Back
This year was a big one for Canary Media. Our merger with the Energy News Network brought new reporters into the mix, expanding our focus on state and local clean energy policy and progress.
We sure needed the extra manpower to cover everything that 2025 brought. President Donald Trump shook up the clean energy landscape as soon as he entered the White House, taking particular aim at offshore wind and EVs. Worries about rising power demand from data centers reached a fever pitch. And startups boasted major breakthroughs in cleaning up manufacturing, decarbonizing home heating, and bringing battery storage to the masses.
That’s just a handful of the many, many topics Canary Media reporters covered this year through more than 600 stories. Here are 11 that you can’t miss, in chronological order.
Data centers are overwhelming the grid. Could they help it instead?
Jeff St. John started 2025 with a deep dive into what became one of the year’s hottest energy topics: data centers. In this first installment of a four-part series, Jeff explored the growing concern over AI data centers’ capacity to drive power demand to new heights, and how utilities may use that rising demand to justify new fossil fuel construction. But with effective regulation and demand management, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The smell of toasted rock could spell victory for geothermal energy
Julian Spector turned his visit to Quaise Energy’s Texas testing grounds into a feast for the senses. Whirring contraptions, hand-warming heat, and the smell of toasted marshmallows: Those are just a few of the ways Julian described the experience of watching the startup blast through rock with an electromagnetic beam. It’s all in hopes of accessing deeper, hotter levels of the Earth for geothermal power generation.
The rural N.C. mayor betting big on clean energy to uplift his hometown
Mayor Mondale Robinson has big clean energy dreams for his small rural town of Enfield, North Carolina, and shared them with Elizabeth Ouzts back in March. Residents of the largely Black, devastatingly poor town face massive winter energy bills, and Robinson envisions tackling them through a solar-plus-storage array that could help stabilize power costs — and a resilience hub that could teach residents about energy savings and keep them safe during emergencies.
From EVs to HVAC, clean energy means jobs in Central Illinois
In May, Canary Media joined fellow nonprofit newsrooms to report a series of stories on the growing clean energy workforce in rural America. That project took Kari Lydersen to Decatur, Illinois, which has been losing factory jobs for years. But a community college program is training a new generation of solar panel installers to change that dynamic, including Shawn Honorable, who’s planning to start a solar-powered hot dog stand called Buns on the Run.
US hydropower is at a make-or-break moment
Since the late 1800s, America’s network of hydroelectric dams has provided a steady, clean source of electricity. But their age is catching up with them, Alexander C. Kaufman reported in this deep dive. Nearly 450 dams across the country will need to be relicensed in the next decade, but many must make significant, costly upgrades to keep operating — and may opt to shut down instead.
How Trump gutted the team meant to build America’s energy future
The end of 2025 may also signal the end of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Created under the Biden administration, the office was meant to be a federally backed launchpad for ambitious but unproven clean technologies. In a thoughtful obituary for OCED, Maria Gallucci recounts the office’s biggest wins, and how that all started crumbling on Day 1 of the Trump administration.
Inside the Colorado factory where AtmosZero is electrifying steam
Cheez Whiz, notepaper, and beer all have one thing in common: They’re made with the help of gas-burning boilers. But if it’s up to AtmosZero, that’ll soon change. Alison F. Takemura took us on a tour of the Colorado factory where AtmosZero will soon start building steam-producing heat pumps, in hopes of decarbonizing all sorts of polluting processes.
Why utility regulators need to do more than call ‘balls and strikes’
Marissa Gillett didn’t make a lot of friends during her time leading Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. While consumer advocates heralded her assertive oversight, investor-owned utility regulators accused her of inappropriate, and even unlawful, bias. In an interview with Sarah Shemkus after she stepped down from PURA, Gillett didn’t back down from her “sustained, rigorous” approach, and called on other regulators to do the same.
This Ohio county banned wind and solar. Now, residents are pushing back.
Ohio has become a hot spot for anti-clean-energy rules, with more than three dozen counties outlawing utility-scale solar development in at least one of their townships. Richland County is among them, but in the new year, residents may reverse the ban. Kathiann M. Kowalski reports on how a group of local advocates secured a referendum on the decision made by just three county commissioners — and how they could inspire other Ohioans to do the same.
As solar booms and coal fades, Greece’s mining region struggles to adapt
This fall, Dan McCarthy took us on a trip to Greece. Far from Athens and the iconic whitewashed buildings of the Cyclades islands is Western Macedonia, which remains the country’s energy-producing hub even as its coal plants and mines shutter. Solar farms have rapidly taken the fossil fuel’s place, but residents are frustrated that the region’s economy hasn’t kept up.
The man behind the fall of offshore wind
Our list closes with a story Clare Fieseler started following three years ago, at a time when Republican lawmakers didn’t have much to say about offshore wind. Since then, the industry has become a prime target for the Trump administration, and David Stevenson is a big reason why. Stevenson is a 75-year-old grandfather from Delaware who believes in climate change — but not in offshore wind’s ability to fight it. Through numerous conversations with Stevenson, Clare shares the winding tale of how his activism brought the fight against offshore to the highest levels of government.
.svg)
