Back
Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal.
I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. In the Politico Magazine article I subsequently wrote, I called the effort “the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement.” Its litigators and organizers had quietly helped retire one-third of America’s coal fleet in five years — 190 plants in all, about one every 10 days — driving some of the first significant emissions reductions on Earth.
The main point of “Inside the War on Coal,” and the key insight of the campaign, was that coal power, historically dirty but cheap, was no longer cheap. In fact, merely operating most existing coal plants had become more expensive than building new clean wind and solar farms as well as less-dirty natural gas plants. That’s why the Sierra Club was waging its war alongside unlikely business allies in obscure utility commission hearings, making the case that less coal would mean lower electricity bills. That’s why Beyond Coal attorneys like Kristin Henry, whose bio identified her as “one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” kept getting utility executives to admit under oath that coal was gouging their ratepayers. That’s why the billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg, who had always seen the Sierra Club as a group of shrill anti-capitalist radicals, agreed to finance its coal campaign, although he insisted on a businesslike, analytical approach.
The article went viral, presumably because of its unexpected blast of good climate news. The war on coal’s successes had enabled President Barack Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, which had enabled the world to commit to even deeper reductions in the Paris climate accord. Humanity was still addicted to oil, but killing coal looked like a kind of gateway drug rehab.
“For the next decade,” I wrote, “our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff.”
Now, a decade later, President Donald Trump has declared war on the war on coal — or, as he insists everyone in his administration call it, “clean, beautiful coal.” So it seems like a good time to see how things are going on the battlefield.
The short summary is that Beyond Coal is still winning, and America is continuing to reduce its reliance on the black stuff. But Trump and the artificial-intelligence boom are complicating the war on coal’s endgame.
The overall trajectory has been remarkable. Coal now generates about one-seventh of U.S. electricity, down from one-half in 2010; solar and wind, little more than rounding errors when the campaign began, currently produce more power than coal and employ far more American workers. Utilities have retired or committed to retire 390 coal plants, leaving less than a third of the original fleet in operation. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down by about 20% from 2005 levels — not quite Obama’s goal, but not too shabby — largely because emissions from electricity generation are down by about 40%. Beyond Coal has helped shutter all but one of the 25 plants it initially declared the most dangerous to local communities, and says the retirements have prevented over 1 million asthma attacks and 60,000 premature deaths. California and New England just went coal-free. While the larger Sierra Club has faced some rough internal and external criticism for straying from its core environmental mission, Beyond Coal is still quietly plugging away and kicking ass.
Made with Flourish • Create a chart
And yet. Trump is on a mission to prop up his coal industry pals, exempting polluting plants from environmental regulations, pouring hundreds of millions of tax dollars into retrofitting them, and opening up millions of acres of federal land to new mining leases while reducing federal royalties from mining companies. Trump’s Department of Energy has even ordered an obsolete Michigan plant that was scheduled for retirement to remain open and is preparing to order other coal plants to do the same. Trump is also blocking new wind and solar just as the AI frenzy is upending expectations of mostly stagnant electricity demand. So some utilities that intended to replace old coal plants with new renewables are rethinking those plans — and Beyond Coal is now working as hard to get them to say yes to clean power as it has to get them to say no to coal.
Unlike gasoline-powered cars, which face competition from electric vehicles but still dominate the global automotive fleet, or natural gas, which is on the upswing, coal is in terminal decline in America. The average U.S. plant is 45 years old. The last new one came online 12 years ago — and even that youngish plant just broke down and had to suspend operations until 2027. With electricity prices around the country rising much faster than inflation, the affordability case for wind and solar has never been stronger, especially since the batteries that can store that clean energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining have never been cheaper.
But after 15 years in the trenches of the war on coal, Henry isn’t sure the final victory is as imminent as she once hoped, because proving that coal no longer makes sense is easier than making it go away. Sure, it’s a dinosaur, but dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years.
“We win on the law. We win on the economics,” she told me recently. “But sometimes we lose on the politics.”
The pivotal battle in my 2015 war-on-coal story was “a dry hearing in a drab courtroom in Oklahoma City,” where Henry cross-examined a hapless Oklahoma Gas & Electric executive about the utility’s request for the largest rate increase in state history to upgrade a wildly inefficient coal plant. She got the executive to admit that the coal he was importing from Wyoming already cost more per kilowatt-hour than the Oklahoma wind that came sweeping down the plains — and that in-state competitors as well as Florida and New Mexico utilities were already buying that Oklahoma wind for less.
Henry’s best Perry Mason moment came while she was dismantling the assumptions the utility had used to justify burning more coal. She pointed out that even though the Obama administration was finalizing four new coal regulations that very year, OG&E’s model had assumed there would be no new coal regulations for decades. When the executive hemmed and hawed, Henry pinned him down: “Isn’t it true you’re assuming zero over the next 30 years?” she asked.
The executive paused for a few seconds, then confessed: “That’s right.”
Henry didn’t ask a single question about coal’s impact on the climate, or even on public health. She just argued about electricity rates, which was why lawyers representing Walmart, the state’s hospitals, and a coalition of industrial users that included a factory owned by Koch Industries all echoed her arguments. Beyond Coal’s lawyers are “not burning bras. They’re fighting dollar for dollar,” an attorney for the hospitals told me. “They’ve become masters at bringing financial arguments to environmental questions.” Sure enough, later in 2015 the state’s rate-setting commission rejected OG&E’s costly plan to upgrade the coal plant.
But that did not turn out to be the end of the saga.
Oklahoma’s then–Attorney General Scott Pruitt — a Republican fossil-fuel booster who would go on to lead the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first term — appealed the ruling, even though he was supposed to be advocating for lower rates for Oklahoma residents. Under intense pressure, the all-Republican commission reversed its decision. So Henry appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and in 2018, she won the case. But it didn’t matter, because OG&E went ahead with the coal upgrades, and the commission eventually approved massive rate increases to pay for them.
It’s not fun to spend years on a case, win on the merits, then lose anyway.
“That’s just reality,” Henry said. “You still have to keep fighting.”
In Ohio, the utility FirstEnergy bribed legislators to pass a bill forcing customers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars propping up two aging coal plants — and even after the scandal erupted in 2020, the subsidies continued until this summer. Now Trump is threatening to prevent any coal plants from retiring; his order invoking an imaginary “energy emergency” to keep that clunky Michigan plant in operation is costing ratepayers millions of dollars per day. His energy secretary, Christopher Wright, recently complained that coal is “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, and New York City.”
The chardonnay set isn’t what’s throttling coal generation in fossil-fuel-friendly Republican states like Utah and Texas. It’s math. The economics of coal plants have continued to deteriorate as they’ve gotten older and creakier. A Sierra Club report on the Oklahoma facility that OG&E kept afloat found it brought in $1.2 billion less revenue over five years than the utility had predicted, because it was so often either down for repairs or unable to produce competitively priced power. The Trump administration just held the largest coal-lease auction on federal land in more than a decade, but had to postpone it after receiving only one bid for less than one cent per ton. The last similar lease sold for more than a dollar per ton.
Meanwhile, the costs of wind, solar, and batteries have continued to plunge; they made up 94% of the U.S. grid’s new capacity in 2024. They now generate more than a quarter of the electricity in California — and a third in Texas. And battery storage is expanding even faster, growing by two-thirds in 2024.
Still, Beyond Coal’s job keeps getting harder. That’s partly because the most egregiously indefensible coal plants are already shuttered, partly because the Trump EPA does not seem to care whether the remaining plants comply with environmental laws, and partly because Trump’s brazen war on renewables has slashed subsidies for existing wind and solar farms while making it much harder to develop new ones. There’s also a less political reason: It suddenly looks like America might need a lot more electricity.
The Sierra Club’s war on coal began in the early 2000s, after a White House energy task force led by former Vice President Dick Cheney called for the construction of 200 new coal plants. That would have been a climate disaster, locking the grid into decades of dependence on the dirtiest fossil fuel, so the club’s leaders mobilized volunteers and lawyers to fight the proposed projects all over the country.
They managed to stop almost all of them, but that feat wasn’t just a triumph of passion and grit. It also turned out no one needed that many new plants of any kind. After the financial crisis of 2008, utilities began scaling back their projections for future electricity demand and struggled to justify a building binge. That’s when the club shifted its focus from blocking new coal plants to shuttering old ones, and Bloomberg cut the organization a $50 million check to launch Beyond Coal as a formal campaign.
The combination of coal getting expensive and power demand remaining flat gave the campaign a huge boost as it targeted the least efficient plants. The club’s ultimate goal was a fossil-free grid, but back then it was laser-focused on killing coal. In Oklahoma, Henry did not object to OG&E’s proposal to convert one of its aging coal boilers to natural gas, and I sat in on a closed-door strategy meeting between Henry and a gas-industry group that shared most of her objectives in the case. At the time, the Sierra Club was under fire for accepting gas-industry donations.
Today, Beyond Coal is fighting the buildout of gas as well as coal, but the AI frenzy has changed the context, now that American utilities have proposed a total of 200 new gas plants to meet the surge in demand they expect from new data centers. Many experts estimate that AI will increase power demand as much as 10% nationally, but the Sierra Club has calculated that the various utility proposals would increase power capacity by more than 100%.
“It’s a lot like the coal situation 20 years ago, with a real threat of digging the hole even deeper with new fossil infrastructure,” said Holly Bender, who oversees Beyond Coal as the club’s chief program officer. “We’ve got to be even clearer about what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against.”
Meanwhile, global coal generation hit a record high last year, even though it continued to decline as a share of electricity. Worldwide the vast majority of new electric capacity came from wind and solar, but that wasn’t enough to meet ballooning demand. So the race is on: The world needs more juice, and unless we can build out an extraordinary amount of clean stuff, we’ll keep burning the dirty stuff.
Before the AI boom, when Laurie Williams was a frontline attorney with Beyond Coal, she helped pressure Xcel Energy to commit to retire all its Minnesota coal plants by 2030. Now she’s the head of Beyond Coal, and she was appalled in 2023 when Xcel Energy, which the Sierra Club had ranked the nation’s most responsible utility, proposed to meet soaring demand from AI by building out nearly as much new gas as wind, and hardly any new solar or storage. But with gas prices spiking and gas plants taking much longer than renewable plants to get up and running, her team eventually worked with Minnesota regulators to get Xcel to delay all but one small gas plant, while committing to twice as much wind, three times as much storage, and five times as much solar as its initial plan.
“We maximized clean energy, and we saved customers $1.5 billion,” Williams told me. “We’re facing serious headwinds these days, even with the best utilities, even in progressive states. But we know how to win these fights.”
The Sierra Club still has NIMBY elements, and its local chapters sometimes care more about protecting turtles than expanding renewables, but it supported the controversial Grain Belt Express transmission line that would have distributed wind to Midwestern cities before Trump and Republican senators killed it. Beyond Coal is now as focused on the beyond part as it is on the coal part, because utilities are going to need more capacity, even if they’re exaggerating how much, and it really matters whether that capacity is zero-emissions.
So Beyond Coal is sticking to its affordability message, at a moment when Democratic candidates around the country just won big by talking about rising costs, especially rising utility bills. The campaign is trying to remind Americans that Trump’s fossil-fueled war on wind and solar makes power more expensive, even though that war also makes existing coal (as well as new gas) marginally more competitive. It’s continuing to challenge outdated industry talking points portraying coal as what keeps the lights on — the aging fleet is increasingly unreliable — and renewables as a woke green scam. You can still find its lawyers at rate-setting commission meetings, arguing the facts and the law and the math.
These days, though, facts and law and math will only go so far. The war on coal is just one theater in the larger political culture war, and public opinion is just one weapon; most people want cheap and clean power, but it’s not yet clear whether voters in red states will punish politicians and utilities that keep them from getting it. It now seems unlikely that Beyond Coal will achieve its goal of ending U.S. coal by 2030. Closing the last 140 plants might be even harder than closing the first 390.
But of course this stuff is hard. If it were easy, it would’ve been done already. A key lesson of the Beyond Coal campaign is that the energy transition isn’t going to happen on its own. People have to do the work to make it happen.
“It’s a lot of Whac-A-Mole,” Henry said. “We stop them over here; they try to come back over there. But we’ll keep showing up. We’re built for this.”
Exxon Mobil has pulled the plug on what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen plants, the latest setback for the effort to scale production of low-carbon versions of the fuel.
In 2022, the oil giant announced plans to build a facility at its refining and petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas, with the capacity to produce 1 billion cubic feet per day of so-called blue hydrogen, which is made using natural gas and carbon-capture equipment. It won a nearly $332 million grant from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy to finance the project.
But the Trump administration yanked that funding this spring. Since blue hydrogen typically costs about one-third more than the “gray” version of the fuel made with unmitigated gas, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said the company could not find enough buyers willing to pay the premium.
“There’s been a continued challenge to establish committed customers who are willing to provide contracts for off-take,” Woods said in an interview with Reuters.
Exxon Mobil Corp. did not return Canary Media’s call Wednesday requesting comment.
The pullback highlights mounting problems for the clean hydrogen industry. Green hydrogen, the zero-carbon version of the fuel made with clean electricity and water, costs even more than the blue or gray types. In October, the Trump administration terminated federal funding for two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast that were meant to help bring down the cost of the green fuel. Blue hydrogen, in theory, was seen as less politically vulnerable since its production ensures a market for gas. But that, too, now appears to be running into similar problems.
“Exxon’s decision reflects a broader reality: Large-scale hydrogen projects depend on long-term market signals, stable policy environments, and customers ready to commit,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, the founder and executive director of the United States Hydrogen Alliance, an industry group. “These dynamics take time to mature.”
But it’s not just the Energy Department’s decision to shutter its Industrial Demonstrations Program, which had given Exxon Mobil the grant, and the cuts to the 45V federal tax credits, which support low-carbon hydrogen production, that have put the industry on shaky ground.
Trump administration moves have also undermined demand for low-carbon hydrogen. In October, the U.S. government thwarted an effort at the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization to put a price on carbon emissions from the shipping sector, pressuring foreign delegates to back off a proposal that would have expanded the market for low-carbon hydrogen.
Blue hydrogen also faces some specific headwinds.
Late last month, the European Parliament passed legislation outlining rules for low-carbon hydrogen that require producers to demonstrate not only that carbon-capture equipment catches at least 70% of emissions but also “pretty rigorous accounting of upstream methane leakage,” according to Pete Budden of the Natural Resources Defense Council. A study published last year in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy found that carbon-capture equipment could reduce emissions by 60%, below the threshold set in the European Union law.
“Based on the work we’ve done tracking emissions from blue hydrogen, it’s going to be really tough for U.S. hydrogen producers to meet that reduction with fossil fuels and [carbon capture and storage],” said Budden, the lead hydrogen advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s a really ambitious emissions reduction because you need a really, really high capture rate, and you need to minimize all your upstream leakage.”
In the U.S., California remains the biggest market for the fuel. While state regulators slashed their 2030 forecast for hydrogen-powered vehicles, a giant power plant in Los Angeles just received approval to convert from gas to hydrogen.
“Yes, there have been significant reductions to federal funding for programs. Yes, we took a hit this year. Yes, it caused uncertainty in the markets. And yes, it caused some projects to pause,” said Katrina Fritz, the chief executive of the California Hydrogen Business Council, the nation’s largest and oldest statewide trade group for the fuel. “But in California, we still have offtake markets that are moving forward. There’s still demand. And we still have new production projects moving forward.”
Among those projects: a solar-powered green hydrogen facility. Its owner? Chevron.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere notoriously hot and sunny. Right?
Well, you would be wrong. The global leader is Hungary, according to a recent report from think tank Ember that pulls from full-year 2024 data and only considers nations that generated over 5 terawatt-hours of solar.
The Central European country got nearly one-quarter of its electricity from solar panels last year, leapfrogging Chile, which had held the top spot since 2021. Hungary’s win is no fluke: From January through October this year, solar grew to account for about one-third of power generated in the nation of 10 million.
It’s quite the shift. Just five years ago, Hungary got only 7% of its power from solar. Ember attributes the rapid growth to robust policies supporting both utility-scale and residential installations.
Rounding out the top five countries on Ember’s list are Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands. The top 10 is dominated by countries in the European Union, which is chipping away at coal- and gas-fired electricity.
To be clear, Hungary is not producing more electrons with solar panels than any other country. That distinction goes to China, which generates far more terawatt-hours’ worth of clean power than anywhere else, even if it only gets about 8% of its electricity from solar.
We’ll check back in next year to see if Hungary has retained its improbable title. The competition will be stiff. After all, the solar boom is a worldwide phenomenon.
DALLAS — The automated machinery and bright, clean factory floor wouldn’t look out of place in the solar manufacturing hub of Changzhou, China. But every so often, the pristine industrial order was punctuated by, of all things, carrier robots blasting psychedelic rock as they rolled down the aisles.
T1 Energy runs this half-mile-long factory just 15 miles south of Dallas, where seven parallel manufacturing lines produced more than 20,000 photovoltaic modules on the day I visited in October. After ramping up in the early months of 2025, T1 is on track to produce up to 3 gigawatts this year, but with the systems dialed in and workers operating 24/7, the facility has been running fast enough to make 5 gigawatts in a year, said Russell Gold, executive vice president for strategic communications.
The factory is finding its legs just as the Trump administration vaporizes pro–clean energy policies and instead pursues a fossil-heavy vision of “energy dominance.”
“What the manufacturers here really want, and really need, is just certainty,” said MJ Shiao, vice president of supply chain and manufacturing at the trade group American Clean Power. What they got this year was “policy whiplash,” he said, which has caused the Biden-era drumbeat of clean-energy manufacturing announcements to morph into a chorus of cancellations, per data from Atlas Public Policy.
But T1 nonetheless is staking a claim to homegrown American solar energy and making the case that it’s still lucrative. The firm has plowed ahead this year, signing deals for U.S.-made polysilicon and U.S.-made steel frames and preparing to build its own solar-cell fabrication facility.
Gold pointed to the booming demand for solar, which has become the biggest source of new power plant capacity getting built in the U.S. today by a long shot.
“We absolutely believe that it is a great time to be making solar,” said Gold, who came to T1 in May after a career covering energy for The Wall Street Journal. “The main reason is we’re in the middle of this massive trend toward more electricity usage … Solar is the scalable energy resource that can produce the amount of electricity that is demanded today.”
T1’s facility bustles with robots and people working side by side.
Autonomous units ferry materials around and handle the heavy lifting of pallets stacked high with finished panels. Specialized machines cut cells and string them together with electrically conductive filaments, while others sandwich rows of cells between glass, snap their frames into place, and roll them through a high-temperature curing process.
Today those frames are made out of imported aluminum, but next year T1 will replace them with U.S.-made steel frames from Nextpower, the solar equipment juggernaut formerly known as Nextracker. Dan Shugar, Nextpower’s CEO, had visited T1 shortly before I did; given Shugar’s well-known love for classic guitar rock, technicians reprogrammed the autonomous guided vehicles’ warning sounds with grooves by Santana and AC/DC. (“Because of course, AC/DC — it’s appropriate,” Gold told me.) The sounds stuck around.
The factory was running two 12-hour shifts every day, with workers watching over the robots and stepping in when necessary to correct their work. Signs listed every key notice in English, Mandarin, and Spanish, and the 1,200-person workforce reflected the diversity of the Texas metropolis.
The only production line that wasn’t operating during my visit had been geared toward smaller residential panels. T1 had paused production in response to slack demand, Gold said, and was working to adjust the line to produce panels for the booming utility-scale market instead.
Around the factory, a few clues hinted at a more nuanced backstory than the triumphal, homegrown American solar narrative that T1 leads with. Much of the production machinery sported the logo of Trina Solar, a Chinese company that ranks among the most prolific solar manufacturers in the world. At the end of the tour, we surveyed the warehouse area, where pallets of finished modules awaited shipping in Trina Solar–branded cardboard boxes.
The Chinese company, in fact, built the factory, as part of a wave of foreign investment in U.S. solar panel assembly that kicked off back in 2018, when the first Trump administration levied new tariffs on Chinese imports. Chinese investment in U.S. solar factories accelerated considerably when the Biden administration passed industrial policy that rewarded manufacturers for U.S. production and developers for installing domestically made equipment.
Within two and a half years of Biden signing the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. built enough factories to assemble all the panels it needed. The entire supply chain had not been re-shored, but it was well on its way — a remarkable turnaround for a sector long since decimated by cheaper Chinese competition. The lone exception to that collapse was First Solar, which makes a thin-film cadmium-telluride panel, in contrast to the dominant silicon-based photovoltaics; that company, too, has expanded its U.S. footprint, recently completing a factory in Louisiana and announcing a new one in South Carolina.
Even before Trump won his second election, though, bipartisan political sentiment was shifting against Chinese companies’ benefiting from federal incentives, even those that built state-of-the-art factories in the U.S. and staffed them with American workers.
Trina had constructed the Dallas factory and had just begun the laborious process of commissioning the lines when it evidently saw the writing on the wall. Trina sold the factory in December to Freyr Battery, which had tried and failed to build battery gigafactories in Norway and Georgia. The entity officially rebranded as T1 Energy in February and now is headquartered in the U.S. and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Gold demurred on the question of who approached whom with an offer. In any case, after the transaction, T1 owned the factory, which it calls G1 Dallas, and Trina retained a 13.2% stake in the company. That arrangement neatly anticipated the “foreign entity of concern” (FEOC) rules that Trump signed into law this summer: Republicans restricted clean energy tax credits from going to companies with too much ownership by Chinese companies.
“FEOC is going to be a challenge for this industry because China has dominated the solar industry for years,” Gold said. But the December transaction took the factory from a level of Chinese ownership that would violate the subsequent FEOC rules to a level “well below the equity cutoff,” Gold noted. “We were doing it before Congress spelled out what people need to do.”
Congress set the FEOC restrictions to kick in at the start of 2026, which means some domestic solar factories will, ironically, cease to qualify for the made-in-America tax credits under their current ownership structures. Santa’s sack just might hold some factories for corporations, like T1, that have made it onto the FEOC “nice list.”
As for the ongoing use of Trina-branded containers for shipping T1 modules, “there was no reason to make extra waste by trashing a bunch of boxes,” Gold said.
Solar panels are the last step of the supply chain, and the one with the lowest barrier to entry: Though highly specialized and automated, the machines at T1, as at Qcells’ facility in Dalton, Georgia, are assembling components produced elsewhere. Making silicon cells requires a step change in capital and technical proficiency, as do the precursor steps of producing wafers and polysilicon ingots.
The U.S. has proved it can make solar panels that, if not economically competitive with those made in China, can get by in a protectionist trade regime that, at least for now, is still buoyed by federal incentives. Cell production is ticking up in the U.S., which currently has factories that can use them — Suniva and ES Foundry each brought about 1 gigawatt of cell capacity on line in the past year. Qcells is finishing up a 3.3-gigawatt cell-production facility in Georgia.
This constitutes an “orderly strategic buildout” for the domestic industry, said Shiao of American Clean Power. “The cell producers aren’t going to come until the module producers come … Right now, we’re starting to see that larger growth of cell production because we’ve had those years for those investment decisions to come to fruition.”
T1 is also getting in on the photovoltaic-cell action. By the end of the year, Gold said, the company expects to break ground on a $400 million cell-fabrication plant, or fab, in Rockdale, Texas, down the road from another silicon-oriented business: a major Samsung chip-fab development. The plan is to ramp up to 2.1 gigawatts of cell production by the end of 2026 and add another 3.2 gigawatts in a subsequent phase.
That’s one angle. This fall T1 also bought a minority equity stake in a fellow upstart solar manufacturer called Talon PV, which is building a 4.8-gigawatt cell fab in Baytown, Texas, and targeting production in early 2027.
Until those factories open, T1 is importing cells from non-FEOC countries, Gold said.
A T1 deal with legacy glass producer Corning signals a further deepening of the U.S. solar supply chain. Corning announced in October that it had opened polysilicon ingot and wafer production in Michigan — the crucial precursor to cell production, and something the U.S. hasn’t had in almost a decade. Business launched on an auspicious note, as Corning has already sold 80% of all its expected production for the next five years to customers including T1.
With that industrial breakthrough, the pieces have fallen into place for a fully American supply of the key silicon solar-panel components. Now the question is whether this fledgling supply chain can survive the tumultuous policy swings of the second Trump presidency.
Over the past decade or so, the Connecticut Green Bank, the first green bank in the United States, has taken on an unusual role — that of a “public developer” of solar projects for schools, cities, and low-income housing across the state.
“There are all sorts of public institutions that take in public money and give a loan, a grant, and that’s all they do,” said Jason Kowalski, executive director of the Public Renewables Project. “This is completely different in what it can achieve.”
The Connecticut Green Bank’s Solar Marketplace Assistance Program Plus (Solar MAP+) actively engages in originating, developing, and even owning projects, he said. To date, the program has deployed $145 million in capital on nearly 54 megawatts’ worth of solar projects that are expected to help save a collective $57 million in energy costs, according to bank data shared with Canary Media.
Though the approach is unusual for a public entity, it needn’t be, Kowalski said. In fact, it is a model that cash-strapped state governments should consider closely as federal clean-energy tax credits disappear and energy costs rise. That’s particularly true for the 16 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have created a government-backed or nonprofit green bank since Connecticut first launched its version in 2011.
The bank’s program targets sectors that private lenders and solar developers might shy away from because of perceived credit risks or low returns on investment, Kowalski explained. It taps into low-cost financing available to state entities and builds portfolios of projects to achieve economies of scale.
Then the revenues generated from those projects are “recycled”: used to expand the pool of capital from which it can make loans for other projects that help achieve Connecticut’s clean energy and environmental justice goals.
While some private-sector solar industry players may see the Solar MAP+ approach as infringing on their turf, state-backed agencies “see it as expanding the role of the private-sector installation business,” Kowalski said.
That’s certainly the case for the school solar projects that Solar MAP+ has built, said Tish Tablan, senior program director at Generation180, a clean energy advocacy group.
A September report by Tablan’s and Kowalski’s groups and the Climate Reality Project found that Connecticut — the third-smallest state by land mass and 29th in population — ranks fifth in the country for total solar capacity installed on K–12 schools and second (behind Hawaii) in the percentage of K–12 schools with solar.
The Connecticut Green Bank developed 27% of school solar installations in the state from 2015 to 2023, according to the report. Those installations are projected to save schools tens of millions of dollars in energy costs, and more than half are in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
The same model can help schools and public buildings do more than solar, Tablan added. “We can look at electrification, we can look at heat pumps, we can look at solar-plus-storage, we can look at microgrids.”
This kind of financial support is increasingly important as the Trump administration cancels federal funding for clean energy projects more broadly, and in disadvantaged communities in particular, Tablan and Kowalski said. That includes the administration’s move to claw back $20 billion in federal “green bank” funds meant to promote precisely this kind of public-sector finance, which is now being challenged in court.
Solar MAP+ evolved largely as a response to gaps in the state’s broader solar market, said Mackey Dykes, the Connecticut Green Bank’s executive vice president of financing programs.
The same 2011 law that launched the bank also created state solar incentives meant to boost development across multiple sectors of the economy, Dykes said. “But there were some areas where we didn’t see a lot of activity. We sat down and started to figure out why that was.”
The first targets were state agencies that were lagging in solar development, despite their access to relatively low-cost capital, he said. This indicated that incentives alone weren’t the solution. It turned out that those agencies “needed help with documentation structures, with procurement, with project labor agreements,” he said. “We put that together, and projects started happening.”
“Then we realized we built this Swiss Army knife of tools that we could bring to bear in other sectors where there were gaps in solar deployment,” Dykes said. The Connecticut Green Bank also started looking at municipalities that were lagging in using solar incentives, particularly smaller towns, he said. At around the same time, he noted, “we realized the solar incentive program in the state was undersubscribed for school projects,” and they set out to fix that.
Bundling multiple school projects can help lower costs. Dykes cited the example of a 67-kilowatt system at an intermediate school in Portland, Connecticut. “You’d have trouble attracting attention for a project that small,” he said. “When you combine it with dozens of projects, and have developers competing with a pool of projects, the projects become more feasible,” with the Connecticut Green Bank serving as a clearinghouse for hiring installers and securing financing at a larger scale.
Tablan highlighted the similarities with Generation180’s work with schools. “If you ask any public-sector entity, they’re going to say budget and cost are the first concerns,” she said. Most of the country’s school solar projects have been developed via third-party ownership models, and “Connecticut Green Bank has taken that approach” as well, she said.
The wraparound services that Solar MAP+ offers bring more than money to the equation, said Advait Arun, senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise. The nonprofit think tank uses the term “public development” to characterize the way public entities can expand beyond financing to include “all of the steps in a project development pipeline,” including ownership, operations, and maintenance.
That’s not a normal role for green banks, Arun said. As of the end of 2023, green banks and partners had driven a cumulative $25.4 billion in public and private investments, according to the Coalition for Green Capital, a group that includes green banks and environmental advocacy organizations. Most of that funding has focused on de-risking harder-to-finance sectors, such as energy efficiency and rooftop solar installations in low-income neighborhoods, without taking the plunge into the full range of project development activities that Solar MAP+ is involved in.
But even under this model, there are gaps that private sector financiers don’t want to fill. That’s where public-sector ownership can help, as the data on school solar’s growth in Connecticut indicates, Arun noted.
“We’re not used to this kind of thing in this country,” he said. But “without the Connecticut Green Bank de-risking schools for this kind of solar investment, the market would have remained smaller than it could be.”
That direct involvement has helped smaller school districts build more ambitious project pipelines over time, said Emily Basham, director of financing programs for Solar MAP+.
In Manchester, Connecticut, once the private developers caught wind of state involvement, city leaders “were somewhat bombarded with proposals,” Basham said. “They wanted to do their first projects with us, to cut their teeth on it.”
The more than $100,000 in projected annual energy savings from the solar systems at seven municipal buildings, including six schools, helped the city gain confidence in moving forward with a subsequent project that has converted one of its elementary schools into the state’s first net-zero school by adding advanced insulation systems and on-site geothermal energy, she said.
The Connecticut Green Bank’s dive into parts of the project development process has drawn fire from solar industry groups in the state.
In 2024, solar developers pushed lawmakers to restrict the bank from developing projects at schools and municipal sites, citing concerns around a lack of competitive bidding. That effort was defeated after representatives of state and local government as well as labor and clean-energy advocates at the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs weighed in to support the bank.
Some of those supporters came from Branford, Connecticut, which contracted with the Connecticut Green Bank to build solar arrays on two elementary schools.
“We’re a municipality with limited staff and dedicated volunteers, but you can’t ask volunteers to procure and oversee a project of that size,” said Jamie Cosgrove, who recently ended a 12-year stint as Branford’s first selectman — the equivalent of the town’s mayor — to join the Connecticut Green Bank’s board of directors. “We use them as a trusted source, and we feel comfortable engaging with them to move forward on a number of these projects.”
The two elementary schools’ solar installations are expected to save about $248,000 over the next 20 years, Cosgrove noted — not a huge payback for a private-sector developer. “Maybe these projects aren’t significantly cash-flow positive. But there are other priorities we have as a municipality. We’re looking to advance our clean energy goals.”
Branford has also done plenty of work with the private sector, including a 4.3-megawatt solar array on a former gravel yard and solar projects at the town’s high school and fire station, said Jim Finch, Branford’s finance director. “It’s not an either-or thing,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a state entity that’s identified reducing carbon emissions as a public purpose to do this kind of work,” Finch added. “We have organizations to deal with clean air, financing sewer projects, et cetera — we can have public purpose entities do that.”
State development finance agencies — government entities in all 50 states that support economic development through a variety of financing structures — could also take on this kind of public developer model, he said.
New York could be a first target, said Kowalski of the Public Renewables Project. The New York Power Authority, the public agency that owns and develops transmission and generation in the state, has been tasked with building gigawatts of large-scale renewables. Backers of more muscular government intervention to rejuvenate the state’s faltering progress on clean energy are calling for the NYPA to follow Connecticut’s lead in building solar on school rooftops.
Finding ways to push more finance into solar projects has become a more pressing matter, Kowalski said, both to offset the loss of solar tax credits from the megalaw passed by Republicans in Congress this summer and to combat fast-rising electricity costs across the country.
“Our whole report is an answer to how to respond to the tax credits getting rolled back. If there’s a shortfall, we think we have an answer,” Kowalski said. “Public developer models can be part of an affordability agenda on climate.”
The world is clamoring for more electrons. It’s getting them from solar and wind.
Between January and September, the two clean-energy sources grew fast enough to more than offset all new demand worldwide, according to data from energy research firm Ember.
Power demand rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all that new demand on its own, increasing by 498 TWh. Wind generation, meanwhile, climbed by 137 TWh.
What happens when clean energy not only meets but exceeds new power demand? We start to burn less fossil fuels. At least a little less: Through Q3, fossil-fuel generation dropped by 17 TWh, compared to the first three quarters of 2024. This trend is expected to continue through the end of the year. Ember forecasts that fossil-fuel generation will have experienced no notable growth in 2025 — something that hasn’t happened since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s unclear whether this flatlining marks the beginning of the end for fossil-fueled electricity or whether it’s just a pause before another surge in dirty power. The answer will more or less be determined by what grows faster: electricity demand or renewable energy.
Common consensus is that the world’s appetite for electricity will expand rapidly in the coming years. The planet is warming and driving increased use of air conditioning. AI developers are building massive power-hungry data centers. Cars, homes, and factories are being electrified. That all adds up: The International Energy Agency expects power demand to rise by a staggering 40% over the next decade.
Meanwhile, it’s almost not worth considering long-term forecasts about the growth of clean energy, given how inaccurate they’ve been in the past. Analysts have consistently underestimated solar, in particular.
For the global power sector to truly decarbonize, carbon-free energy needs to not only keep pace with electricity demand but far outrun it. Let’s hope solar continues to overperform.
Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments.
Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables — a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions.
Ohio has become a hot spot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships.
In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.
By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio.
From the very beginning, “it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it.
“We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. “They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.”
Many petition signers “didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. “And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land.
While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects.
The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure.
All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380 — just 60 more than the required threshold of 8% of the number of votes in the last governor’s election.
Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making.
In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their Feb. 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter.
Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17.
Roughly two dozen residents came to the July meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees.
“The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media.
He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. “I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said.
The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments — and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond.
“It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel — not food. “We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added.
Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties — not townships — have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue.
In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to.
The choice shows how SB 52 has led to “an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, “county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships.
Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board.
As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind — two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy.
“Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said.
Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum.
“It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere.
Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county.
“It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said. As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. “To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.”
Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. “I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said.
Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. “Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said.
“So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.
Brookfield Renewable Partners has signed yet another deal to power a tech giant’s data centers with one of its existing hydroelectric plants, heralding a potential lifeline for America’s aging dams.
In its quarterly earnings call with investors this month, Brookfield said it had signed a 20-year contract with Microsoft “at one of our hydro facilities” in the nation’s largest grid system, PJM Interconnection.
The deal is part of a broader agreement, announced last year, to supply Microsoft’s data centers with 10.5 gigawatts of renewable electricity. But it’s the first contract under that framework to support a specific hydroelectric facility. Brookfield declined to disclose which of its dams is part of the deal. Near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the company operates at least two stations with a combined capacity of nearly 700 megawatts in PJM’s 13-state territory. On the earnings call, Brookfield suggested it may acquire a third plant in the grid system.
The move comes nearly four months after Brookfield signed the biggest deal for hydropower in history: a $3 billion agreement to supply Google’s data centers with up to 3 gigawatts of power for the next two decades.
It also comes at a make-or-break moment for the U.S. hydropower sector, which is one of the few forms of always-on, carbon-free energy available in a country clamoring for clean electrons. Most projects are decades old and will have to undergo relicensing processes over the coming years.
Both of Brookfield’s hydroelectric facilities in Pennsylvania — the 252-megawatt Holtwood Hydroelectric Project, first opened in 1910, and the nearly 418-megawatt Safe Harbor Hydroelectric Project, built in the early 1930s — are up for relicensing in the next five years.
As part of the Google and Microsoft deals, Brookfield said it was able to “upfinance” both facilities, a term that typically describes when private equity companies refinance an existing loan and borrow more money on top of the remaining balance. That could be an indicator that the data center deals are helping Brookfield fund the upgrades and other requirements needed to obtain new operating licenses.
“We continue to evaluate the opportunity to acquire hydro [plants] which would fit well within our portfolio,” Connor Teskey, president of Brookfield Asset Management, said on the earnings call.
Nearly 450 hydroelectric stations totaling more than 16 gigawatts of power-producing capacity are slated for relicensing across the U.S. in over the next decade. That’s roughly 40% of the nonfederal fleet (the government owns about half the country’s hydropower facilities).
The relicensing process for hydropower is uniquely onerous, involving multiple federal, state, and local regulators. Some power plant owners and advocates have accused regulators of using the process to try to squeeze the facilities for additional benefits, such as paying for roads or infrastructure unrelated to a dam itself, which owners say they can’t afford. Faced with relicensing, some stations have simply shuttered, their owners deciding it’s easier to surrender their permits than to make costly upgrades and regional investments needed to win support.
“This is major infrastructure. These facilities cost billions of dollars,” Malcolm Woolf, the National Hydropower Association’s chief executive, previously told Canary Media. “They’re like bridges and roads. They get a license for 50 years. The state agencies view [the relicensing process] as an opportunity to extract concessions from what they view as a deep pocket.”
In the 1970s, he added, “maybe the industry was a deep pocket.”
“But now,” Woolf said, “with the low cost of other fuels like wind and solar and gas, it’s driving these facilities to bankruptcy and to surrender licenses.”
The ocean has beckoned to legions of energy entrepreneurs before dashing their hopes against the rocks. Now a new company is heeding the siren call — but with a twist.
Italy’s Sizable Energy launched in 2022 to build pumped hydro energy storage under the ocean. Cofounder and CEO Manuele Aufiero pursues that outlandish vision with the methodical diligence he picked up as a seasoned nuclear engineer. Now, the firm has deep-water wave testing under its belt, and in October it closed $8 million in seed funding to build its first offshore demonstration project.
This venture takes aim at two longstanding, elusive cleantech dreams: reinventing pumped hydro and harnessing the sea for clean energy. It’s an ambitious project that must navigate choppy seas, literally and figuratively, to succeed. But if Sizable can pull it off, it would unlock low-cost, long-duration storage that could accelerate the broader shift to clean energy.
Even as lithium-ion batteries surge in popularity, legacy pumped-hydro projects still store more gigawatt-hours than any other technology. The latter harnesses gravity, using excess electricity to pump water uphill and releasing it to turn turbines when more energy is needed. This simple, century-old technology rarely gets built anymore, however; besides the environmental implications of forming enormous reservoirs, today’s fast-moving energy markets aren’t particularly encouraging for power plants that take many years to build and cost billions of dollars up front.
That’s not to say pumped hydro never gets built, Aufiero told me — Switzerland recently completed a facility in a high mountain valley, but it took 14 years. Part of the problem there is that every mountain is different, he explained: the height, flow rate, and energy equipment must be customized for each location.
But the ocean, he said, offers the chance to standardize this otherwise bespoke tech — making it far easier and quicker to deploy.
“We are unfolding the possibility of building the system even before knowing exactly where you are going to deploy,” he said. “We do that by deploying offshore. Water is the same everywhere.”
Specifically, Sizable has designed a gravity-based storage system that shuttles a briny liquid up and down a vertical pipe affixed to the seafloor. Inflatable membranes form reservoirs at the bottom and on the surface; from above, it looks like a giant floating donut. The system connects to the land-based grid, and uses power to pump the brine up through the plastic pipe. Reversing that regenerates power.
Startups have tried reinventing pumped hydro by running train cars filled with rocks uphill, loading up ski-lift-style cable systems with weights, and stacking enormous blocks with robotic cranes. Each of those began with the same claims about mechanical simplicity and ended up in the junkyard of cleantech ideas. But where those ventures started on the ground and had to build up, Sizable Energy starts on the ocean surface and goes down.
“There’s a lot of ocean depth in the world — it’s not oversubscribed,” said Bruce Leak, general partner at Playground Global, which led the seed round.
The relatively low costs of Sizable’s design could make it competitive for long-duration storage, something experts think the grid needs but nobody has really delivered yet.
Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly competitive for shorter durations, like four hours. But they get prohibitively expensive for much longer than that. To deliver the same megawatt capacity over 12 or 24 hours (through the night or a whole day of cloudy weather) requires stacking a bunch more batteries, and that stacks the cost.
Any company that wants to compete in long-duration storage has to find materials and designs that make it dirt cheap to add hours of capacity. Traditional pumped hydro does this by filling a large reservoir with water. Sizable chose a double-walled membrane to fill with brine, which fits the cheap and scalable bill. Adding more vertical feet of plastic pipe is pretty inexpensive, too.
The power equipment costs less than 700 euros ($810) per kilowatt in the long term, competitive with pumped hydro, Aufiero said. Where the technology really shines is in the marginal cost of adding more storage duration: less than 20 euros ($23) per kilowatt-hour, at scale. That’s right on par with what Form Energy is targeting with its iron-air battery, an attempt at a mass-produced electrochemical battery for 100 hours of duration.
Sizable is shooting for eight hours to 24 and beyond. The economics improve at a larger scale: If you’ve got to install a mooring system and connect a marine cable to the grid, you might as well ship more power through it rather than less.
That’ll take some time to work up to. Sizable already built a kilowatt-scale proof of concept, which it floated at the Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory in Reggio Calabria, Italy. In September, the company subjected its design to a bombardment of artificial waves in the gigantic pool at the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands, which vets the durability of marine engineering. The successful performance in those tests set the stage for the recent fundraising round.
With the cash infusion, the team is building a 1-megawatt device, which will sport a 50-meter (164-foot) radius and occupy up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) of ocean column off the coast of Reggio Calabria.
Sizable is funding this project itself, since it can’t yet show financiers the real-world performance data they need to underwrite investment. It will be fully functional, using scaled-down components because of its diminutive size, but it won’t connect to the grid. Sizable has already secured a 10-megawatt grid connection in southern Italy for its first truly commercial development.
The unenviable challenge facing Aufiero is to fortify his invention against the torments of the sea, without spending so much money armoring it that it loses its low cost.
“Doing something in the ocean, it is a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity for massive scalability,” Aufiero said. He set out to design a “simple system that can be scaled without too many surprises.”
Wave action has literally sunk many hopeful ocean-energy pilot projects. But such devices in the past sought to harness the renewable power of the waves through direct contact. Sizable Energy only needs the ocean as a uniform space to operate in, so its technology tries to minimize wave contact as much as possible.
Two outer rings of plastic pipe were engineered to disrupt waves before they hit the floating reservoir. In the event that strong surf or heavy rain threatens to weigh down the reservoir, bilge pumps activate to clear out the liquid.
In Europe, people have been leasing seabed for energy projects at grand scale for decades. Sizable will apply to the same regulatory bodies that oversee offshore wind, but needs a much smaller footprint per megawatt.
In fact, offshore wind farms are an attractive potential site for the startup’s contraption, Aufiero said. By colocating, Sizable could share the export cables, and firm up the booms and busts of wind generation by storing it locally and distributing it to the grid as needed. Leak, the investor, likened this pairing to transforming an offshore wind plant into a nuclear power plant by converting variable generation into predictable, baseload clean energy.
For their part, the lead investors at Playground Global find the challenge of surviving Neptune’s wrath exhilarating.
“As engineers, we love things that are hard,” Leak told me. “If it’s a good idea that anybody can do, what’s your difference?”
Australia’s power sector is steadily shifting away from coal and toward running on 100% renewable energy. Now the country is trying to ensure some of its biggest electricity users — aluminum smelters — aren’t left behind in the clean-energy transition.
The Australian government is developing a Green Aluminium Production Credit, or GAPC, to reduce the cost of using solar, wind, and energy storage to power the country’s four giant smelters. The AU$2 billion (US$1.3 billion) program is part of a larger federal industrial policy that aims to decarbonize Australia’s economy over the next decade.
“Australia is sending a signal that it wants this industry to stay,” said Marghanita Johnson, CEO of the Australian Aluminium Council. “Therefore, what do we need to do to keep the industry during this challenging transition?”
Smelters everywhere are power-hungry facilities. That’s because the process of converting raw materials into aluminum can require hundreds of megawatts of electricity running at near-constant rates. In Australia, a country of nearly 28 million people, the four smelters consume roughly 10% of the nation’s electricity and contribute about 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
As in many places, renewables are the country’s cheapest new electricity sources, and battery storage costs are plunging. But the fact that wind and solar power aren’t available around the clock means that smelters need to procure more total megawatts from multiple sources to make sure that, at any moment, they have enough capacity to operate, Johnson said.
Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources is still finalizing the design of its GAPC. Generally, though, it will cover between 30% to 40% of the extra costs associated with using renewables to produce aluminum instead of conventional sources like coal and gas. The program will provide credits to aluminum producers for every metric ton of “green” aluminum they produce for up to 10 years, starting from the 2028-2029 financial year.
The initiative is part of an emerging movement by countries to subsidize or otherwise support domestic heavy industries as they work to decarbonize, said Chris Bataille, an adjunct research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
He noted that, under the Biden administration, the United States had been considering developing tax credits to incentivize industrial manufacturers to use more renewable energy, though those discussions have sputtered under the second Trump administration. In China, meanwhile, the central government is investing more money into projects that reduce or replace coal use in sectors like steel, cement, and chemicals.
”This is going to be a big question going forward: How [can countries] get these big industries off of fossil fuels and onto using variable renewable power, and all the adaptations that are necessary?” Bataille said.
Aluminum smelters typically sign long-term contracts with utilities that lock in the price of electricity the companies pay over years or decades. In Australia, those contracts are coming to an end, and as manufacturers look to sign new deals, they’re finding themselves in a dramatically different energy market, Johnson said.
Today, three of Australia’s smelters get most of their electricity from coal-fired power plants: Rio Tinto’s Boyne Island facility in Queensland, Alcoa’s Portland plant in Victoria, and Tomago Aluminium’s smelter in New South Wales. Only Rio Tinto’s Bell Bay smelter in Tasmania runs predominantly on hydropower.
Coal power is steadily declining in Australia as renewables surge, owing primarily to market forces. About 90% of the aging coal fleet will likely be gone by 2035, and the rest could shutter later that decade, the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, which oversees the nation’s power markets, recently told Canary Media’s Julian Spector. (Australia banned nuclear energy decades ago, so it’s not an option.)
For now, coal still accounts for 46% of Australia’s annual electricity production, according to the International Energy Agency. Renewables contribute about 35%, though existing projects aren’t necessarily located near smelters that need them.
Rio Tinto, which owns a majority share of Tomago Aluminium, warned in late October that the smelter is bracing for a potential shutdown by the end of 2028 owing to the soaring costs of both “coal-fired and renewable energy options from January 2029” that would make the facility’s operations commercially unviable. Tomago is the country’s largest smelter, accounting for about 40% of Australia’s annual aluminum production.
“There is significant uncertainty about when renewable projects will be available at the scale we need,” Jérôme Dozol, CEO of Tomago Aluminium, said in an Oct. 28 statement.
Johnson said Tomago’s troubles point to the broader limitations of initiatives like the GAPC. While the production credit can reduce power costs for smelters, other measures are needed to support the buildout of not just wind, solar, and battery storage but also transmission lines and grid infrastructure that connect the resources to the energy-gobbling smelters.
The Australian Aluminium Council is also advocating for energy policies that reward smelters for the benefits they are able to provide to the grid. For example, smelters can rapidly reduce their power consumption for about an hour at a time to help stabilize the system during emergencies. Alcoa is participating in such a demand-response program in Australia, as is Rio Tinto’s Tiwai Point smelter in New Zealand. Aluminum plants can also be an important source of demand for solar power plants in particular, since factories use plenty of power during the day when households generally consume less.
“We’re doing a lot of work here in Australia, in terms of the energy transition and how all these pieces of the puzzle need to fit together,” Johnson said.
.svg)
