What we’re finding in the market is that the buyers are trying to initiate these [green-steel] deals, but it’s not enough to shift the investment case for a producer,”

Supporters say it would be more efficient for these offshore wind projects to sell all of their electricity to the state instead of a selling pieces of it to multiple utility companies, helping to control costs and keep rates lower.

surcharge imposed on Californians’ electricity bills

3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions

At the same time, even well designed rates will be an approximation of the underlying cost structure, as it is impractical to present the complete underlying details of utility costs to individual customers.

ISO New England estimates that every 700 MW of solar capacity reduces oil consumption by 7 to 10 million gallons or gas demand by 1 to 1.5 billion cubic feet.

European Union is looking to include the shipping industry in its mandatory cap-and-trade carbon market, more commonly known as its emissions trading scheme, as early as 2022,

ohn Kerry in April announced the U.S. will join Saudi Arabia as the second of only two countries pledging to work toward the IMO’s greenhouse gas goal.

drop was primarily due to increased ship size, and design and operational improvements such as decreased traveling speed

According to a recent report by the UN International Maritime Organization, that number could increase to 17 percent by 2050.

IMO watchers said China, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Belarus, Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Colombia, Paraguay, Cuba, Russia and Bangladesh resisted tough interim targets.

Hydrogen and ammonia are also less energy-dense than fossil fuels, potentially necessitating ship redesigns for optimal storage.

Since trucks dedicated to moving goods from ports to warehouses rarely travel longer than 100 miles per day, they’re ideal for electrification.

Electric-truck technology is “light-years ahead” of federal and most states’ requirements

Similarly, the emotional water signs — Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces — might take Sagittarius's blunt commentary a bit too personally, resulting in lots of hurt feelings.

it’s difficult to prove the counterfactual

I use the solar PV analog scenario to estimate the volume of hydrogen covered by looser annual matching rules for different phase-in dates (2024-2032) & regimes (e.g., phase-out w/no grandfathering, placed in service w/grandfathering, commence construction w/grandfathering)

written down the value of their ANS natural gas pipeline development costs to zero.

the Alaska LNG project wouldn’t come online for at least 10 years so would have no effect on alleviating current shortages.

While presented as a “temporary” solution, Alaska LNG would lock in an enormous amount of fossil fuel use and production beyond 2050, deepening the climate crisis.

different ways of de-growth of the economy,

not enough minerals on the planet to replace every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle

bringing those experts to First Nations and helping them review and really be a part of the project,”

The very idea of Free, Prior and Informed Consent is too often unclear, Aspen found,

PG&E has focused billions of dollars and large portions of its workforce on burying and hardening its grid to prevent it from sparking deadly wildfires like those that drove it into bankruptcy in 2019, thereby reducing its capacity to connect new customers.

The roughly 33,500 drayage trucks serving California ports have an even tighter deadline of 2035 for going emissions-free — a tough target for trucking companies and independent drivers facing high upfront electric truck costs and sparse

bigger than Forum’s first eight-charger site at the Port of Long Beach,

every 100 megawatts of community solar [and] storage that gets built on warehouses and other large urban buildings instead of out in rural areas or the California desert, $175 [million] to $375 million in additional quantifiable value for ratepayers will be generated over the life of the projects, based on an average [project] lifespan of 25 years.”

doesn’t mean it’s devoid of life. Microbes called methanogens inhabit its depths; they can devour organic matter in anoxic environments. When that happens, they release carbon-containing methane (CH4), a greenhouse gas that is shorter-lived than CO2 but 84 times more potent over a 20-year timeframe.

The company is striving to sequester a gigaton per year by 2030, initially at $200 per ton of CO2, then decreasing to $80 per ton of CO2 once Rewind has optimized its supply chain, he said.

For one, organic carbon sequestration is notoriously difficult to measure,

James is heading a research project to determine whether the rock waste stockpiled at mine sites can be safely and effectively dusted over fields to sequester CO2.

The facility will be designed to produce and recycle 2.2 tons of sulfuric acid and remove 1 ton of CO2 per day, according to its application to Stripe’s Frontier fund.

Ultimately, for Charm to succeed in removing substantial amounts of CO2, the company will need to not only limit risks and optimize technology but also significantly drive down its costs. Reinhardt said the company aims to lower its per-ton cost of CO2 removal from $600 to $50, below the U.S. Department of Energy’s own goal of achieving a cost of $100 per metric ton.

Schmidt was the lead author on a 2018 paper that analyzed the merits of pyrolyzing biomass as a way of keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. He said that, when it comes to bio-oil, ​“It really depends on how and where you store it. There is a risk of leakage. There is a risk of environmental harm. It’s nasty stuff.

Charm claimed it sequestered 24.3 metric tons of CO2 on April 11. But, after subtracting its emissions, the startup said it delivered only 19.3 tons of ​“net” carbon removal.

Preventing emissions, they argue, is different from removing emissions that already occurred.

Organic waste, such as corn stover or wood chips, is heated at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. The decomposed biomass takes three forms: a solid residue (biochar), a viscous fluid (bio-oil) and a synthetic gas (biogas). Engineers can tweak the temperatures and speeds, with ​“slow pyrolysis” yielding more biochar and ​“fast pyrolysis” delivering more liquid and gas.

rising competition from biofuel-hungry transportation and chemical industries could potentially constrain the available supply of agricultural and forestry residues and push up prices for raw materials

reduction in greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent) of 1.5 billion tons per year in 2050.

The report offers a few ways to think about the impact of these reductions: They’d equate to over $1.2 trillion in public-health benefits in the form of over 100,000 avoided premature deaths, nearly 3 million avoided asthma attacks and the avoidance of over 13 million lost workdays.

If the only reason why Country X is able to do that is because they pay below-market wages or they pour battery acid in the ocean, stuff we wouldn’t allow here, that’s just a regulatory-arbitrage question.

But free trade that’s regulatory arbitrage is not free trade.

50% of maritime, rail, and off-road fuel;

Ramsey Pricing

Why are electric rates for the California utilities so high?  Almost every possible influence on the average cost and unit price for electricity is present, including basic revenue requirement issues, above-market costs in rates, social programs, and rate design.

“income-graduated fixed charges” (IGFC), designed to increase bills for those with higher income, decrease bills for those with lower income, and reduce the per-kWh charge.

One challenge that’s come up as the idea has taken off is that no one can seem to agree about what it should be called. While the term is “networked geothermal” in Massachusetts, New York is using “thermal energy network.” Magavi said it’s also been referred to as “community geothermal,”

The project in Framingham involves building a new set of pipelines alongside the gas system.

20 to 25 percent of their peak electricity demand would ​“ensure high levels of reliability and resilience

setting minimum transfer requirements between regional transmission organizations.

While Kevala predicts that EV charging will hit a peak at 9 pm – thanks to non-EV specific time-of-use rates that drop at that time – the Public Advocates Office’s research is based on forecasts that EV charging will occur much more evenly across the day, the office said. “We believe it is of paramount importance to understand the operational and cost implications of increased electrification to ensure system planning is undertaken optimally and that the most cost-effective approaches are taken

System-level peak load, meanwhile, could increase 56% on average from 2025 to 2035, predominantly due to electric vehicles, according to the study.

regulatory action — especially a rule due out from the SEC that would set reporting standards for companies making environmental claims to investors — stand to upend the ESG ecosystem.

Those sectors, he said, have struggled to close all but the top tier deals in recent months.

‘look, we need to diversify the sources of capital for the industry’, whether it’s [asset-backed securities], debt private placement, traditional bonds,”

report defines clean power as onshore and offshore wind, utility-scale solar and battery storage technology

how local and coastal communities and supply chains are considered are equally important.

DNV believes that because of its comparatively simple engineering and design requirements, methanol is likely to be adopted mainly by smaller ships

Carbon emissions from green methanol would be considered as climate-neutral because combustion would not add more CO2

Electricity “deregulation” hasn’t led to probably lower costs for consumers 2. As NERC has continually warned, grid reliability is a major concern 3. Renewable mandates/subsidies are adding to reliability concerns

. This degree of cost increase could delay the ability to produce green hydrogen at cost parity to lower-cost, blue or grey hydrogen, ultimately hindering the economic competitiveness and adoption of both grid-connected and 100% renewable green hydrogen as a low carbon fuel.

Conversely, hourly matching requirements, depending on their implementation, could result in unfavorable economics for green hydrogen adoption, by limiting operating hours to those when renewable resources are available, ultimately reducing the electrolyzer capacity factor.

This analysis was then benchmarked against our based case hourly generation, pricing and emissions data for each market.

The TCR study was supported by a grant from Meta Platforms, a leading clean energy corporate user. Meta is part of the Emissions First Partnership, which supports carbon matching. Companies in the group, launched in December, include Amazon, General Motors and Intel.

“We don’t necessarily need more wind in Texas or solar in California, so the idea is how do we be a bit more strategic with deploying energy so we actually shave off those locations and times that are not yet carbon-free,” he said.

The study found that local, hourly energy matching is the least efficient strategy for cutting carbon emissions. It fails to achieve carbon neutrality on an hourly basis and only achieves annual carbon neutrality,

ompanies buy emissions-free power in areas with high carbon emissions from power plants, such as in the Southwest Power Pool and parts of the upper Midwest, without considering how close those sources are to where the electricity is being used, he said. Sourcing renewable electricity from those areas will displace more carbon than, for example, purchases from California, which already has a high amount of emissions-free resources, he said.

As with other short-lived species, the radiative forcing from a continuous emission of hydrogen is proportional to emission rates, whereas the radiative forcing from a continuous emission of carbon dioxide is closely related to cumulative emissions.

And, crucially, utility companies can bankroll elected candidates, exerting influence through campaign cash.

eat pump adoption is strongly correlated with geography, climate, and electricity prices

15% of U.S. households have a heat pump as their primary heating equipment, and this is essentially the same for all levels of household income

One concern with subsidies for low-carbon technologies is that they tend to go predominantly to high-income households.

Sarahana Shrestha

adopted a bill to require a higher threshold to win an air permit in an environmental justice area in the state's major cities

the shorthand for the policy utilities want is “ROFR,” or “right of first refusal.”

highlighted by the Brookings Institution to send challenges to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

imposing strict time limits on environmental reviews while also increasing funding to ensure regulators have the capacity to meet those deadlines.

a mess created by decades of well-intentioned efforts to prevent corporations from running roughshod over the interests of individuals, communities and the environment

Congress has empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve major natural gas pipelines, which helped to expedite construction during the fracking boom

2028

Rather than assign costs based on whether or not a specific project triggers a grid upgrade, customers could pay a fixed fee based on the size of their system. That option has already been implemented or is being explored in a growing number of jurisdictions, said Enbar of EPRI.

the Colorado Public Utilities Commission found that the process for linking distributed energy resources to the grid was “fairly smooth,

company has expanded training programs and office hours to help people understand the interconnection process, as well as removed certain steps in the process to make it more efficient, Klemm said.

Utilities say they are constantly refining their processes

community solar installations fell 21 percent and small commercial installations fell 10 percent in the third quarter of 2021 compared with the previous quarter

Eligibility will be granted to customers who live in affordable housing, participate in utility income-based bill-assistance programs, and reside in census tracts where median household incomes are below 80 percent of median incomes in the surrounding area.

many states with large-scale community-solar programs are facing distribution connection problems of their own.

LBNL data indicates that projects of less than 20 megawatts — developments that typically connect to lower-voltage distribution grids rather than transmission grids — tend to be able to execute interconnection agreements much more quickly than larger projects.

workaround to interconnection logjams

Google and EDPR’s program will function much like community-solar programs, which allow developers to build smaller-scale projects and sell the power to individual subscribers to defray a portion of their utility bills.

advocating for federal action and resources to address the challenges at SONGS and remove the nuclear waste out of the region

I will continue to work with my colleagues in the Spent Nuclear Fuel Solutions Caucus

enhancing community engagement

reforming the interconnection process

Rory Jacobson, a senior advisor for deployment at the DOE, who co-authored a new report outlining pathways to ​“commercial liftoff” for carbon management.

solar power projects were the leader—not just among energy projects, but all projects—in terms of avoiding cost overruns. Electricity transmission lines are second best, followed by wind power projects

For his part, Mr. Sheridan thinks renewable projects will gobble up the region’s farmland. He just doesn’t think he’ll live long enough to see that day.

Jenny Chase@solar_chase·Apr 9All of those have proved slow and expensive to deploy in the past, and are one reason US solar costs more and builds slower than European solar. Fundamentally have to question why it's renewable energy's job to fix general inequality (while agreeing inequality is a problem!)

LDES, most have no market mechanism in place to pay them

As a result the BAU case for LDES is only $9-12B through 2030, despite it being an essential way for us to decarbonize the grid. Remember we need $100B scale to achieve our #EarthShot cost reductions so we need to find/make some more markets.

The Bureau of Land Management issued a notice to proceed for the project Tuesday after some 15 years of permitting work,

At this point — about a week after ovulation — the person who has had all these changes happening inside their body still has no idea it has been going on.

This is the moment of fertilization, otherwise known as conception

If sexual intercourse happens the same day as ovulation (or even several days beforehand), that's when sperm may enter the picture.

(Assisted reproductive technologies have greatly expanded how ovulation and fertilization can happen so that many more people can have babies. What we're describing here is what happens when that assistance isn't needed.)

The EPA estimates that complying with the proposed rules would add $633 to the cost of making a vehicle in 2027 and about $1,200 per vehicle in 2032.

Another option is building new sources of clean energy that can be constructed closer to where demand is needed, like small nuclear reactors

opponents of hourly matching noted that the European Commission appeared to be backing away from rules that would require green-hydrogen producers to match their production with clean power, arguing that that was an indication that similar rules wouldn’t work in the U.S.

projects will likely have difficulty securing financing if developers need to meet an hourly matching requirement with no common framework for compliance

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for investor-owned utilities in the U.S., noted in its comments to the IRS that requiring hourly matching would disadvantage producers in parts of the country that lack the wind and sun resources for rapid clean-energy growth.

manufacturers, influenced by Victorian notions of masculinity and femininity, devised a kind of ‘separate spheres’ ideology about automobiles: gas cars were for men, electric cars were for women

A lot of retailers are starting to think about how to make the 15 to 30 minutes of a charging session into experiences that are engaging for the customer and lucrative for business

8. There’s still not much to do while you wait On both trips, another thing held true: Highway charging means wandering through a lot of Walmarts.

Range is often hindered by low temperatures. However, the November trip had spells that were not especially cold — temperatures in the desert West in November ranged from the low 20s to the low 50s Fahrenheit.

he vehicle fell short of its promise. My battery never exceeded 240 miles of range, even when full

argued that phasing out production would hike gas prices and make LA dependent on foreign energy.

The bottom line is nonetheless that we continue to have a lack of viable business models to bring these new concepts into markets and a continued policy failure to regulate carbon in most national, not to mention international settings.

What has changed dramatically is that ideas that were advanced only at the scientific ‘fringes’ by a few original thinkers such as Freeman Dyson at Princeton or Cesare Marchetti at IIASA (who were both early pioneers in thinking about geoengineering and large-scale carbon management) have become ‘mainstream’.

designate FERC as the siting authority for transmission facilities with capacity ratings of 1,000 MW or greater, as called for in Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) Streamlining Interstate Transmission of Electricity Act (SITE) Act, a

recently enhanced existing authorities for transmission siting and permitting that could be effectively deployed, and FERC also has ongoing rulemakings that can address the interconnection backlog, cost allocation for transmission, and regional planning

creating a centralized database to track project timelines and approval processes,

Based on the average electricity rate and the fact that transmission and distribution generally account for two-thirds of utility bills,

Instead, utilities and their allies have produced and perpetuated a farce of free delivery by constantly comparing the cost of large-scale solar installations to rooftop solar.

resource adequacy and renewable energy to San Diego Community Power,

unique 1:1 configuration — 137 MW of solar, coupled with 150 MW/600 MWh of battery energy storage — will allow it to shift daytime solar production to late afternoon and evening hours

The Vikings Energy Farm is among the first solar peaker plants in the United States

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized Pacific Gas & Electric to continue operating the 2,240 MW Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California as it considers the power plant’s expected license renewal application, the agency said Thursday.

measurement and verification procedures are as accurate as possible to prevent overpayments by double counting resources.

PG&E intends to submit a new application by the end of 2023, a utility spokesperson said in January.

utilities have invested in places where demand for electricity was increasing. This dynamic has led to underinvestment in the grids that serve many lower-income and disadvantaged communities. That translates into a lack of infrastructure to support rooftop solar, backup batteries and EV chargers, as a recent study of California’s grid indicated.

That kind of analysis could have taken weeks of time using manual methods, she said. But after asking UrbanFootprint to take it on, ​“the next business day, they had a map of all the real estate that’s qualified and all of the land parcels.”

One crucial issue, the authors write, is whether workers will be willing to relocate if good jobs are not available locally. They note that fossil fuel workers in some regions like west Texas may be more willing to relocate than others in places like Appalachia, whose families may have lived in the region for generations.

Under Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) can issue loan guarantees to projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

One way to mitigate these costs is securitization. Similar to refinancing a home mortgage at a lower interest rate, securitization refers to refinancing higher-cost utility debt or equity with low-interest, ratepayer-backed bonds.

or for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

To raise money to pre-pay for the power, EBCE issues bonds through a public bond issuance “conduit.” EBCE and three other CCAs recently created the California Community Choice Financing Authority (CCCFA),

The good news is that we can actually build renewable energy that *expands* transmission capacity if it connects and serves local load,

Between 2016 and 2020, FERC implemented a series of rules that aim to preempt state energy policy by limiting how resources subsidized by state or local policy are considered in capacity markets

"Those customers who have the least carbon impact on the state will be paying nearly double for this as compared to those customers that have the highest carbon impact on the state," he said he was referring to utilities operating in the New York City area.

In Taiwan and South Korea, industrial-policy agencies don’t only hand out money; they constantly gather information from the private sector and use it to adjust goals and policies over time.

did not emerge from careful study and bipartisan consensus building, but from intraparty haggling and a harried legislative process

which has, virtually since the abolition of slavery, derived a good deal of its industrial energy from extracting carbon from the ground and setting it on fire — find a new primary energy source?

alongside clarity in the connectivity and orientation of terminology, there is large potential for greater impact through transdisciplinary research that involves academics co-producing knowledge with practitioners and activists.

This is where the EIR can help. The EIR will give DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) new authority to provide economic opportunity for fossil-dependent communities while accelerating the clean energy transition.

Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program (EIR).

grave

For example, the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals.

What often hides behind these “green” labels is the large carbon footprint their production generates.

For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything.

this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad.

governments and corporations have teamed up to turn the apocalypse into a money-making opportunity. They have rushed to put forward false solutions to the climate crisis: from the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones, to so-called climate-smart agriculture, to protected areas for nature conservation and massive tree planting projects for carbon offsets

have been working on overhead irrigation, they’ve been working on subsurface drip irrigation, and in my book, all of these hold a lot of promise,

He said one promising proposal would build one or more large desalination plants in Mexico to tap the Sea of Cortez, a project that officials from Arizona have been discussing with their Mexican counterparts.

Bigger turbines, mass production, and larger projects have driven major cost declines across Europe. The U.K.’s 2022 offshore wind auction yielded contracts for 7 GW of capacity at an average of $54 per megawatt-hour, down from $147/MWh in 2014-2015.

Encouraging

Uprating the three units at Helms Pumped Storage Facility to increase the amount of clean, hydroelectric power that PG&E can provide customers during peak periods, and help integrate additional intermittent renewable resources;

adding over 1,000 electric vehicles to PG&E’s fleet by 2026;

Working with customers to remove overhead wires in remote high fire-threat areas, and replace with stand-alone power systems to offer a new approach to utility service.

Iceland is planning for this future increased flow by building hydro plants that can be expanded as glacial runoff increases

Iceland is still building new hydropower plants, and the consensus among energy experts and the general public is that hydro is good for Iceland and is 100% renewable regardless of the size of the plant.

we didn’t have an alternative perspective from the environmental movement, saying, “We want to expedite permitting for renewables. We just don’t want to expedite a pipeline.”

Dominion anticipates SMRs “could be a feasible supply-side resource as soon as the early 2030s,” and the company has thus included SMRs as a “supply-side option starting in December 2032” in all alternative plans.

Because avoided cost is a general value applied across the entire California grid, the ACC can’t be used to capture locational benefits down to the level of individual substations and grid circuits,

Even with strong cash flow in the short term, producers have more to gain from offloading wells and the associated liability — chiefly expensive environmental cleanup — than from pumping more oil and gas, experts say.

Lithium Americas has said the archaeological work does not affect its plans to begin construction on the full mine site next spring.

the BLM approved the mine after sending just three letters to the tribal councils of the Summit Lake, Fort McDermitt, and Winnemucca Indian Colony tribes, well before most members knew anything about the project

"We now know horses have evolved on the North American continent," she says. "They should be considered native."

It started getting into the area where our local herd of wild horses had reduced the fuel...large areas that were grazed open became safe zones for Cal Fire personnel and equipment that were stationed in front of the fire," Simpson says. "These horses helped mitigate the Klamathon Fire."

these targets are “currently not credible” since most countries don’t have policies in place to achieve them.

that water rights were reserved for tribes as an implication of the treaties that created the reservations

It was also held that when American Indian reservations were created by the United States government, they were created with the intention of allowing the American Indian settlements to become self-reliant and self-sufficient

Those include a survey plan, three communication plans with Native American tribes, agencies and a new one for fisheries, which are all due within 120 days of the lease execution.

Now, despite having a reserve of gas that could make a major contribution to bolstering European energy supplies, the government is wary of reopening the throttle at Groningen for fear of a backlash, especially from residents.

ignorant of the centrality of Indigenous people in the successful millennia-long conservation of the natural environments and biodiversity. 

One possible reason, Mulvaney said, is the existence of long-distance power lines that previously carried coal power to L.A. and other cities. Many of those lines were built across public lands — and now they have spare capacity as coal plants shut down.

The Nature Conservancy’s study assumes 35% of the West’s overall rooftop solar potential will actually get installed by 2050 — an ambitious target, although some rooftop solar supporters might argue we can do even better.

Agriculture is the economic cornerstone for many rural communities, not to mention the source of the food we eat. Across the country, small-town residents have rallied to protest proposed solar projects in particular, since those facilities often — but don’t always — preclude farming.

The windiest spots also tend to be far from major population centers. Solar farms can be built closer to big cities with the biggest energy needs, including Los Angeles and Phoenix, meaning they require fewer miles of habitat-disrupting power lines.

One of them is building fewer wind farms in the West’s windiest states, particularly Wyoming, and more solar farms in the sunny desert Southwest.

retrograde

placing an emphasis on the spiritual and functional purposes of the objects for the people who made them, and incorporating testimony from community representatives about government repression of their culture.

Newsom did not propose any specific changes in policy toward Native American communities, though tribal leaders raised concerns about issues such as managing natural resources, preventing wildfires and addressing the historical trauma

Mark Macarro, tribal chairman of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, said the apology is significant.ADVERTISEMENT“To hear an apology like that today from the head of this state sets a new tone. It does for me, on a personal level,” said Macarro.

monitoring salmon after the removal of a century-old defunct dam in the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains and testing for toxins in shellfish

200 miles of coastline

California has 109 federally-recognized tribes, the second highest number in the country behind Alaska

Congress has plenary power to decide what’s best for the Indians,

leading to Supreme Court decisions that further damaged sovereignty, Wharton said. The nation’s high court ruled in 1903 that the government didn’t have to get permission from tribes before dividing the land.

Sunnova said its systems would not be completely isolated. It plans to connect them to the larger statewide grid so it could send excess power to other utilities or draw energy in case of an emergency. But its systems would not be owned or operated by the three major power providers in the state — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison or San Diego Gas & Electric.

In California, the Kirkwood Mountain Resort near Lake Tahoe used a micro-utility to provide power to residents and tourists for years. But the electricity it produced sometimes cost up to 70 cents a kilowatt-hour, or three to five times the rates charged by larger utilities in the state. Eventually, the town of Kirkwood took over the utility and connected it to the state electric grid.

The utopian visions of generating electricity where it is used have often run into maintenance and other problems. Many tiny utilities created under such models in the United States and Canada were later swallowed up by larger power companies.

If you're trying to create a scene that sums up the energy landscape in Texas right now, you couldn't write anything better than this. We were standing next to a defunct coal plant that was now surrounded by what I remember to be, like, hundreds of wind turbines.

rather allow the market to determine the optimal number of parking spots needed in each project.

CAISO, which runs 80 percent of the state’s electric system, must depend on and compete with neighbors for what is sold in energy markets. That means California risks falling short during periods of peak demand, like the one it experienced on Sept. 6.

has complicated energy operations, as an increasing share of electricity is coming from solar and wind farms that produce power only when the sun shines or the wind blows

Where local utilities once produced, transmitted and delivered electricity to their customers, a cast of players now orchestrates the service in most areas of the country.

Russia's Gazprom said on Monday that it will ship 42.4 million cubic metres of natural gas to Europe via Ukraine, a volume unchanged from yesterday.