Category: DC_CN ENERGY2021_CN

Renewable natural gas and green hydrogen could be used to help the District of Columbia affordably reach its 2050 carbon neutrality goal while avoiding costly grid upgrades, Washington Gas told the D.C. Public Service Commission in comments filed Tuesday.

Alex Hillbrand and Clémentine Stip have long dreamed of installing solar panels on the roof of their rowhouse in Mount Pleasant, where sunshine shoots through the leafy canopies of Rock Creek Park, providing an abundant and sustainable source of energy that could heat their home and power their appliances.

Ludlow-Taylor Elementary School is a public school and Community Renewable Energy Facility located in an underserved community in Washington, D.C. that installed a 200 kilowatt (kW) solar array in late 2019 to meet its energy needs and sell an excess of 30kW back to the utility to reduce operating costs. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and forced the school to shift to remote learning, the excess solar being produced amounted to 90 kW – far in excess of the net metering agreement with the local utility, Pepco, for export to the grid.

As the sun glowed through the columns of the Jefferson Memorial around 7:15 AM Wednesday, a man in a racing wetsuit began to churn the murky waters of the Tidal Basin with his kicks as he pushed a model of a sunken row house further into the basin.

If it seems like it’s been a rainy few weeks, that’s because it has been — August 2021, was, in fact, the rainiest August in D.C. since 1967. That’s not even counting the downpours on Sept. 1, as the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through the region. It was a rainy summer altogether: in the past 50 years, there has only been one rainier summer, in 2018.

The latest U.N. climate change report pulls no punches: Human activities are contributing to climate change “at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.” And two of the largest components of household carbon footprints are transportation and household energy use, both of which are correlated with
where people live.

The D.C. government is preparing to build a sprawling school-bus terminal in the historically Black enclave of Brentwood, where residents have long lived amid industrial sites that discharge pollution into their community.

Potomac Electric Power Co. (Pepco) filed a “Climate Solutions Plan” with District of Columbia regulators on Tuesday, sketching out a high-level approach to providing clean energy in the nation’s capital that includes a focus on electric vehicles, building decarbonization and a variety of grid modernization technologies.

Wednesday marks our fourth straight day of hitting at least 90 degrees in Washington as we slog through our third heat wave of the season. But there’s good news for those who loathe the heat: We’re just about at the pinnacle of the hottest part of our summer, meaning average temperatures are about to begin their long decline toward winter.

Just in the past three years, the Trump administration has attempted to roll back at least 95 environmental rules and regulations to the detriment of the environment and Americans’ public health. Moreover, the administration refuses to act to mitigate the effects of climate change