Canary Media

America’s ambitions to harness geothermal energy just keep getting bigger. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Mountain West governors unveiled an initiative to unlock an estimated 200 gigawatts of clean, always-on energy by tapping into the region’s underground heat. That much power would represent a 50-fold…

LOWELL, Vt. — Doug Manning built his three-story home for the views. Mountain peaks ring the 800-person town of Lowell, and just beyond his back porch stretches a hayfield that the community uses as a kind of public square. The 44-acre open space hosts carnivals, sledders, and snowmobilers in the winter, and hikers…

One of the biggest knocks against renewables — their intermittency — could soon be defanged. As technology prices fall and industry prowess compounds, a new type of clean megaproject is starting to look not only possible but also economically attractive. These projects would load up the sunniest and windiest places…

In 2023, the San Francisco Bay Area’s air district passed first-in-the-nation rules setting zero-emissions limits on home heating systems and water heaters. Now, the agency is working to address affordability concerns ahead of the water-heater rule's finalization this year — and defuse calls from some regulators to…

California’s top air regulator wants to overhaul the state’s two-decade-old carbon market. But key lawmakers and environmental groups say the effort will undermine the program — and the state’s decarbonization goals. Last month, the California Air Resources Board proposed major changes to the state’s cap-and-invest…

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter. The Trump administration on Friday defended its legal authority to order coal plants to stay open, arguing before a panel of federal…

Until recently, pacesetting solar projects were measured in the hundreds of megawatts. But panels keep getting cheaper, and developers keep getting better at installing them. As a result, power companies are undertaking projects that are bigger than anyone could have conceived five years ago. China has led the way…

X-energy, the Amazon-backed nuclear startup looking to revive the United States’ high-temperature gas-cooled reactor efforts, just took a major step toward securing federal permits to start construction on its debut plant. On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the key environmental review for…

Ohio’s utilities just can’t seem to pass muster when it comes to preventing power outages and getting the lights back on quickly. In 2025, four of the state’s six regulated electric utilities failed to provide the level of reliable service expected by regulators — marking the 10th year in a row when at least one…

The Texas sun keeps rising, as Texas coal wanes. For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else…

This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. As the war in Iran spikes gasoline prices around the globe, drivers in many countries have headed for an obvious emergency exit: EVs. But buyers in the U.S. aren’t following suit, and a lack of affordable…

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License . Elon Musk's data center company, xAI, has more than doubled the number of unchecked natural gas generators at its Southaven facility since coming to…

See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . First came the solar. Now, the batteries have arrived. Installations of grid batteries, which can store solar and other energy for later use, surged by 48% in 2025 from the year prior, per new data from BloombergNEF . A total of 112 gigawatts of battery…

Photography by Neeta R. Satam JASPER COUNTY, Indiana—Barb Deardorff loves her living room’s wide picture windows. She can gaze out at the cornfields, where sandhill cranes warble and graze, and in the evening, she can unwind from her hectic job as a teachers’ union organizer by watching the sun go down. Her sunset…

Last month, North Carolina’s top utility regulator abruptly halted Duke Energy’s solar farm investments for the year — an unforeseen blow to an industry already reeling from tariffs and a hostile federal government. Now, clean energy businesses and advocates have filed a motion to cancel the order, which they argue…

Fervo Energy , a startup that has pioneered new ways to produce electricity from the earth’s heat, is officially a publicly traded company. It’s the first next-generation geothermal firm to go public. Today’s initial public offering netted the Houston-based Fervo about $1.9 billion and valued it at roughly $7.7…

Amazon has signed a deal for a novel kind of rooftop heat pump that will provide all-electric heating, superefficient cooling, and cheaper energy bills at an undisclosed number of the company’s commercial buildings. After a successful 6-month field trial at an Amazon logistics facility in hot and humid Houston, the…

Pennsylvania needs more energy. Data centers are pushing demand skyward, utilities can't build new capacity fast enough, and electric bills are on the rise. Medium-sized solar installations — smaller than utility-scale farms but larger than home rooftop arrays — could help ease the pressure. But state lawmakers,…

As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat. Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States , the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the…

New York City’s biggest buildings face a huge change: By 2050, they must reduce their planet-warming pollution to net-zero, thanks to the metropolis’s Local Law 97 . In other words, tens of thousands of structures will need to yank out fossil-fueled systems that heat water and spaces, and replace them with…