|
The Trump transition continues to grab headlines in NetZero Insider — and elsewhere — as the president-elect named North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) and fracking executive Chris Wright to lead, respectively, the Interior and Energy departments, as covered by K Kaufmann.
But ahead of the change in administrations in January, DOE continues to award federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and finalize the contracts that will make it difficult for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to claw back the money, Kaufmann reports.
Trump’s impact on the U.S. clean energy transition was also a major theme at the Annual Conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Anaheim, where our Ayla Burnett captured the concerns about IRA rollbacks, but also confidence that the transition is too big an economic engine for Trump to dismiss.
One way to keep the transition moving is to accelerate the process from innovation to the commercial scaling of new clean energy technologies, New England reporter Jon Lamson heard from speakers at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s Energy Innovation Forum in Boston.
Certainly, Massachusetts will be pushing ahead with its clean energy transition, with the passage — after two years of negotiations — of a wide-ranging climate bill that will support electric vehicle charging infrastructure, authorize a major procurement of battery storage and boost advanced transmission and metering technologies, Lamson writes.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Hugh Morley covers the opening round of the state’s exploration of possible changes to its solar net metering policies, which have helped put more than 2.3 GW of solar on the state’s electric system.
And in New York, John Cropley reports on a county-level court decision that has put the brakes on the conversion of a natural gas peaker into a 24/7 source of electricity for a crypto-mining facility.
Our curated content features another major court decision, this one in Virginia, where a state circuit court has ruled that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) cannot take the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, at least not until the legislature passes a law allowing him to do so, according to Inside Climate News.
Looking ahead to Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on all imports, the overseas solar supply chain is again shifting, The Guardian reports, from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam to Indonesia and the Middle East.
The turbulent climate negotiations at COP29 in Azerbaijan are also a top story this week.
New York Times reporter Anton Troianovski writes up his experience of taking an oil bath at an Azerbaijan resort, where the fossil fuel is said to have health benefits but leaves long-lasting stains.
Those stains metaphorically extended to the conference itself, according to coverage in Grist, where a draft statement from Azerbaijan leaders backed off the COP28 agreement for countries to transition away from fossil fuels over the next decade, while also tripling renewable energy.
Environmental groups say that part of the problem is the 1,773 lobbyists from fossil fuel companies in attendance at the conference, according to a report from the Yale School of the Environment.
The impacts of climate change continue across the U.S., where November saw an unprecedented outbreak of wildfires on the East Coast, fueled by drought and unseasonably hot weather — all of it not normal — an article in Grist explains and predicts more erratic, unpredictable weather ahead.
We’ll be taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday and be back on Dec. 9. Until then, read on for this week’s Intelligence Report:
|
Share
Tweet
Share
Forward