Story · The Gas Works

PGW's slow pivot is the city's biggest energy job.

Philadelphia Gas Works is the largest municipally owned gas utility in the country, and the city that owns it has promised carbon neutrality by 2050. Squaring those two facts is a decades-long job, and this week it is back on the council's agenda.

By the Renewable Energy Philadelphia editorsDateline: PhiladelphiaSept. 24, 2026

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Flat illustration of a Philadelphia warehouse rooftop with four rows of solar panels, a riveted water tower, and a brick facade below — **FIGURE A.** A warehouse roof in the industrial corridor, the quiet workhorse of commercial solar. Roofs like this carry most of the city's new panels.

Stories

Every story dated and filed to a source. The running list of what we have covered so far.

J-061OCT 10
2026

Policy
Buying power together in Philadelphia: co-ops, group deals, and the fine print

Group buying and co-ops let neighbors purchase electricity or solar together.
J-060OCT 09
2026

Buildings
Rain gardens, tree trenches, and the energy they quietly spare

Philadelphia's green stormwater program was built to keep sewage out of the rivers.
J-059OCT 08
2026

Solar
Solar in a historic district: the review nobody reads

If your rowhouse sits in one of Philadelphia's local historic districts, the city gets a look at your roof before the panels go up.
J-058OCT 07
2026

Grid
The buses that already run on wires, and the ones that might

SEPTA's Northeast trackless trolleys are the cleanest buses it owns.
J-057OCT 06
2026

Buildings
Big buildings in Philadelphia now report their energy. Then what?

The city's benchmarking law has produced several years of public data.
J-056OCT 05
2026

Grid
PECO's wires plan is a rate case in waiting

The utility files multi-year plans for what it builds into the grid.
J-055OCT 04
2026

Grid
Shore power on the Delaware: the port's long extension cord

Ships at the Philadelphia berths can shut off their diesels and plug into the grid instead.
J-054OCT 03
2026

Buildings
Heat pumps in brick rowhouses: the questions installers hear

Party walls, radiators, and 100-amp panels shape almost every rowhouse retrofit in Philadelphia.
J-053OCT 02
2026

Solar
A capped landfill is the best bad roof in the city

Closed landfills are some of the only large surfaces in Philadelphia that solar can actually use.
J-052OCT 01
2026

Policy
Pennsylvania's net metering cap quietly changed the solar math

Pennsylvania ties the size of a net-metered system to how much power a home uses, and a second, harder-to-see cap is what the reform fight is really about.
J-051SEP 30
2026

Solar
The permit is the project: solar on a Philadelphia rowhouse

The panels are the easy part.
J-050SEP 29
2026

Grid
The subway makes electricity when it brakes

Every time a train on the El or the Broad Street Line slows down, its motors turn into generators.
J-049SEP 28
2026

Policy
Pennsylvania finally has community solar. Philadelphia is the test.

Pennsylvania spent years as a community solar holdout.
J-048SEP 27
2026

Hydro
The Schuylkill Made Power Once. Some Sites Want To Again.

Historic mill dams line the river, from Fairmount to Manayunk.
J-047SEPT 24
2026

PGW
PGW's slow pivot is the city's biggest energy job

The Gas Works keeps hot water and heat on in hundreds of thousands of homes. The city's climate math says it has to change shape. The fight is over the order of operations, and it resumed this week. How it goes will show up in heating bills across the city.
J-046SEPT 22
2026

Solar
Warehouse roofs are the corridor's quiet solar frontier

Big flat roofs, big single electric meters, no tenant votes. Why North Philly industrial real estate keeps signing up for arrays while the rowhouse block waits on paperwork.
J-045SEPT 19
2026

Port
Shore power at the port is a job half-hung

Cranes and cold storage on the Delaware burn serious electricity. The plug-and-play future at Packer Avenue moves one berth at a time. What is actually energized, in plain terms.
J-044SEPT 17
2026

Policy
How to read a PUC filing without losing your afternoon

Tariffs, riders, base rate cases: a field guide to following PECO and PGW paperwork at the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, written in plain language.
J-043SEPT 15
2026

Buildings
Heat pumps on the block: what South Philly owners keep asking

Panel upgrades, rowhouse wiring, and the radiator that outlived three owners. The practical questions from the stoop, answered in plain language.

Where Things Stand

Checked each morning against public records: what is generating, what is in line, and what the season demands.

PGW / HEATThe city-owned Gas Works is studying routes off gas: its 2021 business diversification study, prepared with the consulting firm ICF, examined decarbonized gas blends, thermal networks, and hybrid electrification. Council hearings on the utility's future have continued through this administration.
PECO / GRIDPECO remains a distribution company inside the PJM market. Its territory's load is tilting toward data centers and electrified buildings, and every infrastructure filing now assumes more electric heat, not less.
SOLAR / ROOFSPennsylvania's Act 15 of 2023 finally enabled community solar, with program rules from the PUC following. Philly's own Solarize Philly and the Philadelphia Energy Authority keep chipping away at permitting and financing friction on residential roofs.
TRANSIT / SEPTASEPTA buys renewable power for operations and has piloted wayside storage to capture energy from braking trains. A transit agency as an energy player: underreported, and real.

Figures here are rounded and stated conservatively. When a number is not in a primary document, the story says so. Stylized charts are labeled as such.

Shop-drawing figure showing a slate-blue daily load curve and a safety-orange solar bell curve crossing over a diagonally raked field, with an amber sun disc and hour ticks — **FIG. 1.** What a typical day looks like on the local grid: electricity demand stays high from morning through evening, while solar output rises and sets with the sun. This diagram shows the pattern, not real measurements.

Field Briefs

Two standing briefs, kept short. The full stories are in the list above.

Port

On the river, the cranes are switching jobs

Diesel gantries, electric cold storage, and the long plug-in at the marine terminals. The port's electrification is incremental, expensive, and hard to unsee once you know where to look.

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Rowhouses

The block turns over one quiet roof at a time

Flat roofs, party walls, and a parapet full of south-facing sun. Why the rowhouse block is harder than a warehouse roof, and why it matters more to the city's arithmetic.

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How We Work

The rules we work by, posted so readers can hold us to them.

About this publication

Renewable Energy Philadelphia is a new daily publication covering clean and renewable energy in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley: the PJM grid, PECO and PGW filings, warehouse and rowhouse solar, port and industrial electrification, SEPTA's energy work, and the local permitting and incentive machinery that decides what actually gets built.

We are not an advocacy group and not a trade outlet. A utility filing is news here. So is a warehouse owner's array, done properly.

Our rules

Primary documents first: PUC filings, PJM queues, city council hearings, program pages, project permits.
Numbers are rounded and hedged unless they sit in a primary source. When we are estimating, we say so.
Illustrative figures are labeled as such, every time. If a chart shows a pattern rather than real data, the caption says so.
No invented quotes, no anonymous officials who do not exist, no press releases passed off as reporting.
Corrections run at the top of the story, dated, with the original text preserved.

Send documents, data, or corrections to tips@renewableenergyphiladelphia.com.

Three-panel illustration repeating one rowhouse block with rooftop solar panels in slate blue, then safety orange, then dark bench with amber panels — **FIGURE B.** The same rowhouse block, three ways: the flat roofs and party walls that decide how fast solar spreads in Philadelphia.