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Genex Power looked at the vertical gap between those two holes and decided it was a battery. At its deepest, the drop from the upper pit into the lower one is 715 feet. Send water down that distance through a pair of turbines and you get 250 megawatts for eight hours straight. That project, K2-Hydro, is Australia’s first new pumped hydro plant in more than 40 years and, according to the federal agency that lent it the money, the first one anywhere built inside an abandoned gold mine. It was supposed to be dispatching power into the grid this October. It is now not due to finish until July 2027.
Y Combinator alumnus Apollo Atomics is shrinking a key nuclear reactor part, which promises to slash the cost of electricity below natural gas. The nuclear power industry is undergoing something of a renaissance, with startups raking in funding to develop advanced reactors in a quest to lower costs. But based on recent projections, it’s unlikely those reactors will be cost-competitive anytime soon. Assil Halimi and Drew Walker, the founders of Apollo Atomics, think that’s because companies have been chasing the wrong problem. So instead of designing a new reactor, Apollo is rethinking the way thermal energy is converted into electricity.
“Electric vehicle owners create a real problem for transportation finance,” write Christopher Knittel and Gilbert E. Metcalf. “Because they do not buy gasoline, they do not pay gasoline taxes, which have long helped fund the Highway Trust Fund." So, as electric vehicles become more common that revenue base will continue to erode. A recent bipartisan federal proposal would respond by charging EV owners a flat annual fee, reportedly $130 initially, rising over time, with a lower fee for plug-in hybrids. The instinct is understandable. The design is not.
As global temperatures rose by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius), heat and drought put stress on the forests, killing large numbers of trees. Forest canopies opened, exposing the ground to more sunlight and altering the movement of water through the landscape. In southern Wyoming, ferns briefly flourished where relatives of elms, walnuts, dawn redwood and avocado trees once thrived. Then palms and other warmth-loving plants spread northward. In a new study in the journal Science, my colleagues and I show how those Wyoming forests lost 60% of their canopy during this period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, and how it took them well over 100,000 years to recover.
Last week, the Los Angeles County Fire Department released the results of its 18-month investigation into the Eaton fire, a preventable tragedy that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings. The report concluded that the fire was sparked by a Southern California Edison transmission tower — on a line that hadn’t been in service for more than 50 years. -
Follow the money: Back in 2001, regulators proposed a rule requiring utilities to remove abandoned lines unless they could prove that they would be used in the future. But utility companies put up fierce opposition, lobbying for a weaker rule that would allow them to keep abandoned lines for as long as they wanted. In 2005, the California Public Utilities Commission — then chaired by the former president of Edison International — approved the weaker regulation. Utilities “pretty much wrote those rules,” a former CPUC safety engineer told the L.A. Times.
The mayors of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boise, Idaho, make the case for investing in the improvement and innovation of local government. The water in Charleston does not flow through the city as a policy debate. It comes gushing over curbs, through intersections, around school buses and storefronts. The city sits at sea level, and the sea is rising. For years, Charleston flooded, recovered, and waited for the next storm. What changed was not the weather, but participating in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and carrying those lessons home. City Hall began using data in new ways: tracking road closures alongside tide and weather patterns, analyzing high-water vehicle deployments, and mapping 118 vehicle rescues from floodwater over two years. A 7.1-foot tide with a northeast wind no longer leaves crews guessing. What had looked like scattered emergencies became a shared set of facts from which to build solutions. We are the mayors of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boise, Idaho. We come from different parties, different regions, and different circumstances. As the nation’s 250th birthday invites reflection on the ideas that built this country, we write together about one of the most overlooked investments in strengthening it. For centuries, Americans have argued about what government should do. Michael R. Bloomberg has instead bet on what it takes.
Rejecting North Sea drilling licences and protecting nature are just some measures Andy Burnham must implement to ready country. From record-smashing temperatures, wildfires, hosepipe bans and thousands of premature deaths, the climate crisis has left its mark across the summer of 2026. Tackling the root cause – the burning of fossil fuels – and ending the crisis will take years. So will fixing the UK government’s calamitous failure to protect lives and livelihoods against the long-predicted affects of global heating. But the climate emergency is right here, right now, and here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently.
Now that JPMorgan Chase & Co. is nearly finished turning the parking lot at its McCoy Center at Polaris into a giant solar farm, it is planning to do something similar at its other Columbus offices. The bank, the Columbus region's largest private employer with about 20,000 workers here, will be adding solar arrays at three other of its commercial sites in the Columbus area — Vision Drive, Morse Crossing and in Westerville. Like the Polaris project, the panels are being added to carports at the sites. "These installations in the Columbus market are the crowning jewel of our solar deployments because of the scale and the size and the impact," said Tyler Deaton, vice president in Chase's global real estate group who has a focus on sustainability.
A cybersecurity researcher explains how hackers target small computers that control a water system’s tanks, pipes and valves. Hackers tried to break into at least 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota on July 26-27, 2026. Since then, Michigan, New Jersey and several other states have reported similar cyberattacks. The attackers did not try to infiltrate the computers that utility offices use. Instead, they tried to seize control of small computers in equipment like pumps and valves that deliver drinking water to millions of people. The utilities countered the attacks by shutting down the control computers and sending personnel out into the field to operate equipment manually. Utility officials have said that water remained safe to drink.
Investors and founders at a Pacific Northwest Climate Week happy hour named the technologies drawing too much money and the ones showing real promise. Hear from them on new episode of GeekWire's Positive Charge podcast.
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced tariffs on polysilicon and its related products, in his administration’s latest attempt to eliminate China’s choke points in the global supply chain for solar panels and semiconductors. But Trump’s directive won’t take effect until Dec. 4 — well after November’s midterm elections and a planned September summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — as the administration grapples with voters complaining of high prices and fragile trade negotiations with China.
Greater Philadelphia earned failing air quality grades. A new study finds higher asthma rates near industry and major roads, especially where green space is scarce. Philadelphians who live near industrial land and major roads – those who live in the Port Richmond and Bridesburg neighborhoods along I-95, or the Delaware River port-industrial corridor, for example – face worse air pollution and are more likely to have asthma than residents who live farther from those sites. Philly neighborhoods with a higher percentage of green areas, by contrast, have lower levels of diesel particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and other toxic air pollutants, which inflame and irritate the respiratory system. Many of them have lower asthma rates too. We are urban and regional planning professors and a graduate research fellow with expertise in environmental planning, environmental health and climate resilience. In 2025 we studied 766 census tracts across nine counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that fall within the Philadelphia metropolitan area. This region has a mix of cities, older suburbs and lower-density communities.
US News: Every year after Christmas, thousands of used trees are thrown away. In New Orleans, however, many of them get a second use. Instead of ending up in landfill, the trees are collected, tied into large bundles and dropped by helicopters into coastal marshes to help slow land loss.
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It’s a tough time to build renewable energy in the U.S. In fact, solar and batteries alone made up more than two-thirds of all new capacity added to the grid between January and June. As one analyst told Inside Climate News in a story parsing this same data, solar-plus-storage has become the grid’s “workhorse.”
This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be the strongest on record. Here’s what to expect. El Niño looks to reach an intensity unprecedented in recorded history. Characterized by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, El Niño occurs every few years. Meteorological agencies and researchers around the world are on high alert because when the heat stored in the ocean is released into the atmosphere, it triggers a chain reaction that affects rainfall, temperatures, and even hurricane activity around the world.
Bruce Schauer is thrilled to show off all 10 of his new solar panels. When the city offered to put them on his house for free, he signed up right away. “I've been wanting it for a long time. I'm the first one in the neighborhood to get it put up,” he says. He lives with his daughter, his granddaughter, and his great-granddaughter, and they’re no strangers to power outages. Michiganders have some of the least reliable electricity in the country. Electric utilities have been facing all kinds of problems recently. Data centers are gobbling up every megawatt-hour they can, rates are up, and extreme weather is causing reliability issues.
. Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup. “It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University. So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.”
The outer continental shelf is mostly a desert of sand. Flat and shifting, and almost entirely without anything hard to hold onto. A mussel needs a wall the way a climbing plant does, and out there no wall exists. Then a crane arrives and drives a steel cylinder the size of a grain silo into the seabed. It does that fifty four times. Nobody set out to build a reef, but that is what happens next. What the divers counted off Taiwan The clearest picture comes from the other side of the world. Off Miaoli County on Taiwan’s west coast, 69 foundations went into a flat sandy seabed between 2016 and 2021, and fish biologists have been diving on them ever since. The tally is not subtle. Divers logged 11,552 individual fish across 97 species, and pole and line surveys added another 40, bringing the total to 137. Of those, 86 were reef fish, and every single one was recorded within about 165 feet of a foundation. Not one turned up in the open sand between the towers.
The state of the global diesel market is getting even more precarious as the Russia-Ukraine war and the Iran crisis squeeze supply from multiple angles. Why it matters: Diesel prices ripple through economies here and abroad, affecting shipping costs, construction and plenty in between. - The average U.S. price is up 44 cents over the last month to $5.32 per gallon, compared to $3.71 a year ago, per AAA.
- However, during the Iran crisis, it hasn't hit the all-time high of $5.82 per gallon that AAA recorded in mid-June of 2022.
Move over, data centers. AI's climate impact may extend well beyond the electricity it consumes. Why it matters: A new peer-reviewed study finds AI could help produce more oil and natural gas — and produce a climate impact the authors argue could far outweigh the technology's benefits for renewable energy. Driving the news: The research, just published in a Nature journal, concludes AI's role in boosting oil and gas production would outweigh its climate benefits from accelerating renewable energy, leading to a net increase in emissions under a range of scenarios. - The study is among the first to estimate how AI-driven gains in fossil fuel production could affect global emissions.
After RWE disclosed its new gas investments as part of the deal, one climate campaigner declared that "committing to reinvest over $1 billion in fossil fuels is a disastrous mistake." Despite climate concerns and high prices from President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran, his administration continued its assault on offshore wind this week, using another “taxpayer-funded bribe” to convince a company to instead invest in fossil fuels. The German company RWE announced Thursday that it had reached a settlement with the US Department of the Interior to relinquish offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana for $1.22 billion.
After appearing to back off earlier this year, President Donald Trump this week renewed his threats to seize Greenland. A Saturday report that a Texas oil company with ties to Trump had begun preparing to drill in the Arctic territory without permission has raised fresh concerns that his push for control of the island may already be moving beyond rhetoric.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) formally approved an estimated $211 million rate increase for Xcel Energy electric customers last week, including higher profits for utility shareholders. The decision contrasts with actions in several other states to rein in utility costs and profits. The rate hike drew strong opposition from consumer advocates and received an unprecedented 8,600 comments from Xcel customers, nearly 17 times as many as the last Xcel rate case. Concerns about Xcel’s profits and executive pay showed up in more than half of the comments analyzed by the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota (CUB), a nonprofit ratepayer advocate. The divide between Xcel shareholders and its customers has widened over the years.
Amazon is backing what could be the largest natural gas power plant ever built in the United States. The company confirmed to Cleanview that it has acquired a site in Pecos County, Texas, where it plans to build an AI data center campus powered by on-site natural gas generation. Permits for the gas plant reveal that it would use 35 turbines to generate 7.65 gigawatts of power. It would be entirely disconnected from the Texas electricity grid — at least initially. “Amazon believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our new planned data center campus in Pecos County does just that: it’s powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families and designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.”
Grid operator PJM wants states and utilities to hold data centers responsible for buying their own power — or risk being cut off from grid service. PJM Interconnection, the biggest grid operator in the U.S., has finally settled on a plan to prevent data centers from causing other customers’ utility bills to soar further in its 13-state territory. That plan relies heavily on states themselves, and the utilities they regulate, to force data centers to secure their own power supplies — or face the possibility of getting their power cut off during grid emergencies.
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