I’m behind on sharing some of my recent stories with you here, so I figured I’d round up three from the past week in one email:

When I was in Salt Lake City in August reporting a feature on a lithium project in the Utah desert, I stopped by the offices of the geothermal company Zanskar before my flight home to New York. The company had long stood out to me as promising contrarian amid the next-generation geothermal hype cycle. Unlike companies such as Fervo Energy, Sage Geosystems, or XGS Energy that I’d been writing about recently, Zanskar wasn’t using special drilling strategies or new next-generation technologies to create artificial geothermal reservoirs in hot rocks. Instead, Zanskar was doing conventional geothermal — that is, finding steamy underground pockets of water and harnessing that to make electricity. But the company wasn’t just playing the incumbent industry’s old hits. It was using artificial intelligence to predict where pockets of conventional geothermal resources were located underground. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the industry, the company’s founders believed that there’s a lot more regular geothermal resources out there that we haven’t yet mapped out, both at previously untapped sites and at existing facilities. The most expensive part of building a geothermal plant is drilling lots of holes until you find the right spot. The AI was meant to help with that.

Well, it’s working. As I wrote for Canary Media earlier this month, Zanskar made the largest “blind” geothermal discovery in the United States in more than three decades. (Blind, in this case, is an industry term for a geothermal formation that hasn’t been mapped out before and shows no visible signs on the surface such as vents or geysers.) You can read that story here.

You may remember when I told you over the summer about the New York Power Authority’s plan to build the Empire State’s first new nuclear station in a generation. The legal mandate the largest government-owned utility in the U.S. after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority used to justify the investment came from a bill passed in the 2023 state budget that allowed NYPA to take majority ownership stakes in renewable energy projects. On Tuesday, NYPA finalized its plans for its portfolio of solar, wind, and battery projects.

As I wrote last night for Canary Media:

In a unanimous decision, the board of trustees voted to greenlight the utility’s new strategic plan for renewables. Though the 5.5 GW figure is an increase over the utility’s initial plan, released this January, it also represents a reduction from the 7 GW draft plan NYPA unveiled over the summer.

The utility blamed the slimmer target on private renewable-energy developers pulling out of 16 joint ventures. Activists, however, accused NYPA of dropping projects to boost plans for new fossil-fuel infrastructure recently approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat.

The 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act requires New York to generate 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and the rest of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. It’s one of the most ambitious decarbonization goals in the country, but the state is lagging behind on meeting its legally mandated benchmarks in virtually every category of clean power except for distributed energy sources that include rooftop solar.

Today, natural-gas-fired power stations provide about half New York’s electricity. Aging hydroelectric stations, backed up by additional dams in Canada, provide nearly one-quarter of the state’s power, closely followed by nuclear reactors from plants upstate. Solar and wind each account for only a single-digit share of the state’s power mix, below the U.S.-wide share and far below that of California, Texas, and other states.

You can read that full story here.

Over the summer, the solar installer Sunnova went bankrupt, leaving purported former customers complaining on Reddit that the bankrupt company “is not offering the service of removing and reinstalling their own panels.” Well, Sunnova’s founder and chief executive John Berger has returned to the industry to do just that.

As I wrote in an exclusive for Latitude Media:

In September, he licensed the name Otovo from an eponymous Norwegian startup that has built a business across 13 European countries providing round-the-clock maintenance service to customers with solar panels, batteries, and generators in need of repair. Like many U.S. drivers do with AAA, these customers pay a subscription fee for speedy fixes.

Tomorrow, Latitude Media has learned, the Texas-based U.S. company is set to merge with its sister firm in Oslo. Berger will serve as CEO of the trans-Atlantic company, which is publicly traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange and plans to eventually dually list on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ.

“At Sunnova, I was always focused on service,” Berger told Latitude Media in the lead-up to the merger’s announcement. “If you go back and look at earnings calls, I looked at the new build market and financing as ways of getting service customers.”

In the solar industry, “everyone else viewed it the opposite,” he said. “They wanted new builds and financing but had to deal with service. As a result, you had a service problem — and hence a reputation problem in the industry.” At Otovo, Berger added, they’re “going to keep financing out of it.”

Berger told me he expects a lot more solar companies to go bankrupt, meaning there will be many more customers looking for help managing their rooftop units.

In Europe, solar companies are going bankrupt after the war in Ukraine drove up electricity prices that sent demand surging, only to fall again as interest rates climbed, household purchasing power fell, and the power price spike eased. Meanwhile, in the U.S. the market has struggled with what Berger characterized as “the policy whipsaw.” The U.S. industry outlook could change yet again if Democrats take back Congress in next year’s midterm election, or when Trump leaves office in 2028.

“That doesn’t really matter to us though,” Berger said. To meet his target of a quarter-million customers in the next three years, “business can be extremely slow,” as he only needs a tiny sliver of the tens of millions of households whose panels and batteries could need service.

“What’s the risk? Things stop breaking?” Berger added with a laugh. “Pretty sure that’s not going to happen.”

You can read that full story here.

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Signing off a chilly Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the New York City ferry system has finally established a direct route to Staten Island — meaning that if you want to ride our bikes there, we no longer have to drive them across the bridge or schlep into Manhattan to take the Staten Island Ferry. Very cool.