It is not every day that your country is given good odds on an important project of such an ambitious scale.

The Economist’s WOODBINE column has this to say about it:

America’s chance to become a clean-energy superpower

Getting the most ambitious energy and climate laws in American history through Congress was not easy. Now comes the hard part

The future catches you in unexpected places. Drive down Interstate 95, the highway running along America’s Atlantic coast, into south-eastern Georgia and you will find signs and rest stops named after pecans and peaches. Take the local roads to Woodbine, an outpost so far from traditional industrial hubs that a state development officer, a proud Georgian, confesses that: “The nearest civilisation there is Florida.” In this unlikely spot you can get a glimpse of America’s clean-energy future.

Plug Power, a pioneer in energy technology, provides warehouses operated by Walmart and Amazon with forklifts run on hydrogen. Plug is building one of the world’s largest plants to make liquid hydrogen. When your correspondent visited, workers were removing tarps from giant electrolysers, which will use clean energy to crack water into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. Sanjay Shrestha, Plug’s chief strategy officer, says the output will be able to power 10,000 of those forklifts a day. Local officials helped with site selection and permitting, he explains, but the Inflation Reduction Act (ira), a climate-focused law passed by Congress last August, has had “a transformational impact” on the prospects for clean hydrogen…

Read the whole article here.