Canary Media

Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week. An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its 18 townships. But the ballot’s wording…

Lawmakers backing an Illinois bill that would clear the way for balcony solar have ended their push to pass the measure this year. With three weeks still to go in the legislative session, they hit a stalemate as opponents, including the state’s powerful electrical workers union, raised concerns about safety. …

For the past 15 years, onshore wind projects have followed the same process to get the Department of Defense’s permission to build. Now, that familiar route has been closed off, effectively jeopardizing all new wind projects on private land — more than 250 nationwide — and threatening to sideline 30 GW of potential…

See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . Quick — ignore the map above and take a guess: Which three states get the highest share of their power from wind and solar? If you said Iowa, South Dakota, and New Mexico, well done. If you had Texas or California in there, fair enough — but neither of…

For years, community solar in Maine grew at a breakneck pace, elevating the state to the top of the list for most capacity per capita in the U.S. Now, however, development has slowed to a standstill, and the industry faces an uncertain future. “What we saw was a very swift rise, and it has now come to an end,” said…

In 1872, while on a trip to Europe, Andrew Carnegie met with an engineer and inventor named Henry Bessemer. During the Crimean War, Bessemer had accidentally discovered an efficient (for the time) new method of making steel, which involved blowing air through molten iron to remove its impurities. He later developed…

Steel and sweatshirts. Trucks and smartphones. Snickers and beer. The stuff in modern life requires huge amounts of dirty fossil fuel to make. And lately, that’s been a liability for industries battered by the global energy shocks of the 2020s . First, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spiked liquefied…

Residents in Richland County, Ohio, voted narrowly Tuesday to keep a ban on utility-scale solar and wind across much of the community — a setback for those who hoped the referendum could serve as a blueprint for overcoming local restrictions on renewables nationwide. The vote was 53% to 47% in favor of keeping the…

Back in 2017, Tesla promised to bring an all-electric semitruck to market that would have a longer range and lower cost than its competitors. Then, the trucking industry waited — and waited. The initial production target of 2019 came and went, as did each newly announced date over the next three years. But in 2022,…

The developer Ocean Winds cut controversial deals with the Trump administration last week to abandon two U.S. offshore wind developments. But across the Atlantic, it’s making big strides — especially with floating wind. On Monday, Ocean Winds said its 30-megawatt project in the south of France has started…

This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here . Abigail Spanberger won a landslide victory in the Virginia governor’s race last November with a platform that focused on reining in rising electricity costs . Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of…

March 1, 2024, marked a bittersweet milestone in the American nuclear industry’s modern history. Exactly 3,755 days after construction started on the second of two new state-of-the-art Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Station in eastern Georgia, the facility hooked up to…

The United States has taken one of its biggest steps yet to encourage the construction of commercial microreactors — the latest move in its broader push to overhaul the country’s nuclear regulatory processes. In late April, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission released its draft rule for a proposed new licensing…

In the face of soaring energy demand and electric rates, battery developers across the U.S. are stepping in with massive, multihundred-megawatt systems that can cheaply dispatch power when it’s needed most. Virginia — the world’s data center capital — is starting to catch on to the big-battery trend. But a new…

California regulators have denied utility Southern California Gas permission to collect $266 million from its customers to fund a sprawling hydrogen pipeline network it hopes to build across Southern and Central California. Environmental and consumer advocates are cheering the decision — and urging state policymakers…

This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday. America’s hydropower systems are in hot water — but the federal government may soon unclog a stream of funding to help them out. We’ve been using water to generate electricity in the U.S. since the 1880s,…

See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column . When it comes to electric vehicles, old is gold. In the U.S., sales of new EVs are slumping — but more used EVs are being driven off the lot than ever, per Cox Automotive data . With hundreds of thousands of battery-powered vehicles coming off leases soon,…

U.S. Steel says it will invest $1.9 billion to build a modern and lower-carbon ironmaking plant in Arkansas — marking a key expansion beyond the company’s coal-based steel mills. The new “direct reduced iron” plant will sit alongside the sprawling Big River Steel Works, in the town of Osceola, where four electric…

The Middle East crisis is straining global supplies of aluminum — a metal that’s key to making everything from fighter jets and soda cans to clean-energy technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. Iran’s strikes on two Gulf aluminum smelters and the monthslong blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have…

New electric rates for heat pump owners helped more than 140,000 Massachusetts households save money on their heating bills this winter. Massachusetts consumers with home heat pumps saved some $37 million on their power bills — an average of more than $250 per customer — for the period from November 1 to March 31,…