Back
POLICY: Vermont lawmakers pass a bill making utilities purchase only renewably sourced power by 2035, though the governor is expected to veto the bill over cost concerns. (Seven Days)
ALSO: A top Connecticut Democrat says he intends to force a vote on two bills that Republican lawmakers want to block, including one that declares a climate crisis in the state. (CT Mirror)
FOSSIL FUELS:
SOLAR:
BUILDINGS: Pennsylvania lawmakers advance minimum appliance efficiency standards that would conserve enough energy to power more than 56,000 homes in a year. (WTAJ)
BIOENERGY: A trio of developers detail plans to bring a combined heat and power system to northern Maine that would be fueled by waste wood from the state’s forest industry and “enabled by super-critical carbon dioxide.” (Mainebiz)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Six newly installed electric vehicle fast chargers at a New York City wastewater facility help the city reach 2,000 municipal chargers. (news release)
TRANSIT: Although New York City is poised to kick off traffic congestion pricing next month, similar ideas in Boston are having a tough time getting off the ground. (Boston Globe)
WIND: The head of an anti-wind group files an open meetings law complaint against Nantucket over a wind development working group’s meeting that she says should’ve been public. (Nantucket Current)
RENEWABLE ENERGY: New York energy officials grant $175,000 to a Finger Lakes-area town to help it continue undertaking renewable energy and decarbonization projects. (Finger Lakes Times)
COMMENTARY:
SOLAR: A northern Maine community of around 11,400 homes and businesses was able to run on only solar power last week for about 12 cumulative hours, a first-ever occurrence for utility Versant. (Maine Public Radio)
OFFSHORE WIND: New Hampshire lawmakers and business leaders want state energy officials to take a more active role in encouraging offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine compared to the “market-based approach” to electricity decarbonization being used. (NHPR)
GRID:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
TRANSPORTATION:
GAS: A Connecticut county’s farm bureau wants the state to support more anaerobic digesters on farms to turn wasted food into electricity, heat and fertilizer. (CT News Junkie)
CLIMATE:
UTILITIES: A consortium of four southeast Pennsylvania counties signs a five-year deal with a retail energy supplier to help them purchase more renewable power. (WHYY)
HYDROPOWER: Both federal- and state-level public comment periods are open this summer as the lengthy relicensing process draws closer to an end for three hydropower dams in Massachusetts’ Franklin County. (Mass Live)
TIDAL: Federal energy regulators grant an eight-year license to a nonprofit firm to test out tidal energy turbines in the Cape Cod Canal. (Cape Cod Times)
COMMENTARY: The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s former president encourages Marylanders to ditch gas-powered landscaping equipment to reduce emissions and noise pollution. (Baltimore Sun)
SOLAR: While a federal database shows around 0.02% of U.S. cropland is used for large solar projects, an analysis of four Midwest counties reveals much higher penetrations, worrying some farmers and advocates. (Reuters)
WIND: Wind turbines only take up about 5% of the land where they’re built, meaning there’s room to co-locate farms and other facilities below them, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Washington Post)
OIL & GAS: Advocates suggest establishing a new tax on oil and gas production in the world’s wealthiest countries, with a report finding the charge could raise $720 billion for climate mitigation by 2030. (Guardian)
POLITICS:
GRID: The U.S. power grid performed better during cold snaps this January than it did during winter storms over the past few years thanks to grid operators’ improvements, a report finds. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GEOTHERMAL: A Texas company uses software and sensor-equipped drilling tools to install geothermal heating and cooling systems in spaces previously considered too small to house such projects. (Canary Media)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CLIMATE: The Southeast faces one of the most rapid sea level surges in the world, an analysis finds, combining with increasingly severe storms to create epic floods. (Washington Post)
EFFICIENCY: Advocates laud a new Virginia law that strengthens energy efficiency standards and mandates the development of a standardized test to measure the cost effectiveness of proposed efficiency programs. (Energy News Network)
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration unveils new federal permitting rules designed to prioritize projects with environmental benefits while adding reviews for ones that could worsen climate change. (New York Times)
FOSSIL FUELS:
NUCLEAR:
GRID: The U.S. Energy Department starts preparing for the rise of artificial intelligence and its projected energy demand, and begins exploring ways that AI could make power delivery and energy project permitting more efficient. (Axios)
EMISSIONS: Companies’ return-to-office plans are often out of line with their own climate pledges, as multiple peer-reviewed studies find working from home can significantly reduce a worker’s emissions impact. (Grist/Fast Company)
STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
UTILITIES: Several New England utilities plan to seek federal funds for a regional energy data platform to make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that would make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies.
Clean energy advocates see this kind of service as key to supporting the rollout of Inflation Reduction Act rebates and, more broadly, to controlling costs and demand on a lower-carbon power grid.
Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities are working with several subsidiaries and state groups and agencies to propose the new data platform to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) grant program, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Their $29 million data hub concept, with half the funding requested from the Department of Energy, builds off a similar state-level platform that’s been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019. Proponents say federal funding is needed in part to encourage that state’s regulators to give final approval for the project.
Launched over the next four years, the regional data hub would provide standardized access to “very minute usage information” for millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, according to Unitil.
“With this data more readily available, customers could better understand their energy consumption, which would help them make decisions about energy conservation steps they may want to take at home or in the workplace,” Unitil said in a statement. “For instance, the information could be used to obtain a price quote from a rooftop solar provider, a competitive supplier to receive a price estimate, or a storage provider to determine the appropriate size of behind-the-meter battery storage.”
Multi-utility data platforms currently exist in Texas and New York, both states with unified electric grids, proponents said — but in New England and many other places, customers’ data access is inconsistent.
In a concept paper on their data hub proposal filed with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, the Northeast utilities say costs for efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources or DERs, can be inflated by the “idiosyncratic processes” and “bespoke electronic interfaces” needed to work with each customer’s data.
“Today, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs, while others install monitoring packages with their solar and storage applications that are functionally duplicative of the utility’s advanced meters, driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation,” the proposal says.
To estimate cost savings in a quote for rooftop solar, for example, a homeowner may have to provide a year’s worth of paper or electronic bills for their prospective installer to compile and analyze by hand — an “incredibly silly manual process,” said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that’s participating in the regional data hub proposal.
“And that’s just the single homeowner level — think about a multi-family housing project, where you have forty, fifty, a hundred units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It’s just a total nightmare.”
An automated system would access customers’ data on demand in a standardized format and could spit out expected project savings at essentially the push of a button, he said. Contractors he’s spoken with, he said, call this approach “transformational for the way that we interact with customers.”
The data hub could also support energy dashboards, especially for environmental justice areas, to help visualize progress toward climate targets with a goal of “reducing the energy burden for historically disadvantaged communities,” said Eversource spokesperson Sarah Paduano in a statement.
“By breaking down the walls of historically utility-housed and owned data, Unitil believes this would remove a significant barrier for a variety of stakeholders that would be able to leverage the data in a meaningful way and towards advancing an equitable clean energy transition,” Unitil’s statement said.
Estimated savings from individual energy projects aren’t just nice to have, said Michael Murray, president of Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit working on the hub project — they are often required. Certain Inflation Reduction Act rebates are only offered to projects that can prove at least a 20% energy savings.
“The legislation was really intended to be the first sort of fusion between making an efficiency project a smart grid asset,” Murray said. “It’s no longer just, ‘efficiency is in its own silo and all you care about is annual energy savings.’ The question is, how does it become interactive and part of a ‘virtual power plant’ kind of concept?”
Better data on individual projects could help customers access savings from new rate designs that incentivize less usage at times of peak demand, the proposal says, improving resilience and lowering costs on a more variable, renewables-powered grid.
“Energy data is increasingly going to become the currency of a modern grid,” said Evans-Brown. “It’s really difficult to manage our peaks if you have no idea where they’re coming from, like what’s causing them all the way down to the consumer level.”
Without standardized, streamlined access to energy data, Murray said, contractors trying to work with IRA rebates in states that choose to offer them will face a costly and time-consuming burden of iterating individualized manual processes thousands of times.
“(The IRA) is going to touch millions of American homes. Each one of these is multiple data requests and processing. And so we need to figure out a way to do it in a streamlined way,” he said. Otherwise, “all that federal money gets drained into stupid overhead as opposed to actually delivering value for people.”
Not every New England state or utility is participating in the grant proposal. Connecticut-based Avangrid, with subsidiaries like Central Maine Power or CMP, is one that declined to join.
CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program’s first round last year for technology to reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and plans to seek additional GRIP funding on its own this year.
“Our decision for round two was to focus on reliability and load capacity grid improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” said spokesperson Jon Breed in a statement. “We are aware of the concept of the Regional Joint Utility Energy Data Hub and will be monitoring the performance of the program if it receives funding.”
For Murray, the long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the six states’ regional grid manager. He said utilities — and their customers — that don’t get on board, if the project moves forward, could risk becoming siloed and left behind in older systems.
“The whole industry is moving towards an automated system, which New Hampshire is building,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately need to go.”
More than 100 megawatts of planned solar projects throughout southeastern Massachusetts are facing lengthy delays as needed grid upgrades wait for state approval.
Arrays at Cape Cod schools, installations on an affordable housing complex on Martha’s Vineyard, and residential solar arrays for low-income homeowners are among the planned renewable energy developments that have been held up or reconfigured as regulators consider utility requests to upgrade substations and spread out the cost among customers. Until these improvements are approved and executed, no solar developments larger than 15 kilowatts for single-phase systems or 25 kilowatts for triple-phase systems can be connected to the grid in many of the covered areas.
“This stalling runs counter to the state’s climate goals,” said Kate Warner, energy planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the regional planning agency for Dukes County. “The Vineyard wants to do our part, but we can’t because we can’t add any more significant solar to the grid.”
These delays are one more twist in the ongoing growing pains the state — and many places across the country — is experiencing as the move away from fossil fuels changes the flow of power through the system. As Massachusetts aims to go carbon-neutral by 2050, the transition to home heat pumps and electric vehicles is ramping up the need for electricity. At the same time, growing numbers of solar arrays are sending more and more power to the grid. The surge in both supply and demand has utilities and regulators scrambling to expand and strengthen the grid as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Under previous rules in Massachusetts, a distributed generation project such as a new solar development would find itself on the hook for any expensive grid upgrades needed to connect the new power source to the system. Even though these improvements would benefit future projects, the development that triggered the need for the upgrades would have to bear the cost.
To remedy this imbalance, the state energy department created a process that lets utilities propose plans to spread the cost burden of some grid upgrades among ratepayers, then recoup some of this money from future distributed generation projects and use it to reimburse ratepayers. These capital investment project proposals must be approved by utilities regulators. Massachusetts is the first state to create such a process.
In April 2022, Eversource — which covers 140 towns around Boston and in the southeastern and western parts of the state — filed six such proposals relating to improvements in regions throughout southeastern Massachusetts. One of the proposals has been approved; the other five remain pending, raising questions about what happens next — and when.
“The thinking was that it was going to be pretty quickly reviewed and approved — and that has not been the case,” said Mariel Marchand, power supply planner for the Cape Light Compact, the regional energy administrator that serves the 15 towns of Cape Cod and the six on Martha’s Vineyard.
The Department of Public Utilities was unable to share any concrete timeline, noting that it intends to consider each application in detail. Because the process is new — in Massachusetts and beyond — there is no precedent for how long such deliberations should or usually do take.
The capital investment project proposal for Cape Cod, which also impacts Martha’s Vineyard, calls for upgrading the distribution lines connected to five substations and additional equipment on three substations.
The goal is to make the infrastructure ready for a significant amount of solar and wind power to come online in coming years as part of the state’s push toward decarbonization and electrification, said Eversource spokesperson William Hinkle.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the wait for these improvements means a 20-unit affordable housing development originally designed to maximize its solar production has had to go back to the drawing board. The project, intended to provide solar power and the associated savings to low-income residents, will now have to be configured as 10 smaller systems, each with its own interconnection. This arrangement, however, raises other regulatory questions about having more than one system on a single parcel of land, creating another delay.
“That project probably could’ve been built by now, but it’s now held up in this more complicated planning process,” said Ben Underwood, co-founder and co-CEO of Resonant Energy, the solar developer on the project.
On Cape Cod, the delays are slowing the deployment of a pilot program that provides low-income houses with solar panels, battery storage, and heat pumps. While many residential projects fall under the 15-kilowatt cap and can still be connected, the addition of batteries can increase the system size close to or over the limit, Marchand said.
“Before we recommend that this customer should have a battery, we have to make sure it can be installed,” she said. “It’s more work on our end, but we’re making it work.”
If the pending plans are rejected, the old system that would impose prohibitive costs on a small number of projects will remain in effect. If they are approved, it will still take significant time to complete the upgrades. At the moment, therefore, all anyone can do is wait.
“Right now we are dead in the water,” Warner says.
After languishing since 2022, a revamped measure to launch a shared solar program in southwest Virginia found daylight this year.
The General Assembly gave the go-ahead to a pair of measures (SB 255, HB 108) directing utility regulators to set up Appalachian Power’s inaugural 50 megawatt program by Jan. 1.
Despite the modest size laid out in the new law, Charlie Coggeshall, Mid-Atlantic regional director with the Coalition for Community Solar Access, is content with the breakthrough into a part of the state historically dependent on the coal industry.
“Our expectations had to be tempered significantly,” Coggeshall said. “But we got to a place where we’re putting a stake in the ground in Southwest Virginia, a win for continuing the advancement of shared solar in Virginia.”
It isn’t yet clear how soon Appalachian Power customers will be able to subscribe. The utility must provide tariff information and other related requirements by July 1, 2025.
Relatedly, the Senate and House of Delegates passed separate legislation, SB 253 and HB 106, to enlarge Dominion Energy’s existing shared solar initiative to 350 MW from its current 200 MW limit.
Shared solar, also known as community solar, allows Virginians to purchase solar power via subscriptions to communal, off-site arrays typically built and owned by third-party entities, not utilities.
The arrangement is attractive to customers who can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop panels, residents with shaded southern exposure or subject to homeowner association restrictions, and apartment renters and condominium owners without control of their rooftops.
Ideally, subscribers earn credits in the form of savings on their monthly electric bills while also helping to pay down the cost of constructing the shared array.
Proponents are encouraged that programs for both investor-owned utilities could eventually include incentives for shared solar projects that are sited on underused surfaces such as rooftops, landfills and brownfields or that incorporate advances such as combining solar with agriculture ventures.
The Virginia Department of Energy will be organizing a stakeholder group to shape the particulars of such inducements.
Coggeshall and other advocates were disappointed two years ago when legislation aiming to set on-the-ground goals for shared solar at Appalachian Power was scuttled in favor of a bipartisan law calling on utility regulators to meet with interested parties to evaluate the program’s possibilities.
Peter Anderson, the director of state energy policy at Appalachian Voices, said proponents had no choice but to persist. Now, he added, it’s up to the State Corporation Commission to institute an affordable model that attracts subscribers and solar developers.
“I’m over the moon that we are establishing shared solar in Appalachian Power territory,” Anderson said. “But my fear is that if we don’t have demonstration projects to build from, we’ll have to go back and rewrite the bill.”
One continuing fractious issue with Dominion’s shared solar program is the debate over what’s called the “minimum bill.” It’s a monthly fee the utility is allowed to charge enrollees to account for the costs of implementing the program and for use of the utility’s grid infrastructure.
In 2022, regulators opted to set that fee at $55, but agreed to exempt lower-income participants from paying it.
Advocates argued that such a high charge for a renewable energy initiative designed to save customers money would prevent wealthier residents in Dominion territory from enrolling. That has indeed been the case since operators began enrolling participants last July 1.
On the other hand, the Appalachian Power program will include a minimum bill, but does not include an exemption for lower-income customers.
“This makes it risky for solar project developers,” Coggeshall said. “With Dominion, at least developers can be somewhat confident about building a project that’s 100 percent for low- and middle-income customers. Appalachian Power doesn’t have that kind of backstop.
“Still, the interest is there. I have coalition members asking me about Southwest Virginia. I tell them the economics are to be determined. We won’t know for about a year.”
Utility regulators are tasked with setting Appalachian Power’s minimum fee. The utility pushed to reshape the legislation this session because it didn’t want non-participating customers to be burdened by any costs of adding shared solar.
“This issue is specifically listed within the bill as a factor the SCC must consider when determining the minimum bill,” spokeswoman Teresa Hamilton Hall said. “Appalachian Power worked hard to get this language inserted in the legislation, and we believe the SCC will be mindful of the financial impacts to non-participating ratepayers when making decisions.”
While advocates will be weighing in on that docket to be sure it sets a fair minimum bill, they’re also heartened that the new Dominion law directs regulators to recalculate the current $55 minimum bill charged to market-rate subscribers.
Specifically, the commission must calculate the benefits of shared solar to the electric grid and the state, then deduct those benefits from other costs. Regulators must spell out each cost, benefit or other value used to determine the minimum charge.
The law basically requires a reconsideration of the minimum bill, Coggeshall said, adding that other states already recognize that shared solar and other distributed generation projects help utilities offset the cost of transmitting and generating power.
“Dominion has failed to look at the other side of the ledger and ask what the benefits of solar really are,” he said. “This law is forcing that discussion. Nothing is guaranteed. It’s still going to be a big fight.”
Anderson said it will be intriguing to watch how the three-member SCC — which has two new commissioners — approaches assigning a value to solar that will help dictate a minimum bill.
“The commission is where the rubber meets the road,” he said. “I’m an optimist. We’ll take our swings in front of the commission. My fingers are crossed and I’m hopeful we get projects in the ground.”
Robin Dutta, the acting executive director of the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association, said having shared solar folded into Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2022 Energy Plan gave it priority status among legislators.
“It’s a great example of how clean energy should be bipartisan because it’s a step forward in building an equitable clean-energy economy,” he said. “Seeing the program expand in megawatts and territory is valuable.”
Quashing any growth since shared solar legislation was first authorized would have been the worst outcome, he said.
In 2020, Fairfax County shared solar champion Sen. Scott Surovell ushered in the original legislation by reluctantly capping Dominion’s program at 150 MW. That was permitted to stretch to 200 MW if at least 30% of the enrollees qualified as lower income. No project can be larger than 5 MW.
Thus far, Dominion has greenlighted 41 shared solar projects totaling close to 150 MW, according to its website. Operators began enrolling participants last July 1 when the law took effect. Another 15 projects — which add up to 60-plus MW — are on Dominion’s waiting list.
Under the new law, half of the additional 150 MW in Dominion’s territory can cater to lower-income subscribers. However, the other 75 MW must basically be split between market-rate and lower-income subscribers.
Another switch in the Dominion program allows the utility to keep the renewable energy credits from each project so they can count toward compliance with the state’s renewable portfolio. Appalachian Power also will benefit by holding onto its renewable energy credits.
“Before, developers in Dominion territory could do anything at all with the credits,” Coggeshall said. “Monetizing the credits helped developers recover costs of building projects, so that’s a lost economic advantage. That change might provide ammunition to regulators to lower the minimum bill.”
Even though Virginia’s shared solar program is relatively small overall, Coggeshall and other advocates are hopeful a federal infusion of $156 million announced on Earth Day can widen its reach.
The Virginia Energy Department will use its Solar for All grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — part of the $7 billion national Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — to design and expand residential solar programs serving marginalized communities. Funding for the five-year program begins in 2025.
Surovell, the Senate Majority Leader who represents suburbs of Washington, D.C., latched onto the idea of shared solar in Virginia more than five years ago when he clicked on an ad for a program while visiting his vacation house in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
He signed up in five minutes during that summer of 2019 and soon discovered that tapping into an off-property array would about cover his entire electric bill.
Though the Democrat admits the learning curve has been steeper in his home state, he has doggedly sponsored legislation every year since 2020 to enlarge shared solar’s overall footprint and ensure that access to renewable energy doesn’t solely benefit affluent homeowners.
This year, he was the patron behind both Senate versions of the bills that became law. Notably, neither was amended by Youngkin. Last year, Surovell introduced Senate Bill 1266, which would have boosted total capacity to 1 GW. It passed the Senate with a nine-vote margin but failed to advance out of committee in the House.
Regulators’ decision to set a high minimum charge has continually frustrated Surovell. He has always maintained that such fees must be reasonable to attract subscribers seeking fairly priced renewable energy.
For Coggeshall, this session’s shared solar gains only reinforce the reality that Virginia is poised to embrace incremental progress, not great leaps forward.
“Virginia is not New York,” he concluded. “It has been a roller coaster trying to strike a balance to meet Virginia where it is at instead of where we want it to be.”
RENEWABLES: In northern Illinois and across the nation, waitlists to connect large renewable energy projects to the electric grid have ballooned, leaving over 1,400 gigawatts of wind and solar projects in limbo. (Chicago Tribune)
ALSO:
CLIMATE:
OHIO: FirstEnergy donated $2.5 million to a dark money group backing Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s campaign, according to newly released records. (Floodlight/USA Today)
OIL & GAS:
COAL: A St. Louis-area coal plant emitted far more sulfur dioxide pollution than any plant in the country, a news organization’s analysis finds. (Post-Dispatch)
NUCLEAR:
BUILDINGS: A monastery expects to become Wisconsin’s first net-zero retreat center this year after it integrates battery storage and geothermal systems with its existing ground-mounted solar array. (Cap Times)
ETHANOL: The U.S. EPA issues an emergency fuel waiver allowing gasoline blended with 15% ethanol to be sold during the summer despite concerns that it contributes to ground-level ozone in warmer weather. (South Dakota Searchlight)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A Minnesota electric vehicle driver has used a website and app to review nearly 2,100 charging stations over the last seven years. (Star Tribune)
WIND: The Northern Chumash Tribe and wind energy companies agree to a phased establishment of a national marine sanctuary along central California’s coast that would clear the way for offshore wind development while providing protections the tribe seeks. (KCLU)
ALSO: The Biden administration plans to lease up to a dozen new federal offshore wind tracts over the next five years, including ones in California and Hawaii. (Associated Press)
SOLAR:
BATTERIES: Battery storage system output was the largest power source on California’s grid for the first time this week, surpassing natural gas, hydroelectric and wind generation for about two hours. (Renew Economy)
UTILITIES:
POLLUTION: The American Lung Association finds the Los Angeles area continues to be the nation’s smoggiest region, even though air quality has improved significantly over the last three decades. (Los Angeles Times)
HYDROGEN: The nation’s first commercial hydrogen fueling station for big-rig trucks opens at a port in Oakland, California. (Los Angeles Times)
OIL & GAS:
PUBLIC LAND: Western advocates and Republican lawmakers prepare for a legal battle over the Biden administration’s new federal public lands rule aimed at putting conservation on a par with extractive uses. (Utah News Dispatch, Source NM)
CLIMATE: The National Science Foundation awards an Alaska university $20 million to study how climate change could affect the state’s fishing and aquaculture industries. (KTOO)
BIOFUELS: Construction begins on a 13.4 MW power plant in California that will be fueled by wastewater-derived biogas. (Microgrid Knowledge)
OFFSHORE WIND: Federal ocean energy regulators soon plan to publish updated regulations that could lead to 12 new offshore wind lease sales by 2028, including in the Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight and the central Atlantic. (Offshore Wind Biz)
ALSO:
HYDROGEN: Siemens Energy and a hydrogen production and storage startup join together to identify where and what type of hydrogen production is best suited for Delaware. (Delaware Business Times)
GRID:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The head of transportation and parking at Princeton University discusses how the school’s shuttle bus fleet went all-electric this past fall, describing the costs and benefits of making the switch from diesel. (WHYY)
BUILDINGS: A New Hampshire town works to train and certify at least 16 more people to do energy audits, installations and weatherizations as it aims to decarbonize 200 of its and a neighboring town’s buildings. (NHPR)
RENEWABLE POWER: A Maine startup business accelerator contracts with two executives-in-residence to push innovation at clean energy companies. (Mainebiz)
COMMENTARY: Several Delaware Tech faculty and students say the university shouldn’t drop a renewable energy degree program because it provides a “unique and affordable opportunity to enter the clean energy workforce.” (Delaware Online)
.svg)
