Author

Robert Zullo
Robert Zullo is the energy transition reporter for States Newsroom. He has spent 13 years as a reporter and editor at weekly and daily newspapers, beginning at Worrall Community Newspapers in Union, N.J., where he was a staff writer and managing editor. He spent five years in south Louisiana covering hurricanes, oil spills and Good Friday crawfish boils as a reporter and city editor for the The Courier and the Daily Comet newspapers in Houma and Thibodaux. He covered Richmond city hall for the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 2012 to 2013 and worked as a general assignment and city hall reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 2013 to 2016. He returned to Richmond to cover energy, environment and transportation for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He grew up in Miami, Fla., and central New Jersey. A former armored car guard and a graduate of the College of William and Mary, he has received numerous first-place awards for editorial, feature and column writing as well as breaking news coverage and investigative reporting.
As utilities spend billions on transmission, support builds for independent monitoring
By: Robert Zullo - November 21, 2022
An aging electric grid, fossil fuel power plant retirements and a massive renewable electricity buildout are all contributing to a boom in transmission and distribution wire projects by electric utilities across the country. In 2020, investor-owned electric utilities spent $25 billion on transmission, up from $23.7 billion in 2019, figures that the Edison Electric Institute, […]
Amid a major federal investment in electric cars, it’s time for states to step up, advocates say
By: Robert Zullo - November 8, 2022
For years, electric vehicles posed something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Mass adoption, seen as critical to cutting the largest single source of U.S. carbon emissions, couldn’t happen until the infrastructure to allow drivers to recharge wherever they were heading was in place. And those charging stations weren’t coming until more drivers switched to plug-in electric […]
Coal plant operators shirking responsibilities on ash cleanup, report contends
By: Robert Zullo - November 4, 2022
States are vying for money to start ‘hydrogen hubs.’ What are they?
By: Robert Zullo - October 25, 2022
Across the country, states are inking agreements with neighbors or striking out on their own to pursue billions in federal funding to set up “hydrogen hubs,” clustered centers for production, storage and use of the gas that many see as a crucial piece of the puzzle for decarbonizing the U.S. economy. How broad a role […]
Report says many utilities are slow-walking clean energy goals
By: Robert Zullo - October 6, 2022
DENVER – A report released this week by the Sierra Club faults dozens of utilities that provide a major chunk of U.S. electric generation for failing to speed up their decarbonization efforts. “For the sake of our communities and planet, we must do everything in our power to create a clean, renewable electric grid by […]