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2020 Campaign
Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate Plan
Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Tuesday a new plan to spend $2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building sectors, part of a suite of sweeping proposals designed to create economic opportunities and build infrastructure while also tackling climate change. In a speech in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden built on his plans, released last week, for reviving the economy in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, with a new focus on enhancing the nation’s infrastructure and emphasizing the importance of putting the United States on a path to significantly cut fossil fuel emissions. [ read more … ]
Biden set to offer newly ambitious climate goals
Joe Biden’s campaign announced a proposal Tuesday to transform the nation’s energy industry, pledging to eliminate carbon pollution from power plants by 2035 and spend $2 trillion to turbocharge the clean energy economy. The plan would dramatically reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels, and the 15-year timeline for a 100 percent clean electricity standard is far more ambitious than anything Biden has previously proposed. [ read more … ]
Joe Biden Plots Energy Path With Eye on Left Flank, Swing-State Jobs
During a virtual fundraiser Monday night with dozens of renewable energy developers and advocates, Biden said clean energy would offer an opportunity for American workers to rebound from multiple predicaments. “It makes it all easier in a bizarre way,” he said. “We’re facing a historic set of crises: a pandemic, an economic crisis and systemic racism. And the most sweeping crisis of all — climate change — touches each one, and it exacerbates the threats to global health and to the economy and racial justice.” [ read more … ]
Wind Energy
Offshore wind energy investment quadruples despite Covid-19 slump
Global offshore wind investment more than quadrupled in the first half of the year even as the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented economic shock. A report has found that investors gave the greenlight to 28 new offshore windfarms worth a total of $35bn this year, four times more than in the first half of 2019 and well above the total for last year as a whole. [ read more … ]
Solar Energy
As woods give way to solar farms, state to issue controversial rules that could harm solar industry
Massachusetts has been a national leader in solar power and now boasts more of the renewable energy than most other states. But it has come at a cost to forests and woodlands, and environmental advocates — not a group ordinarily prone to voicing doubts about renewable sources — say misguided state incentives have encouraged building solar farms on undeveloped land.Now, with the coronavirus already causing major job losses and great uncertainty in the solar industry, state officials are planning to issue new rules that will sharply limit where solar farms can be built. [ read more … ]
Pandemic
‘Compelling’ evidence air pollution worsens coronavirus – study
There is “compelling” evidence that air pollution significantly increases coronavirus infections, hospital admissions and deaths, according to the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date. The research indicates that a small, single-unit increase in people’s long-term exposure to pollution particles raises infections and admissions by about 10% and deaths by 15%. The study took into account more than 20 other factors, including average population density, age, household size, occupation and obesity. [ read more … ]
G.A.O.: Trump Boosts Deregulation by Undervaluing Cost of Climate Change
A federal report released on Tuesday found the Trump administration set a rock-bottom price on the damages done by greenhouse gas emissions, enabling the government to justify the costs of repealing or weakening dozens of climate change regulations. The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan investigative arm, said the Trump administration estimated the harm that global warming will cause future generations to be seven times lower than previous federal estimates. Reducing that metric, known as the “social cost of carbon,” has helped the administration massage cost-benefit analyses, particularly for rules that allow power plants and automobiles to emit more planet-warming carbon dioxide. [ read more … ]
EPA rejects tougher air quality standards, says 2015 limits are sufficient
The Trump administration on Monday said it will maintain national air quality standards put in place in 2015, despite calls for more stringent regulations that advocates say are necessary to protect Americans in communities that are particularly vulnerable to a range of respiratory ailments. In a call with reporters, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler argued that the existing limits on fine particulate matter — otherwise known as soot — are sufficient, and that the decision was “based on a review of the scientific literature and recommendation from our independent science advisers.” [ read more … ]
Storage
Biggest U.S. Battery System Connects to California’s Grid
The biggest battery storage system in the U.S. connected to California’s electricity grid, giving the state more flexibility to bank excess solar power generated during the hottest parts of the day and deploy it later. The California Independent System Operator, which manages a grid that powers powers 80% of California and a small portion of Nevada, added 62.5 megawatts to its storage capacity in June, when the initial phase of LS Power Group’s Gateway Energy Storage project came online in San Diego. [ read more … ]
FERC
D.C. Circuit ruling reignites FERC storage battle
Renewable and storage advocates are cheering a federal court decision last week upholding a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order aiming to knock down barriers for electric grid-level energy storage. But how much will the order really boost technologies like batteries? [ read more … ]
EVs
More than a dozen states unite to boost electric trucks
More than a dozen states are teaming up to boost sales of pickup trucks, school buses and big rigs that run entirely on electricity and do not pump climate-warming pollution into the air.
Leaders from Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and 10 other states, along with the District of Columbia, say they will try to make sure every new medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sold within their borders is fully electric by the middle of the century. [ read more … ]
Note: News clips provided do not necessarily reflect the views of coalition or its member governors.