Biden makes his picks: Granholm is Energy Secretary and McCarthy is Climate Czar

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Twitter was wrong. Jennifer Granholm is Joe Biden’s expected pick for Energy Secretary.

A few months back, we polled Twitter on Biden’s likely DOE secretary and Twitter gave us answers such as Nick Fury, Tony Stark and Scrooge McDuck. More serious responses included Martin Heinrich, David Hochschild, Ken Caldeira, Saul Griffith, Ed Markey, Sonia Aggarwal, Hal Harvey, Daniel Kammen, Sandra Steingraber, Ari Peskoe and Jacky Rosen.

Although the clear crowd favorite was Washington Governor Jay Inslee, the correct answer is Jennifer Granholm.

Granholm is familiar with the auto sector. That matters because Biden hopes to greatly speed up adoption of electric vehicles as part of his energy and climate agenda.

Jigar Shah said that it was Good to see a politician get this job again,” on Twitter.

Obama-era EPA boss Gina McCarthy is slated to be named Biden’s White House domestic climate policy adviser to lead a government-wide policy push. Ali Zaidi, a top New York State energy and climate official, is expected to be named her deputy. Neither role requires Senate confirmation. Source: Axios

Software continues to eat the solar industry: RatedPower developed pvDesign, software that optimizes the design and carries out the engineering of utility-scale solar photovoltaic plants, reducing the process from weeks to minutes. The pvDesign interface incorporates a tool for comparing designs, as well as a financial optimization tool of PV plants — allowing users to create price templates used by the algorithm to automatically calculate the CAPEX and LCOE of all the projects simulated in pvDesign. Source: RatedPower

Ormat Technologies completed the acquisition of a shovel-ready energy storage asset in Upton County, Texas from Con Edison Development. Ormat’s wholly owned subsidiary, Viridity Energy Solutions Inc., will design, build, own and operate a 25 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project at the site. The project is co-located with an operational 157 MW solar PV generating facility that is owned and operated by CED Upton County Solar.  The BESS facility will provide ancillary services and energy optimization to the wholesale markets managed by ERCOT. Source: Ormat Technologies

CS Energy, an energy firm that designs and builds projects in the solar and storage installed over 1 GW of solar projects nationwide. CS Energy is one of only ten companies in the country to have reached this achievement. Source: CS Energy

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