Canary Media

Those in the energy sector, like everyone else, could not stop talking about artificial intelligence this year. It seemed as if every week brought a new, higher forecast of just how much electricity the data centers that run AI models will need. Amid the deluge of discussion, an urgent question arose again and again:…

Five and a half months. That’s all the time Donald Trump needed to crush the only major climate law the United States ever managed to pass. It was swift work, using a sledgehammer and not a scalpel , and now the energy transition will have to make do with the fragments of the law that remain. The words bleak and…

It’s been a rollercoaster of a year for clean energy. There’s no better way to show those ups and downs than with a chart, and luckily, we made a lot of those this year. As 2025 comes to a close, let’s focus on just the ups. Here are 10 charts that prove the clean energy transition is still marching on in the U.S.…

This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here . President Donald Trump spent most of 2025 hacking away at large parts of the federal government. His administration fired, bought out, or otherwise ousted hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Entire agencies were…

For press releases, policy changes, and promises to build new nuclear power, 2025 was a gangbusters year. For actually adding new reactors to the grid, not so much. In fact, around the world, more gigawatts’ worth of nuclear reactors were retired than turned on this year, according to new data from the consultancy…

Kansas ranks among the sunniest states in the nation, and its famously flat landscape is ideal for vast rows of solar panels. Yet it ranks just 41st for solar installations, raising the question: What’s the matter with Kansas? The simple answer is that on the gusty Great Plains, wind energy gained an early foothold…

Two years ago, Massachusetts regulators created a framework for phasing out the use of natural gas in buildings — a groundbreaking move for the state’s decarbonization efforts. Today, however, momentum has slowed as gas companies clash with lawmakers, regulators, and advocates on a fundamental question: Are utilities…

The Interior Department announced Monday it is pausing leases for all five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction in America, citing unspecified issues of national security. Canary Media obtained a copy of a letter notifying one of the affected wind farm developers, providing new details about the…

Rooftop solar and home batteries are way more expensive in the U.S. than in most countries, largely due to slow and burdensome local permitting and utility interconnection processes. But there are tools installers can use to bring down these so-called “ soft costs ,” which make up about two-thirds of the price of…

American factories use lots of hot water and steam to produce everyday goods like milk, cereal, beer, toilet paper, and bleach. Most facilities burn fossil fuels to get that heat, emitting huge amounts of planet-warming pollution in the process. Switching to electricity could significantly and immediately slash…

The Georgia Public Service Commission on Friday approved a controversial plan that will allow the state’s biggest utility to commence one of the largest new fossil-fuel buildouts in the country — a move that critics fear will raise utility bills for most Georgia residents over the coming years. The last-minute…

This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. This year in energy has been an absolute blur. We started with President Donald Trump’s declaration of a federal energy emergency, saw the gutting of clean-energy tax credits, and finished with an Election…

See more from Canary Media’s "Chart of the week” column . It’s been a difficult year for clean energy in America. President Donald Trump entered office in January and promptly stopped the transition away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and batteries in its tracks. Right? Not quite. In fact, for all of…

Booming data center growth and sluggish power plant construction are driving up electricity costs in the country’s biggest energy market. On Wednesday, PJM Interconnection announced the results of its latest capacity auction, which sets the price of resources needed to meet peak power demands for a grid serving more…

For years, a team of experts has traveled from tiny town to tiny town in New Hampshire, helping the communities plan and execute clean energy strategies. Now the idea has secured federal funding to expand nationwide — a notable win as the Trump administration claws back billions of dollars for decarbonization policy.…

The Trump administration has ordered another aging, costly coal plant to keep operating past its long-planned retirement date — this time in Centralia, Washington. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order requiring Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia Generation power plant to keep running…

Ford, a century after it launched the modern automotive era , has given up on its early ambitions to charge into the electrified future. The company announced that it will delete nearly $20 billion in book value to extricate itself from its EV investments, an eye-popping loss that amounts to one of the biggest…

LED light bulbs and TVs. Front-loading washing machines. Energy-lean refrigerators. All were once nascent technologies that needed a push to become mainstream. Now, California is trying to add über-efficient plug-in heat pumps and induction stoves to that list. It’s a tall order; today these innovative products…

European steelmaker ArcelorMittal is an industrial giant, producing more of the high-strength metal than any other company except China’s state-owned Baowu Group. Its reliance on coal-fueled blast furnaces has made it a target for climate activists, who claim the Luxembourg-based manufacturer isn’t moving nearly fast…

The wide expanses of rural America are foundational to one of the nation’s oldest businesses — raising crops and farm animals — along with one of the youngest: producing cheap, renewable energy. Sometimes in conflict but often in harmony, the two industries are coming together in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form one…