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Michelle Lewis

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Michelle Lewis is a writer at Electrek. She has previously worked for Fast Company, The Guardian, News Deeply, Time, and others. She lives in Massachusetts.

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GAF Energy to build second US nailable solar shingle factory to meet growing demand

solar shingle

GAF Energy, the sister company of GAF, the largest roofing and waterproofing company in North America, will build a 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Georgetown, Texas, to meet growing demand for its “world’s first” nailable solar shingle, the Timberline Solar Energy Shingle, which launched in January.

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The real reason Joe Manchin is sabotaging the US clean energy plan [update]

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Coal investor and US Senator Joe Manchin III (D-WV) opposes his own political party’s clean energy program. And since not a single Republican will support the infrastructure bill that contains the program, Manchin has disproportionate power to sink the US plan to decarbonize in order to slow global warming and meet the Paris Agreement target of net-zero by 2050. Why does he oppose it?

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A new sodium-ion battery breakthrough means they may one day power EVs

Sodium-ion batteries have great promise. They’re energy dense, nonflammable, and operate well in colder temperatures, and sodium is cheap and abundant. Plus, sodium-based batteries will be more environmentally friendly and even less expensive than lithium-ion batteries are becoming now. Sodium-ion battery performance has been limited because of poor durability, but this is about to change for the better.

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26% of US households use electricity as their only energy source – but there’s a caveat

EPA HFCs

In 2020, 26% of US households – that’s 32.25 million out of 123.53 million homes – used electricity as their only source of energy, according to the US Energy Information Administration. But what the EIA doesn’t note is what fuels that “electricity as the only source of energy.”

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This two-bladed offshore wind turbine can withstand hurricanes

hurricane resilient wind turbines

Eleven US East Coast states have already committed to procuring nearly 40 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power. But increasingly powerful Atlantic hurricanes will be a threat to those future offshore wind farms. A team of scientists investigated how to make offshore wind turbines more resilient – they found that when they turned an offshore wind turbine around, it was better able to withstand violent storms.

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The US Supreme Court EPA ruling is really bad, but here’s why all is not lost

DOE coal

The US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling this morning, “sharply curtailed” the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) options to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants – the second-largest source of emissions in the US. Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change.

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The world’s first CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage is being commercialized [update]

world's first co2 battery

Italian startup Energy Dome has now begun to commercialize the world’s first CO2 Battery, which was launched earlier this month in Sardinia, Italy. The battery uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy on the grid, and Energy Dome says the technology can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world.

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