Sarah Shemkus
Sarah Shemkus reports on how the clean energy transition is reshaping daily life, policy, and business, with a particular focus on state-level decisions and real-world performance in New England’s energy systems. She writes as a reporter at Canary Media, bringing long experience covering business, technology, sustainability, and the points where they intersect. Her work stands out for connecting complex infrastructure and policy debates to concrete impacts on households, communities, and regional grids.
State energy policy, affordability and climate politics
Shemkus regularly examines how state legislation and regulatory decisions affect energy costs and the pace of decarbonization. She has covered Massachusetts’ struggle with soaring energy bills, detailing how disagreements over causes and solutions are scrambling traditional political alignments around clean energy and affordability. In another piece, she follows the passage of a major energy-affordability bill through the Massachusetts Senate, tracking how lawmakers balance ratepayer protections with climate goals.
Her reporting on the effort to move Massachusetts off gas service documents the legal fights and utility obligations that can slow or redirect plans to phase out fossil fuel infrastructure. She extends this focus beyond one state, co-reporting on how Rhode Island’s budget process ultimately preserved funding for energy efficiency and clean energy even as elected officials invoked affordability to justify rollbacks. Shemkus also writes about broader shifts in climate politics, including a feature on the “climate vibe shift” in which she explores changing public sentiment, new advocacy tactics, and evolving political coalitions.
Across these stories, she traces the tension between cost, reliability, and emissions, showing how those trade-offs play out in legislative chambers and utility commissions.
Grid reliability, hydropower and regional clean energy flows
A recurring thread in Shemkus’ work is the performance of the regional grid under stress and the role clean energy resources play in keeping the lights on. She has reported on a major transmission line carrying hydropower from Canada into a New England state, assessing whether the project is delivering the promised renewable power and documenting days when no electricity at all flowed over the line.
Follow-up coverage tracks a period when Canadian hydropower slowed to an “ominous trickle,” using that disruption to highlight the risks of relying on long-distance imports and the need for diversified clean energy portfolios.
In another article, she focuses on a severe heat wave that hit New England’s grid and shows how behind-the-meter solar and a growing network of batteries helped avert blackouts and save consumers millions of dollars. She also covers the early retirement of the region’s final coal plant, explaining what that closure means for emissions, reliability, and the mix of replacement resources.
These grid stories combine narrative reporting with careful attention to data, emphasizing whether high-profile projects and policies are delivering on promises for reliability and decarbonization.
Electrification, electric vehicles and distributed energy
Shemkus devotes substantial coverage to electrification initiatives and the technologies that bring clean energy closer to consumers, including electric vehicles. In one Massachusetts story, she reports on a program that will allow parked EVs to feed electricity back into the grid during the summer, explaining how bidirectional charging could support system reliability and provide value to drivers. She has profiled a household where an EV helps power appliances and contributes to grid services, using the case to illustrate the practical benefits and complexities of vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid setups.
Her reporting on balcony solar laws surveys where states stand on allowing small-scale solar systems on multiunit buildings, highlighting how these policies can expand access to clean power for renters.
She also covers a food bank that installed a microgrid for backup power, showing how distributed energy resources can protect vulnerable communities from outages. In the transport space, Shemkus has written about a Massachusetts startup developing versatile solar-powered boats, describing how sun-and-battery propulsion could be customized for ferries, tourist cruises, and water taxis.
She further follows geothermal innovations, including a company completing its first project with novel drilling technology, situating the work within broader efforts to tap superhot geothermal resources. Across these pieces, she focuses on how emerging technologies are deployed in specific programs and businesses, rather than treating them as abstract concepts.
Programs, pilots and rural clean energy challenges
Another hallmark of Shemkus’ reporting is close attention to pilots and local programs that could become models for wider adoption. She has covered a home-electrification pilot that provides solar, heat pumps, and batteries to households that could not otherwise afford them, detailing how turnkey offerings can overcome financial and logistical barriers. Her coverage of New England’s plan to spend $450 million to accelerate heat pump adoption explains how incentives and outreach are structured to move the region off fossil-fuel heating.
She also reports on how Vermont’s pioneering clean heat plan fell apart, unpacking the roles of misinformation, political opposition, and complicated program design in the plan’s collapse.
In a collaborative feature on rural America, Shemkus examines the challenges and opportunities of deploying clean energy in less densely populated areas, including land-use conflicts and economic development questions. She extends this lens to local tax policy, with a story on New Hampshire Republicans seeking to raise taxes on homes with solar, showing how fiscal decisions can influence the viability of residential clean energy. By tracing both successful and failed initiatives, she gives readers a grounded view of what it takes to move from policy ambition to durable implementation.
Broader sustainability and long-form investigative work
Beyond energy and vehicles, Shemkus brings a broader sustainability and accountability background to her beat. Her biography notes that she has reported on small-town government in New Hampshire, investigated alleged swindlers and con men, and explored the intricacies of local food systems. She is described as a longtime journalist whose work on business, technology, and sustainability has appeared in national and international outlets such as The Guardian, The Boston Globe, TheAtlantic.com, and Slate.
That experience informs her current coverage, which often blends investigative curiosity with accessible explanation of complex systems, whether she is unpacking the politics of clean energy affordability or the technical performance of new infrastructure.
4 more automobile journalists.
Aarian Marshall
Aarian Marshall is a staff writer at WIRED who stands out for covering how cars, software, and policy collide. She writes on transportation systems and cities, from the auto industry to broader mobility systems. Before WIRED, she reported on cities and urban policy for The Atlantic’s CityLab. Her beat runs from electric vehicles, fuel prices, tariffs, and car-buying decisions to autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, and software-defined cars. She reports with a systems view, linking policy shifts, technical failures, and urban life to what happens on streets, in repair shops, and at the pump.
Abby Smith
Abby Smith’s most distinctive work combines motorsports coverage with live digital and radio reporting. She is Digital Director at KRDO13 and covers the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, including race updates, weather shifts, breaking developments and ways to follow the action. Her beat also includes automotive news, crime, public safety, politics, city government and community life. Notable work includes coverage of homicide arrests, a major drug bust, a presidential address about the war with Iran, a family’s effort to bring Stephen Hubbard home, a state governor candidate and a city security ordinance. She also reports on fitness, school spirit and station staff. Smith writes in a concise, factual style shaped by investigative documentary experience. She turns live events, official announcements and daily developments into clear coverage across digital and radio platforms.
Adele Peters
Adele Peters covers climate solutions and other structural problems as design and policy questions, focusing on what can work in practice. She is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she reports on energy, transportation, housing, materials, agriculture, corporate sustainability, and social impact. Her stories examine climate technologies, grid resilience, electric vehicles, renewable energy, modular construction, homelessness, affordable housing, compostable materials, regenerative agriculture, and ecosystem restoration. She looks at whether projects can scale, their real-world constraints, and their measurable effects. She interviews political and philanthropic leaders, startup founders, and climate tech entrepreneurs, anchoring stories in what is being built and tested. She has written more than 3,000 stories and contributed to Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and State of Housing Design 2023.
Adrian Leung
Adrian Leung writes engineering-led coverage of Chinese electric vehicles and performance cars for CarNewsChina. He focuses on new energy vehicles, battery systems, powertrains, electric platforms, high-end domestic brands, and track-ready models, and he explains technical details in plain language for non-specialist readers. His reporting treats new models as hardware and systems stories, with precise figures on range, battery capacity, chassis layout, motor outputs, weight, and acceleration. He also covers the Chinese auto industry’s finances and technology roadmap, including sector profits, vehicle volumes, and solid-state battery timelines. His background in Electrical and Computer Engineering shows in the way he writes about vehicle electronics and battery management.