Police have dropped charges against more than 100 protesters two years after they blockaded the port of Newcastle as part of one of Australia’s largest climate protests.
In the Newcastle local court on Friday, the police prosecutor withdrew charges against 125 protesters. Legal group Climate Defenders Australia, which is representing the bulk of the protesters, said it had petitioned police to do so.
A different kind of energy project has arrived in central Utah’s Castle Valley, with the launch of Green River Energy Center—a facility boasting a million solar panels and close to 500 batteries spanning several square miles.
The sprawling new facility, which officially went online in June, was recently captured in satellite images obtained by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat-8 satellite.
The region has long been associated with energy production, beginning with coal mines beneath Utah’s Wasatch Plateau, which, in the late 1800s, helped establish the region as an important source of fuel well over a century ago.
Now, with the launch of the Green River Energy Center, the massive energy facility, located around 130 miles south of Salt Lake City, reportedly boasts 400 megawatts of solar-generating capacity along with another 400 megawatts of battery storage.
At such production levels, the new facility now ranks among some of the largest and most promising utility-scale solar and battery projects that U.S. officials anticipate will be linked to the U.S. electrical grid by the end of the year.
(Image Credit: Lauren DauphinUSGS/NASA)
Growing Concerns of U.S. Power System Failures
The Green River Energy Center has launched its operations amid growing concerns about the strain on the power grid that ensues during the summer amid elevated temperatures. On Sunday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued an emergency order to help ensure power could be maintained across 17 U.S. states that are currently being impacted by extreme temperatures.
The order specifically orders generation units maintained by Southwest Power Pool, Inc., to be dispatched, along with maintaining its backup generation resources only as a last resort before any declaration of an Energy Emergency alert (EEA) 3.
“The Trump Administration is tapping into an abundant supply of unused backup generation to maintain affordable, reliable, and secure power for hardworking American families and businesses,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in a statement.
Batteries and a Million Solar Panels
With its unprecedented million-solar-panel facility, the Green River Energy Center is anticipated to become a major provider to Salt Lake City and other parts of Utah, with project staff estimating that it could generate enough electricity to serve more than 100,000 homes.
Although the site’s massive solar array is what is most eye-catching in the newly released satellite imagery, it is the facility’s battery system that has been getting attention. A primary reason is the system’s ability to store electricity produced during periods of strong sunlight and heat, the likes of which many states are currently experiencing. This allows the facility to continue supplying power even after sunset, or during periods of cloud coverage where less solar generation is available.
Additionally, the project leverages Castle Valley’s existing energy infrastructure. Transmission lines dating back to the region’s coal-powered energy facilities can now help move electricity back into the broader grid, which helps the project build off of existing power infrastructure in the region.
Coal Remains Important
Coal still plays an important role in Utah’s history. The state’s official rock, this fundamental fuel source has long been what drives the state’s energy systems, although that has significantly declined in recent years.
Coal still accounted for close to 75 percent of Utah’s electricity generation a little more than a decade ago. As of 2025, that figure had fallen to nearly half, while solar power had seen a major increase in use during the same period, rising from almost no use in 2015 to producing close to 14 percent of the state’s electricity by 2025.
The Big Picture
More than just revealing a view of power generation facilities like the Green River Energy Center from space, satellite observations that include the new Landsat imagery can help document changes like these, as energy infrastructure expands across the landscape.
That data can often be vital in terms of helping planners and policymakers working to evaluate the renewable energy potential of a region like central Utah, as well as helping to monitor how new energy systems are adopted and perform over time.
For Castle Valley, the Green River Energy Center represents the latest chapter in a long history of producing energy for Utah, and one that builds on some of the fundamental infrastructure that taps into the state’s history of coal production.
Additional details about the new Landsat-8 imagery can be found here.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
At Branxton community hall in the New South Wales Hunter Valley last week, local resident Janet Murray was given five minutes to speak about plans for the state’s biggest coalmine extension.
Before her were dozens of people, also there to share their views about whether the 19-year extension proposed by Hunter Valley Operations (HVO) should be allowed to proceed.
A 201-million-year-old climate catastrophe turned Europe into a landscape of fern savannahs that repeatedly caught fire, according to new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Campaigners hope move will force commercial banks to rethink holding assets linked to the fossil fuel
Climate campaigners have declared a victory after the Bank of England said it would no longer accept bonds linked to one of the most polluting industries on the planet for key loan arrangements.
The ban, which comes into force in October, marks a fresh crackdown on thermal coal, which is burned in power plants to create electricity, and has long been a target of green policy activists.
Paleontologists in China have discovered what they say is the earliest confirmed pieces of amber ever found, a fossilized resin roughly 385 million years old (Middle Devonian epoch) that predates the previous record-holder by about 65 million years.
There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead
The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.
Lanchester Wines in north-east England uses heat from a disused coalmine to maintain wine temperatures and with 23,000 flooded mines in the UK, there’s huge potential for more businesses and homes to follow its lead
Shove them in a fridge, stash them in a cellar – this is how most people store their favourite bottles of wine. But if you have warehouses full of thousands of vintages, you have to think a little differently.
For the last eight winters, Lanchester Wines has used heat from a disused coalmine to maintain ideal storage temperatures at its facilities in the north-east of England, helping to prevent freezing or spoilage.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced his administration's latest attempt to prop up the US coal industry during an incoherent press event that randomly oscillated between energy issues and Trump's fixation with building and renovating monuments in DC. The energy portion of the events was also frequently disconnected from reality.
"Today we're taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal," said Trump, apparently unaware that coal is one of the most expensive means of generating electricity in the US.
With wind and solar power getting cheaper, coal has become the second-most expensive way of producing electricity, trailing only the cost of building a new nuclear plant. As a result, no new coal plants have been completed in over a decade, and coal has gone from powering over half the electrical grid to producing only about 15 percent of the nation's electricity. That's before the indirect costs of coal use are considered. It produces the most greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy, releases dangerous particulates and chemicals into the atmosphere, and leaves behind ash that has high levels of toxic metals.
Of the roughly $700 million in total funding, $425 million would be used to upgrade and extend the life of 13 coal plants that otherwise might have closed in the coming years.
US president announces plans for two new coal plants, in Alaska and West Virginia, using Defense Production Act
Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday.
Maxwell Chikumbutso's claim of a "free energy" vehicle powered by radio frequency energy, contradicts established physics, particularly the laws of thermodynamics. All forms of energy involve costs. Chikumbutso provides no evidence to support his "free energy" from radio-waves claim. It is foolish to believe in unverified revolutionary energy solutions.
A recent high-grade iron ore discovery in Western Australia, valued at $6 trillion, raises questions about environmental policies. The processing of iron ore to make steel requires coal, leading to significant CO2 emissions, highlighting the stark contradiction with the Climate Cult agenda.
Climate Cult windfarms expose the myth that wind can replace hydrocarbon fuels for power generation. Wind turbines in Scotland are revealed to be secretly powered by diesel generators due to cold weather challenges. Their reliance on hydrocarbon fuels raises environmental concerns and questions the sustainability of wind power in a changing climate.
Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably.
A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned to its normal pattern: slow growth, with renewables pushing coal off the grid. The one oddity is that hydroelectric production has surged without a corresponding increase in capacity, likely due to unusually warm weather in the western US causing the snowpack to melt early. That may have consequences later in the year.
Pushing fossil fuels out
Overall demand in the US grew by only 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period the year before. Often, changes in demand during this part of the year are driven by weather-related heating demand. But the US had an unusual combination set of weather conditions to start 2026, with the western half baking in unseasonal warm temperatures, while the eastern half suffered a deep freeze. So we'll probably need data from more of the year before we read too much into the small rise in demand we've seen so far.
Login
