Inside Climate News has a story about a community that blocked solar projects by listing them in the zoning code next to junkyards and adult bookstores. I like how little effort that took. Nobody had to argue that solar is bad. They only had to decide which drawer it goes in, and the drawer did the arguing. Anyone who has stared at a zoning ordinance knows the categories are where the real decisions get made, and almost nobody reads them.

Data centers are getting their drawer too, and it’s a better-labeled one. Duke reached an agreement on a large-load tariff in North Carolina, a week after the commission there rejected its gas turbine request as “staggering” in cost and murky in need. Read together, those two look like a regulator saying: fine, you can have the customer, but the customer comes with a price list. A tariff is a category with a bill attached. That makes it more honest than the junkyard approach, though the junkyard approach was faster.

Then there’s Maryland, which went shopping for 800 MW of grid storage and came home with 440 MW. The reason given is the PJM capacity crunch, which I keep seeing and still find a little funny: the region is short of power, and its response to being short of power makes it hard to buy the thing that would help. Shortage seems to be self-reinforcing.

Meanwhile a smart thermostat company renamed itself Everyday Electric. I wonder what drawer that one goes in.

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