Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee is known for his never-ending fight for climate action. The state will run on 100% clean electricity by 2045. It’s phasing out new sales of gas and diesel cars and trucks by 2035. A cap-and-invest bill puts a limit on emissions and makes big polluters pay to help support cleaner tech and transportation. New homes and large buildings now need to use heat pumps, not fossil-powered heat. A new Climate Corps will train people in green jobs. The list goes on.

A new investigation into Chevron’s climate pledge has found the fossil-fuel company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies, which do little to offset its vast greenhouse gas emissions and in some cases may actually be causing communities harm. Chevron, which reported $35.5bn in profits last year, is the US’s second-largest fossil fuel company with operations stretching from Canada and Brazil to the UK, Nigeria and Australia.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court will take its first crack at whether a governor can force power plant owners to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, or whether he first needed approval from a Legislature that refused to go along with the plan. Hanging in the balance is Pennsylvania’s effort to become the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt carbon pricing.

More than 40 years have passed since EPA’s noise regulation program was silenced by a Reagan-era rollback. It’s time to start again, in the view of an advocacy group that accuses the agency of turning its back on a major peril.

“We need cash. It’s all about cash,” Tim Dawidowsky told an energy conference organised by Esade in Madrid. “The energy transition for sure needs wind as one of the strong pillars. On the other hand, with all the support from the European Union and around the world, the main elements of that value chain, meaning the ones who need to provide these little turbines that make the trick at the end, are losing billions.” When it comes to public support, the U.S Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has “one huge advantage” over European subsidies, Dawidowsky added. “You create jobs, and in return you get cash right away.” “I can build a plant in U.S. cash neutral,” he said, adding that this was something that is “impossible in Europe”.

Colorado River states announced a deal Monday that would reduce water deliveries to California, Arizona and Nevada to ensure enough water remains in major reservoirs to preserve hydropower generation in the drought-plagued river. State officials from the three Lower Basin states announced their agreement Monday in a letter to Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, following nearly a year of contentious negotiations about how to share the pain of reductions in water use.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Monday night that an overhaul of the nation’s permitting laws was still on the table in debt ceiling negotiations. He also strongly hinted that President Joe Biden could endorse a framework that would speed up approval for oil and gas projects, not just renewables. If the White House were to agree to such a proposal, it would put Biden at odds with his base in the environmental advocacy community and, more crucially, congressional progressives whose votes he will need to pass legislation to extend the nation’s borrowing authority as early as June 1.

An Italian company announced plans to build a $1 billion solar factory in Oklahoma on Monday, shaking up the industry as its growth path is uncertain and some of its key incentives face pushback in Congress. Enel North America said that its affiliate 3Sun USA would make solar panels and cells at the new facility in Inola, Okla., beginning in 2024. Up to 3 gigawatts of panel capacity could be manufactured at the plant the following year, with that number rising to 6 GW in subsequent years, it said.

Over the past two years, San Francisco startup Ample Inc. has quietly deployed more than a dozen robotic battery-swap stations around the Bay Area and in Europe. On an afternoon in May at an unmarked warehouse, the company previewed its next-generation swapping stations, at which a drained battery can be changed out for a charged one in about five minutes — half the time of its current stations.

In 1839, German scientist Gustav Rose went prospecting in the Ural Mountains and discovered a dark, shiny mineral. He named the calcium titanate “perovskite” after Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski. The mineral was one of many that Rose identified for science, but nearly two centuries later, materials sharing perovskite’s crystal structure could transform sustainable energy and the race against climate change by significantly boosting the efficiency of commercial solar panels.