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California is facing a severe housing shortage. And in some places, namely Los Angeles, the need for new construction is even more dire because of recent wildfire destruction.
So in late June, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) prioritized faster construction over cleaner buildings with a law that pauses updates to state building codes for six years. It’ll also stop local jurisdictions from enacting their own stricter standards, Canary Media’s Alison F. Takemura reports. The move comes after LA suspended its all-electric building requirements to speed its post-wildfire rebuilding efforts.
As it stands, California already has some of the strongest efficiency standards in the country. But this law will make it harder for progress to continue, stopping municipalities from implementing new rules that could, for example, encourage heat-pump adoption in multifamily buildings or mandate all-electric renovations.
And it may not even help the state cut home prices or speed construction. A 2015 study showed no significant correlation between California’s efficient building codes and construction costs, while a 2019 analysis estimated that building an all-electric home cost less than a gas-powered home in most parts of the state. A more efficient home also typically means lower power bills, which translate to even more savings.
On the other coast, a Massachusetts town is further boosting the case for efficient building codes, Canary’s Sarah Shemkus reports. In 2024, the Boston suburb of Lexington banned gas hookups in new construction and adopted an efficiency-boosting building code. The move hasn’t stymied development: Over the last two years, the town of 34,000 has still permitted around 1,100 new units of housing, 160 of which will be affordable. That aligns with a 2022 RMI study that found all-electric homes in Boston are slightly less expensive to build and operate than mixed-fuel homes.
Another state will soon test the balance between affordable and clean construction, Alison reports. New York just approved an all-electric building code that bars gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings. State officials estimate the new standards will end up raising construction costs, but the lowered energy bills they lead to should offset that increase within a decade.
Solar for none?
The U.S. EPA says it will roll back more federal clean energy funding, this time targeting $7 billion earmarked for states, cities, tribes, and nonprofits under the Solar for All program. The program was created under the Biden administration to help low- and moderate-income households tap into solar power that can help lower their electricity bills.
The clawback comes just as grant awardees were starting to spend their federal dollars. Just this week, Georgia launched a program to let homeowners lease rooftop solar panels for free. Colorado is meanwhile finalizing three programs to boost solar deployment and workforce development. And as Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports, burgeoning projects all across the country could lose their funding, threatening new power generation that the U.S. needs if it wants to lower electricity prices and meet rising demand.
Advocates say the EPA doesn’t have the authority to claw back the money and promised on Thursday to sue, as Jeff reports in a follow-up piece.
A week of blows to renewables
It’s not just residential solar that’s in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. The administration has also issued a series of orders over the last two weeks targeting solar and wind development on federal lands and in federal waters.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum started by ordering his department to stop “preferential treatment for wind projects” and to evaluate whether to halt wind development on federal lands altogether. The next day, the Interior Department de-designated more than 3.5 million acres of federal waters previously slated for wind development, rendering offshore wind leasing “effectively dead” in the U.S., Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports.
Back on land, the DOI also issued an order that would consider a power project’s “density” before it’s approved. It’s a test that wind and solar are destined to fail, as they take up more land than gas power plants to generate the same amount of electricity.
Tax credit kerfuffle: Two Republican senators fight against the Trump administration’s clampdown on wind and solar tax-credit use by placing holds on three of President Trump’s Treasury Department nominees. (Politico)
A literal moonshot: “It is about winning the second space race”: Transportation Secretary and interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy will announce plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. (Politico)
Electrification is brewing: A Minneapolis coffee company is curbing its emissions with its electric commercial-scale roaster, one of just a few of its kind in the U.S. (Canary Media)
Driving change: As Illinois looks to meet ambitious EV adoption goals, utility ComEd is turning community leaders into EV ambassadors who can help convince skeptical neighbors and businesses to go electric. (Canary Media)
Corruption correction: Ohio has finally repealed consumer-funded subsidies for two 1950s coal plants first created by the power-plant bailout law at the heart of the state’s utility corruption scandal. (Canary Media)
Counting climate wins: A new report shows how local climate action like a Maine heat-pump installation campaign and the Keystone XL pipeline protests will keep millions of metric tons of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere across the U.S. (Grist)
After a decade of urging from clean energy advocates, utility Duke Energy finally has a plan to let its North Carolina customers access detailed information about their electricity use.
Approved by state regulators on July 16, the program has backing from the state customer advocate and the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association. But critics say unresolved aspects, including the size of the fee Duke charges third parties for data access, will determine its success or failure.
The Duke plan is a step toward solving a common problem for utility customers, large and small: They don’t have ready access to complete, granular information about their energy use or an easy way to share that data with others. That can complicate decarbonization efforts for a range of consumers, from households that want rooftop solar to cities aiming to shrink their carbon footprints.
The city of Charlotte, for instance, owns one of the world’s busiest airports, which it aims to power entirely with clean energy by the end of the decade. But dozens of private entities within the facility have electricity accounts, so city officials don’t know exactly how much power the entire complex uses — or how much renewable energy they need to meet their target.
At the other end of the size spectrum, individuals considering energy-efficiency improvements, rooftop solar panels, or switching to a heat pump often don’t have a full picture of when their energy use peaks or which appliances gobble up the most power.
Limited access to energy-usage data is hardly confined to Duke, said Michael Murray, who cofounded the nonprofit Mission:data after realizing that getting usage data in his home state of California was like pulling teeth.
“California actually had the first policy on this in the country in 2013,” Murray said, thanks in part to his group’s advocacy. Now, Mission:data engages with utilities commissions in about 10 states every year. “To date, we’ve gotten policies in place for about 41 million electric meters in the country. Not all the policies are perfect,” he said. Referencing the freshly approved Duke plan, he added, “this is certainly one of those.”
Like North Carolina-based advocates, Mission:data has been cajoling Duke for better data access for years. And though the group declined to endorse the proposal put forward in November by the utility, in-state advocates, and others, Murray doesn’t question the rationale of those who backed it.
“It does make some progress for the communities who are interested in energy benchmarking,” he said.
That’s especially welcome under the Trump administration, which has created countless new barriers to adopting clean energy. With the November proposal now blessed by regulators, communities and individuals alike are better equipped to take advantage of what federal climate programs still exist — and to decarbonize in general.
“There are still some [climate programs] that are absolutely out there that are moving forward,” said Ethan Blumenthal, regulatory and legal counsel for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.
For example, North Carolina’s federally funded $156 million Solar for All program, called EnergizeNC, is intended to help low-income customers put rooftop panels on their homes. Improved data access will enable them to right-size those installations.
“[The state is] still dotting a lot of I’s and crossing T’s on program design,” Blumenthal said, “so this data access capability could be very useful.”
Individual customers contemplating solar or high-efficiency appliances like heat pumps can still access a 30% federal tax credit, though only until the end of this year.
Aggregate data that shows the combined energy use of multiple utility customers can help cities like Charlotte administer a new state law that allows commercial building owners to borrow money for renewable energy and energy-efficiency upgrades and pay it back on their property tax bills.
“We do have a lot of large buildings with multiple tenants,” Aaron Tauber, Charlotte’s sustainability analyst, said last fall when the access program was first proposed. “I’m just really excited for these building owners to really — for the first time — gain an understanding of how their buildings are using energy.”
Granular details about energy use at 15-minute intervals are also helpful for customers as Duke and other utilities across the U.S. experiment with time-of-use rates and virtual power plants. Virtual power plants are networks of rooftop solar, home batteries, and other distributed energy resources that utilities can manipulate to support grid reliability at large, while time-of-use rates are electricity charges that vary over the course of the day to nudge energy use to periods of low demand.
“Duke has been making this big push to time-of-use rates,” Blumenthal said, noting that the utility just got a pilot program approved to encourage customers to charge their EVs overnight, when the grid is typically less strained.
But certain features of the new data access program remain unsettled, and the devil could be in those details, says Murray.
Customers can receive two years of their own individual data for free. But Murray worries that regulators will allow Duke to charge exorbitant access fees for aggregated data or to third parties, which would undercut the program.
“Authorized third parties will be charged ‘commission-approved fees’ — but these will be determined later, and could be anything,” he said. “Maybe if the fees are $3, this is fine, but what if they’re $100 or $200?”
In the latter case, third parties would be more likely to resort to “screen-scraping,” a practice that’s illegal at worst and inefficient at best, whereby energy service contractors obtain usage data by combing through customers’ online account profiles with their usernames and passwords.
What’s more, Murray said, “third parties must meet Duke’s ‘cybersecurity risk assessment,’ which is unknown and could be unilaterally changed at Duke’s whim, creating business uncertainty. There is also the risk of Duke discriminating against third parties and accepting some while rejecting others.”
Time is of the essence. Duke has pledged to implement the rules within 18 months — a promise underscored by the recent order from the Utilities Commission.
Asked when Duke planned to submit proposed fees and cybersecurity standards, Duke spokesperson Logan Stewart said it “will file a plan with the Commission within 30 days of the order, which details the … plan for implementing the data sharing functionality.”
That means a more fleshed-out proposal could come in mid-August, and Mission:data will be watching.
“This is not the utilities’ proprietary business data that they can hide from disclosure,” Murray said. “This is the customer’s data. They own their data. And they should be able to exchange that with whoever they want, even if the utility is not happy about that.”
2025 is a pivotal moment for climate action. Countries are submitting new climate commitments, otherwise known as "nationally determined contributions" or "NDCs," that will shape the trajectory of global climate progress through 2035.
These new commitments will show how boldly countries plan to cut their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, transform their economies, and strengthen resilience to growing threats like extreme weather, wildfires and floods. Collectively, they will determine how far the world goes toward limiting global temperature rise and avoiding the worst climate impacts.
A few countries, such as the U.S., U.K. and Brazil, have already put forward new climate plans — and their ambition is a mixed bag. But it's still early: Many more countries, including major emitters like the EU and China, have yet to reveal their NDCs and are expected to do so in the coming months.
We analyzed the initial submissions for a snapshot of how countries' climate plans are shaping up so far and what they reveal about the road ahead.
A decade ago, the world was headed toward 3.7-4.8 degrees C (6.7-8.6 degrees F) of warming by 2100, threatening catastrophic weather, devastating biodiversity loss and widespread economic disruptions. In response, the Paris Agreement set a global goal: limit temperature rise to well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and strive to limit it to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), thresholds scientists say can significantly lessen climate hazards. Though some impacts are inevitable — with extreme heat, storms, fires and floods already worsening — lower levels of warming dramatically reduce their severity. Every fraction of a degree matters.
To keep the Paris Agreement's temperature goals within reach, countries agreed to submit new NDCs every five years. These national plans detail how (and how much) each country will cut emissions, how they'll adapt to climate impacts like droughts and rising seas, and what support they'll need to deliver on those efforts.
Countries have gone through two rounds of NDCs so far, in 2015 and 2020-2021, with their commitments extending through 2030.
While the latest NDCs cut emissions more deeply than those from 2015, they still fall short of the ambition needed to hold warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C. If fully implemented (including measures that require international support), they could bring down projected warming to 2.6-2.8 degrees C (4.7-5 degrees F). And without stronger policies to meet countries' targets, the world could be heading for a far more dangerous 3.1 degrees C (5.6 degrees F) of warming by 2100.
Now the third round is underway, with countries expected to set climate targets through 2035.
These new NDCs are expected to reflect the outcomes of the 2023 Global Stocktake, which was the first comprehensive assessment of global climate progress under the Paris Agreement. In addition to bigger emissions cuts in line with holding warming to 1.5 degrees C, the Stocktake called on countries to act swiftly in areas that matter most for addressing the climate crisis — especially fossil fuels, renewables, transport and forests — and to do more to build resilience to climate impacts.
2025 NDCs are also an opportunity to align near-term climate action with longer-term goals. Over 100 countries have already pledged to reach net-zero emissions, most by around mid-century. Their new NDCs should chart a course toward achieving this.
Under the Paris Agreement's timeline, 2025 NDCs were technically due in February. As of early June, only a small proportion of countries had submitted them, covering around a quarter of global emissions.
These early movers include a diverse mix of developed and developing nations from different regions and economic backgrounds.
Among the G20 — the world's largest GHG emitters — only five countries submitted new NDCs so far: Canada, Brazil, Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom. (Since submitting its NDC, the U.S. announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.)
Several smaller and highly climate-vulnerable countries have also stepped forward, including Ecuador and Uruguay in Latin America; Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa; and island states such as Singapore, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives.
That means close to 90% of countries have yet to submit their new NDCs.
There are several reasons for this. The last round of NDCs was pushed back by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving countries only four years to prepare new plans. Geopolitical tensions, ongoing conflicts and security concerns have further complicated progress. Many smaller developing nations are also facing capacity constraints as they work to complete biennial climate progress reports and new national adaptation plans (NAPs), also due this year.
Most countries are now expected to present their new NDCs by the UN General Assembly in September.
Compared to previous targets, the NDCs submitted so far have made a noticeable but modest dent in the 2035 "emissions gap": the difference between where emissions need to be in 2035 to align with 1.5 degrees C and where they're expected to be under countries' new climate plans.
If fully implemented, new NDCs are projected to reduce emissions by 1.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2035 when compared to 2030. Looking only at unconditional NDCs (those that don't require international support), this leaves a remaining emissions gap of 29.5 GtCO2e to hold warming to 1.5 degrees C. When conditional NDCs (those that do require international support) are included, this gap shrinks to 26.1 GtCO2e.
Much of the progress in narrowing the gap comes from major emitters that have already submitted new NDCs — most notably the U.S., Japan and Brazil. Given their large emissions profiles, their new commitments account for the majority of the reductions seen so far.
While this marks progress, it's far from what's needed to keep global warming within safe limits. Getting on track to 1.5 or even 2 degrees C would require much steeper cuts than what's currently on the table.
However, this is not the full picture.
Many of the world's largest emitters have yet to submit their 2035 targets. The remaining G20 countries alone account for about two-thirds of global GHG emissions. This makes their forthcoming NDCs especially important: The scale and ambition of these commitments could meaningfully narrow the emissions gap — or, if they fall short, leave the world locked into a trajectory that puts global temperature targets out of reach.
Among the countries that have submitted new NDCs so far, the United Kingdom stands out for its ambitious climate trajectory. Following the recommendations of its Climate Change Committee, the U.K. has set a bold target to reduce emissions 81% by 2035 from 1990 levels. This rapid decline in the coming decade would put the country on track toward its net zero goal by 2050, based on realistic rates of technology deployment and ambitious but achievable shifts in consumer and business behavior.
Other countries, such as Japan and the United States, have opted for a "linear" approach toward net zero — meaning if they drew a straight line to their net-zero target (for example, 0 GtCO2e in 2050), their 2030 and 2035 targets would fall along it, reflecting a constant decline in emissions each year. Japan aims to cut emissions 60% from 2013 levels by 2035, while the United States has pledged a 61%-66% reduction from 2005 levels by 2035.
Despite the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, undermining climate policies and attempting to dismantle key government institutions, its NDC target may still provide a framework for climate action at the state, city and local levels, as well as for future administrations. Many of these entities have already rallied around the new NDC and are committed to making progress toward its targets.
However, the linear approach Japan and the U.S. are taking to emissions reductions — as opposed to a steeper decline this decade — risks using up a larger share of the world's carbon budget earlier and compromising global temperature targets.
Brazil presented a broader range of emissions targets in its NDC, committing to a 59%-67% reduction by 2035 from 2005 levels. These two poles represent a marked difference in ambition: A 67% reduction could put Brazil on track for climate neutrality by 2050, while a 59% reduction falls short of what's needed to meet that goal. It is unclear which trajectory the government intends to pursue, leaving Brazil's true ambition in question. The NDC also omits carbon budgets for specific sectors (such as energy, transport or agriculture), which would clarify how it plans to meet its overarching emissions goals. However, Brazil committed within its NDC to develop further plans outlining how each sector will contribute to its 2035 target.
Elsewhere, Canada made only a marginal increase to its target, shifting from a 40%-45% emissions reduction by 2030 to 45%-50% by 2035 from 2005 levels. This falls short of the recommendation from Canada's own Net-Zero Advisory Body, which called for a 50%-55% reduction by 2035 — and warned that anything below 50% risks derailing progress toward the country's legislated net-zero goal by 2050. While every increase in ambition counts, such incremental changes do not match the urgent pace of progress needed among developed and wealthy economies like Canada.
The ocean makes up nearly 70% of the planet’s surface, bursting with rich biodiversity and natural resources that are vital for both the climate and economies. Yet, beyond national coastlines, protecting much of the ocean has long been a murky endeavor.
For nearly 20 years, governments, scientists and ocean advocates have worked toward securing a global treaty to protect marine life in the ocean areas that lie beyond countries’ individual jurisdictions. These vast, mostly unregulated waters, known as the high seas, hold huge importance to the health of the planet.
Finally, in June 2023, the 193 member states of the United Nations adopted the landmark Treaty for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ agreement), under the UN Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS).
Though the text of what is commonly known as the “High Seas Treaty,” has been agreed, the story is far from over. By the conclusion of the third UN Ocean Conference, 51 parties had ratified the treaty with more pledging to follow, putting the treaty within reach of the 60 needed to put it into force. Once ratified, it will trigger a 120-day countdown, leading to the first Conference of Parties (BBNJ COP) that will determine how the treaty is fully implemented.
The ambition of the High Seas Treaty has always been immense. Roughly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside any single country’s jurisdiction, forming a collective space teeming with life from microscopic plankton to colossal blue whales.
The high seas are also home to lucrative natural resources, which countries and companies increasingly seek to explore and exploit, such as critical minerals needed for EV batteries and other low carbon technologies and marine genetic materials that are increasingly sought after to support pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and other innovations.
Yet, without a binding treaty, the high seas are governed patchwork-style through regional fisheries agreements, shipping conventions and scattered marine protected areas. This leaves critical gaps in protecting marine biodiversity or ensuring developing countries are also benefiting from discoveries made in international water.
When ratified, the High Seas Treaty will fill critical regulatory gaps and complement national efforts. It will help to guide regional cooperation and link seamlessly to sustainable ocean plans for national waters already being delivered by member countries of the High Level Panel for Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel) and future plans through the 100% Alliance. Together, they will weave a comprehensive net of ocean stewardship from coastlines to open ocean.
In 2023, countries compromised on four core pillars of the BBNJ agreement:
The treaty will create a mechanism to establish marine protected areas (MPAs) and other conservation management tools on the high seas. MPAs are typically clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to conserve marine biodiversity and ecosystems.
Many MPAs on the high seas already exist. For example, in 2010, six MPAs were established in the Northeast Atlantic with a total area of 286,200 square kilometers (110,502 square miles) and in 2016, the Ross Sea MPA with a total area of 1.5 million square kilometers (600,000 square miles) was established in the Southern Ocean.
The treaty will also establish a process for proposing new zones for protection via a consultation process, supported by scientific evidence.
The treaty will also establish rules for sharing financial and non-financial benefits from the commercial application of genetic material sourced from high-seas marine organisms — such as bacteria, corals or deep-sea sponges — that can be used in medicine, cosmetics, food, and biotechnology. These innovations hold huge potential benefits for human health and wellbeing.
The High Seas Treaty also supports sharing technology and knowledge developments, particularly to low-income countries that need and request it for conservation and sustainable use to ensure they participate fully in high seas governance.
The treaty will create a process for countries or companies proposing high seas activities — such as deep sea mining in areas beyond national borders — to conduct assessments and follow international standards, that can be shared transparently.
By the conclusion of UN Oceans Conference on June 13, the treaty had 136 signatories and was ratified by 51, just nine shy of the 60 parties needed to put the treaty into force. Those ratifying the treaty include island states such as Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Dominica and the Maldives; the European Union and some of its members including France, Portugal and Spain; and other nations such as Chile, Norway and South Korea. (Track the signatories and parties on the UN website here.)
Starting in the early 2000s, the United Nations began informal discussions on how to close the regulatory gaps over how to manage the high seas, wrangling over how to share the benefits of its natural resources while ensuring necessary protections. But the very complexity of coordinating nearly 200 countries meant progress was often incremental, alternately buoyed by breakthroughs and bogged down by competing interests.
The slow ratification progress highlights both the strengths and limitations of international diplomacy. On the one hand, global consensus ensures that the resulting High Seas Treaty creates a single set of rules for all high-seas users. On the other hand, aligning the diverse interests of small island states, distant water fishing nations and environmental non-profit organizations is inherently time-consuming. Each negotiating text must thread the needle between these interests, with every word or comma potentially sparking months of debate.
Moreover, the decision-making processes of the UN, anchored in principles of sovereign equality and consensus-building, can struggle to keep pace with the urgent, evolving threats that marine ecosystems face: like the increasing demand for deep-sea minerals, growing plastic pollution and overfishing practices. By the time a treaty is finalized, new pressures may emerge, requiring fresh rounds of technical and legal work.
Countries, operating within their own jurisdictions — also known as exclusive economic zones, which extend 200 nautical miles from a country’s coastline — can make more immediate progress on conservation and climate initiatives. For example, Ocean Panel members are sustainably managing 100% of their national waters. The process for developing these holistic sustainable ocean plans, while not simple, has been faster than multilateral processes. Ocean Panel members are now calling on all coastal and ocean states to replicate this success in their own national waters by 2030 by joining the 100% Alliance.
At this month’s UNOC, it’s expected that many UN member states will announce either their signing or ratification of the High Seas Treaty. However, for it to be effective, it is crucial that the underlying framework and governance structures are agreed upon before coming into force. The BBNJ Preparatory Commission (BBNJ PrepCom) hopes to fill this gap: shaping the treaty operations and preparing for the first BBNJ COP.
Governments and negotiators are hoping to develop key recommendations to shape the critical elements of the treaty. This includes forming governing structures; outlining the roles and responsibilities of institutions such as those that provide data, and scientific and technical advice; creating tools and mechanisms to ensure equitable implementation of the treaty; and establishing systems to ensure funding and technical knowledge is distributed so all member states can fully participate.
The first BBNJ COP will see these recommendations brought forward and hopefully adopted. It is critical therefore that these meetings are constructive and that a consensus is reached. Only with the relevant governing and financial mechanisms in place can this High Seas Treaty go from a landmark agreement to a fully functioning international treaty that protects the global ocean.
Management of the ocean needs to be as interconnected as the ocean itself. By weaving together national actions with a robust global treaty, the world can ensure a resilient, equitable and thriving ocean for generations to come.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on June 5, 2025 and updated on June 17,2025 to reflect new information about the countries who have signed and ratified the treaty.
It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland.
Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ “economic savior” in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.
Neither the Cleveland-based steelmaker nor the Department of Energy, which put up $500 million to back the project, has formally pulled the plug on the plan to build a direct reduced iron plant capable of using hydrogen and two electric melting furnaces. But updates from the company in recent weeks suggest the ambitious carbon-free version of the project is all but dead.
On a first-quarter earnings call with investors last month, Cleveland-Cliffs’ CEO Lourenco Goncalves said the company was negotiating with the Department of Energy to “explore changes to the scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
Rather than use hydrogen, the green version of which remains expensive and in limited supply, Goncalves said the project would “instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.” At an event earlier this month hosted by the lobbying group American Iron and Steel Institute, Goncalves said the lack of a hydrogen-generating hub nearby made it impossible to source the fuel on the project’s timeline.
“Without hydrogen, the entire thing falls apart,” Goncalves said, according to E&E News. “At the very least, I will not have hydrogen at the time I need for that specific project.”
Cleveland-Cliffs did not reply to Canary Media’s emailed questions on Friday, nor did the Energy Department return a request for comment on the status of the federal funding.
But Goncalves could announce the fate of the project as soon as Tuesday, when he’s set to speak at the Global Steel Dynamics Forum in New York City.
“Before all this uncertainty, this project was going to be, potentially, the first green-steel plant in the U.S.,” said Hilary Lewis, the steel director at the climate research group Industrious Labs. “With all this uncertainty, and particularly with this potential pivot toward fossil fuels, the future of clean iron and steelmaking in the U.S. is much less clear, and that puts our competitiveness at risk.”
The up-front costs of installing entirely new equipment always outweighed those of simply renovating the existing coal-fired unit.
Relining a blast furnace costs up to $400 million, according to RMI estimates. The total cost of building the DRI plant and electric melting furnaces came out to $1.6 billion, meaning Cleveland-Cliffs was on the hook for $1.1 billion even with the federal grant the Biden administration finalized last September.
The traditional coal-based method of making steel — which involves melting iron ore in a blast furnace then refining the iron into steel in a basic oxygen furnace — produces the cheapest metal, at roughly $390 per metric ton, according to an October report from Columbia University’s Business School. Scrap melted down in an electric arc furnace came out to $415 per metric ton. Steel made with iron from DRI fueled with natural gas and then refined in an electric arc furnace averaged out to $455 per metric ton.
Producing the iron through DRI with entirely green hydrogen, instead of gas, spiked the price to around $800 per metric ton.
The cost of making hydrogen with electrolyzers powered by certifiably clean electricity is among the biggest challenges to green steel in the U.S. That hurdle is now poised to become even higher as congressional Republicans seek to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s 45V tax credit, which aimed to make green hydrogen cost-competitive with the gas-derived version of the fuel. The Senate Finance Committee on Monday released its version of the budget bill, which aligned with the recently passed House version in eliminating the incentive at the end of this year.
That isn’t an issue for Europe’s leading green steel project. Formerly known as H2 Green Steel, the newly renamed Stegra plant benefits from the vast amount of carbon-free energy in Sweden, where the overwhelming majority of power is generated from hydroelectricity, wind turbines, and nuclear reactors.
In the U.S., by contrast, green hydrogen plants hinged on massive projects to construct wind turbines and solar panels that needed to be 70% larger in capacity to make up for the intermittency of the renewables, according to Elizabeth Boatman, a lead consultant at the Michigan-based clean energy consultancy 5 Lakes Energy. A dedicated nuclear reactor to generate the power for electrolysis could do so more efficiently, she said, noting that the availability of underground salt caverns to store hydrogen for later use could also further bring down the cost of projects.
“I don’t think anyone on any side of this thought hydrogen at scale wouldn’t be a barrier,” Boatman said. “The amount of new renewables the company would have to build out, along with transmission infrastructure, was clearly going to be expensive.”
In 2022, the Biden administration set a target of $1 per kilogram of green hydrogen within the next decade. (Last fall, a Florida-based geothermal startup called Magma Power filed patents that claimed it could generate green hydrogen for less than $1 per kilogram. The company did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Canary Media on whether that figure banked on the 45V tax credit.)
If the U.S. managed to achieve a supply at that price, steel made with green hydrogen-powered DRI and an electric arc furnace could come out to $544 per ton, according to a report published last July by Transition Asia, a nonprofit think tank focused on climate research. That’s marginally less than the cost of steel from gas-powered DRI and an electric arc furnace, at $550 per ton, or blast furnace steel at $565 per ton. If the U.S. were to institute even a modest carbon price, it could reach cost parity with coal-fired steel.
But if the 45V tax credit disappears, those numbers will be near-impossible to achieve.
Regardless of cost challenges, Boatman said, “it’s still an attractive solution, not just because of the potential to curb climate-warming emissions but also criteria air pollutants and other hazardous air pollution tied to the production process from a blast furnace with coal.”
The original, low-carbon version of the Cleveland-Cliffs project also has significant potential economic benefits.
The plant overhaul would have spurred $373 million in economic activity around the facility and brought 2,300 jobs to Middletown, according to analysis shared with Canary Media by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a think tank. It’s not clear how a relining project would stack up.
That’s what made the project so significant, not just as a potential climate solution but as a way to revitalize a town in the heart of America’s steelmaking region, said Brad Townsend, the Ohio-based vice president of policy and outreach at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
“Middletown is sort of the quintessential Midwest steel- and paper-making town that is looking for a way to leverage that history and infrastructure and know-how to chart a path forward,” he said. “This project would have done exactly that.”
Cutting fossil fuels out of transportation and buildings will mean embracing electric vehicles and equipping homes and offices with heat pumps. But cleaning up these sectors will take much more than tackling their energy supply — it’ll also require eliminating carbon emissions that come from producing the materials that roads and buildings are made of.
A growing number of states are starting to do just that, with policies that take a more holistic view of the climate challenge.
Nine states have enacted Buy Clean laws to boost demand for lower-carbon steel, concrete, asphalt, glass, and other industrial products. California enacted the nation’s first such policy in 2017, followed in subsequent years by Oregon, Colorado, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Agencies in other states are starting to adopt similar strategies, including by collecting emissions data about products used in public works projects.
“We’ve [historically] invested a lot in policies to improve the energy efficiency of buildings,” said Hanna Waterstrat, director of the Washington State Department of Commerce’s state efficiency and environmental performance office. “But the footprint of the materials — from the manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance, and disposal — can actually be the equivalent of, or bigger than, the entire greenhouse-gas footprint of operating a building through its lifetime.”
The so-called embodied carbon in construction projects represents a significant share of the world’s annual emissions, with an estimated 11% coming from materials used in buildings alone. That’s largely because manufacturers consume huge amounts of fossil fuels to make products like steel and cement. State authorities and companies have tended to overlook these emissions when assessing the climate impact of, say, a new office tower or highway.
“That’s been a gap in the land of climate and energy policy so far,” said Waterstrat, who leads her department’s efforts to implement Washington’s Buy Clean and Buy Fair strategy.
Until last month, the states working to shrink that policy gap had a powerful partner in the federal government.
The Biden administration launched the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership in 2023 to build upon existing efforts and accelerate the U.S. market for cleaner construction materials. Federal agencies designated billions of dollars in climate funding to help state governments and contractors track emissions and to enable domestic manufacturers to decarbonize their operations.
President Donald Trump has since abandoned the federal Buy Clean strategy and is attempting to rescind related grant programs. The about-face will undoubtedly delay a deep transformation of the country’s construction sector. But state agencies and industry associations say they’re forging ahead — guided by their own laws and commitments to slash embodied carbon.
“Buy Clean is a great example of how states and other nonfederal actors can continue to press forward on climate action, regardless of what the federal government does,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors.
The group is working to maintain collaboration among the 13 states that joined the federal-state Buy Clean initiative, and in recent weeks it has downloaded the datasets, analytical tools, and other relevant resources that the Trump administration could wipe from the internet. Katims noted that the alliance formed under similar circumstances in 2017, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the first time.
“It’s quite literally in our DNA to sustain climate work at the state level,” he said.
The broader Buy Clean vision is to harness the government’s massive purchasing power to jump-start the private market for low-carbon industrial materials. Companies bidding to construct new public buildings or bridges must show they can not only compete on cost but also on the carbon intensity of their concrete or steel, which in turn creates demand for more cleanly produced products.
Today, states are largely still laying the foundation for this future reality.
The first place many agencies start is by requiring suppliers to furnish environmental product declarations. EPDs, which are often likened to climate nutrition labels, provide granular data about the emissions associated with extracting, manufacturing, and transporting individual materials. Defining criteria for individual products involves lengthy discussions between state authorities and industry groups. The EPDs themselves can cost companies thousands of dollars and dozens of hours to complete.
In 2021, the Washington State Legislature commissioned a pilot study to collect data about both the environmental impacts and labor standards related to materials used in five state construction projects. Three years later, the state adopted its Buy Clean and Buy Fair law, which requires state agencies and public universities to report on the impacts of concrete, wood, and steel products purchased for new state-owned building projects.
Waterstrat said her team has since developed specifications and language for companies to follow to ease the process of bidding on projects. Her office is also working on a database for EPDs to show the carbon intensity of the materials the state procures and to inform future policymaking. Eventually, the idea is to set limits around products’ carbon footprints — but for now, the state’s law doesn’t call for that.
“Just having that knowledge and data is really the first step in understanding what your procurement choices are,” Waterstrat said, adding that she’s “hopeful it will lead project owners to select lower-carbon materials.”
A handful of states that are gathering EPDs also require construction products to meet certain emissions thresholds, which are known as global warming potential limits.
In 2022, California’s Buy Clean policy began requiring that four categories — structural steel, concrete reinforcing steel, flat glass, and insulation — used in public works projects meet GWP limits equal to or below the industry average. The Buy Clean Colorado Act similarly calls for setting industry-average thresholds for three types of steel, as well as asphalt, concrete, glass, and wood used in new state projects from January 2024 on. Next year, Colorado’s Office of the State Architect will review those limits and report to the Legislature on the program’s progress.
New York, for its part, set GWP standards in 2023 for concrete mixes used in all state building and transportation projects, making it the first state to do so. The Buy Clean Concrete guidelines, which began as voluntary, became mandatory last month. The current threshold is equivalent to 150% of the emissions for average concrete mixes in the eastern U.S. The idea is to create a policy that’s initially attainable not just for major manufacturers but also “mom-and-pop concrete plants” in rural parts of the state “for whom this is all fairly new,” said Mariane Jang, a senior policy advisor on the resiliency and sustainability team in New York state’s Office of General Services.
However, starting in 2027, the limits will progressively lower to reflect ongoing efforts to slash emissions from cement and concrete production. In the meantime, “the aim is to do more capacity-building and to engage even those smaller companies to prepare them for the upcoming changes,” Jang said.
The ability to gather accurate data from many disparate suppliers is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of Buy Clean: slashing embodied carbon from construction materials.
That work will potentially get harder if the Trump administration succeeds in its attempts to claw back congressionally mandated climate and energy spending.
Among the funding stuck in political purgatory is a nearly $160 million grant program by the Environmental Protection Agency to help dozens of businesses develop “high-quality” EPDs for 14 material categories.
The National Asphalt Pavement Association was selected last year to receive $10 million of that funding, which hasn’t yet made it out the door, according to Richard Willis, who manages the organization’s team that works on engineering and sustainability issues. The industry association has developed widely used software that helps asphalt-mix producers develop and publish EPDs for individual plants and mixtures. But using the tool costs companies around $3,000 to $6,000 per plant.
Willis said the EPA funding would be used to reduce costs and other barriers for asphalt-mix producers while helping fill in the “data gaps” from the businesses that supply additives. The contents of asphalt pavement — made from aggregate and a liquid petroleum-based binder — can vary widely depending on the local climate and the types of ingredients available nearby.
“Asphalt is about as local of a material as it gets,” Willis said. That makes it tricky to create robust EPDs using general industry information or to develop plans for curbing emissions at a given plant.
A $1.2 billion program from the Federal Highway Administration is similarly ensnared in Trump’s funding freeze. In November, the FHWA selected transportation agencies in 37 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico to receive grants to help them study, track, and ultimately purchase cleaner materials for roads and highways.
New York was tapped to receive $31.9 million, though because the funding wasn’t legally obligated before Trump took office, it’s unclear if the state will ever actually get it, said Bruce Barkevich, who is vice president of the New York Construction Materials Association, a trade group representing producers of asphalt, aggregate, and ready-mix concrete in the state.
The timing of the grant would’ve been especially helpful for New York manufacturers and suppliers working to develop EPDs. State construction projects that use over 8,000 short tons of asphalt are now required to gather such data; projects of all sizes will have to do the same starting in 2026. New York’s policy, Executive Order 22, also requires agencies to report the quantities of concrete mixes, five types of steel products, and three types of glass products procured for state projects and provide EPDs when available.
“Even with that [funding uncertainty], we’re not losing the emphasis on sustainable pavements and low-carbon materials, because we’re in New York state — we have laws on the books,” Barkevich said. He added that companies and agencies in the state have worked together for years to curb emissions from asphalt production, including by reducing temperatures used in asphalt-mixing plants and incorporating more recycled material.
Emily Rubenstein, the deputy commissioner for resiliency and sustainability in New York state’s Office of General Services, said her team continues to press ahead with the state’s Buy Clean strategy, including by hosting public webinars, meeting with industry, and training staff in various state agencies. The office is also currently analyzing embodied-carbon data from state projects with the goal of identifying future pathways for reducing embodied carbon.
“This work takes a village, and we’ve been thrilled with how both supporting agencies and industries have been in [backing] the transition,” she said, adding that she’s also glad the U.S. Climate Alliance has picked up the mantle of organizing states.
In New York and other Buy Clean states, program leaders said they’re still meeting quarterly through the climate alliance and trading notes to learn from each other’s experiences. Such collaboration is especially pertinent now that the biggest player in the game — the federal government — is stepping back, said Ted Fertik, vice president for manufacturing and industrial policy at the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups.
“There’s a broad recognition that, in most cases, one state’s procurement is probably not sufficient to drive large-scale shifts in production processes,” Fertik said. “So there will need to be more intentional efforts around harmonizing [state efforts] to drive decarbonization.”
COAL: Executives from a dozen U.S. power companies urge the Trump administration to roll back federal regulations on coal ash disposal and rescind recent enforcement action. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The Trump administration’s efforts to claw back upwards of $7.5 billion in federal electric vehicle charging funding from states will likely be met with legal challenges, experts say. (Canary Media)
NUCLEAR: Home electrification, electric vehicles, new data centers and a 2040 carbon-free power mandate are putting pressure on Minnesota lawmakers to lift the state’s ban on new nuclear plants. (Minnesota Reformer)
UTILITIES: Missouri’s two largest utilities want state permission to charge customers for new gas plants before they’re built, which consumer advocates slam as a scheme to increase utility profits. (Missouri Independent)
GRID:
SOLAR: Consumers Energy breaks ground on a 360 MW solar project in southwestern Michigan that the utility says will help meet its goal of 8,000 MW of solar by 2040. (WWMT)
POLITICS: Jurors begin to deliberate in the corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who is accused of ushering favorable legislation for ComEd in exchange for jobs for associates. (Chicago Sun-Times)
COMMENTARY: A lung cancer specialist says Wisconsin utilities’ plans to prolong the life of coal plants and open new gas plants will harm public health. (Wisconsin Examiner)
Jane Thornton tried and failed to stop the wood pellet plant from being built within earshot of her home in Faison, a tiny farming town in eastern North Carolina where she’s lived for over 60 years.
Now, some eight years later, she and her neighbors have a smaller but critical aim: getting the facility to better control its dust and the nuisance it creates.
Silver-haired and soft-spoken, Thornton is quick to wax philosophical about the forces that have fueled the pellet industry’s rise, largely driven by a decades-old carbon accounting loophole that countries use to allege climate progress. The unintended consequences are concentrated in the U.S. Southeast, which has emerged as a hub for the industry.
“It’s not green,” she said, referring to industry claims of sustainability. “Because when you cut the trees down, you lose the effect of them taking the bad stuff [out of the air]. And then we send them to Europe and use a lot of diesel fuel, which is not good. And they burn it and pollute their air. So how do they think it’s green?”
A host of advocates, scientists, and data backs up Thornton. Producing pellets, shipping them to Europe and Asia, and burning them in power plants all creates carbon pollution greater than that of burning coal. Too often, pellets are made from whole, hardwood trees that were absorbing carbon dioxide while they were alive. Their replacements, often pines, can’t regrow in time to make up for it.
As global climate negotiators debate the fuel’s carbon cycle, today Thornton and others in Faison are focused on dust. Indeed, neighbors of five wood pellet mills in the Southeast, including two operated by Enviva Biomass in North Carolina, list dust as their top concern, according to research conducted by the Southern Environmental Law Center and several other groups.
“That is the number one thing I have heard from almost every community I’ve talked to about pellet mills. It’s incessant dust,” said Heather Hillaker, senior attorney at the law center.
“We’re up against limited regulatory opportunities,” she acknowledged. But the state could force Enviva to tamp down the problem. “This is one area where there is a regulation that applies to an issue that is very prevalent for the community.”
At her home last month, Thornton described watching suppliers roll past on their way to Enviva’s factory.
“I’ve seen more log trucks come by today,” Thornton said. “They clear-cut everything. You get the oaks and the maples and the sycamores and whatever else is out there, and then you come back and plant pines. So, we’re going to have pine forests – or pine plantations.”
She added, “They’re not forests, because a forest is whatever the Lord puts out there.”
The practice of burning pellets for power isn’t economical without massive government supports, which don’t exist in North Carolina or elsewhere in the U.S.. What’s more, the Biden administration’s new rules for the Clean Electricity Tax Credit make it extremely unlikely that wood pellets could qualify.
Still, many countries count burning wood pellets as a positive on their climate ledgers, and the United Kingdom heavily subsidizes the fuel source. While those incentives are set to expire in 2027, the industry is campaigning heavily to get them renewed.
Often overlooked in the climate accounting debate is the experience of the disproportionately low-income communities of color in the Southeast, where pellet mills are invariably located. From the get-go, neighbors have sought to alleviate dust and noise from the mills.
Enviva’s first facility in North Carolina, in Ahoskie in Hertford County, began operating in 2011, and regulators required the company to control its dust soon thereafter.
“That pellet mill is a right smack dab in the middle of town,” said Hillaker. “So, it makes sense that they would have had some pretty significant dust issues immediately.”
Success in other communities has been more elusive.
A former professor at the University of Mt. Olive, Dr. Ruby Bell is an organizer with the nonprofit Dogwood Alliance in Faison. She lives far enough from the Sampson County mill that she doesn’t notice many impacts at her own home. Not so when she’s closer to the facility.
“When I first started this position,” Bell said, “I decided to go visit the people who live across the way. I sat outside for 20 minutes… When I left, I was sniffing. My nose was running. I had mucus beginning to form in my throat.”
Tiny air particulates invisible to the human eye are thought to be the most insidious to human health because they can burrow deep into the lungs and bloodstream. But large dust particles can cause the issues Bell described, because they tend to get trapped in the upper respiratory tract.
They can also exacerbate symptoms in people with pre-existing respiratory conditions. More than 100 households in the 300-person survey by Dogwood, Southern Environmental Law Center, and others, reported having asthma. Over half said they simply avoided outdoor activities like grilling and gardening to avoid the dust.
That’s part of why organizers want state regulators to require dust management plans at Enviva’s mills in Northampton, Richmond, and Sampson counties – not just the one in Ahoskie.
To be sure, the plan wouldn’t address every concern with the Faison facility. Neighbors complain about the noise from the mill’s 24-7 operations. They also blanch at the constant truck traffic, from the delivery of downed trees to the mill to the transport of the finished pellets some 80 miles south to the Port of Wilmington.
“This road out here was built as one of those farm-to-market roads,” Thornton said during the visit at her home, surrounded by farmland. “It wasn’t built for trucks, and they’ve torn it up I don’t know how many times.”
Activists are pressing Enviva to address all of their complaints voluntarily, saying that in addition to controlling its dust, the company should adopt best practices for incoming and outgoing trucks and cease operations between 10 at night and seven in the morning.
Yet even without these extra steps, the dust plan would make a measurable difference, community members believe. The Ahoskie plan, for instance, requires Enviva to apply water to “minimize fugitive dust emissions from any ground surfaces” when dust is observed or conditions are dry, among other measures. It also calls for grass berms, which could mitigate noise.
“The plan is better than nothing,” said Hillaker. “There’s better ability for [the state] to act if the plan itself is violated.”
But convincing North Carolina regulators to mandate the dust plans has been a slog. State rules say a plan is required if regulators can verify two dust complaints in a 12-month period. But that substantiation is far from simple.
“Trained Division of Air Quality inspectors visit the site and determine whether off-site dust is present,” Shawn Taylor, a division spokesperson, said over email. “If so, they attempt to determine the source of the dust by physically inspecting the dust, reviewing weather and wind data, reviewing operating schedules and air quality records of nearby facilities, and using other methods.”
Dating back two years, Bell has submitted grievances on behalf of neighbors in Faison that have yet to be confirmed. And while scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill installed and collected air quality monitors at Thornton’s home and that of others, their research is ongoing and separate from the state’s process for verifying dust complaints.
“Fugitive wood dust usually consists of larger particles that are less likely to be detectable with these monitors, so physical inspection is used,” Taylor said. “Even if monitors detect dust, they cannot determine the source of the dust, so our investigation would need to rely on additional data to make this determination.”
Still, after years of little to no headway, organizers finally saw some progress last year. Regulators verified two complaints at the Enviva facility at the Port of Wilmington and will now require the company to enact a dust management plan.
“The details of that plan are still being developed by DAQ and Enviva,” Taylor said, “and will be implemented later this year.”
The success at the port has given a jolt of hope to organizers and pellet mill neighbors who feel they aren’t being heard.
“It’s hard to get them moving sometimes,” Bell said. With some justification, many in the community believe “it doesn’t matter what we say,” she said.
In Thornton’s eyes, the battle against wood pellets is all too typical of the way the country approaches environmental regulation.
“We’re not proactive to make sure what we’re doing is right,” she said. “We say ‘oh, this is new, this is good, we’re going to do a whole bunch of it,’ and after we get done, somebody comes along and says I don’t believe we should have done that.”
She added, “that’s true with a lot of things we’ve done in this country. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you ought to.”
EFFICIENCY: St. Louis is the first large Midwest city with building performance standards that will reach initial deadlines this year and determine whether building owners are penalized for noncompliance. (Canary Media)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS: Ohio’s new General Assembly leaders signal an interest in taking up energy-related policies in the new session, including making it easier to drill for gas in the state. (Ohio Capital Journal)
GRID:
UTILITIES: Missouri lawmakers are set to consider legislation that would allow gas utilities to base customer rates on projected expenses rather than actual costs, which critics say could increase bills. (Missouri Independent)
BIOGAS: An Illinois natural gas provider is now operating its first renewable gas interconnection in the state at a facility that produces biogas from methane and carbon dioxide from landfill waste. (Pipeline and Gas Journal)
OVERSIGHT: North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong names the director of business for the state’s Public Service Commission to fill a vacancy on the regulatory board. (North Dakota Monitor)
BIOFUELS: A Missouri agency invests $3.4 million on fuel distribution upgrades to expand the availability of higher blends of ethanol and biodiesel. (KMZU)
COMMENTARY: Big tech companies should be required to shoulder the costs of new generation to power their data centers so that costs aren’t shifted on to utility ratepayers, an economist and author writes. (Utility Dive)
OIL & GAS: The U.S. Interior Department announces it received no bids for oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, saying industry’s lack of interest shows some places are “too special and sacred” for drilling. (Alaska Beacon)
ALSO: The Biden administration rejects Hilcorp’s bid for more time to develop an offshore Arctic oil and gas project that has been stagnant since the 1990s, meaning its leases will expire at the end of the year. (Alaska Beacon)
BIOFUELS: Oregon regulators greenlight a proposed $2.5 billion biofuel refinery along the Columbia River amid advocates’ concerns over environmental impacts. (Oregonian)
COAL:
POLITICS: Right-wing Wyoming lawmakers introduce “make carbon great again” legislation that would block the state from designating the greenhouse gas as a pollutant and repeal carbon capture mandates. (WyoFile)
GEOTHERMAL: The Biden administration plans to extend Endangered Species Act protections to a butterfly found only in a stretch of northern Nevada, potentially affecting future geothermal development. (Nevada Current)
STORAGE: The U.S. Energy Department awards a firm a $1.76 billion conditional loan guarantee to fund a proposed 500 MW advanced compressed air energy storage system in southern California. (news release)
ELECTRIFICATION: California startups successfully demonstrate their “watt diet” that uses smart circuit-splitters to electrify homes without expensive service or panel upgrades. (Quitting Carbon)
CLIMATE: The Biden administration awards tribal nations and organizations $121 million to fund climate resilience planning. (news release)
TRANSPORTATION: Daimler plans to stop selling large diesel trucks in Oregon over concerns it won’t meet the state’s advanced clean truck rule’s electric vehicle quota. (Willamette Week)
UTILITIES: Analysts find NorthWestern Energy and Pacific Gas & Electric stand to profit from new data centers’ growing power demands in their service areas. (Utility Dive)
POLLUTION: The U.S. EPA plans to lift sanctions imposed on Alaska for failing to address toxic emissions in Fairbanks after the state revised its air pollution plan. (Alaska Beacon)
SOLAR: A developer begins construction on a 226 MW solar-plus-storage project in southeastern Nevada to provide power to Las Vegas casinos. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
MICROGRIDS: A Wendy’s restaurant in California plans to install a solar-plus-storage powered microgrid. (Microgrid Knowledge)
GRID: The Bonneville Power Administration says it is still weighing the pros and cons of joining a regional day-ahead power market after leaning towards SPP’s Markets+. (RTO Insider, subscription)
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