Is Trump’s Epa Going Too Far? — This Week In Cleantech
This Week in Cleantech is a weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in clean energy and climate featuring Paul Gerke of Factor This and Tigercomm’s Mike Casey.
This week’s episode features special guest Jake Spring from The Washington Post, who discusses the EPA’s move to repeal Biden-era limits on carbon pollution from power plants.
This week’s “Cleantecher of the Week” is Dulcie Madden, co-founder and CEO of Dig Energy. Her small startup spent five years developing its technology in a New Hampshire barn, and this month it completed its first commercial job, drilling a set of geothermal wells for a Boston office building using a high-pressure water jet that cut water use by 90%. The approach could cut geothermal drilling costs by up to 80%, and the company’s already booked with jobs into mid-2027. Congratulations Dulcie!
1. A solar industrial complex is turning Republicans into believers — POLITICO
Republicans in Bartow County, Georgia – where Trump won three quarters of the vote in 2024 – are turning into some of solar’s biggest supporters. The reason is the new Hanwha Qcells factory in Cartersville, a nearly mile-long, $2.3 billion plant that opened in June and makes every major component of a solar panel under one roof, the ingots, wafers, cells and modules. It’s the first US facility to do all of that in one place, and it ed Qcells’ original Dalton, Georgia plant, which opened back in 2019 as a response to tariffs from Trump’s first term.
The Cartersville plant alone employs nearly 2,000 people, and the mayor says the town went from asking where the jobs are to asking where the workers are.
2. Tech giants launch flexible-power coalition for data centers — Axios
Google and Nvidia are backing a new coalition with startup Emerald AI called the AI Energy Management Alliance, aimed at getting data centers to flex their power demand. It launched Wednesday with 20 companies and organizations involved, including Anthropic, utilities National Grid and AES, and power producers Constellation, NRG and RWE.
Data centers have always been treated as giant, 24/7 power users. The coalition wants to change that, so the data centers that can reliably cut their grid demand when supplies get tight can connect faster and skip some of the costly grid upgrades. An earlier version of the group started back in 2014 to push demand response, but had gone largely inactive before this revival.
3. Oil Executives Say the Great Fuel Crisis Is Here — The Wall Street Journal
Oil executives say the fuel crisis they’d been warning about for months has now arrived, as commercial fuel stocks keep depleting and strategic crude reserves can’t be tapped much further. Attacks last week knocked out a major crude pipeline in Saudi Arabia that had been bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, stranding an estimated 2.5 million barrels a day from an already tight global market.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said at an energy conference in Austin that the mechanisms that had been cushioning prices and supply have largely played out, and the system doesn’t have the buffers it once did.
Diesel prices have hit a record $6.23 a gallon, and gasoline, which had dipped below $4 this summer, has climbed back up to $4.32.
4. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for the energy transition — The Financial Times
A new S&P Global report argues that energy and climate planning needs to stop treating the energy transition as one global plan, since rich and developing countries are working from two completely different starting points. Developing countries must expand their energy systems, rather than swap out fossil fuels for clean technologies the transition assumes.
Everyone assumes data centers are what’s driving global energy demand, but S&P claims that most of the growth is coming from emerging markets and developing economies. They’re on track to grow energy demand 60% by 2060, which is adding an entire second China to the world’s energy system.
China drove energy growth for the last 25 to 30 years, but China is plateauing now, and developing economies are where growth is headed next.
5. Trump’s EPA is ending one of the nation’s biggest climate protections — The Washington Post
The EPA has repealed Biden-era limits on carbon pollution from power plants, reverting the standard back to a weaker 2015, Obama-era rule. Administrator Lee Zeldin called it part of “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history,” and the agency says the move will $310 billion over the next 20 years while easing pressure on a grid facing surging demand from data centers and AI.
The agency also proposed going further, eliminating greenhouse gas standards for power plants altogether, building on its earlier repeal of the “endangerment finding” that had underpinned most federal climate policy. Environmental groups say the rollback will worsen air quality and public health, especially in states Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Arizona, and have pledged to fight it in court. The public has 45 days to comment before the EPA can finalize the broader repeal.
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Renewableenergyworld.com