National Weather Forecast

On Friday, Florida will continue to see showers and thunderstorms due to an area of low pressure off the Atlantic Coast. A system moving through the eastern United States will also bring rain and snow chances. Meanwhile, California, the Great Basin, and parts of the southwestern deserts will see rain and even some snow chances.

We continue to watch the potential for an inch or two of rain through Saturday across the western and eastern United States, with mainly dry weather in the center of the nation.

Several inches of snow will fall through the first half of the weekend across the Sierra and Rockies.

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‘Deep disappointment’ over Xcel’s new policy that restricts small solar

More from the Star Tribune: “The financial benefits of rooftop solar were part of Kenneth and JoAn Warwick’s retirement plan at their historic house in Faribault — once home to the inventor of the Tilt-A-Whirl. So in 2021, they began the process of installing an array, spending $2,000 to remove a large maple tree in their yard and lining up a loan for initial costs. But to hook up solar to the grid, Xcel suggested the family would need to pay an enormous sum: $1 million. “Hours and hours of work, thousands of dollars and a deep disappointment in a company which pretends to care for the rate payers,” Kenneth said in an October letter to state regulators. The Warwick family is not alone in receiving a shockingly high estimate. The exorbitant cost would pay for infrastructure to make space on Xcel’s power distribution network, which has long had capacity problems.

America’s first hydrogen-powered ferry is set to sail

More from Canary Media: “America’s first hydrogen-fueled ferry is set to launch in San Francisco early next year after more than five years in development. As the milestone nears, the vessel’s owner says it’s already looking to deploy more zero-emissions ferries nationwide — particularly in places where aging, polluting diesel boats still ply rivers, sounds and coastlines. On Thursday, the startup Switch Maritime said it raised $10 million in Series A funding to expand its one-vessel fleet. Nexus Development Capital led the round, which the investor described as ​“catalytic capital” meant to help Switch move beyond its first pilot project to become a full-on ferry-building business. “A lot of municipal ferry operators in populated cities are under pressure to decarbonize, as are most transit systems,” Pace Ralli, Switch’s CEO, told Canary Media. ​“The technology exists; now it’s just about learning how to adopt these new decarbonized technologies and getting them to scale.”

A celebrated startup promised Kentuckians green jobs. It gave them a ‘grueling hell on earth.’

More from Grist: “The workers had spent the morning of November 8, 2021, clipping, trussing, and trellising hundreds of thousands of tomato plants that twisted almost four stories into the air. They were inside one of the world’s largest high-tech greenhouses, which sits on more than 60 acres of a former cattle field in Morehead, Kentucky. As one of the greenhouse workers, who I’ll call Nora, sat down for lunch in the worker canteen, she heard her colleagues whisper about their new task for the day. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell would be visiting that afternoon to give a speech praising the greenhouse company, AppHarvest. Before he arrived, management had to make sure their Spanish-speaking colleagues disappeared. “We had very little time,” recalled Nora, whose real name is being withheld because she is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. “We had to get them off the premises and away before he got there.”

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– D.J. Kayser