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Toyota has announced plans to invest an additional $8 billion in its electric battery manufacturing site in Randolph County, including hiring another 3,000 employees. This historic announcement comes on the heels of Governor Cooper’s meeting with Toyota President Koji Sato during the SEUS/Japan Conference in Tokyo earlier this month. Toyota’s total investment in the Randolph County site will now total $13.9 billion and more than 5,000 jobs.

The vehicles emit only water vapor and warm air as exhaust, reducing air pollution in the neighborhoods where they run. But producing and transporting hydrogen for the fuel cells can be a significant source of climate emissions, which is why SARTA is partnering with energy company Enbridge and the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2, on a plan to make the fuel on-site with solar power. “So it will be green,” said Kirt Conrad, SARTA’s CEO, referring to the use of renewable energy to power the production of hydrogen by splitting water.

The nation’s first networked geothermal system owned by a utility went live June 4 in Framingham, Massachusetts. The roughly $15 million network of ground-source heat pumps will cool and heat 36 buildings without fossil fuels, says Eversource Energy, the utility leading the project. As decision-makers nationwide eye networked geothermal as a technology with the potential to decarbonize entire neighborhoods, the two-year Framingham pilot aims to offer lessons for other communities.

Of the $100 million, $53 million is available for business and public-sector EV fleet purchases, while nearly $38 million is designated to upgrade infrastructure for non-residential charger installations. An additional nearly $9 million is intended for residential charging stations.

Already, the startup has worked with ready-mix suppliers to provide its cement for projects with Caltrans, the City of Santa Cruz, and the City of Berkeley, alongside various California-based contracting companies. Last year, Fortera received $85 million in series C funding to expand operations beyond its plant in Redding, California. Since then, it has begun engineering an expanded plant at an undisclosed location in the Western U.S., with the capacity to produce 400,000 tons of cement per year. (The Redding plant produces 15,000 tons per year.)

Amogy, which was founded by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD graduates, aims to help decarbonize sectors like maritime shipping that are viewed as more difficult to shift away from fossil fuels. To do that, it created a chemical reactor that ​“cracks” ammonia — a compound often used in products like fertilizer — into nitrogen and hydrogen. The hydrogen then goes through a fuel cell that can power vessels, trucks, and other machinery, while the nitrogen is released into the air.

The manufacturer Calumet said the funding process is back on track for its subsidiary, Montana Renewables, which plans to expand its biofuels facility in Great Falls, Montana. The company currently makes fuel for planes and trucks using seed oils and discarded animal fats. With the expansion, the refinery will be able to produce about 315 million gallons per year, most of which will be sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.

The Biden administration offered a $1.76 billion conditional loan guarantee for GEM A-CAES, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian startup Hydrostor. That federal backing will help secure financing for the Willow Rock advanced compressed-air energy storage (A-CAES) project planned near the town of Rosamond in California’s eastern Kern County.

In northeastern Oregon, nearly 9,500 acres of farmland will soon be transformed into a 1,200-megawatt solar project. State regulators approved Sunstone Solar, the nation’s largest proposed solar-plus-storage facility, last fall. Once up and running, the project will include up to 7,200 megawatt-hours of storage, and its nearly four million solar panels will produce enough clean electricity to power around 800,000 homes each year. Pine Gate Renewables, the North Carolina–based developer behind the project, touted a first-of-a-kind initiative to invest up to $11 million in local wheat farms to offset economic impacts on the region’s agriculture. Construction will begin in 2026.

LPO on Friday afternoon finalized a $996 million loan guarantee for Ioneer​’s Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project, a massive lithium and boron mining and processing facility in Nevada. That final commitment ​“upsized” the initial $700 million conditional commitment offered to Ioneer by DOE in early 2023.