The weather ― in particular, the heat dome sending temperatures spiking for millions of Americans ― was an inescapable part of the news cycle this week, underlining the impact of many of the stories NetZero Insider reporters are following.
In New York, John Cropley covered both a new solicitation for land-based solar and wind, and the state’s roadmap for deploying 6 GW of grid-scale storage to back up the renewables without the aid of natural gas peaker plants.
Other stories from Cropley included overviews of two reports on the tangle of state and local siting regulations that are slowing or killing the development of renewable energy projects across the country, and of another study showing that Vermonters are shifting from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps to keep their homes warm in the winter.
Our Jon Lamson was in Boston for an industry roundtable on the critical role “early and meaningful” community engagement can play in clean energy siting and permitting.
In New Jersey, legislators had a hot debate over a bill that could require utilities to set up “beneficial electrification” programs to help consumers install electric heating and cooling and other home appliances. But they put a hold on a bill mandating recycling of solar panels at the end of a project’s life, NetZero correspondent Hugh Morley reports.
On the federal beat, NetZero’s K Kaufmann sat down for an interview with Gene Rodrigues, who heads the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity and is focused on de-risking and accelerating the development, demonstration and adoption of new grid technologies.
Kaufmann also had the story on DOE’s latest big funding announcement: $900 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to kick-start the development of a pipeline of next-gen small modular nuclear reactors, which could provide 24/7, carbon-free power for data centers and industrial decarbonization.
Weather is also out front in our curated content; for example, an article in the Iowa Capital Dispatch on the insurance companies that are abandoning or hiking their rates sky-high in states at high risk of climate-driven extreme weather, such as California, Florida and Louisiana.
Staying in Iowa, The New York Times digs into the politics of weather forecasting, with the story of a Des Moines weatherman’s increasingly embattled efforts to incorporate fact-based climate reporting into his daily weather predictions.
Louisiana is no stranger to the unexpected impacts of climate change, with a combination of drought and sea level rise triggering a mass die-off of roseau cane, a key plant that helps to protect the state’s coastal wetlands and Mississippi Delta, the Louisiana Illuminator reports.
The standard conservative line on federal regulations, laid out in The Federalist, is to raise fears that any attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants will result in power blackouts.
But the Biden administration is working overtime to get final environmental and energy regulations in place ahead of a potential mid-summer deadline that would make it harder for a second Trump administration to roll them back, according to a report in E&E News.
Read on for more in this week’s Intelligence Report:
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