Philadelphia’s weather is downright tropical in the summer, but that can be hard to remember in January as residents crank up the heat and dread the monthly heating bills. PECO’s residential heating rate takes out some of the sting for households that heat with electric power. PECO’s “RH” rate, as they label it, “is designed
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“Nothing’s quite as sure as change,” goes an old song by The Mamas & the Papas. Change, though certain, is hard to predict. Things sometimes go the way you want them to, other times the opposite direction, and often somewhere in between. Here in our 200th issue, we look back at some of the stories
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Joseph Nguyen, 27, lives in South Philly and holds a 2020 Temple University degree in international business. But if you ask him what he does, the answer is much more nuanced. “I live three different lives,” he says. Nguyen performs audits for government and corporate clients, competes as a Muay Thai martial artist, and runs
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Within days of a police raid in the home he shared with his parents in Krasnodar, southern Russia, Ilia Chernov, 26, a computer programmer and system administrator, went into hiding. Over five years, “I was subjected to repeated questioning, threats, police surveillance and house searches due to my political views and activism,” says Chernov. A
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Jeff Strahley, of Red Bank, New Jersey, spent an early November afternoon riding along the Delaware Canal towpath near Washington Crossing Park in Bucks County. He has mixed feelings about the increased e-bike presence on the popular trail. “There’s good and bad. The good is it gets more people out on the trails that might
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Modern construction is notorious for producing waste. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the amount of used soil abandoned to landfills. What’s needed is a cost-effective, environmentally responsible solution that keeps material in circulation and preserves its value. “Every day, thousands of tons of soil come off construction sites in and around Philadelphia.
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I am a 15-year-old resident of Chestnut Hill, and I live near Wissahickon Valley Park. In 2022, I started the group Monarch Defenders, which aims to plant native pocket meadows in Philadelphia and beyond to support endangered monarch butterflies and other pollinators. One of our local meadow restoration projects was done in partnership with Friends
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In the nine years Julia Jackson lived in Manayunk, just a few streets from the Leverington Avenue bridge, she witnessed her fair share of flooding — and Venice Island residents using the bridge to evacuate from their homes during floods. When she saw that the paper mill site at the island’s northern tip had been
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A new climate resiliency plan is in development for Philadelphia, with a new focus: community vulnerability. The work is being funded by $600,000 the Office of Sustainability (OOS) received in March from the William Penn Foundation. The City’s resiliency plan outlines climate change’s impacts on Philadelphia and how the City will meet the challenges they
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When Grid was planning a home electrification guide for the January 2025 issue, the universe threw us a curveball. Donald Trump’s reelection as president of the United States cast doubt on the longevity of federal financial incentives for homeowners across the country to purchase solar panels, electric stoves, heat pump HVAC units and other climate-friendly
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