nick.nigro@atlaspolicy.com

It’s not hard to find a Connecticut church that dates back to the 19th or even the 18th century. But finding a way to heat and cool these old buildings as utility costs rise and congregations shrink is a timely challenge. Rev. Albert Bailey is the pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church, one of Hartford’s oldest Black churches, which dates back to the early 1900s. The church can seat up to 500 people, but a good turnout nowadays is about 100 people. Still, the place needs to be heated and cooled, even if fewer people are turning up.

New Haven, Connecticut, has broken ground on an ambitious geothermal energy network that will provide low-emission heating and cooling to the city’s bustling, historic Union Station and a new public housing complex across the street. The project will play a crucial role in the city’s attempt to decarbonize all municipal buildings and transportation by the end of 2030. As one of Connecticut’s first geothermal energy networks, it will also serve as a case study of how well the technology can both lower energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the state considers promoting wider adoption of these systems.

Georgetown area residents who want to install solar panels but aren’t currently allowed to will soon have their moment in the sun. Delaware Electric Cooperative (DEC), which provides power to most of southern Delaware, plans to add its first battery storage facility at Bruce Henry Solar Farm. The facility will allow about 100 DEC members in the surrounding area to install solar panels. DEC spokesperson Jeremy Tucker said those residents are not currently allowed to install solar panels because they would produce too much energy for the local grid to handle. But the new battery facility will store that excess energy, keeping the grid stable. Tucker said the company plans to officially announce the solar battery facility by the fall, then start installation 18 months to two years from now.

A report to the Delaware General Assembly indicates that the benefits of net metering of solar systems outweighs any shortcomings. The report came from Energize Delaware, a state utility that focuses on renewable energy and energy conservation.

An unwanted byproduct of North Dakota’s oil field could be the key to unlocking a new industry in the state within the next few years. An international company is proposing to begin extracting lithium, a key component of batteries produced for smartphones and other technology, from produced water by the end of 2027. It’s one of at least four similar projects in development in the state.

The discussions started roughly a decade ago, when an account manager at Xcel Energy, the electricity and gas utility provider, expressed confusion, officials at Colorado Mesa University recalled. A public school on the state’s remote western slope, Colorado Mesa had recently doubled in size, but its energy usage had hardly budged as it began installing an advanced geothermal heating and cooling system. Since its geothermal buildout began in 2008, the university has saved more than $15 million in energy costs, money it has passed on to students through lower tuition and more scholarship funding. Hundreds of boreholes drilled approximately 500 feet beneath athletic fields and parking lots tap low-temperature thermal energy to help heat and cool campus buildings in what is now one of the largest such networks in the nation.

In the back of Black Seed Bagels in northern Brooklyn is a giant catering kitchen filled with industrial-size condiments and freezers full of dough. A tall, silver electric oven, named the Baconator, stands in a far corner, cooking thousands of pounds of meat every week to accompany Black Seed’s hand-rolled, wood-fired bagels. The Baconator is connected to a battery the size of a carry-on suitcase, which is plugged into the wall. While the morning rush is underway, the 2.8-kilowatt-hour battery can directly power the commercial oven to reduce the company’s reliance on the electric grid, Noah Bernamoff, Black Seed’s co-owner, explained recently at the company’s Bushwick shop. Two more batteries are paired with energy-intensive refrigerators in the front.

Electric Hydrogen is relying on proving out its lower-cost claims to win advantage. The company, which has raised over $600 million, has built a factory in Devens, Massachusetts, to make its electrolyzer stacks — the core parts of the proton exchange membrane (PEM) systems that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It has also partnered with other component manufacturers and engineering firms to streamline and standardize building the many other working parts of a green hydrogen plant — including power conversion, gas processing, water treatment, and thermal management — in a more modular way, Garabedian said. Overall, Electric Hydrogen claims its total installed costs are less than half those of systems using electrolyzers from PEM competitors such as Germany’s Siemens Energy and Thyssenkrupp Nucera, as well as those of lower-cost alkaline electrolysis systems built by Chinese companies, which make up the majority of installed capacity today.

As new technologies consume more power and alternative energy sources become increasingly necessary to fuel Iowans’ lives, Iowa State University researchers are working to create new batteries from accessible materials to store power from variable sources. Steve Martin and Patrick Johnson, both materials science and engineering professors at ISU, have earned a nearly $459,000 grant from the Iowa Energy Center to develop batteries using sodium, waste glass, biochar and sulfur — materials they’ve already tested and found viable.

Sunvapor, Inc. and Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC) have launched the first solar-powered desalination plant at a facility about 10 miles southeast of Carlsbad, the college announced. The pilot project aims to make use of the salty wastewater, called “produced water,” generated during oil extraction.