Saturday, 29 August 2026

California has filed suit against Trump over the cancellation of wind power projects, CleanTechnica reported.

The litigation targets actions taken during Trump's presidency. According to CleanTechnica, he cancelled billions of dollars of wind power leases and paid companies not to build wind farms.

CleanTechnica characterised the cancellations as ridiculous in its account of the state's legal challenge.

CNOOC made four offshore discoveries and completed 16 successful appraisals in the first half of 2026, alongside three project start-ups offshore China, according to Offshore Magazine.

The discoveries were located in Bohai Bay and the South China Sea, and Offshore Magazine reported that they support China's ongoing efforts to increase domestic offshore oil and gas production.

Three developments came onstream offshore China during the period: the Penglai 19-3 Oilfield 1/2/3/8/9 Area Secondary Adjustment Project, the Weizhou 10-3 Oilfield West Area Development Project, and the Huizhou 25-8 Oilfield Comprehensive Adjustment Project, per the same report.

Outside its production portfolio, the company connected Haiyou Anlan, described by Offshore Magazine as China's first tension-leg floating wind power platform, to the grid. The platform should supply 54 million kWh of electricity per year to an oil field.

CNOOC also fully commissioned China's first offshore carbon capture and utilization project, according to Offshore Magazine.

The pairing of a floating wind platform feeding an offshore oil field with a first-of-its-kind offshore carbon capture and utilization installation places power supply and emissions handling inside the same upstream programme that produced the four discoveries and 16 appraisals.

Chile is expected to surpass 6 GW of battery energy storage systems (BESS) capacity by the end of 2026, according to pv magazine.

The build-out follows a law passed in Chile that created incentives for battery projects developed alongside utility-scale solar, pv magazine reported. Pairing storage with solar plants lets operators shift midday output into later demand hours rather than curtail it.

Transmission is moving in parallel. Chile is constructing a line to link Santiago and other demand centers with the north of the country, according to pv magazine. The northern regions host the bulk of the country's solar resource, and the connection addresses the distance between where generation sits and where load concentrates.

The 6 GW figure is a projection reported by pv magazine rather than a confirmed installed total.

Pennsylvania's waste coal burners collected roughly $180 million through the state's Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards in 2025, about half of the payments made under the standard's Tier II category, according to NRDC figures cited by Inside Climate News.

The unit cost of Tier II fuels, which also cover landfill gas and hydropower, rose roughly 13-fold between 2020 and 2025, per the same NRDC accounting. AEPS itself dates to 2004 and obliges utilities operating in the state to buy a set share of their power from specified sources.

The bill has climbed since lawmakers voted in 2020 to require that coal waste burned under the program originate inside Pennsylvania's borders, Inside Climate News reported.

Separate state tax breaks, first put in place in 2016, add about $50 million a year for the industry.

The volumes are modest against the state's total supply. Pennsylvania burns 7 million tons of waste coal annually, the state's Independent Fiscal Office found. That output covers about 3% of the state's energy, against about 4% from renewables, according to the same office.

On emissions, a September 2025 study by University of Nevada researchers found that burning waste coal produces 7% to 118% more greenhouse gas emissions per kilowatt hour than traditional coal plants.

Pennsylvania ranks 42nd in the country for renewable energy generation and now produces more energy from waste coal than from solar arrays, Inside Climate News reported.

California's Air Resources Board (CARB) assigned a biogas-to-hydrogen project at the Bar 20 dairy farm the lowest carbon-intensity rating ever issued under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), according to Inside Climate News.

The rating was set at -1887.35 grams of CO2-equivalent per megajoule, a measure of the greenhouse gas a fuel is responsible for relative to the usable energy it produces, Inside Climate News reported.

The project is run by H2B2, which captures biogas from methane waste lagoons at the roughly 13,000-cow Bar 20 dairy in Kerman, California, and converts it into hydrogen sold as a transportation fuel under the LCFS.

CARB spokesperson Lindsay Buckley said the project is groundbreaking on two counts: it converts a waste into electricity using a fuel cell, and it converts biogas into hydrogen.

The negative rating matters because LCFS credits scale with how far a fuel sits below the program's benchmark. A deeply negative score reflects the avoided methane emissions credited to capturing gas that would otherwise escape from the lagoons, rather than the energy content of the hydrogen itself.

CARB has pointed to the program's cumulative effect, stating that since the LCFS began, more than 31 billion gallons of fossil fuels had been displaced by lower-carbon options.

The scale of the digester buildout underpinning those credits is contested. At least 165 digesters operate in California, in a state with more than 1,000 concentrated animal feeding operations, according to Inside Climate News. CARB has disputed the argument that digesters are a factor in accelerating herd growth on farms.

That dispute goes to the core of how the credits are calculated. If digester revenue encourages larger herds, the avoided-methane baseline that produces ratings such as the one issued to the Bar 20 project would rest on emissions the subsidy itself helped create. CARB rejects that link.

H2B2's output enters the transportation fuel pool, tying dairy manure management to hydrogen supply for vehicles rather than to pipeline gas or on-site power alone.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition put $1 million into the South Carolina Republican Senate primary, where Darline Graham beat Rep. Ralph Norman, Inside Climate News reported.

Backing for the group comes from solar entrepreneurs and venture capital investors in Silicon Valley, and it has picked out Republican candidates who backed efforts to unwind clean energy programs, according to Inside Climate News. Its chair is Tom Matzzie, who runs the retail electricity supplier CleanChoice Energy as chief executive.

Norman had held back his vote on Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act until the president promised him a faster wind-down of wind and solar subsidies, Inside Climate News reported.

In Tennessee's 5th congressional district Republican primary, the coalition spent $2 million; former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher unseated incumbent Rep. Andy Ogles, according to the same outlet.

Against Texas Rep. Chip Roy the group laid out $1.7 million. Roy lost his attorney general runoff to State Sen. Mayes Middleton by 55.2 percent to 44.8 percent. He had claimed in press statements and interviews that the One Big Beautiful Bill would terminate more than 90 percent of all future wind and solar projects.

A $125,000 contribution went the other way, to the primary campaign of Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a smaller sum than the group's other expenditures, Inside Climate News reported.