The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released final plans to protect endangered North American right whales, of which there are only about 360 left in the world. The agencies said they are trying to find ways to better protect the whales amid a surge of offshore wind farm projects, particularly on the U.S. East Coast. The news came about an hour before the companies Equinor and BP announced they were swapping leases for offshore wind projects in New York and Massachusetts. The deal calls for Equinor to take full ownership of the Empire Wind lease and projects, and for BP to take full ownership of the Beacon Wind lease and projects.
Despite being turned back by the California Public Utilities Commission and an appeals court in San Francisco, three groups have taken their fight to overturn recently passed rules regarding rooftop solar to the California Supreme Court. The groups filed a petition for review Monday afternoon with the high court. The groups argue that a decision issued last month by the First Appellate District wrongly upheld the utilities commission’s vote that overhauled net energy metering guidelines, which determine the compensation that solar customers receive when their systems generate more energy than they consume.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will compensate local and state governments for energy efficiency upgrades to school and hospital facilities in the wake of natural disasters, the agency announced on Tuesday. Under the new policy, FEMA’s Public Assistance grant program will offer funding for net-zero energy installations including solar panels and heat pumps for public facilities damaged by extreme weather and other disasters.
The largest combined solar and energy-storage project in the U.S. is now online and operating in California’s Mojave Desert. The project stretches across 4,600 acres in Kern County and is located on private land as well as the Edwards Air Force Base. It’s the biggest public-private partnership involving the U.S. Air Force. The Edwards & Sanborn project, developed by Terra-Gen and built by Mortenson, has a generating capacity of 875 MW from solar along with 3,287 MWh of energy storage.
New Jersey utility regulators awarded contracts on Wednesday to a pair of the largest offshore wind projects ever planned in the United States. The two projects combined would generate enough power to supply 1.8 million homes and deliver an emissions cut equivalent to removing nearly 1.3 million cars from the road. Leading Light Wind would be a 2.4 GW project built more than 40 miles off the New Jersey coast. The project is a joint venture of clean energy developers Invenergy and energyRe.
Dominion Energy has received the last two major federal approvals needed to begin construction of its 2.6 GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, scheduled for completion in late 2026. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management provided its final approval of the project’s construction and operations plan, authorizing construction offshore.
CVS Health is turning to solar at nearly 1,000 locations through two new agreements with Constellation Energy Corporation. The agreements total 264,000 MWh, with Constellation to purchase zero-emission, renewable energy equivalent to the annual electricity use of nearly 1,000 CVS Health locations in California, Washington D.C., Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey.
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