CLIMATEWIRE | Detroit’s mayor wants to make the Motor City into a solar city.

Under an ambitious — and uniquely Detroit-ish — plan announced last week, Mayor Mike Duggan said the city of 620,000 residents will seek to repurpose thousands of blighted home and business lots into solar energy generation sites with the capacity to power all of Detroit’s municipal buildings.

To make it happen, the city must piece together 250 acres of land into 10- to 50-acre parcels that could host thousands of photovoltaic solar panels and converter stations. In most cases, the sites would sit cheek-to-jowl with the … Read More >>

Six years after Hurricane María underscored Puerto Rico’s urgent need for a resilient power supply, a small town in the island’s mountainous interior will switch on its first community-owned solar microgrid, weeks ahead of peak storm season.

Composed of two half-megawatt battery storage systems connected to 700 solar panels, the US$2-million microgrid marks another essential step in Puerto Rico’s accelerating grassroots effort to break the shackles of fossil fuel serfdom via La Insurrección Energética, or Energy Insurrection, reports Next City.

Puerto Rico has endured an unreliable grid for decades, but in 2017 Hurricane María really laid bare the consequences of … Read More >>

By Lorraine Mirabella

Low-income utility customers in Maryland pay more collectively for energy savings programs offered by utilities than they receive in benefits, according to the Office of People’s Counsel for Maryland, a state agency that advocates for residential utility consumers.

All utility consumers statewide pay a surcharge on their gas and electric bills for EmPOWER, which is a mix of programs rewarding consumers who reduce energy consumption. EmPOWER is run by Baltimore Gas and Electric and five other utilities around the state, as well as by the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

But EmPOWER fails to meet … Read More >>

BY JARED GANS

The Biden administration announced it is providing more than $830 million to help make low-income housing energy efficient using funds from the Inflation Reduction Act that passed last year. 

The White House said in a release Thursday that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is making the money available through a funding notice for the Inflation Reduction Act’s Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, which makes investments in energy and water efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, generating clean energy, and implementing climate strategies in multifamily housing. 

The program is designed to simultaneously address climate change and … Read More >>

When entrepreneur Crystal Napier’s washer and dryer went on the fritz this winter, she feared the dual failure might short-circuit her home-based clothing boutique.

But the mounds of dirty laundry she anticipated never piled up due to quick action from a Charlottesville environmental nonprofit.

Being at the helm of a small, minority-owned business qualified Napier for a $2,400 grant offered by the Community Climate Collaborative (C3) that covered the purchase and installation of an energy-efficient washer and dryer.

“These grants are a tremendous service for a small business owner,” Napier said. “It’s a challenging world and we live in challenging … Read More >>