Canary Media

Big companies have spent years pushing Georgia to let them find and pay for new clean energy to add to the grid, in the hopes that they could then get data centers and other power-hungry facilities online faster. Now, that concept is tantalizingly close to becoming a reality, with regulators, utility Georgia Power,…

See more from Canary Media’s "Chart of the week” column . If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere…

Geothermal energy is undergoing a renaissance, thanks in large part to a crop of buzzy startups that aim to adapt fracking technology to generate power from hot rocks virtually anywhere. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom on conventional geothermal — the incumbent technology that has existed for more than a century…

In 2017, the early leaders in energy storage made an audacious bet : 35 gigawatts of the new grid technology would be installed in the United States by 2025. That goal sounded improbable even to some who believed that storage was on a growth trajectory. A smattering of independent developers and utilities had…

WESTERN MACEDONIA, Greece — For more than a decade, Lefteris Ioannidis had been saying what no one wanted to hear: Coal is dying, and it’s time to prepare for what comes next. He could see the writing on the wall while serving as mayor of Kozani, the largest city in Western Macedonia, even as other local politicians…

In landmark rulings last month, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered FirstEnergy’s three regulated companies to pay roughly $250 million for violations linked to the state’s largest-ever utility corruption scandal. More than $186 million of that will be refunded or credited to consumers. It’s one of the…

Extreme weather is making the grid more prone to outages — and now FirstEnergy’s three Ohio utilities want more leeway on their reliability requirements. Put simply, FirstEnergy is asking the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to let Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., Ohio Edison, and Toledo Edison take longer to…

Colorado just set a major new climate goal for the companies that supply homes and businesses with fossil gas. By 2035, investor-owned gas utilities must cut carbon pollution by 41% from 2015 levels, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission decided in a 2–1 vote in mid-November. The target — which builds on goals…

Exxon Mobil has pulled the plug on what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen plants, the latest setback for the effort to scale production of low-carbon versions of the fuel. In 2022, the oil giant announced plans to build a facility at its refining and petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas, with…

Jean Gay-Robinson said she “cried tears of joy” when utility ComEd switched all the polluting gas-fired equipment in her Chicago home to modern electric versions, at no cost to her. As a retiree on a fixed income, she is relieved that she’ll likely never have to buy another appliance, her energy bills are lower, and…

Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal. I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign , watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. In the Politico Magazine article…

See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column . The world is clamoring for more electrons. It’s getting them from solar and wind. Between January and September, the two clean-energy sources grew fast enough to more than offset all new demand worldwide, according to data from energy research firm Ember. …

This story was first published by Grist . Phillip Stafford has been converted. After two years of driving a Tesla, he says there’s no going back to gasoline — the money he saves on fuel alone makes that clear. And since his work as a crisis counselor takes him all over Richmond, Virginia, he charges often. That’s…

Over the past decade or so, the Connecticut Green Bank, the first green bank in the United States , has taken on an unusual role — that of a “public developer” of solar projects for schools, cities, and low-income housing across the state. “There are all sorts of public institutions that take in public money and…

Two new battery projects on Virginia’s remote eastern peninsula could signal a growing trend in the clean-energy transition: midsize energy-storage units that are bigger than the home batteries typically paired with rooftop solar, but cheaper and quicker to build than massive utility-scale projects. The 10-megawatt,…

Around the world, smelters use massive amounts of electricity — often generated by fossil fuels — to turn raw materials into aluminum. As more carbon-free energy comes onto the grid, these power-hungry facilities will get progressively cleaner. But smelters will never be entirely emissions-free until producers can…

DALLAS — The automated machinery and bright, clean factory floor wouldn’t look out of place in the solar manufacturing hub of Changzhou, China. But every so often, the pristine industrial order was punctuated by, of all things, carrier robots blasting psychedelic rock as they rolled down the aisles. T1 Energy runs…

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus announced an award of $14.5 million in federal funds to build almost 200 EV charging stations across the Chicago area. A few weeks later, after President Donald Trump had taken office, the funds were “gone,” as the caucus’ environmental…

President Donald Trump has made it his mission to banish offshore wind farms from America. He has derided wind energy as unreliable and expensive while freezing permitting and halting projects already under construction. Yet a new report suggests that the president’s moves could be working against grid reliability…

New England winters can get wicked cold. This week, five of the region’s states launched a $450 million effort to warm more of the homes in the often-frigid region with energy-efficient, low-emission heat pumps instead by burning fossil fuels. “It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s…