u/Vegetable_Day_6786

Out of nearly $1 trillion in grants, contracts and other direct federal outlays provided by Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws, POLITICO found approximately $600 billion dollars remains available for recipients to spend or for federal agencies to award. Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that total $1 trillion — about $60 billion — though many of those cuts are still wrapped up in court challenges.

Now the fate of those leftover dollars is an emerging subplot in the November elections and in congressional efforts to prevent a government shutdown this fall.

Battery adoption is on the rise and prices are dropping but this backlog is putting a damper on momentum. What ideas and solutions are out there to mitigate this and speed up the process?

1. What kind of lawsuits have been filed?
2. Which courts get to decide?
3. How did OBBBA change things?
4. Can the agencies simply shift their priorities?
5. Has anything been decided yet once and for all?

The AI data center boom relies on copper, lithium, and rare earths, but ongoing supply chain pressures are testing whether producers can keep up.

Came across this in a Substack this morning and had fun poking around! It's a tool that shows the variability in energy needs across the U.S., including how/where DERs are going to be valuable. It also uses an algorithm to predict the hourly load carried by every transmission substation in the country. Interesting to even take the zoomed out view and see where load scores are higher, I thought there were some surprising pockets in the central/southern regions.

Where does a driverless robotaxi go between rides?
A new study — Staging at the Curb: Evaluating the impacts of shared automated vehicle fleet operations under curb usage restrictions — finds that letting AVs consume curb space might actually be the optimal outcome.

Researchers modeled 1,700 shared automated vehicles serving 68,000 daily San Francisco trips. Tying together Autofleet’s commercial fleet simulator, synthetic ridehail demand from Replica and curb availability data from INRIX, they compared several operating models: continuous circling, staging only at free non-residential curbs, access to all legally available curbs and overnight staging.

The package of four bills, known as the Safe and Clean Outdoor Ownership Practices, or SCOOP, Act came in response to rising complaints about dog droppings around the city.

Federal tax credits for residential storage expired at the end of last year, prompting record sales in Q4 of 2025 — and then sales climbed even higher in the first quarter of 2026, per a BloombergNEF analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

As we're all well aware, costs are up for a myriad of reasons! I've seen some discussion here of the pros and cons of raising prices to help margins. But has anyone considered or tried utility reward programs or even third-party technologies like what Wonder is doing with this new NYC program? Seems to be a relatively localized/niche solution but also promising if similar options gain momentum elsewhere.

Stationary batteries added a cleaner, fuel-free choice to the back-up power mix, but they can be even more expensive to purchase outright than diesel or natural gas generators, putting them out of reach for most middle-class homeowners. With import tariffs, country-of-origin restrictions and other factors putting upward pressure on component and module pricing for small battery systems, this dynamic seems unlikely to change soon.

Yet distributed battery adoption could still grow, propelled by retailers marketing home batteries for little or nothing up front and a monthly fee that in some electricity markets costs a little more than a top-tier Netflix or Hulu subscription.

Today Mayor Zohran Mamdani will announce plans for a lottery to give New York City high school students 2,100 free tickets to several Broadway productions.