Southeast ​“battery belt” expands with new N.C. factory

STORAGE: North Carolina awards a sodium-ion battery maker a $21.7 million grant plus additional incentives for workforce training and site improvements to secure its commitment to build a $1.4 billion factory at a long-dormant business park. (Raleigh News & Observer, WRAL)

OVERSIGHT: A Louisiana regulatory board quietly approves the $484 million sale of Entergy Louisiana’s gas distribution system to a private equity firm that’s given more than $200,000 in campaign donations to the five board members plus a past commissioner. (Floodlight)

WIND: As the burgeoning offshore wind industry faces economic and political headwinds, Dominion Energy is buying more leases and sinking investment into building the supply chain around its massive project near Virginia. (Politico, E&E News)

SOLAR:

• Florida regulators report a 31% increase in renewable energy installations last year as people and businesses add rooftop solar. (Spectrum News)
• An energy company begins operation of a 180 MW solar farm in Arkansas that produces power for General Motors. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

OIL & GAS: 

• The U.S. oil and gas industry’s boom under President Biden illustrates how difficult it is for a president to stop or even slow oil production. (Washington Post)
• Air pollution from liquefied natural gas export terminals in the U.S. is responsible for an estimated 60 premature deaths and $957 million in health costs each year, environmental groups find. (The Guardian)

GRID:

• Texas’ grid operator is concerned that plans by San Antonio’s municipal utility to close three units at a power plant by next spring could put more pressure on an already-troubling transmission chokepoint and further destabilize an already wonky power grid. (Houston Chronicle)
• A Republican Texas Congress member who is retiring at the end of this term discusses why he thinks the state grid needs more natural gas and nuclear power until there’s a better way to store energy. (Texas Tribune)
• Duke Power restores power to the home of a Florida man who lost electricity for more than a week after his road flooded in the days following Tropical Storm Debby. (WCJB)
• The family of a South Carolina woman killed by a rotting utility pole will receive $30 million through a wrongful death settlement involving Dominion Energy and a communications company. (Associated Press)

ELECTRIC VEHICLES:

• A Tennessee think tank urges state officials to update ​“outdated and arbitrary” zoning laws to facilitate more housing needed to accommodate an expected population boom following the completion of Ford’s BlueOval electric vehicle and battery complex. (Tennessee Lookout)
• Hyundai’s ambitious plans for its Georgia electric vehicle factory have been complicated by a spat over water with its neighbors. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

GEOTHERMAL: A new Texas high school is powered by geothermal energy from more than 4,000 wells that pump water from a large pond. (WFAA)

NUCLEAR: A company that makes a sodium-cooled fast fission reactor receives letters of intent for roughly 1,350 MW of microreactor capacity, including for an energy company’s oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin. (Utility Dive)

COAL: Coal industry leaders gather in West Virginia for a three-day symposium about mining safety and the fossil fuel’s future. (Bluefield Daily Telegraph)