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NetZero Insider reporters had some good stories to chase on the East Coast this week, so let’s start at the top and work our way down.
In New York, John Cropley provides an update on the proposed cap-and-invest program that state officials are moving forward, too slowly for many environmental advocates, but too quickly for the gas and pipeline industries, who want a pause to consider how the proposed program might affect consumer costs.
James Downing wrote about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rolling back FERC’s approval of a natural gas pipeline in New Jersey that the Board of Public Utilities had previously opposed as unnecessary.
Cropley also had the story on the ARCH2 hydrogen hub in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, which got the go-ahead ― and about $30 million in federal funds ― from the Department of Energy to start planning and designing the regional project, aimed at producing green hydrogen using natural gas and carbon capture and sequestration.
In Maryland, K Kaufmann reported on a debate over the future of natural gas in the state, as the Public Service Commission considers whether it should push gas utilities to start planning for a potentially shrinking market because of the state’s goal for a 100% zero-carbon grid by 2035.
The U.S. General Services Administration has its own ambitious target ― providing carbon-free electricity for thousands of federal buildings by 2030, Kaufmann writes. The agency released an RFP for 1.1 million MWh of CFE for facilities in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Moving to our curated content, the election continued to grab headlines as Vice President Kamala Harris quickly nailed down the delegate votes to become the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, triggering examinations of her record on climate and energy.
Harris has snagged a key endorsement from the Green New Deal Network ― a coalition of grassroots climate, energy and environmental justice groups ― which could pull in younger voters who had been less than supportive of President Joe Biden, before his decision to end his campaign, Inside Climate News reports.
But climate and energy are already emerging as a wedge issue that Republicans and former President Donald Trump will use in their campaign against Harris, and a New York Times analysis suggests she will have to walk a fine line on the issue.
In Washington state, ProPublica and The Seattle Times dig into Gov. Jay Inslee’s seemingly tepid efforts to balance his pro-tech and pro-clean energy policies as data centers receiving state tax breaks suck up an increasing amount of its abundant hydropower, and some counties consider fossil fuel-powered generation to meet growing demand.
Both the election and growth of data centers are taking place against a backdrop of rising temperatures and extreme weather. The Los Angeles Times reports that despite two wet winters, the megadrought in the West is far from over, as Earth sweltered through its hottest days on record on July 21, 22 and 23, and scientists tell The New York Times that we are in “truly unchartered territory.”
Read on for this week’s Intelligence Report:
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