By JENNIFER McDERMOTT

CALISTOGA, Calif. (AP) — For residents of this quaint tourist town on the northern edge of Napa Valley, the threat of wildfire is seldom out of mind. The hillside bears burn scars from a 2020 fire that forced all of Calistoga to evacuate, and the 2017 Tubbs fire that killed 22 people in wine country started just a few miles from downtown.

When fire danger required shutting off transmission lines that might spark a blaze, the town relied on a bank of generators in a popular recreation area that belched choking diesel exhaust and rumbled so loudly it drove people away.

But now Calistoga is shifting to a first-of-its-kind system that combines two clean-energy technologies — hydrogen fuel cells and batteries — for enough juice to power the city for about two days. Experts say the technology has potential beyond simply delivering clean backup power in emergencies; they say it’s a steppingstone to supporting the electric grid any day of the year.

As the system was undergoing its final tests in late May in an area that includes a dog park, ball fields, community garden and bike trail, residents said they were grateful to be guaranteed clean energy year-round. Lisa Gift, a resident who also serves on the city council, noted Calistoga is already grappling with climate change that is fueling more intense and frequent wildfires.

“Continuing to depend on fossil fuels was simply not sustainable,” Gift said. “That’s what excited me about this. It’s a clean and reliable energy solution that ensures the safety and resilience of our community.”

Energy Vault, an energy storage company based in California, built the new facility that was to come online in early June. Next year, it could be exporting power to the electric grid whenever needed once its application to fully connect is approved.

The installation sits next to where Pacific Gas & Electric used to set up nine mobile generators every year from late spring through fall. Behind a chain-link fence stand six hydrogen fuel cells standing two stories tall made by Plug Power in New York. Water vapor wafted from one of the fuel cells being tested as The Associated Press got an exclusive tour of the site as it was in final testing.

Shipping containers hold two pairs of Energy Vault’s lithium-ion batteries. Nearby, a cinder block wall surrounds a massive, double-walled steel tank that holds 80,000 gallons (302,833 liters) of extremely cold liquid hydrogen that gets converted to gas to run the fuel cells.

Utility was searching for a cleaner solution

California utilities, especially PG&E, have had to pay large settlements over igniting wildfires. PG&E began cutting power at times to reduce fire risk in 2018, one of California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire years. It ships diesel generators to about a dozen towns to provide backup power during those periods.

Calistoga, the largest with about 5,000 people, has had its power shut off 10 times. When generators ran, they spewed exhaust with harmful nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and soot. PG&E considered replacing Calistoga’s diesel generators with a natural gas version that would pollute less, but opted instead for Energy Vault’s fully clean solution, said Dave Canny, the utility’s vice president for the North Coast Region.

Energy Vault CEO Robert Piconi said other communities, military bases and data centers could all use something similar, but potential customers wanted to see it function first.

“There’s a massive proof point with this project,” he said. “I think it’ll have a lot of implications for how people think about alternative, sustainable solutions.”

The fuel cell maker, Plug Power, is planning for these types of products to be its main business in a decade. Energy Vault said it’s buying clean hydrogen, produced with low or no greenhouse gas emissions, to run the fuel cells in Calistoga.

“This solution is just beautiful,” said Janice Lin, founder and president of the Green Hydrogen Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for green hydrogen projects to combat climate change. “No noise, no emissions. And it’s renewable. It’s dumping diesel.”

A year-round clean system brings comfort

Calistoga caters to tourists with a main thoroughfare that emphasizes local shops, restaurants, tasting rooms and art galleries over franchise stories. Residents pride themselves on a smalltown vibe, and say Calistoga isn’t posh like much of the rest of Napa Valley.

Some of those residents were concerned at first about the hydrogen, which is flammable and can be explosive. Fire Chief Jed Matcham said the “very, very large tank” got his attention, too.

He collaborated with Energy Vault on emergency planning and training, and said he’s comfortable with the safety measures in place. Energy Vault’s batteries also come with alarms, detectors and piping to extinguish a fire.

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The next time PG&E turns off the power to the area to prevent wildfires, it will tell Energy Vault when it’s safe to electrify Calistoga. The batteries will get things back up and running, discharging the energy stored inside them to the local microgrid.

Then the hydrogen fuel cells will take over to generate a steady level of power for a longer period. By working in tandem — the company likened it to the way a hybrid vehicle works — the batteries and fuel cells are expected to keep the lights on for about 48 hours or longer.

Clive Richardson, who owns downtown’s Calistoga Roastery and can typically be found behind the counter, drinking coffee and chatting with customers, said people in Calistoga get on edge when the winds kick up. And he knows what it’s like to have to empty out his store when power goes out — a big hit for a small-business owner.

A year-round clean solution for emergency power gives him a measure of comfort.

“This will give us far more security than we had before,” he said. “It’s fantastic that it’s come. Here we are, little ol’ Calistoga, and we’ve got the first-of-a-kind system that hopefully will be endorsed and go all over the world.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty,” has died. He was 85.

White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg.

Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash.

FILE – Author Edmund White appears at his home in New York, Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2019. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)

A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”

Childhood yearnings

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer “who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.” His mother was a psychologist “given to rages or fits of weeping.” Trapped in “the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,” at times suicidal, White was at the same time a “fierce little autodidact” who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” or a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the 1991 essay “Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf.”

FILE – Author Edmund White stands outside his apartment April 24, 2006 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.

“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”

Early struggles, changing times

Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would “dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.” A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”

“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

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White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”

His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”

“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told The Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”

By KEVIN FREKING

WASHINGTON (AP) — A small government office with some 275 employees has found itself caught in the political crossfire as Congress debates President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful bill.”

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the legislation would increase federal deficits by about $2.4 trillion over 10 years. That’s a problem for a Republican Congress that has spent much of the past four years criticizing former President Joe Biden and Democrats for the nation’s rising debt levels.

The White House and Republican leaders in Congress are taking issue with CBO’s findings. They say economic growth will be higher than the office is projecting, resulting in more revenue coming into government coffers. Meanwhile, Democrats are touting CBO’s findings as evidence of the bill’s failings.

Here’s a look at the office at the center of Washington’s latest political tug-of-war.

What is the CBO?

Lawmakers established the Congressional Budget Office more than 50 years ago to provide objective, impartial analysis to support the budget process. The CBO is required to produce a cost estimate for nearly every bill approved by a House or Senate committee and will weigh in earlier when asked to do so by lawmakers.

It also produces a report each Congress on how to reduce the debt if lawmakers so choose with each option including arguments for or against. Plus, it publishes detailed estimates when presidents make proposals that would affect mandator spending, which includes programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Lawmakers created the office to help Congress play a stronger role in budget matters, providing them with an alternative to the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of a Republican or Democratic administration, depending upon the president in office.

Is the CBO partisan?

CBO hires analysts based on their expertise, not political affiliation. Staff is expected to maintain objectivity and avoid political influence. In evaluating potential employees, the CBO says that for most positions it looks at whether that person would be perceived to be free from political bias.

Like other federal employees, the CBO’s staff is also prohibited from making political contributions to members of Congress.

The CBO’s director, Phillip Swagel, served in former Republican President George W. Bush’s administration as an economic adviser and as an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department.

Why is the CBO being attacked now?

The stakes are incredibly high with Republicans looking to pass their massive tax cut and immigration bill by early July.

Outside groups, Democrats and some Republicans are highlighting CBO’s analysis that the bill will increase federal deficits by about $2.4 trillion over 10 years and leave 10.9 million more people uninsured in 2034.

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Republicans spent much of Biden’s presidency focused on curbing federal deficits. They don’t want to be seen as contributing to the fiscal problem.

GOP lawmakers say the CBO isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create, to the point where it would be deficit-neutral in the long run, if not better.

“The CBO assumes long-term GDP growth of an anemic 1.8% and that is absurd,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The American economy is going to boom like never before after the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ is passed.”

Republicans began taking issue with the CBO even before Trump and the current Congress were sworn into office.

“CBO will always predict a dark future when Republicans propose tax relief — but the reality is never so dire,” Rep. Jason Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a December news release.

Recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson has been taking digs at the office.

“The CBO is notorious for getting things WRONG,” he said in a Facebook post.

What did CBO say about the tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term?

In April 2018, CBO said that tax receipts would total $27 trillion from fiscal years 2018 to 2024.

Receipts came in about $1.5 trillion higher than the CBO projected. Republicans have seized on that discrepancy.

But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Some of the criticism of the CBO ignores the context of a global pandemic as the federal government rushed to prop the economy up with massive spending bills under both Trump and Biden.

In a blog post last December, Swagel pointed out three reasons for the higher revenues: The primary reason was the burst of inflation that began in March 2021 as the country was recovering from COVID. That burst of inflation, he said, led to about $900 billion more in revenue.

There was also an increase in economic activity in “the later years of the period” adding $700 billion. Also, new tariffs added about $250 billion, with other legislation partially offsetting those three factors.

By MIKE CORDER, Associated Press

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch opposition parties called Wednesday for fresh elections as soon as possible, a day after anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders sparked the collapse of the country’s four-party coalition government.

Prime Minister Dick Schoof’s 11-month-old administration fell apart when Wilders withdrew his Party for Freedom ministers. Schoof and the ministers of three remaining parties remain in power as a caretaker Cabinet.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof announced handing the resignation of the PVV party ministers in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 3, 2025, after far-right leader Geert Wilders pulled his party out of the ruling four-party coalition in dispute over a crackdown on migration. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

The government, with limited powers, now has to lead the country for months before new elections and during what could — again — be protracted talks to cobble together a new coalition in the fragmented Dutch political landscape after the vote.

Lawmakers can declare some policy areas “controversial” during the caretaker period. That restricts the government from taking concrete action on those issues.

What happens now?

The Dutch electoral commission will schedule a general election for all 150 seats in the Second Chamber of parliament.

It is very unlikely to happen before the fall because of a parliamentary recess that starts July 4 and runs to Sept. 1 and that will be followed by several weeks of campaigning.

What does Schoof want?

In a statement to lawmakers, Schoof said he wants to keep control, even in caretaker mode, of vital policies over the coming months.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s about security, both nationally and internationally, including support for Ukraine and everything that’s needed for defense,” he said.

He also wants to be able to act on the economy, including the global trade war unleashed since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, “because that can have a direct effect on the Dutch economy and on our business community.”

But Schoof acknowledged that some other policies will be put on ice until there is a new coalition.

“The last thing we want now is postponement, but it is unavoidable in some cases,” he said.

What do opposition lawmakers want?

They want to go to the polls.

“I hope we can organize elections as quickly as possible, in the shortest possible time,” said Frans Timmermans, the former European Commissioner who now leads a two-party, center-left bloc.

Frans Timmermans, of the center-left two party bloc of Labor Party and Green Left, looks on in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 3, 2025, after far-right leader Geert Wilders pulled his party out of the ruling four-party coalition in dispute over a crackdown on migration. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Timmerman’s bloc of the Labor Party and Green Left is challenging Wilders’ party for top spot in Dutch polls. Wilders won the last elections in November 2023.

Lawmakers used Wednesday’s debate to attack Wilders for failing to make good while in office on his 2023 election pledges — in what sounded like a proxy electoral debate.

“You turned your back on these people,” Jimmy Dijk of the Socialist Party said, suggesting that Wilders apologize to his voters.

And it’s not just the opposition that wants elections. Wilders also is looking forward to campaigning.

“Let’s go back to the voter,” he said.

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What about the NATO summit and support for Ukraine?

The government remains committed to hosting the meeting of government leaders from the NATO alliance in The Hague later this month.

Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp took to X soon after the administration’s collapse to stress that the meeting will go ahead despite the political turmoil.

“We remain fully committed to organising the #NATOsummit in The Hague. We look forward to welcoming all NATO Allies on 24 June,” he wrote.

He also said the Netherlands will continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. The Netherlands has provided key arms to Kyiv, including F-16 fighter jets.

“We remain committed to European cooperation and security. Dutch support for Ukraine is a key part of that,” he wrote.