Sustainable Energy Coalition

Community Energy

The Domestic Manufacturing Gap: Can America Actually Build the Clean Energy Supply Chain It Claims to Need?

The United States has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerating its clean energy transition, yet the factories, foundries, and processing facilities required to manufacture the hardware of that transition remain stubbornly concentrated overseas. From solar wafers to wind tower steel to battery-grade lithium, America's supply chain vulnerabilities expose a fundamental tension between clean energy ambition and industrial policy reality. Closing these gaps is possible—but it will re

Aug 21, 2026

Community Energy

Clean Energy's Inequality Problem: When the Green Transition Leaves Low-Income Households Behind

America's clean energy transition is generating enormous wealth, environmental benefits, and technological innovation—but the costs of that transition are falling with crushing disproportionality on the households least equipped to bear them. As affluent families install rooftop solar and insulate themselves from rising grid costs, low-income renters and working-class homeowners face escalating electricity bills driven in part by the infrastructure investments that make the renewable revolution

Aug 21, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Utility Companies at the Crossroads: Adapt, Collapse, or Become the Grid of the Future

America's traditional electric utilities are confronting an existential reckoning as rooftop solar, community choice aggregation, and distributed energy resources erode their captive customer base. Trapped between aging business models and a rapidly decarbonizing marketplace, some utilities are scrambling to reinvent themselves as grid modernization leaders—while others risk becoming the Kodaks of the energy sector. The choices made in the next decade will determine who controls America's electr

Aug 21, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Small Reactors, Big Claims: Stress-Testing Nuclear Energy's Next Chapter

A new generation of nuclear technologies — small modular reactors, molten salt designs, and fusion ventures — has arrived with promises of cost competitiveness, rapid deployment, and carbon-free reliability that their predecessors catastrophically failed to deliver. Before policymakers commit billions of public dollars to this revival, a rigorous accounting of the science, economics, and track record of advanced nuclear is not merely warranted — it is essential.

Aug 18, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Blood in the Battery: How America's Clean Energy Revolution Is Fueled by Congolese Child Labor

The lithium-ion batteries powering America's electric vehicles and renewable energy storage systems depend heavily on cobalt, most of which is extracted under brutal conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Washington accelerates its clean energy ambitions, a troubling question demands an honest answer: can a transition built on exploitation ever be truly green? This investigation examines the human cost embedded in America's electrified future and what corporations and policymakers ar

Aug 18, 2026

Community Energy

Windfall for Whom? How Outside Investors Are Harvesting Rural America's Renewable Wealth

Across the American heartland, wind turbines and solar arrays are generating billions of dollars in clean energy revenue — most of which flows directly to out-of-state utility companies and institutional investors rather than to the rural communities hosting these projects. A growing number of landowners, local governments, and cooperative advocates are challenging this arrangement, arguing that the clean energy transition must deliver genuine economic democracy, not merely a new form of resourc

Aug 18, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Glass, Silicon, and Toxic Leftovers: Confronting the Solar Industry's End-of-Life Crisis

America's solar boom is generating an uncomfortable byproduct: millions of aging panels destined for landfills, carrying hazardous materials and squandering recoverable resources. Without urgent action from industry, regulators, and policymakers, the clean energy transition risks trading one environmental liability for another.

Aug 06, 2026

Community Energy

When the Tax Base Leaves Town: The Fiscal Collapse Facing Coal-Dependent Communities

For generations, coal-fired power plants served as the financial anchors of hundreds of small American towns, funding schools, fire departments, and roads through property tax revenues that dwarfed what any other local employer could provide. As those plants shutter at an accelerating pace, the communities they leave behind face a fiscal reckoning that federal transition programs have only begun to address.

Aug 06, 2026

Community Energy

After Sunset: How America's Renewable Energy Gap Reshapes the Grid — and Who Pays the Price

Solar energy's dominance in daytime electricity markets masks a structural vulnerability that emerges every evening: the hours after sunset when generation drops and demand persists. Understanding who benefits and who bears the burden of this daily transition is essential to building a genuinely equitable clean energy grid.

Aug 06, 2026

Corporate Accountability

The Hard-to-Abate Economy: Breaking the Barriers That Keep America's Heaviest Industries Locked in Carbon

Steel mills, cement kilns, chemical refineries, and aluminum smelters collectively account for roughly one-third of America's total carbon emissions — yet these sectors remain conspicuously absent from the mainstream conversation about clean energy transition. The barriers are real, technically complex, and economically daunting, but they are not insurmountable. A rigorous examination of where the obstacles lie, and where credible pathways forward exist, is long overdue.

Aug 04, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Thirsty Power: How the American West's Water Crisis Is Forcing a Reckoning With Renewable Energy's Hidden Footprint

As historic droughts tighten their grip across the American West, a largely unexamined tension is emerging at the heart of the clean energy transition: the water demands of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure. From evaporative cooling at concentrating solar facilities to the concrete-intensive foundations of wind turbines, energy production and water consumption are more entangled than the industry's green credentials suggest. Resolving this conflict will require both technological innov

Aug 04, 2026

Community Energy

Invisible Consumption: The Standby Power Drain Quietly Undermining America's Clean Energy Goals

Across millions of American homes and offices, devices that appear to be 'off' continue drawing power around the clock, collectively consuming enough electricity to rival the output of dozens of power plants. This silent energy drain not only inflates household utility bills but actively complicates the nation's transition to a cleaner, more efficient grid. Understanding and addressing phantom load is no longer a matter of personal finance — it is a prerequisite for serious climate progress.

Aug 04, 2026

Community Energy

The Heat Beneath Our Feet and Above Our Rooftops: America's Underinvested Thermal Energy Revolution

The clean energy conversation in America is overwhelmingly framed around electricity — solar panels, wind turbines, and the grid that connects them. Yet nearly half of all U.S. energy consumption goes toward generating heat: warming homes and commercial buildings, powering industrial processes, and producing the steam that drives manufacturing across the country. Thermal energy solutions are addressing this enormous demand quietly and effectively, and they deserve far more attention than they re

Jul 29, 2026

Community Energy

Atlantic Winds Rising: The Coastal States Betting Their Energy Future on Offshore Power

The U.S. Atlantic coastline holds one of the most formidable untapped renewable energy resources on the planet, yet America has barely scratched the surface of its offshore wind potential. From Maine to Florida, coastal states are racing to claim their share of a transformation that could redefine the nation's energy landscape — if the industry can overcome the political, economic, and logistical obstacles still standing in its way.

Jul 29, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Beyond Lithium: A Rigorous Assessment of the Energy Storage Technologies Competing to Power Tomorrow's Grid

A wave of next-generation battery technologies is approaching commercial markets with bold claims about solving the limitations that have constrained lithium-ion's dominance. Solid-state cells, flow batteries, sodium-ion chemistries, and a dozen other contenders are attracting billions in venture and industrial capital — but separating genuine breakthroughs from well-funded hype demands a level of scrutiny that breathless press releases rarely invite.

Jul 29, 2026

Community Energy

Still Water, Wasted Watts: Why America's Aging Dams Are Failing the Clean Energy Future

Thousands of aging dams, reservoirs, and irrigation systems across the United States sit largely untapped as potential clean energy assets, yet a tangle of outdated regulations, deferred maintenance, and financing gaps keeps their renewable potential locked away. As the nation races to decarbonize its electricity grid, hydroelectric modernization and pumped-storage expansion represent a largely overlooked opportunity. This investigation examines why America's water infrastructure is failing to d

Jul 22, 2026

Community Energy

Buried in Red Tape: How America's Permitting Maze Is Stalling the Clean Energy Transition

The United States possesses the wind, solar, and land resources to power a clean energy future many times over — yet a labyrinthine web of overlapping federal, state, and local permitting requirements is keeping that future perpetually out of reach. Developers report that securing approvals for a utility-scale wind or solar project can consume a decade or more, long after the turbines and panels themselves could have been manufactured and installed. Understanding why this bottleneck exists — and

Jul 22, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Green Promise or Gas Industry Lifeline? The Battle Over America's Hydrogen Future

Hydrogen has emerged as one of the most contested technologies in the American clean energy debate, championed simultaneously by climate scientists and fossil fuel executives—often for very different reasons. While genuine applications for green hydrogen exist in hard-to-decarbonize sectors, a growing body of evidence suggests that much of the industry's enthusiasm is less about solving the climate crisis than about preserving natural gas infrastructure. Understanding the distinction is essentia

Jul 22, 2026

Community Energy

When the Lights Go Out: Community Microgrids and the Grassroots Fight for Energy Resilience

As hurricanes, wildfires, and ice storms deliver increasingly devastating blows to America's aging power infrastructure, communities across the country are no longer willing to simply wait for restoration crews. Microgrids — locally controlled energy systems anchored by renewable generation and battery storage — are emerging as a frontline defense against climate-driven grid failure. From tribal nations in the Southwest to coastal towns along the Gulf of Mexico, the push for distributed energy r

Jul 21, 2026

Corporate Accountability

Silicon, Servers, and the Climate Bill: Holding Big Tech Accountable for AI's Energy Appetite

The artificial intelligence boom is quietly driving one of the most significant surges in electricity demand the United States has seen in decades. Data centers powering AI workloads are increasingly running on fossil fuels, raising urgent questions about whether the tech industry's climate commitments can survive its own ambitions. Meaningful policy intervention and corporate transparency are now essential to ensure AI's rise does not reverse hard-won progress on decarbonization.

Jul 21, 2026