CLIMATE: Climate change-intensified storms and permafrost thaw threaten Alaska’s power grids and the electric freezers that store Alaska Natives’ traditional subsistence foods. (New York Times)
ALSO:
• Palo Alto, California’s city council adopts a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 and aims to replace 1,000 households’ natural gas-powered heaters with heat pumps by the end of next year. (Palo Alto Online)
• San Diego climate advocates sue the city over its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, saying it lacks funding and concrete goals and timelines. (Voice of San Diego)
GRID:
• Nearly 1,800 households in Hawaii join a program that will compensate them for sending battery power back to the grid, but uncertainty about its long-term viability keeps others away. (Canary Media)
• Clean energy advocates say an Idaho transmission line’s 14-year-and-counting approval process illustrates how permitting delays could hamper the Biden administration’s decarbonization efforts. (Route Fifty)
UTILITIES: San Diego, California’s city council begins studying the feasibility of creating its own publicly funded utility to replace SDG&E. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
OIL & GAS:
• New Mexico and Texas regulators agree to jointly regulate oil and gas facilities that straddle the states’ border. (Carlsbad Current-Argus)
• A study based in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico develops a method to differentiate oil and gas-related methane emissions from coal mine methane venting. (news release)
COAL: A Wyoming utility says recently increased federal tax credits for carbon capture will lower the cost of retrofitting its coal plants with the technology, but not enough to justify it to ratepayers. (WyoFile)
TRANSITION: New Mexico environmentalists urge lawmakers to leverage federal funds to support clean energy development and worker retraining in fossil fuel-affected areas. (Carlsbad Current-Argus)
MICROGRIDS:
• New Mexico researchers work to enable bidirectional power flow between microgrids to better integrate DC microgrids into the AC grid. (Microgrid Knowledge)
• Puget Sound Energy installs a solar-plus-battery-powered microgrid at a Washington state high school that also serves as a community emergency management center. (Thurston Talk)
WIND: The Biden administration completes the environmental review for an offshore wind lease sale along the central California coast scheduled later this year. (Offshorewind.biz)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: New Mexico awards an electricity cooperative $800,000 to install seven electric vehicle fast-charging stations in the Taos area. (news release)
CRITICAL MINERALS: The nation’s largest mine targeting cobalt, a mineral used in electric vehicle batteries, launches operations in central Idaho. (Idaho Mountain Express)
BIOFUELS: An Arizona utility extends its contract to purchase power from a plant that burns wood chips from forest thinning projects meant to reduce wildfire risk. (Daily Independent)
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