The US utility-scale clean energy sector has announced more than $150 billion in capital investment since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law last August – the American Clean Power Association breaks it down in a new report.
US clean energy boom
The American Clean Power Association’s new Clean Energy Investing in America study reports the statistical breakdown of where all this capital investment is going. The association is a federation of renewable energy companies that want to make clean energy the “dominant power source in America.”
Highlights of US clean energy growth in just the last nine months include, according to the American Clean Power Association’s summary:
46 announcements of new, expanded, or reopened utility-scale manufacturing facilities:
26 solar manufacturing facilities
10 battery storage manufacturing facilities
8 wind manufacturing facilities
2 offshore wind manufacturing facilities
18,000 new American manufacturing jobs
Nearly 96,000 MW of announced clean energy capacity
$4.4 billion in announced consumer savings
24 million Americans served by utilities that announced consumer savings
States that will see new or expanded factories include Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, while other locations remain undetermined.
But the report warns that in order for the anticipated clean energy buildout to happen in a timely manner, it’s going to need an expedited and streamlined permitting process. The American Clean Power Association asserts that failure to do so will put “100 GW of clean energy at risk of significant delay.”
Jason Grumet, CEO of American Clean Power, said:
The clean energy transition is racing ahead. American companies are making massive investments that are increasing American competitiveness and revitalizing the manufacturing sector.
But we cannot build a strong, modern, and resilient economy absent dramatic improvement in the permitting of new energy infrastructure.
The American private sector has the technology, resources, and workforce to build a clean energy economy and deliver affordable, reliable, clean power to American families and businesses.
Now we need Congress to create a permitting system that is equal to the challenge and designed to succeed.
Electrek’s Take
This is good news and is the type of momentum we at Electrek knew would come from the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage because it’s groundbreaking legislation. We know the American Clean Power Association has an agenda, and it’s an agenda we align with. We want everyone to electrify and move to clean power as quickly as possible.
The report is right to raise the issue of a potential permitting backlog. It notes that “the average timeline for a clean energy project to obtain necessary National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews is 4.5 years.”
That’s too long for these clean energy projects to have to wait. Congress needs to reform the permitting process in a way that strikes a balance between timeliness and thoroughness of environmental reviews.
Photo: First Solar Desert Sunlight Solar Farm/US Department of the Interior
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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.
Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!
I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!
Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.
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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.
Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!
Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.
The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.
The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!
I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.
That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.
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The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.
This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.
In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”
The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.
One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.
Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.
They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.
Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.
At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.
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