Distributed Energy Resources, GHG Emissions, Regulation, Distributed Generation, Regulation, Solar  -  March 18, 2017

Weekend reads: Brooklyn's blockchain microgrid; Obama's climate money; solar developer woes & more

Every Saturday, we'll bring you five of the most interesting — or quirky; it is the weekend after all — energy stories from around the web that you may have missed this week. This weekend's reads: 

Solar Experiment Lets Neighbors Trade Energy Among Themselves (The New York Times): Brooklyn is known the world over for things small-batch and local, like designer clogs, craft bourbon and artisanal sauerkraut. Now, it is trying to add electricity to the list. In a promising experiment in an affluent swath of the borough, dozens of solar-panel arrays spread across rowhouse rooftops are wired into a growing network. Called the Brooklyn Microgrid, the project is signing up residents and businesses to a virtual trading platform that will allow solar-energy producers to sell excess-electricity credits from their systems to buyers in the group, who may live as close as next door.

To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It's Hard to Find (Bloomberg): President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies -- in part so they couldn't easily be cut. There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.

Google names Houston top U.S. city for rooftop solar potential (Houston Business Journal):  Houston may be the oil and gas capital of the world, but solar energy may be a better fit, according to a new report. Google Inc. announced on March 14 an expansion of its Project Sunroof website, which shows how much money homeowners and property owners can save by installing solar panels on their roofs.

Trump seeks to ax Appalachia economic programs, causing worry in coal country (Reuters): President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating funding for economic development programs supporting laid-off coal miners and others in Appalachia, stirring fears in a region that supported him of another letdown on the heels of the coal industry's collapse. The 2018 budget proposal submitted to Congress by the White House on Thursday would cut funds to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The Washington-based organizations are charged with diversifying the economies of states like West Virginia and Kentucky to help them recover from coal's decline.

Sungevity Cuts Staff by Two-Thirds as Downward Spiral Continues (Greentech Media): The residential solar company, ranked fifth for market share on GTM Research's PV Leaderboard, laid off 66 percent of its remaining workforce Thursday morning. The company had already cut dozens of workers in January after an expected merger fell through at the close of 2016, taking with it the promise of a $200 million cash infusion. Bankruptcy could be coming very soon, multiple sources at the company reported. 

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