource is preparing its own proposal. Together, the three utilities provide service to about 86% of Massachusetts’ households.
The goal of the rates is to accelerate adoption of heat pumps by making it cheaper to run these super-efficient, low-carbon appliances in a region where the economics of switching from fossil-fueled heating don’t always pencil out for homeowners.
“The end result, all over Massachusetts, is that this will change the numbers. It will encourage heat pump adoption,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “Then the question will be: What do we do for an encore?”
Utility regulators are already looking into that question, opening an investigation in March to determine how to make future iterations of seasonal heat-pump rates as effective as possible.
Expanding the use of heat pumps is a major part of Massachusetts’ strategy for reaching its ambitious goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Today, nearly 80% of the state’s homes burn fossil fuels — natural gas, heating oil, or propane — for heat. Many of the remaining homes use inefficient electric resistance heating.
The state’s climate plan calls for installing 500,000 heat pumps by 2030 to tackle emissions associated with building operations. Air-source heat pumps, the most common version of the appliance, use electricity to extract thermal energy from the surrounding air to heat and cool homes. The only greenhouse gas emissions associated with the systems are those that come from generating the electricity used.
The persistently high cost of electricity in Massachusetts — only three states had higher residential prices in January — is an obstacle for many homeowners interested in heat pumps. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources has expressed skepticism that the state can reach its heat pump goals without changes to current rates.
Most households now using oil, propane, or electric resistance heating would likely save money by using heat pumps, regardless of electric rates. But for many consumers using relatively cheap natural gas, the added electricity use from switching to heat pumps would drive their total costs up. That’s where seasonal heat-pump rates come into play, charging lower prices to homes using heat pumps so the added power consumption doesn’t translate into higher total energy bills.
Unitil was the first of Massachusetts’ three main investor-owned electric utilities to put forth a seasonal heat-pump rate, receiving regulatory approval in June for a discount of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour — 64% below the summer rate. Regulators then ordered National Grid to do the same; that proposal was approved in February. In the state Department of Public Utilities’ order launching the investigation into heat pump rates, regulators required Eversource to submit its own such plan by May 15 and committed to moving the proposal through the regulatory process quickly enough to make a new rate effective for the coming winter.
These lower rates are possible because utilities are essentially overcharging heat pump customers for their winter electricity use under the current system, said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
On each utility bill, customers pay, of course, for the electricity they use. They also pay a delivery charge that funds the construction and maintainence of a grid that can accommodate moments of peak demand: those few hot summer evenings when dishwashers, televisions, and millions of air conditioners are running at the same time.
In the winter, though, average demand is much lower, so the strain on the grid is much lighter. During these months, the delivery charge doesn’t properly reflect the actual costs of keeping the grid running, said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for clean energy nonprofit Acadia Center.
Households that operate heat pumps in the winter are “not actually putting much stress on the system at all,” he said. “They really shouldn’t have to pay as much as they are.”
A collaboration of state agencies, known as the Interagency Rates Working Group, modeled several possible rate designs and found that a 5-cent winter discount, compared to the existing rate, could slightly increase overall costs for a household switching from natural gas. A discount of 18 cents, however, would result in significant savings across the board: A house switching from natural gas could save up to $78 per month, and a home making the move from electric resistance heat could save more than $500 per month.
Though more numbers need to be crunched, energy advocates are inclined to support a deeper discount. Because of the high cost of electricity in Massachusetts, a larger rate reduction might be needed to make a heat pump a competitive choice, they said.
“You do need a pretty significant discount in some states to ensure that a heat pump is lower-cost than a gas furnace going forward,” Kresowik said.
As part of the investigation into seasonal heat-pump rate design, regulators have asked the public to submit comments by June 2. The approach to gathering feedback is a welcome departure from the usual process, Chretien said.
In most cases before utility regulators, outside organizations can only participate if they become formal intervenors and have a lawyer representing them. It is expensive, time-consuming, and beyond the reach of many advocacy groups and most individuals, Chretien said. The request for comments from any interested parties opens up the proceedings, he said, allowing anyone with a stake in climate or energy affordability issues to participate.
“The [Department of Public Utilities] is recognizing that their normal intervention process is onerous,” Chretien said. “To me, it’s good government to do it this way.”
For this approach to make a real impact, however, regulators must have a plan for reaching out to all communities, not just the narrow slice of people who are aware of public utilities regulations and issues, said Charles Hua, founder of consumer education nonprofit PowerLines. It will be important to connect with groups of different income and education levels, to ensure everyone has a voice.
“I would not expect in a vacuum that there would be awareness,” Hua said. “I suspect they need to proactively engage communities.”
ENFIELD, N.C. — When history buffs reenacted a Revolutionary War general’s visit to this tiny, rural North Carolina town in February, its top elected official was notably absent.
General Marquis de Lafayette may have helped liberate America from England, but over 240 years later his story has little relevance to Mayor Mondale Robinson.
“I find it extremely hard to be celebrating the Revolutionary War when people in Enfield — households of four people — are living on $24,000 a year,” said Robinson, sitting in his windowless office, sparsely decorated with small, framed photos of Black leaders. “I don’t know what freedom looks like, because you can’t tell me people in Enfield are free to live the way they want to.”
Robinson, who was elected in 2022, envisions a day when Black people in his community are able to live a life of pride, freedom, and economic stability. He believes clean energy will play a central role.
Alongside other community leaders and clean energy advocates, Robinson is planning a new solar farm that could meet most of Enfield’s electricity needs. He wants a modern substation to replace the town’s dilapidated one. And he aims to create a “storefront” for energy efficiency that could help residents reduce energy waste and their electric bills.
“We’re trying to be energy independent,” Robinson said. “Besides green energy being good for the environment, it’s also going to help our people … live a life with dignity. That includes the housing, the grid, figuring out how to do renewable energy in a way that is not just sustainable but also job-creating.”
Some formidable barriers stand in the way, from the Trump administration’s antipathy to clean energy and communities of color, to pockets of local opposition to the large solar farms that have become common across the region. But with money still flowing for now from Biden-era climate laws — which were intended to fund progress in historically disadvantaged communities like Enfield — Robinson and his fellow visionaries say their aspirations are within reach.
“[It’s] a place that has more than 260 sunny days per year on average,” said Robinson. “I’m super excited about what’s possible.”
In many ways, Enfield typifies eastern North Carolina and the rural South. Once a trading post for peanuts, tobacco, and other crops, the town’s commercial district, five miles east of Interstate 95, now stands nearly empty. Like much of the state, the town faces increasingly frequent natural disasters, like hurricanes. It’s devastatingly poor and overwhelmingly Black, home to many descendants of those who remained enslaved long after Lafayette’s victory tour.
Robinson grew up in Black Bottom, Enfield’s historically Black section. The neighborhood still has no sidewalks, and he says indoor plumbing wasn’t a given here until the 1990s. On a walk through town, he pointed out the shotgun home he lived in for a time as a child with his parents and some of his 12 siblings.
“I’m 45 years old,” he said. “I should not know what an outhouse is.”
When Robinson looks back on his childhood, he sees clearly how the lack of infrastructure and the quality of the environment impacted the health of those around him. Many of his schoolmates had ringworm, a result, he thinks, of poor sewer systems, water contamination upstream, or a combination of the two. Severe asthma, which can be triggered by air pollution, kept one brother in the hospital for most of 4th grade.
Dumpster diving for glass bottles and other recyclables as a teenager, Robinson found a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” He must have read it four times cover to cover. The seminal essay collection helped Robinson draw the line between systemic racism and Black public health.
“My people suffer the most,” Robinson said. When America sneezes, he said, “Black people get a flu.”
In 1997, Robinson left “the bleak reality of Enfield” for a stint in the Marine Corps, then Livingstone College, a historically Black university in Salisbury, North Carolina. After graduating, he ran dozens of progressive political campaigns around the country and the world, from Illinois to the Congo.
In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, Robinson founded the Black Male Voter Project — aimed at communicating year-round, on- and off-season, with a demographic often taken for granted by the Democratic establishment.
“I wanted to do something for the brothers,” he said. “Maslow would say they would be on the bottom rung,” referencing the late American psychologist who conceptualized a hierarchy of needs to explain what motivates human behavior. “They don’t have their basic needs met.”
A constellation of political projects still occupies him. But he returned to North Carolina to run for mayor because he felt like a “fraud” for not organizing his people back home.
One of his first official acts: livestreaming the removal of a prominent Confederate monument in town. Any headwinds he’s facing over his clean energy vision are akin to the blowback he’s still experiencing over that day in 2022, Robinson said.
“I’m getting pushback because I’m loud, and I’m a Black man, and I should know my place.”
About 30 miles south of the Virginia border, in Halifax County, Enfield is in a part of the state largely untouched by Duke Energy’s grid and its monopoly. The town owns its electric utility, a holdover from when private electric providers couldn’t foresee profiting from serving far-flung hamlets of 2,000 people. Much of the area connects to a regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnection, in which wholesale electricity has long been bought and sold on a competitive market. That means independent power producers can enlist customers besides Duke, and they’ve already built scores of solar farms in the area, demonstrating the economic viability of the resource.
Those factors drew William Munn, regional director of the Carolinas for advocacy group Vote Solar, to Enfield.
“In late 2023, we were looking for communities to share the great news around the Inflation Reduction Act,” Munn said, referring to the 2022 climate spending law that includes incentives for historically disadvantaged towns.
The fact that the town owned its own utility was especially enticing. “If you have the political will,” Munn said, “you can do whatever you want, and that’s rare in this regulatory environment.”
The town’s atrocious energy burden is generating a lot of that will. Despite having small homes and even smaller incomes, Enfield households have average winter electric bills of $650 a month, according to the town finance director. That’s in part because much of the housing stock is old, poorly insulated, and inefficient.
“These are [800- to 1,200-square-foot] homes that have bills this high. These aren’t big homes,” said Reggie Bynum, Southeast community outreach director at the nonprofit Center for Energy Education, based up the road in Roanoke Rapids. “It’s old wiring; it’s old insulation. Weatherization needs are definitely there. These aren’t modern homes.”
Higher-than-average rates compound the problem. The town buys electricity from Halifax Electric Membership Corp., which in turn buys from the statewide association of electric cooperatives. The association owns some generating facilities but also buys wholesale power through PJM and from investor-owned utilities like Duke. In Raleigh, one of the wealthiest areas in the state, Duke charges 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Enfield, one of the poorest, the rate approaches 14 cents.
“We’re selling our residents electricity that’s third-time bought and sold,” Robinson said.
A three- to five-megawatt solar farm on about 20 acres of land, backed up by a battery with a duration of four hours or more, could supply all of the town’s 1,200 electric meters, most of them residential. The move would likely cut rates, especially if government grants covered all or part of the approximately $10 million solar array and backup battery. All told, experts believe the generation system could pay for itself in about 15 years.
The town would remain connected to the surrounding grid during emergencies, Munn said, “but the most important part is that for 95% of the time, they are going to be drawing on their own battery bank and solar generation, and that’s going to stabilize the cost for the long term.”
Replacing the town’s dilapidated substation, which requires frequent repairs, is also a priority. Its wooden poles were erected in the middle of the last century, and its power lines have limited capacity — not enough to receive and transfer power from a five-megawatt solar farm, advocates say.
Six of the substation’s seven lines are at 2,400 volts, said Nick Jimenez, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It’s so low that they don’t make equipment to fix that anymore.”
“It’s like having an antique car,” Robinson said. “Waiting on parts.”
Replacing the substation’s wooden frame with a metal one and swapping out the 2,400-volt feeder lines for 7,200-volt versions would bring Enfield into the 21st century for a price tag of about $5 million.
Across the train tracks from the rundown substation are the town fairgrounds, a playing field, a basketball court, and a small windowless building labeled “Enfield Parks and Recreation.” Here, the next piece of the clean energy vision is beginning to take shape.
“The town had for a long time been considering building a community center,” Munn said. “We came to them and said, ‘How about you make that community center a resilience center? Let’s dream big.’”
Called the Enfield Energy Center, the structure would replace the concrete parks building and a few others on the site. It would be powered by rooftop solar panels and battery storage, serving as a gathering place during emergencies. A commercial kitchen would help incubate food businesses and supply healthy meals during disasters. And an on-site community garden would provide food and educational opportunities.
“When people see, feel, and touch solar and renewable energy, and see that it works,” Munn said, “see it constructed in a beautiful space, then it gets demystified.”
Around the corner from the future resilience center, on the town’s main commercial strip, sits a boarded-up, three-bedroom home. Built in 1925, the house is advertised on Zillow as a “classic fixer-upper.” Robinson, who earns a pittance as mayor but has other income from his political consulting work, bought it earlier this year for $32,500, per Zillow.
The plan is to transform the nearly 1,800-square-foot home into a Weatherization Hub. Like the Enfield Energy Center, the building would be topped with solar panels backed up with battery storage. There, staff could hold do-it-yourself weatherization workshops and help residents apply for free energy-efficiency improvements, potentially including from Energy Saver NC, the state’s recently launched rebate program for new appliances, weather stripping, and other upgrades.
“It may take a while for that concept house to be built,” said Bynum, who’s spearheading the weatherization project. “Energy Saver is good if it’s still around, but I think there’s life in that house after that to do other things. We will be able to have weatherization training there. We’d be able to have weatherization supplies for people.”
Since last fall, Robinson, together with advocates and organizers like Munn, Jimenez, and Bynum, has been holding town meetings to lay out their vision and get feedback and buy-in. “I always like to overshare with my people,” Robinson said.
Dozens of residents attend the monthly gathering, and most have been supportive. “It’s quirky to them,” Robinson admitted. “But once they understand that with solar, we can lock in our rates for 30, 40 years — that, to them, is rewarding, and it brings them into the conversation.”
He recognizes that clean energy is not top of mind for most of Enfield’s residents. “I don’t get upset when my people are talking trash about me [for] talking so much about green energy, because I know that they’re literally just surviving,” he said.
For Munn of Vote Solar, energy independence is a key part of survival. “Once you’re able to control your own destiny, you essentially control your own quality of life,” he said, “and that’s something that has been elusive in communities of color throughout the Black Belt.”
The concept of personal control over private property helped solar advocates notch a win earlier this year. Halifax County had placed a temporary pause on new solar farms in October after pushback from some residents. As the expiration date for the moratorium neared, officials were weighing a new ordinance that would require a mile between each new project.
The result would be an economic “dead zone” where panels might have otherwise gone, said Enfield Commissioner Kenneth Ward and others at a public hearing in February. The buffer would dash the town’s plans for self-generation.
“Responsible solar development can bring jobs, lower energy costs, and strengthen our local economy without harming local agriculture at all,” Ward said, responding at the hearing to misinformation about the impact of renewables on farming.
The one-mile limitation would also harm private landowners who rely on lease income from solar developers, several speakers at the hearing said.
“I think that really carried the day,” said Munn. “It showed folk [that] Enfield had a vision, had intention, and had allies.”
In the end, county commissioners voted four to one to reject the one-mile buffer and allow the moratorium to expire.
Money remains the biggest barrier to carrying out these ambitious plans. One of the poorest towns in the nation, with an annual budget of around $6 million, Enfield and its residents can’t float the up-front cost of its clean energy projects, even though they may ultimately pay for themselves in the form of lower utility bills.
That’s part of why town leaders decided to formally retain the Southern Environmental Law Center to help access government grants intended for communities exactly like theirs. Despite blows from the Trump administration’s funding freeze and continued mass layoffs at the agencies responsible for distributing funds, three big pots of money created during the Biden administration still appear available.
First, there’s the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, set up and administered by the U.S. Department of Energy as required by the 2021 infrastructure law. Last October, officials announced a funding opportunity of $400 million for “energy improvements in rural or remote areas.” A not-yet-scrubbed government webpage explains that the program “gives communities with 10,000 or fewer people the tools and resources they need to improve the resilience, reliability, and affordability of their local energy systems.”
Another outgrowth of the infrastructure law is a federally funded state program for grid resilience and improvement that is distributing $9.2 million annually over five years.
Both programs, Enfield advocates say, appear custom-made to enable the town’s clean energy blueprint.
“We’re very, very confident that we are going to be able to convince folks to give us money and get this built,” Munn said. “I don’t know that there’s any community in the Black Belt who is trying to get this done. If you can do it in the Black Belt in North Carolina, in the South, I think it shows [it can be done] anywhere.”
The large solar farm could be built with help from the Solar for All initiative, created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. While the resulting $156 million state program is largely intended to help low-income households purchase rooftop panels, it can also be tapped to support “community solar pilot programs, many with municipal utilities and electric co-ops, which will lower energy costs for participating households,” according to the program’s website.
Though early Trump edicts froze Solar for All funds, they began flowing again early last month.
However, the White House has made clear its animus to clean energy and to any effort to right a history of systemic wrongs against Black Americans. Press reports say the Trump administration is moving to eliminate the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations entirely. So, while these funding sources appear safe for now, nothing is guaranteed.
“Elections have consequences,” Munn said. “We recognize that. Big fossil-fuel interests helped Donald Trump get elected, and now we are at the crossroads of where we want to be as a society.”
If these federal and state funds don’t pan out, there are “B and C” plans afoot, Jimenez said, mostly in the form of enlisting private donations. “The plan is to keep forging ahead regardless,” he said.
Robinson, for his part, will also keep forging. The mayoral job takes an emotional toll, he said, and he had waffled about whether to run for another term this fall. He ultimately decided to go for it. “I’m determined to do this work. I’m passionate about it,” he said. “I am convinced I have more work to do with my town.”
He used an urban-planning metaphor to explain how he sees his role. “They talk about skylarks and moles,” he said. “Skylarks are the people with the vision. But the moles are the ones that get it done. At this moment, I feel like I’m a sky-mole.”
“Hopefully it won’t be that long until people say, ‘Here, we got this, step aside.’ That’s what I’m excited about.”
A clarification was made on April 15, 2025: The caption for the first image in this story originally implied that the building behind Robinson is Enfield’s town hall. The caption has been changed to better reflect his location in the image.
California, for all its talk of clean energy and climate leadership, has long depended on fossil gas to keep its lights on. A decade ago, gas provided around 60% of the state’s electricity production. But this long-running dominance may be coming to an end.
California’s solar systems, from rooftop panels to massive desert installations, generated nearly as much electricity as its gas plants last year, according to data pulled from think tank Ember’s U.S. Electricity Data Explorer. Gas’ market share has declined gradually since its 2012 high, while solar’s shot up steadily — last year, the two nearly intersected. This year could be the first time that solar takes the lead.
Solar far outpaces all other electricity sources in new power plant construction, not just in California but in Texas and the nation as a whole. But that metric is measured in megawatts of production capacity — it doesn’t tell us how much electricity solar panels actually make in the course of a year. Solar produces only when the sun shines, so it needs more megawatts of nameplate generating capacity to rival sources like gas or nuclear that can operate around the clock.
That’s why this chart is so striking: It displays actual electricity production in California throughout 2024. Solar really produced more than 30% of the state’s electricity, while gas fell closer to that percentage than it has ever been in the modern era.
This inflection point represents the culmination of yearslong trends. Gas surged to a record level in 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear plant ceased pumping out carbon-free baseload power. But new gas plant construction in the state has effectively stopped, and the rapidly expanding battery fleet is now competing for the most valuable peak hours. Gigawatts of batteries now cut into gas plants’ run-time, as can be seen on hot summer nights and mild shoulder months alike.
Over the last decade, it’s worth noting, generation from nuclear, wind, and geothermal has stayed flat, and hydropower fluctuated with the annual weather patterns. Those carbon-free sources all have their own passionate advocates and deeply researched reports from the Department of Energy on how they can break out of stasis and grow again. But solar is the only one of the bunch consistently increasing production year over year.
That’s not guaranteed to always be the case. The Republican-led Congress still could axe federal tax credits that currently support renewable installations for the next decade. California has also gotten in its own way, as when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handpicked utility regulators chose to dismantle the prevailing rules for rooftop solar, greatly diminishing the pace of residential installations.
Nonetheless, if gas power production continues its downward plunge, California will eventually have to figure some things out. Specifically, it needs other tools to ensure on-demand power through the nights and weather patterns that dampen solar production.
State grid planners have ordered utilities to start procuring long-duration energy storage, a category of technologies promising to deliver steady clean power for far longer than lithium-ion batteries can manage at today’s price points. The state is also taking early steps to open up its coastline for offshore wind development; the deep Pacific seabed calls for floating turbines, a newer technology that has not yet been built in the U.S. Efforts to better connect the western grid could also make it easier to balance supply and demand across the region.
California, whose state economy would rank fifth among the world’s nations, is not a place that can change course in an instant. But this impending unseating of gas power by solar shows what can happen over a decade of dedicated policy, regulatory, and business efforts to push down carbon emissions and accelerate clean energy. It took time to get to this point, but now the results are undeniable.
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