States plan lawsuit against Trump’s offshore wind deals

This roundup of energy news headlines comes from our Northeast Energy News newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.

OFFSHORE WIND

• Eight East Coast states plan to take legal action to challenge the Trump administration’s deals paying energy developers to abandon their offshore wind leases. (E&E News)

• Offshore wind turbines near New England are increasingly providing a home for Jonah crabs. (WPRI)

SOLAR

• The wildfire smoke that turned skies orange and hazy in much of the Northeast this week also caused solar production to plummet in New England. (WBUR)

BIOMASS

• Lawmakers and advocates hope Massachusetts’ pending energy bill will deal a fatal blow to a proposed wood-burning power plant in an asthma-prone community that has been fighting the project for more than 15 years. (Canary Media)

DATA CENTERS

• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) signs a law that will allow data centers to gain priority in the interconnection queue if they fund residential clean energy and energy efficiency projects. (Canary Media)

• Amazon plans to have more than 350 fossil-fuel-fired backup generators at a data center complex it is building in Pennsylvania, despite neighbors’ concerns about water pollution, emissions, and strain on the grid. (WHYY)

• Grid operator PJM seems poised to adopt a new auction process that would push data centers to pay directly for the energy infrastructure they need to operate. (Canary Media)

FOSSIL FUELS

• Congressional Republicans fall short in their efforts to end a fracking ban in the Delaware River Basin, though environmental advocates expect them to try again. (Inside Climate News)

• The pop-up discount gasoline chain Freedom Fuels Network appears to have been started by an assistant NFL coach and a former commodities trader with ties to Republican politics. (Politico)

• Maryland regulators are failing to enforce a new law requiring utilities to prove natural gas pipeline replacements benefit customers and make the system safer. (Maryland Matters)

• A Delaware refinery with a long history of environmental violations is fined nearly $1 million for releasing toxic gas into the air for three weeks in May. (WHYY)

EFFICIENCY

• Massachusetts’ state House and Senate energy bills both include provisions that would require some moderate-income residents to undergo income verification before receiving some efficiency incentives, a measure some advocates call ​“counterintuitive” and ​“infuriating.” (CommonWealth Beacon)

TRANSMISSION

• The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a new transmission line carrying hydropower from Canada into New York, is expected to be offline until the end of July: ​“This ongoing CHPE outage is unacceptable,” said a Hochul spokesperson. (Reuters)