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Mounting evidence shows that gas stoves — used in nearly 40% of U.S. homes — pose serious health risks.
Now, Coloradans have a new tool to learn about the dangers of cooking with little blue flames. Gas stoves sold in the state will need a yellow health-warning label under a first-in-the-nation law that went into effect earlier this month.
“It’s fair to warn people, especially if they have health impacts from [poor] air quality, to know what they’re buying in advance,” said state Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Democrat who cosponsored the legislation.
Like other gas-burning appliances and gasoline-burning cars, gas ranges spew noxious compounds such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. Even off, they emit benzene, a potent carcinogen found in secondhand cigarette smoke; breathing in the fumes from gas ranges increases the risk of cancer, especially in kids. Children in homes with gas stoves are also estimated to be 42% more likely to develop asthma.
“We know that this information has not been reaching the public at the point of sale,” said Kirsten Schatz, public advocate at the nonprofit CoPIRG Foundation.
Since the 1970s, fossil-fuel companies have cited industry-backed research and hired scientists to discount evidence that gas stoves cause harm, according to an investigation by NPR. In 2024, the U.S. gas-stove market was estimated at $3.8 billion. In a 2022 survey of retail stores in 10 states, public advocacy group U.S. PIRG, affiliated with CoPIRG, found that most salespeople said they were unaware of the health risks of gas stoves.
Manufacturers have thrown up a hurdle to the new rules; they’ve asked the federal district court in Colorado to freeze the law’s enforcement. Violators would normally face an up to $20,000 fine, but on Wednesday, the state’s attorney general agreed not to enforce the rules until the court reaches a decision, according to Abe Scarr, energy and utilities program director at PIRG.
Though Colorado is the first state to mandate warning labels, Massachusetts and New York could be next. Last year, proposals in Illinois and California both failed, though the Golden State got close; ultimately, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed the bill.
Colorado’s new requirements follow other policies — from building ordinances to performance standards to air-quality regulations — adopted at state and municipal levels to rein in the sale of gas equipment. More than 70 local governments are ensuring gas appliances aren’t installed in most new buildings by requiring new construction to be all-electric. In July, New York became the first state to codify such rules.
Under Colorado’s law, gas-stove warning labels need to bear the phrase, “Understand the air quality implications of having an indoor gas stove.” The stickers will have a URL link or QR code that directs curious consumers to a state webpage. Colorado requires that the site, created and maintained by its Department of Public Health and Environment, provides “credible, evidence-based information on the health impacts of gas-fueled stoves.”
The warnings only need to be displayed on floor models or the website on which they’re being sold, Kipp said. “We made it really simple for manufacturers to comply,” she added, but still, “they just don’t want to do it.”
In a federal lawsuit filed Aug. 5, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers alleges that Colorado is compelling its members to endorse a warning label that directs consumers to “non-consensus, scientifically controversial, and factually misleading” information. In doing so, the industry group continues, the state is violating its members’ First Amendment rights “to be free from … unconstitutional compelled speech.”
“The lawsuit is frivolous,” Kipp said. “It’s well within the authority of our Colorado legislature to pass laws that implement consumer protections.”
While appliance makers are portraying the science as unsettled, “that’s not true,” Kipp said.
Several nonpartisan nonprofit organizations recognize the large body of peer-reviewed research on gas-stove pollution and have voiced support for warning labels, Schatz said, including the American Public Health Association, American Lung Association, American Medical Association, and American Thoracic Society.
The parties to the lawsuit are asking for a hearing to be scheduled in early November, Scarr said. They’ve also agreed to a deposition — sworn testimony outside the courtroom — of any witness whom appliance manufacturers rely on to make their case.
“This litigation is set to become a battle of the experts regarding the health impacts of gas stoves,” Scarr said. “Given the science, we’re confident the state can win.”
It’s no Route 66.
But the roughly 80-mile stretch of U.S. Route 50 that snakes across Virginia from the nation’s capital to the West Virginia border is rich in American history and culture. The mostly two-lane, winding mountain road features vineyards, battlefields, high-end resorts, and more. And just like the iconic route from Chicago to California, U.S. 50 is increasingly making way for the future of American road trips: electric vehicles.
The tiny town of Middleburg, Virginia, is a case in point: Officials there installed a fast charger nearly 18 months ago to serve EV drivers in the wealthy, bucolic region just 45 miles west of Washington, D.C.
Named for its equidistance between Alexandria and Winchester, Middleburg has long been at the center of foxhunting and steeplechases. These days, the town of less than 1,000 people is also surrounded by wineries and boasts a film festival, a 168-room five-star resort, and a Christmas parade replete with horses and hound dogs.
“Since colonial times it has been a stopping place, and it’s continued to be a place where people come from all over the world, as well as from the greater D.C. area,” said Lynne Kaye, chair of Middleburg’s sustainability committee.
As electric vehicles have become more prevalent, so too has “EV tourism”: towns off the beaten path seeking to lure travelers with charging infrastructure. While visitors juice up — often for free at relatively slow Level 2 chargers – they might browse local art galleries and shops, grab some dinner, or visit another attraction they may have otherwise missed.
But Middleburg is part of Loudoun County, the nation’s richest, with some of the most robust EV adoption numbers in Virginia. The town has ample attractions, so the idea to install a charger was less about drawing in new visitors than it was about keeping those already passing through happy.
“When we walked around town, we were noticing a bunch of EVs,” said Kaye. “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t accidentally become unappealing to people who were driving them.”
Reducing the town’s climate footprint was also a consideration. Kaye and others reason that cars driven by visitors and residents are the leading contributor to its planet-warming emissions.
“We only have 673 residents. We can only create so much carbon,” she said. “But when you have 20,000 people come to an event, that’s a lot of carbon all at once.”
When town leaders were in the planning stages of adding their charger, they also noticed a lack of devices in the region that could fill up a car battery in an hour or less. “Not everybody wants to spend however many hours getting their EV charged,” Kaye said.
For all these reasons, the decision to install a fast charger in the heart of town was an easy one. But bringing that choice to fruition wasn’t as simple.
An expansive bay with 10 or more chargers, an increasingly common feature at gas stations, wasn’t logistically feasible in the tiny Town Hall parking lot. And most charging companies Middleburg approached wanted to install no fewer than six fast chargers.
“Getting this huge bank of chargers didn’t fit a historic town,” Kaye said. “There wasn’t really space for it, and we weren’t sure that we were going to get enough traffic to use the chargers effectively.”
XCharge North America came to the rescue. The charger manufacturer was “willing to work with us and come up with a way to have the one charger,” Kaye said. “And it’s been a success.”
Initially called Current Electric, the startup had recently been acquired by a European equipment maker. Its business proposition: making fast chargers cheaper by using a 208-volt system rather than the global standard of 480V.
While Middleburg had already wired its new Town Hall to accommodate the industry standard, XCharge still leapt at the opportunity to showcase its hardware, said company cofounder Alex Urist.
“This was very much a way for us to get early applications in the U.S.,” said Urist, who lives in New York City. “The proximity to D.C. is great as well. Selfishly, I go to D.C. to visit the in-laws frequently enough, so I can always check in on the charger. I like to take them over there and show off that I actually have a job,” he quipped.
Typical direct-current fast-charging units can run between $30,000 and $120,000. In Middleburg’s case, XCharge provided its hardware for free while the town covered the installation. The two entities share the revenue from charging sessions, and the company can learn from how the fast charger performs as it explores other markets.
“It’s not really a charger on a high-throughput area,” Urist said. “But what is interesting about it is, it’s kind of dead in the middle of Virginia wine country. It’s along this rural corridor where the perceptive availability of chargers is very important.”
Between March 2024, when the charger was installed, and February 2025, 181 sessions were logged. Since then, there’s been an uptake, with 268 sessions logged as of May 2025, according to XCharge.
“It’s a really interesting use case for us to see. How does it help with the local economy? Are they going to also see any ancillary impacts of it beyond just the revenue coming in?” Urist said.
Indeed, that’s one of the expectations behind an initiative called Virginia Green Travel, which helps the state’s towns, especially those with carbon-reduction goals, attract environmentally minded tourists, said Alleyn Harned, executive director of Virginia Clean Cities.
“Electric vehicle chargers have been part of green tourism in Virginia,” said Harned, whose group is among the backers of the Green Travel initiative.
Virginia Clean Cities, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded entity that’s based at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, is what brought Middleburg and XCharge together. The town’s success with its fast charger was a bright spot for the organization after President Donald Trump stalled the rollout of $5 billion for charging infrastructure launched under his predecessor.
“This is a positive story in getting something done,” Harned said, “because this stuff really improves our economy.”
As the Trump administration moves toward releasing National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funds after losses in court, more towns across Virginia may have the chance to follow Middleburg’s lead.
Kaye says they should know that fast charging is possible for them. “I think it’s important for other small towns to realize that there is an opportunity, if they want to take it,” she said.
For decades, electrical engineers have dreamed of a device that can seamlessly connect solar panels, battery systems, and on-site generators to high-powered equipment like EV chargers or data center servers, without loads of expensive hardware to make it all work together.
Now, these devices, called solid-state transformers, are actually starting to hit the market — and they couldn’t be coming at a more opportune time.
That’s because the technology could be key to dealing with the torrent of power demand from data centers, factories, and electric-vehicle charging hubs that threatens to overwhelm the grid and cause utilities to burn more planet-warming fossil fuels.
Right now, these large electricity customers are clamoring for more power than the U.S. grid can easily supply. In theory, this problem could be solved by allowing them to install their own solar arrays, batteries, and generators on site — ideally as a microgrid — but that seemingly simple solution is actually complicated and costly to execute.
Every solar array, battery, fuel cell, generator, or other source of on-site power requires multiple pieces of equipment — electrical protection gear, isolation transformers, step-up and step-down transformers, power converters — to safely turn direct current into alternating current or vice versa, and to raise or lower voltages to match the needs of different loads within a building.
Solid-state transformers can do all that from a single device, controlling electricity as nimbly as routers control the flow of data. That’s particularly valuable when it comes to managing equipment with high power needs, like EV chargers, or with extremely sensitive requirements for power quality, like the server racks populating data centers.
So says Haroon Inam, CEO and cofounder of DG Matrix, one of a handful of companies starting to get solid-state transformers into real-world applications. DG Matrix raised $20 million in March and is building a factory in North Carolina, set to open late this year, that will be capable of producing up to 1,000 units annually, he said.
“We’re hitting the massive underserved commercial and industrial microgrid market,” he said. “People haven’t done it because it costs so damn much to build individual snowflake microgrids.”
DG Matrix is not the only firm working on this. Heron Power, a startup founded by Tesla alum Drew Baglino, has raised $43 million in funding with the goal of building its first solid-state transformers in 2027. Amperesand raised $12.5 million last year to continue developing solid-state transformers being tested on Singapore’s power grid.
Major electronics companies are interested. Electrical equipment giant Eaton last month agreed to acquire Resilient Power Systems, which raised $5 million in 2021 to build and deploy its power-conversion devices for EV charging hubs and other energy-hungry settings. Eaton will spend $55 million on the company on closing; additional payments based on Resilient Power’s financial and technological performance in the coming years could total another $95 million.
“People have been working at this technology for well over a decade,” said Aidan Graham, senior vice president and general manager of Eaton’s critical power solutions business. But now, following several key engineering advances, the technology may finally be ready for primetime — and utilities and others are starting to test it out.
Eaton has been working on solid-state transformers for years. The company isn’t saying how it intends to scale up manufacturing and deployment of Resilient Power’s technology. But “there are a couple of branches we’re chasing,” Graham said, including EV charging and integrating batteries into data centers and other critical environments, “where people‘s lives are on the line, or a lot of money is on the line, if the power goes out for even a fraction of a second.”
Michael Wood III, DG Matrix’s chief of staff, said the company is testing its devices with companies including electrical-equipment manufacturing giant ABB, North Carolina-based utility Duke Energy, and PowerSecure, a major microgrid and data-center power system developer owned by utility Southern Co.
“The best way to get the next gigawatt of energy is to build distributed systems,” Wood said. “Today, you need all of this gear to make those projects work. DG Matrix eliminates all that balance of systems and boils it down to a single system.”
Using a DG Matrix solid-state transformer can cost half as much as using the standard mix of multiple technologies to connect the components of a typical on-site microgrid, Inam said. It also makes it a lot simpler to quickly mix and match devices or to change up the configuration of systems at data centers, EV charging hubs, and other potential microgrid sites.
So if solid-state transformers are such a useful technology, why are they just now getting into the field?
There are good reasons why it’s taken so long, said Vlatko Vlatkovic, a veteran of General Electric’s industrial electrification business and a partner at DG Matrix investor Clean Energy Ventures, who joined the startup’s board of directors this year.
Much of the power grid relies on electromechanical devices that operate in relatively simple ways that haven’t changed much in a century. Despite recent advances that have enabled things like solar inverters or electric-vehicle drivetrains, the same kind of semiconductors that make modern computing possible have yet to be applied widely to the power grid.
“It’s always been a big challenge to move that industry towards using more power electronics,” Vlatkovic said, particularly at the higher voltages of electricity on the grid. Until relatively recently, the underlying technology “wasn’t big enough, wasn’t reliable enough. There were technical issues.”
Similar challenges have dogged solid-state transformers in higher-voltage industrial applications, said Neal Dikeman, a partner at Resilient Power investor Energy Transition Ventures. Consistent advances in silicon carbide semiconductors have helped, as have strides in the computing ability required to make them effective at power conversion, he said. “But that doesn’t make it easy.”
Inam, who served as chief technology officer at grid power-controls provider Smart Wires before joining DG Matrix in 2023, noted several key challenges that the startup had to solve to get to this point.
Dissipating the heat created by converting alternating current and direct current at high voltages is tricky, for one. So is dealing with “electromagnetic noise,” or interference caused by that same high-frequency electrical switching. “If you don’t understand how to critically mitigate that noise, it gets into everything. It causes overheating, blow-ups, and misperformance,” Inam said.
Solving those challenges has its rewards, however. “We’re at the point where the technology is mature enough and good enough so that we can introduce reliable devices,” Vlatkovic said.
The timing couldn’t be better.
“Everything’s being electrified, from cars to industry to housing,” Vlatkovic said. “If you look at the projections for what the grid needs to deliver over the next 10 to 20 years, at a minimum we have to double the capacity of the grid. Some projections say we need to triple what we have.”
Meeting power demand from data centers is a particularly big opportunity, Inam said.
Tech giants’ AI ambitions are taxing the grid capacity of utilities in data center hot spots like Virginia, Georgia, and Texas. That’s led data center developers to explore ways to reduce the stress they put on grids — including the potential for generators and batteries built nearby or on site.
“The three big problems are speed to power — customers can’t get power fast enough — cost of power, and the ability to aggregate multiple resources to reach flexibility,” Inam said. “We talk to enterprise customers with hundreds or thousands of sites. Their biggest challenge is having to design every single one from scratch. They’re looking for a turnkey solution to the challenge of not having to deploy one, but having to deploy 1,000.”
Solid-state transformers can help meet those needs, Vlatkovic said. “You go from complex installations and multiple companies to one company doing everything.”
Packing more capabilities into a smaller “power-dense” package also saves valuable space in tight environments like data centers and EV charging sites, Eaton’s Graham said. And solid-state transformers can be made en masse in factories, reducing the cost and time spent on electrical labor on job sites. “You’ve pulled that back into a controlled manufacturing environment,” Graham said.
Plus, having a single device that can perform multiple tasks simplifies engineering needs, Dikeman said.
“If you’re using off-the-shelf components and designing a complex system, the mismatching of” different devices that don’t perfectly match the needs of the system “drives up costs and drives down efficiency,” he said. “You can get around that by building custom stuff — but that’s more expensive and more risky. When you get to solar and storage and data centers and people who need to go fast and need things that are reliable and cheap, all of that breaks down.”
All of these potential benefits have led PowerSecure, the microgrid developer, to launch pilots of at least two solid-state transformer technologies, including its tests with DG Matrix, said Joaquin Aguerre, the company’s director of strategic portfolio development. “We’re trying to be in front on this technology.”
PowerSecure has designed and installed more than 2.4 gigawatts of microgrid capacity for customers ranging from big-box retailers and hospitals to utilities and data centers. It’s particularly interested in solid-state transformers to integrate power-efficient “hybrid microgrids” that combine “solar, energy storage, natural-gas generators, fuel cells, EV charging, you name it,” Aguerre said.
“There is starting to be a real market need,” he said. At the same time, “the majority of these companies are still in the early stages. … The next logical step is doing proper pilot programs, to see real customer use cases at a smaller scale” and to test the durability and reliability of the technologies in question.
After all, whatever their drawbacks compared to cutting-edge power electronics, traditional transformers “don’t fail that often,” Aguerre pointed out. “Everyone’s going to expect the same reliability for whatever solid-state transformer they’re looking at.”
A clarification was made on Aug. 19, 2025: This story originally stated that Eaton will pay $55 million to acquire Resilient Power. The piece has been updated to clarify that the deal also includes additional payments contingent on Resilient Power’s performance over the next couple of years.
The Trump administration has set up yet another roadblock for wind and solar power in the U.S. — one that will make it harder for clean-energy developers to qualify for federal tax credits before they expire next summer.
Treasury Department guidance released Friday puts new restrictions on the “safe-harboring” rules that have for decades guided whether solar and wind developers are considered to have “commenced construction,” a key milestone required to secure tax-credit eligibility.
The rules, which will go into effect on September 2, are likely to further slow the rollout of wind and solar power — two of the fastest-growing sources of energy in the country, both of which have been under siege by President Donald Trump since January.
Clean-energy industry advocates attacked the guidance as an improper use of executive authority that will make it harder for the U.S. to meet growing electricity demand and will further drive up electricity bills. But industry analysts noted that the new rules, though restrictive, could have turned out even worse.
Under the big new tax and spending law passed by Republicans last month, solar and wind projects must commence construction by early July 2026 to access tax credits.
For projects larger than 1.5 megawatts in size, Treasury’s new guidance eliminates one way for developers to prove they’ve started work: spending at least 5% of the total cost of the project by the deadline. That new restriction won’t apply to residential and commercial solar installations, so companies in that space such as Sunrun, Freedom Forever, SolarEdge, and Enphase, saw their share prices rise on Friday.
But it will apply to most other clean-energy developments, from community solar farms to massive utility-scale solar and wind projects. Starting in just a few weeks, projects larger than 1.5 megawatts will have only one option for proving they’re under construction: They must demonstrate that they are undertaking “physical work of a significant nature” on a continuous basis.
The test is not new, and project developers have relied on it in the past. But it is less straightforward than the 5% safe-harbor rules, creating uncertainty that could make it harder or more expensive for developers to lock down financing for a project.
“Unless you’re pretty far along, you’re not going to go build some roads and install racking overnight,”said Andy Moon, CEO and cofounder of Reunion Infrastructure, a company that manages clean-energy tax-credit transfers. “It’s not so easy to change your plans and accelerate something that fast.”
Clean-energy industry groups declined to speculate about how the changes would impact the hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind projects now under development across the country. But these industries are already reeling under the much-shortened timeline for securing tax credits under last month’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; previously, under the Inflation Reduction Act, developers had until at least 2032 to commence construction and thereby secure tax credits. Analysts have said the drastically shortened tax-credit window will cut clean-energy growth by more than half over the coming decade.
That’s a problem for a country facing rising demand for power for data centers, factories, and broader economic growth. Solar, batteries, and wind made up 96% of new capacity added to U.S. grids last year and will remain the primary option for new power in the next few years, given that there are five- to seven-year wait times for new gas turbines and even longer construction timelines for nuclear and geothermal power plants.
“This is yet another act of energy subtraction from the Trump administration that will further delay the buildout of affordable, reliable power,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a Friday statement.
Since Trump signed the megalaw in July, his administration has taken a host of anti-wind and anti-solar actions, including subjecting projects to byzantine Interior Department reviews, setting “capacity density” restrictions for projects on federal lands, and potentially halting already permitted wind farms both onshore and offshore.
Shortly after the law passed in July, Trump ordered the Treasury Department to review the safe-harbor rules. The directive came after pressure from the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus members in the House of Representatives, who were upset that the law preserved tax credits for wind and solar projects at all. In that same executive order, Trump also told Treasury to develop rules governing “foreign entity of concern” restrictions; those rules, which are still in development, could be even more disruptive to the industry.
“The Treasury Department’s decision to accelerate the phaseout of clean energy tax credits undermines the integrity of our energy grid and our legislative process,” Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association trade group, said in a Friday statement. “Congress explicitly chose to provide energy companies with one year to phase out tax credits to keep energy prices low while meeting growing power demand.”
Friday’s guidance came despite entreaties from Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa and John Curtis of Utah, who negotiated the tax-credit amendment to the final bill. Though both senators voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cleared the Senate by just one vote, earlier this month they placed holds on three of Trump’s Treasury Department nominees in an attempt to force the administration to negotiate a less harmful change to the safe-harbor rules.
Grassley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon.
“Frankly, I think the intervention worked,” said Pavel Molchanov, a Raymond James analyst covering cleantech companies. “Treasury could have gone really far in the direction of making life difficult.”
Molchanov cited rules left unchanged in Friday’s guidance, such as the four-year window for projects that commence construction by July 2026 to complete their work to secure their tax-credit eligibility. “Imagine if they had said, ‘Oh, did we say four years? It’s actually two.’”
Similarly, the “physical work” requirements listed in Friday’s guidance are not outside the bounds of what a large-scale solar or wind project developer can reasonably take on over the next year, he said. Exemptions for extreme weather, permitting delays, and other obstacles to continuing work should shield developers from risks of being declared out of compliance with those requirements, he said.
“The good news is that it’s still almost 11 months until July 2026, so developers have plenty of room to make adjustments before starting construction,” Molchanov said. “From my perspective, it’s actually better than expected. But maybe my expectations were just so low to begin with.”
Jeff Cramer, CEO of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a trade group that represents companies building smaller-scale solar and battery projects, decried the new guidance as a violation of the deal Republicans made in crafting the megalaw. But he also said that simply knowing the rules of the game is a help.
“I think the only good news is that there may now be less uncertainty,” he said. “The onus is now on the states to ensure that any projects that can meet that July 2026 deadline can do that.”
While China leads the world in both the production and adoption of clean energy tech like solar and EVs, the country has been slower to tackle decarbonizing heavy industry. That is starting to change.
In July, the Chinese state-owned steelmaker HBIS Group agreed to sell more than 10,000 metric tons of green steel to a buyer in Italy. The agreement set a deadline for delivery by the end of August. That same week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited China and pledged to work together to build out the green steel industry.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., steel producers are backing away from earlier commitments to produce green steel. Just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Swedish steelmaker SSAB pulled out of negotiations for $500 million in federal funding to back a project to make iron with green hydrogen. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs abandoned its own green steel effort in Middletown, Ohio, after the Trump administration pressed the steelmaker to use a $500 million Biden-era grant to ramp up coal-fired iron production. Nippon Steel pledged to modernize U.S. Steel after securing Trump’s support for a $15 billion acquisition of its American rival in June, but the Japanese giant’s reputation as a “coal company that also makes steel” suggests the merger could extend the life of blast furnaces in Indiana and Pennsylvania.
“A lot of the rhetoric around competitiveness with China makes it seem like we think we must not fall behind. Stories like this make clear we already are behind,” said Marcela Mulholland, a former official at the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations who now leads advocacy at the nonpartisan climate group Clean Tomorrow. “It is happening. The green steel example is just one of many.”
China produces a staggering amount of steel each year — more than 1 billion metric tons. About 90% is made with a two-stop process that relies on coal. First, iron is smelted from ore in a coal-fired blast furnace. Then the iron is transformed into steel in a basic oxygen furnace. About 10% of the country’s steel is made with an electric arc furnace, a process that – if powered by green electricity – is much cleaner, but depends on a steady supply of scrap metal as a feedstock. (The U.S. has a decided advantage with this particular technology since most of the steel that the nation produces uses scrap metal in EAFs.)
China has yet to widely implement the technology known as direct reduction of iron, or DRI, which typically relies on natural gas to produce iron but which can also use hydrogen. The country’s supplies of the former fuel are limited, spurring it to experiment with ways to conduct DRI using the latter.
China has many small-scale pilot projects manufacturing steel with hydrogen, but most involve minimal volumes of the material. For example, the country’s No. 2 steelmaker, Angang Steel Co., is producing just 10,000 metric tons of iron from green-hydrogen-fueled DRI per year. HBIS is shipping that volume of steel to Italy this month alone. Only HBIS and another major producer, China Baowu Steel Group, are producing green steel with hydrogen in significant quantities, according to research published last month by the Helsinki-based nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
How clean the hydrogen is that China uses to make steel is a complicated question.
Hydrogen – the smallest molecule – is already widely used in industrial processes and offers a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels since it produces no carbon dioxide when burned. Yet the vast majority of the global supply of hydrogen is made through methods that use fossil fuels and generate planet-heating emissions. When made with electrolyzers powered by renewable energy, hydrogen produces almost no emissions at all, but production of this form – green hydrogen – is nascent and comes at a high premium. (DRI using green hydrogen paired with EAFs is the highest – but nearly nonexistent – standard for producing green steel.)
Headquartered in Hebei province, HBIS started experimenting with lower-carbon steel in part by using hydrogen captured from its coking plants, where coal is roasted at more than 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit to cook off contaminants and produce an industrial-grade fuel. Roughly 60% of the gas emitted during the process is hydrogen.
It’s unclear how much of the steel HBIS is shipping to Italy is made with iron that employs hydrogen produced from industrial waste processes rather than the green stuff made from electricity generated by nearby renewables. HBIS did not respond to a request for comment.
But David Fishman, a principal at the Shanghai-based energy consultancy The Lantau Group, said “there are quite a few” sources of hydrogen made with renewable power near HBIS’s facility in northern China. He noted that HBIS has a strategic partnership with the China National Petroleum Corp., which launched its first large-scale demonstration project to make green hydrogen in 2023.
The export deal may be a sign of China raising its ambitions for cleaner steel. The national government had set a target for 15% of steel coming from EAFs by the end of this year. But that steelmaking capacity has remained at 10% for more than a decade.
Part of the problem is that provincial steel targets are at odds with the policies set in Beijing. Though the national government opened China to imported scrap steel that could be used in EAFs, imports halved in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analysis. Ten provinces, meanwhile, ramped up production of coal-made steel in the first half of this year, bringing down prices and disincentivizing more costly green investments, said Xinyi Shen, the China team lead for the Finnish nonprofit, who authored the report.
But if China can deepen its stockpiles of scrap steel, the country could more quickly build out a lower-carbon steel industry using EAFs while it waits to improve technology on green hydrogen that can bring down costs of fully decarbonized steel, Shen said.
“This is a more promising way to produce low-carbon steel,” she said. “For hydrogen steelmaking, it depends on the progress of green power.”
The bottleneck, she said, is “always the feedstock for DRI.”
But two recent policy changes on renewable power could incentivize Chinese companies to use more of the nation’s vast solar and wind resources to generate green hydrogen.
The first, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and requires that new distributed solar arrays — like those on buildings’ rooftops — first power the facility they are sited on before selling any surplus electricity onto the grid. The second, dubbed the 531 policy, eliminates the guaranteed “feed-in tariffs” that renewables projects long benefited from in China, and requires new solar and wind farms to sell electricity on the spot market.
Whether policies that direct renewable power away from the grid benefit hydrogen producers by making that power more available to them depends on the provincial-level strategies for the fuel, which vary, Shen said. But the emergence of overseas buyers willing to pay more for steel made with green hydrogen could drive the market, she said.
Starting next year, the European Union, of which Italy is a founding member, is set to fully implement its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The carbon tariff essentially levies an extra cost on imports made with more planet-heating pollution. That means China’s coal-fired steel is about to become less competitive. While China could ramp up scrap-based EAF steel, Shen said the quality of that product tends to be very low, making it unappealing for export. The Italy deal, according to the Boston Consulting Group, shows the levies are creating a market for truly green material.
“This development holds significant implications,” Nicole Voigt, the Boston Consulting Group’s global lead of metals, told Canary Media. “China’s commitment clearly highlights its intent to seize commercial opportunities in the green steel market, especially in Europe.”
It’ll take time for the cost to come down. But China “overall has a long-term direction for carbon neutrality,” Shen said. “This gives companies and investors confidence and certainty to invest into newer technologies.”
Under the previous administration, the U.S. pumped billions of dollars into green hydrogen and clean industrial projects, and made tax credits for renewables available into the 2030s. Even then, America hardly employed all the policy mechanisms at play in China. The federal clean-industry program where Mulholland worked supported a few dozen projects, almost all of which saw their funding yanked away by the Trump administration this spring. Last year alone, China had nearly twice the number of low-carbon industrial demonstration projects. This year, Beijing funded a second set of more than 100 new projects.
“The investment into these new technologies will need a long, stable policy environment,” Shen said. “Long-term, the political goal is there here in China.”
A correction was made on Aug. 18, 2025: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that basic oxygen furnaces directly burn coal.
President Donald Trump’s crusade against wind energy is intensifying — and it could come with some serious costs.
As much as $317 billion in lost investment, to be exact, per new analysis from research firm Cleanview. That figure is based on the 790 projects totaling 213 gigawatts that developers plan to build in the years to come — all of which are at risk of delay or even cancellation under the administration’s policies.
To be clear, those figures represent the high end of what’s at stake — they’re based on what’s currently in the interconnection queue, and projects drop out of that process all the time for various reasons.
But if even a fraction of that investment is canceled or delayed, it will be painful for the regions that miss out on the tax revenue and jobs, with Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey standing to lose the most.
It would also be bad timing: Electricity demand is on the rise nationwide, largely due to the boom in AI data center construction. Delaying or blocking the buildout of gigawatts worth of wind projects when the U.S. is in the midst of an energy-supply crunch would drive up already-climbing power bills. Wind produced just over 10% of U.S. electricity last year.
And, of course, any slowdown in the construction of clean energy is a setback for efforts to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels, a task that grows more urgent with the passage of every hot summer day.
Trump entered office in January with promises that not a single new “windmill” would be constructed during his second term. Though he’s not managed to carry out that vision in its most literal sense, he has certainly operated with its spirit in mind.
On his first day, he issued an executive order calling for an end to offshore wind leasing and a review of leases and permits for all wind projects. In the spring, Trump tried — and ultimately failed — to quash the Empire Wind offshore installation that had just begun construction near New York’s coast. After GOP lawmakers rammed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through Congress, Trump signed the megalaw on July 4, mandating the swift phaseout of tax credits for wind (and solar) projects.
In recent weeks, his administration has stepped up its attacks even further and undertaken an all-out blitz on wind power, issuing a barrage of far-reaching orders that, at least in theory, could jeopardize every wind project underway in the country.
Cheese. Beer. Clothes. Paper. Manufacturers across the country rely on combustion boilers to produce the heat required for making a range of products. But by burning coal, oil, gas, and other fuels to do so, that equipment spews health-harming and planet-warming pollution into the skies.
A different technology would allow communities to breathe easier. Electric heat pumps, which can provide industrial heat without emissions, are spreading but remain underutilized. They only supply about 5% of global industrial heat.
Now, a new study quantifies what Americans stand to gain from manufacturers switching to heat pumps. A gradual transition would not only decarbonize heating but deliver a staggering $1.1 trillion in public health benefits and avoid 77,200 pollution-inflicted deaths from 2030 to 2050, according to a report released Thursday by the nonprofit American Lung Association.
It’s a move “that’s going to save lives, reduce health emergencies, cut asthma attacks, [and] keep kids healthy enough to be in school rather than missing school days,” said Will Barrett, an assistant vice president at the American Lung Association who works on national clean air policy.
Nearly half of the U.S. population lives in places with very unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, two of the most common and dangerous air pollutants. Antiquated boilers are an oft-overlooked part of the problem.
Like other fossil-fuel-burning machines, such as home appliances and cars, industrial combustion boilers release nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide into the air. These toxic byproducts can harm children and adults in severe ways, such as asthma attacks, preterm births, heart attacks, strokes, and an impaired ability to think.
To quantify the benefits of switching to industrial heat pumps, the authors created an inventory of the industrial boilers across the U.S. based on publicly available data. They found that about 33,500 boilers scattered around the nation operate at the low and medium temperatures — i.e., less than 200 degrees Celsius — that make them the best candidates for heat pumps to replace. (For now, heat pumps are most feasible for lower temperatures, though Barrett noted research-and-development efforts will bring down the costs for higher-temperature changeouts over time.)
The team then estimated how much pollution would be avoided by gradually swapping these boilers out for electric heat pumps over the next 15 years, with lower temperatures addressed soonest. By leveraging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health impacts tool, the team found that switching to heat pumps would not only save thousands of lives but also prevent 33 million asthma attacks, 204,000 asthma cases, 13 million lost school days, and 3.4 million lost work days.
States in which more people live close to industrial pollution sources would experience the greatest boost to public health and productivity, according to the team’s analysis. The three with the biggest estimated health benefits are Florida, which would save $107 billion over the study period, Pennsylvania ($82 billion), and North Carolina ($68 billion). Twenty-three others would save at least $25 billion each.
The transition would also reduce carbon emissions by 1.6 billion metric tons through 2050. That translates to $351 billion in avoided societal costs due to a destabilized climate — which is already being felt in record-breaking heat waves and deadlier floods. Sources of industrial heat, including boilers, account for 9% of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, according to the Department of Energy.
The findings come as the Trump administration aggressively rolls back public health protections, emissions regulations, and support for industrial decarbonization projects, having cancelled $3.7 billion in funding in May.
To push industries to switch to heat pumps, the report recommends state and local policymakers offer manufacturers incentives to electrify their heating, launch education campaigns aimed at communities and companies, and require the adoption of nonpolluting equipment. California has taken the lead; its South Coast Air Quality Management District passed a first-in-the-nation measure last year to gradually phase out combustion boilers and process heaters starting in 2026.
“It’s a new paradigm when you’re operating and fulfilling all the needs of these manufacturing heat processes without causing health-harming pollution,” Barrett said.
Massachusetts has taken another significant step toward its goal of a fossil-fuel-free future.
Last week, state regulators issued an order changing who pays when a new customer wants to connect to the gas system, shifting the burden from gas utility consumers as a whole to the household or organization that requests the hookup. Utilities have 30 days from the date of the order to file plans that reflect the new payment guidelines for consideration by regulators.
It may seem like a small change, but it’s actually a pretty big deal, advocates said.
“It means the expansion of the gas system will be much slower than it otherwise would’ve been,” said Mark Dyen, a climate activist working with advocacy groups Gas Transition Allies and 350 Mass. “It says, ‘If you want to add to that for your own benefit, you can pay for it.’”
Massachusetts has for years been at the forefront of efforts to transition away from natural gas. In December 2023, state utility regulators issued a sweeping order — the first of its kind in the country — that made clear the state’s goal is to move away from fossil-fuel use as it aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2023 order laid out a framework for how gas utilities will be expected to participate in this evolution.
Last week’s decision on who should pay for gas-line extensions is the latest effort to turn those principles into practice.
Under the old rules, a new customer that wants to hook up their building to gas generally does not have to pay out of pocket: The cost is spread out among all the utility’s customers over the course of several years on the assumption that the newcomer’s future fuel use will create enough revenue to cover the initial price, a practice known as “line-extension allowances.” In 2023, the average cost of such an installation was $9,000, for an annual total of more than $160 million statewide, according to an analysis filed in the case by research firm Groundwork Data.
“Existing customers are subsidizing these new customers,” said Kristin George Bagdanov, senior policy research manager for the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. “It’s a misalignment of who’s shouldering the costs.”
In their ruling last week, Massachusetts’ regulators agreed with this stance and also declared that the existing approach runs counter to the state’s climate goals by encouraging greater adoption of natural gas. Plus, they said, the current system increases the chance that customers will be left paying for unneeded infrastructure, as more homes and businesses leave the gas system for electricity.
Typically, utilities calculate a 10-year payback period for commercial connections and 20 years for residential. However, as more customers adopt energy-efficiency measures, switch to electric appliances, and even electrify completely, their gas usage — and therefore the revenue they generate for utilities — will drop, extending the payback period, argued Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell in an October filing to state utility regulators.
Currently, more than half of Massachusetts homes are heated with natural gas. However, between 2021 and 2024, about 90,000 households installed heat pumps using incentives from energy-efficiency program Mass Save; the true total, including installations that didn’t go through the incentive program, is likely higher. The state is aiming to get 500,000 households to adopt heat pumps between 2020 and 2030.
“It really doesn’t make sense for existing ratepayers to pay for people to join when we are actively transitioning people off the system,” said Sarah Krame, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The economics of that don’t make sense anymore. We’re no longer in that world.”
Massachusetts joins a handful of other states addressing the issue of line-extension allowances. Over the past three years, these subsidies have been reduced or eliminated in six states, and another six and Washington, D.C., are now considering reforms, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. In 2022, California became the first to do away with the practice. In June of this year, Maryland utility regulators ended the allowances, and New York state legislators passed a bill that will do the same if it becomes law.
“This is definitely a trend we’re tracking,” George Bagdanov said. “It’s part of the larger movement to reevaluate business-as-usual gas system operations.”
A clarification was made on Aug. 14, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect that there will still be a round of comments taken on the new plans utilities must file.
As the Trump administration aims to bolster fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy expansion, new research shows the oil and gas sector has so far failed to become a major jobs creator for heavily fracked areas of northern Appalachia.
“To the degree that we allocate resources to help develop that industry, we’re diverting those resources from other industries that actually could deliver” more jobs and higher per-capita incomes, said Sean O’Leary, author of the recent report from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
The report uses the term “Frackalachia” to describe 30 top oil- and gas-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. As a group, the counties have smaller populations and a net loss in the number of jobs compared to 2008, just before Appalachia’s shale-gas boom began.
The counties’ growth in per-capita income also has lagged behind the national average, even as their nominal gross domestic product nearly doubled, increasing their share of the country’s GDP by 6%. Basically, comparatively high economic output from the counties did not produce higher-than-average incomes for their residents.
“Despite immense economic growth as measured by GDP, Frackalachia is in a position of actually having lost jobs since the beginning of the natural-gas boom,” O’Leary said. In his view, the numbers contradict pro-industry pitches for more oil and gas development.
“Whatever else it is, the natural-gas boom is not an engine for economic prosperity,” O’Leary said. He thinks the gas industry is “structurally incapable” of delivering lasting growth in jobs and income for the people living in heavily fracked areas. The Frackalachia counties have also seen relatively few jobs from “downstream” industries, such as the production of plastics, he added.
Oil and gas development is “highly capital-intensive, but not very labor-intensive,” O’Leary explained. Most earnings go to shareholders, investors, and suppliers based far from where fossil fuels are extracted, so only a small share of project income stays in the community to stimulate more economic activity.
Completed wells don’t need many permanent employees, O’Leary said. And many people who work in drilling and fracking come from outside the local area.
Canary Media’s review of data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is consistent with that observation. From 2012 through 2022, the agency issued annual reports about the economic impact of the state’s oil and gas industry, including data for both “core” jobs and “ancillary” industries, which support oil and gas development.
More than half of the new hires for the core industry jobs in 2021 came from outside Ohio, according to the state data. Even in ancillary industries, nearly four-tenths of new hires were from other states.
Meanwhile, the state holds clean energy companies to higher standards when it comes to sourcing local labor. Solar developers who want to qualify for certain property tax relief must provide at least 70% of a project’s jobs to Ohio residents.
Canary Media drilled further into the figures from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to see how employment numbers compare to those touted by fossil-fuel industry organizations.
As of 2024, the core shale-industry sectors employed almost 9,100 people. The net gain compared to 2012 was about 860 jobs. Employment in those sectors peaked in 2017 at about 16,400.
Roughly 199,000 people worked in the industry’s ancillary sectors in 2024, for a net gain of about 30,000 jobs compared to 2012. However, the Department of Job and Family Services’ reports note that those ancillary sectors support other industries as well, such as engineering services, iron and steel mills, and construction of highways, streets, and bridges.
The Ohio agency numbers fall short of the 204,000 new jobs that an industry-funded report forecast oil and gas businesses might create or support. That analysis was published in 2011, in the lead-up to the 2012 law that set up the state’s current regulatory scheme for drilling and fracking of horizontal wells.
The agency numbers are also far lower than the 79,000 direct and 375,000 total jobs the American Petroleum Institute cited in a 2021 report based on data from 2019.
A communications representative for the American Petroleum Institute declined to answer Canary Media’s questions about that report or the new research from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association did not respond to a phone call and emails seeking comment for this story.
The cyclical boom-and-bust dynamics that often characterize oil and gas development also impact jobs, said Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at Loyola University Chicago. In contrast, utility-scale solar could be built out over time, to offer “opportunities for a more stable and consistent workforce,” he said.
An analysis prepared by Michaud and others in 2020 estimated that utility-scale solar development could provide tens of thousands of jobs over the course of a few decades if the state encouraged it. That study came out before Ohio lawmakers added extra hurdles for most utility-scale solar and wind projects in 2021.
Now federal policy has also shifted away from renewables and in favor of fossil fuels.
“While this might spur some jobs in oil and gas, it will also take jobs away from renewables, which can be built nearly anywhere, not just in places like eastern Ohio that have shale resources,” Michaud said. “It will threaten a big renewable energy pipeline that has developed over the past decade or two.”
State leaders and clean energy groups across the country are pushing to build more wind and solar projects before the window to claim federal tax credits slams shut.
The new GOP megalaw rapidly phases out incentives for clean energy, years before the Biden-era tax credits were set to lapse. The shortened timeline is expected to slow the construction of wind and solar projects at a moment when states are grappling with soaring power demand that is raising both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many local lawmakers and utility regulators were already working to modernize their grids and streamline energy permitting before President Donald Trump signed the budget bill last month. Recently, decision-makers in a handful of places have taken steps to expedite those efforts so that more large-scale renewables projects can qualify for the tax credits before they expire.
Under the megalaw, wind and solar farms must either start construction by July 4, 2026, or be placed in service by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify for the full production or investment tax credits. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act previously allowed developers to access credits if they began construction either by 2033, or by the time the U.S. power sector cut emissions by 75% compared with 2022 — whichever came later.
For states, “The question then becomes, what can they do to try to maximize the benefits they’ll get from those [clean] technologies between now and then — the jobs, clean air, and power?” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
In Maine, state utility regulators have responded by fast-tracking plans to procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, so that projects can get started before tax credits phase out. Residential and community solar developers in California’s Orange County and Minnesota say they’re focused on installing as many solar arrays as they can, including by tapping into state and municipal incentives that still remain.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has directed state energy regulators to conduct “a high-level review” of the budget law and its “specific impacts to New Yorkers.” However, clean energy developers in the state are calling for more specific actions to expedite wind and solar development, such as speeding up the yearslong process for issuing construction permits and improving coordination among state agencies.
For now, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) is the only state leader to issue an executive action to prioritize deployment of clean electricity projects in response to Trump’s budget law.
Earlier this month, Polis penned a letter that directs state agencies to “move quickly and secure success” for large-scale wind, solar, and battery storage resources, as well as community solar projects. The letter calls for eliminating “administrative barriers and bottlenecks” and “prioritizing expeditious review of projects as they come into the queue for state consultation and permitting.” It also raises the idea of invoking the Public Utilities Commission’s authority to override local permit denials.
“When we look at the new generation that is being built in Colorado, the vast majority of it is wind and solar,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told Canary Media. “Getting as many projects as possible able to move forward on a timeline that allows them to receive those [tax] credits is very much in the interest of the state — not only for clean energy goals, but very much for reducing costs to ratepayers.”
Alana Miller, who leads NRDC’s climate and clean energy policy team in Colorado, said the governor’s letter “is a key first step and provides a lot of urgency at this specific moment.” Still, “There’s a lot to be seen how it plays out and how agencies actually implement it,” she said, noting that state legislative action could follow next year.
In Colorado and beyond, officials are largely waiting to outline more concrete plans until the Treasury Department issues its new tax-credit guidance, which is expected to tighten the rules on which projects can claim incentives. Policy experts say they’re watching closely to see how the leaders of other major energy-producing states, including Pennsylvania and California, step in to support renewables in their backyards.
In June, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) warned legislators that the House’s version of the budget bill — which proposed even deeper cuts to clean energy incentives than the final version — would undermine more than $3 billion in direct investment in Pennsylvania energy projects. The impact would be most severe on the “nearest-term energy sources,” namely wind, solar, and batteries, that are coming online to meet surging demand in the state, his letter said.
Shapiro has made building “next-generation power” a key priority as power-hungry data centers strain the state’s grid and drive up electricity costs. His sweeping six-part energy strategy released in January includes policy proposals to increase the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources in the state, and to establish a “cap-and-invest” program that reduces carbon emissions while also lowering electricity bills.
In California, a leader on clean energy deployment, the industry is urging Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to help blunt the megalaw’s impact on utility-scale wind, solar, and energy storage developments.
Five trade groups sent a letter last month asking Newsom’s office and state legislative leaders to create a “coordinated action plan” to address the shortened tax-credit timelines, as well as the Treasury Department’s forthcoming guidance. The groups proposed steps such as streamlining environmental reviews and making it easier to build projects on agricultural land.
Another measure that California officials could immediately take is to enable wind, solar, and batteries to access “surplus interconnection” at existing gas-fired power plant sites — a concept that state legislators are currently considering.
Gas power plants in California are running less often as the state works to slash its planet-warming emissions, Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, explained in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That leaves gas plants’ transmission wires mostly unused. Wind and solar projects could use this existing surplus to immediately connect to the grid, rather than wait years for system upgrades.
A working paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that this pathway could allow California to cost-effectively integrate 24 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. For context, the state currently has nearly 90 GW of total generation capacity.
Clean energy developers in every state will need all the bureaucratic fixes and outside-the-box solutions they can get in order to maintain momentum for the energy transition. Early estimates found that Trump’s megalaw could shrink new clean capacity additions to the grid by up to 62% over the next decade compared to the baseline scenario. By 2035, national average household energy bills could be $78 to $192 higher than if Biden-era policies remained in place, according to Rhodium Group.
“We still anticipate that clean energy will be built and will likely still be able to compete [with fossil fuels] despite the headwinds,” said Miller of NRDC. But the cost of electricity will be higher without the tax incentives.
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