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The $3 Billion Plan To Turn Hoover Dam Into A Giant Battery

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Ivan Penn

Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century. Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.

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California Wants To Reinvent The Power Grid. So What Could Go Wrong?

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Ivan Penn

Two decades ago, when California deregulated the delivery of electric power, lawmakers, regulators and even some environmentalists hailed the decision as a way to lower consumers’ bills. The strategy proved disastrous. The plan resulted in an energy crisis that sent power bills soaring, prompted billions in penalties against utilities and banks for manipulating the new electricity market, and led Congress to enact laws to help prevent it all from happening again. Now the state’s leaders have a new proposal for an energy makeover, this time to create a single authority to manage the electric grid for most or all of the West.

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California Is Preparing For Extreme Weather. It’s Time To Plant Some Trees.

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Henry Fountain

For years, there has been a movement in California to restore floodplains, by moving levees back from rivers and planting trees, shrubs and grasses in the low-lying land between. The goal has been to go back in time, to bring back some of the habitat for birds, animals and fish that existed before the state was developed. But in addition to recreating the past, floodplain restoration is increasingly seen as a way of coping with the future — one of human-induced climate change.

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‘The New Normal’: Wildfires Roar Across The West, Again

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Thomas Fuller and Julie Turkewitz

As a roaring fire engulfed the hillside above him, Capt. Mark Bailey leaned on his shovel and guarded against embers leaping to the unburned side of the road above this small Northern California town. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said on Monday. He was one of a dozen firefighters positioned along the dirt road in a remote patch of forest, which fire engines and bulldozers used to access the front lines of the blaze, a wall of flames several stories tall and moving north above a valley filled with vineyards and olive groves.

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Scott Pruitt, Under Fire, Plans To Initiate A Big Environmental Rollback

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Coral Davenport

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected on Friday to send President Trump a detailed legal proposal to dramatically scale back an Obama-era regulation on water pollution, according to a senior E.P.A. official familiar with the plan. It is widely expected to be one of his agency’s most significant regulatory rollback efforts.

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