Energy, Utilities & Environment

Greenville – October 08, 2026 -- Pacolet Milliken, LLC has acquired 100% of Georgia Renewable Power (GRP), adding 116 MW of biomass generating capacity across two Georgia plants and roughly tripling the size of its biomass platform. Financing for the deal was provided by Manulife; transaction terms were not disclosed.

Two Georgia biomass plants now sell output to Georgia Power under long-term contracts

GRP owns facilities in Franklin County and Madison County, Georgia, both fueled by woody biomass and classified as renewable power sources under federal and state standards. The plants sell electricity to Georgia Power under long-term power purchase agreements and generate renewable energy credits traded on the open market.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – October 08, 2026 -- Duke Energy has reached a settlement with North Carolina regulators and major tech firms that forces data centers and other large-load customers to pay upfront for all grid connection costs, shielding existing ratepayers from the expense of the state's data center boom.

Settlement expands cost protections to a wider pool of large-load customers

The agreement, filed with North Carolina Public Staff, lowers the threshold for mandatory customer protections from 100 megawatts to 50 megawatts with an 80% load factor. It applies to any electric service agreement signed after October 08, 2026, at Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress, the utility's two North Carolina subsidiaries.

Austin, Texas – October 07, 2026 -- Enverus has launched Runsheet Assistant, a new AI capability within Enverus Courthouse that lets land, title, and legal teams analyze an entire chain of title in a single query, cutting runsheet analysis time by up to 75% depending on the task.

Teams move from document-by-document review to querying entire filing sets at once

Title work has traditionally required reviewing documents one at a time, even with digital courthouse access, forcing professionals to open, read, and cross-reference dozens or hundreds of filings to establish a single ownership position. Runsheet Assistant replaces that manual process by letting users query a full document set simultaneously, identifying relationships across filings and reconstructing chains of title in minutes.

Greenwich, Conn. – October 07, 2026 -- Silver Point Capital's Direct Lending business has led a $650 million term loan financing to support Stryten Energy LLC's acquisition of C&D Technologies, Inc. and Trojan Battery Company, LLC, creating a combined battery manufacturing platform operating 18 facilities across the United States, Mexico and China.

Stryten completed the C&D Trojan acquisition on October 1, 2026

The deal brings together Stryten's existing energy storage business with C&D Technologies' stationary batteries, used in data center, telecom, utility and government standby power applications, and Trojan's specialty motive batteries, which power golf carts, low-speed electric vehicles, aerial lifts, floorcare machines, RVs and boats. Stryten is a portfolio company of Atlas Holdings, while C&D Trojan was previously owned by KPS Capital Partners.

Ann Arbor, Mich. – October 07, 2026 -- Volt Harbor, a software-defined energy startup based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will exhibit its MAC-BESS platform at The Battery Show North America 2026 in Detroit, claiming the technology cuts battery energy storage project costs by roughly 40-50% while shrinking physical footprint by half.

The company will demonstrate the system at Booth #6212 from October 12-15 at Huntington Place, positioning MAC-BESS as a single battery-agnostic layer covering the entire front-end power stack from grid connection to data center load.

Cary, N.C. – October 07, 2026 -- Solar electrification at rural Ugandan health clinics has driven a 107.3% increase in attended births, according to a data analysis conducted by SAS employee volunteers for nonprofit Let There Be Light International.

Electrified clinics gain nearly 12 additional operating hours per day

The SAS-led Data for Good project found electrified clinics reported an average of 11.5 additional operating hours daily, alongside 48.9 more patients served each week. Volunteer teams analyzed more than a decade of clinic and household data to quantify outcomes tied to solar installations under the organization's Safe Births + Healthy Homes program.

Copenhagen – – October 07, 2026 -- Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) has reached a final investment decision on Via Verde, an Italian biomethane platform with a pipeline of 20 projects, marking the firm's first deployment under its Advanced Bioenergy Fund II (ABF II) and its entry into the Italian renewable gas market.

Via Verde pipeline spans three Italian regions with 20 planned plants

The platform's projects are located across Lombardy, Abruzzo, and Campania, with each plant designed to process between 60,000 and 100,000 tonnes of agricultural waste annually, converting feedstock into biomethane for injection into the gas grid.

Apple Valley, Minn. – October 07, 2026 -- Great River Greening, GF and the Minnesota Twins are expanding their multi-year water restoration partnership to a 31-acre site at Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield, Minnesota, marking the second year of a joint sustainability initiative targeting high-impact locations across the Twin Cities metro.

Volunteers target 31 acres of buckthorn-degraded forest at Wood Lake Nature Center

On Oct. 7, volunteers from the three organizations will plant native forbs into a moist prairie within the 150-acre nature reserve, which features three miles of trails and boardwalk used for wildlife observation and environmental education. The restoration addresses forb diversity loss and buckthorn encroachment that has crowded out native shrubs and threatens the forest's understory layer, a condition partners say puts local water quality at risk.

Cambridge, Mass. – October 07, 2026 -- MIT Technology Review has released its 2026 list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, spotlighting startups and multinational corporations building solutions across energy storage, nuclear power, flood defense and electric vehicle batteries.

Editors vetted dozens of firms before selecting 10 honorees

The newsroom drew on input from researchers, investors, analysts and academics over several months of deliberation to narrow the field to 10 companies judged best positioned to address urgent climate threats.

Energy Dome, WeLion and WaveSave headline the grid, battery and flood-control categories

Energy Dome was recognized for grid-scale energy storage systems, WeLion for its semi-solid-state batteries used in electric vehicles, and WaveSave for a portable rubber dam designed for flood mitigation. The full list spans clean energy, nuclear fission, flood barriers and EV technology.

Bellaire, Texas – October 07, 2026 -- Resource Environmental Solutions, LLC (RES) has launched EcoSite IQ, a patent-pending methodology that combines geospatial, hydrologic and ecological modeling to accelerate early-stage screening of environmental restoration projects. RES, which describes itself as the nation's largest dedicated provider of nature-based solutions, has filed a provisional patent application for the system.

Early deployments identify water yields up to 665 million gallons annually

Initial applications of EcoSite IQ focused on water-resource initiatives, screening for projects with verified hydrologic benefits. Early site evaluations have surfaced individual opportunities with estimated annual water yields ranging between 26 million and 665 million gallons.