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Want to know why EV chargers can be so hard to connect to crowded urban power grids? Just look to San Francisco’s latest public charging station, opened by startup Revel last week.
At first glance, the station, Revel’s first foray outside of its home city of New York, doesn’t seem like it should be that tricky for Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric to connect. It’s a fairly small parking lot in the city’s Mission District, right next to a major freeway, featuring a fairly standard number of high-speed chargers — 12 — that are available 24/7.
But when all those chargers are used at once, the total demand on the grid adds up to 1.3 megawatts, Neema Yazdi, a strategic analyst on PG&E’s clean energy transportation team, said at the ribbon-cutting event last week. That’s equivalent to roughly one-quarter of the power demand of the city’s tallest building, the 1.4-million-square-foot, 61-story Salesforce Tower.
“That’s a big feat for a utility to energize,” he said — “and to do something like that is impossible without the close collaboration of our customers.”
More such challenges and collaborations are on the way. Revel plans to start construction this year on seven more Bay Area sites with a total of 125 fast-charging plugs. It’s an ambitious pace in a state with notoriously long wait times to bring EV charging hubs online.
One way Revel hopes to achieve this plan is by entering two of its upcoming stations into a new PG&E program to fast-track EV charging hubs. On one condition, that is: Station operators have to be willing to reduce the power that chargers can deliver at the times when PG&E’s grid can’t handle the maximum draw. PG&E and Revel will pursue this “flexible service connection” approach at one site in the city of Oakland and another near San Francisco International Airport.
Under standard utility practice, customers can’t connect if their maximum power draw threatens to overtax the grid, even if only during a handful of hours per year when grid demand peaks. That’s despite the fact that many EV charging sites are highly unlikely to have enough vehicles charging at once to reach that limit — and that they can theoretically dial back their power use during those critical hours.
Flexible service turns that theoretical capability into an operational reality. The process is straightforward: PG&E forecasts its grid needs and, a day ahead of time, sends customers instructions for when they need to curtail power use.
Both customers and utility win out, Yazdi said. Customers can “connect quickly and more seamlessly” and charge at full capacity most of the time, as they wait for PG&E to complete grid upgrades that will eventually remove the constraints they face during peak hours.
PG&E, meanwhile, gets to expand EV charging more quickly than it would otherwise be able to. That’s not just good for meeting the state’s carbon-cutting goals but for reducing rates for customers at large. That’s because the program helps reduce immediate pressure on PG&E to make grid upgrades, which are a primary driver of rising electricity rates in its territory, while also quickly expanding its electricity sales.
“Only a few utilities in the United States are doing this nowadays,” Yazdi said. “This is really forward-thinking, and we’re really excited about it.”
So are the authors of a February Environmental Defense Fund report that highlights PG&E’s leading position among U.S. utilities on the flexible connection front. Southern California Edison is pursuing a similar pilot project, the report notes, and utilities and regulators in Illinois and Colorado are exploring approaches to flexible interconnection as well.
Finding ways for EV charging stations to connect more rapidly provides “both economic benefits to the fleet that can put its newly acquired vehicles and chargers to work, and societal benefits where these electric trucks and buses are displacing fossil fuel vehicles earlier than otherwise possible,” the report’s authors wrote.
It took PG&E more than a year to establish, test, and gain confidence in the underlying technology needed to complete its first flexible interconnection at a Tesla charging complex in California’s Central Valley late last year.
With initial projects proving the technology is reliable, PG&E started looking to expand its use of flexible connections, including at several more EV charging sites in the Central Valley — and Revel’s two sites in the Bay Area.
Revel has been working with PG&E for about 18 months to identify sites and plan for its flexible connection projects, said Jake Potent, the company’s vice president of corporate affairs. “There are a lot of times we don’t go forward because we’re grid-constrained.”
In New York City, Revel has already built five locations serving a total of 88 fast chargers and plans to more than triple that number to 267 chargers by the end of the year. But finding spots with enough grid capacity to serve those concentrated power demands hasn’t been easy, Paul Suhey, Revel’s chief operating officer and cofounder, told Canary Media back in 2021.
At last week’s ribbon-cutting, Suhey emphasized that building urban fast-charging stations is “kind of hard — well, it’s really hard. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
But finding ways to fit megawatt-scale charging into cities is important for localities in states like New York and California, which have set aggressive goals to end sales of new gasoline-fueled cars by 2035. EVs now make up about one-third of passenger vehicle sales in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie said at last week’s event, well above the national share of around 8%.
Those adoption numbers gave Revel confidence its fast chargers would get enough use to earn back its costs, Suhey told Canary Media. In New York City, where EV adoption is lower, Revel also operates an all-EV rideshare fleet rather than relying solely on public customers to make the economics of its charging sites work out. New York City and California have mandates for rideshare companies to switch to EVs over the coming years, which further heightens the need for charging sites.
Cities also struggle to bring public charging stations into neighborhoods where most people rent their homes, said Joe Piasecki, public affairs and policy coordinator for the San Francisco Environment Department.
That’s a big problem: Most people charge their EVs at home, but renters face an uphill battle in convincing landlords to install EV chargers on their behalf. That means renters tend to be disproportionately reliant on public EV charging while also having worse access to it. About 70% of San Francisco residents live in multifamily housing, Piasecki said.
The economics of urban EV charging have been helped along in California and New York by regulator-approved programs that instruct utilities to cover the costs of “make-ready” infrastructure — digging trenches, installing transformers and switchgear, and other work required to connect charging stations to the grid — that the site developer might otherwise bear. Similar programs support EV charger installations in Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states.
But make-ready work is just one of the expenses that EV charging creates. Sometimes, big sites might force utilities to upgrade the substations serving entire neighborhoods. Flexible interconnection can allow utilities to postpone those “upstream” upgrades until they can be conducted as part of a broader strategic grid expansion plan.
Demand for those upgrades will increase as high-speed charging expands — and as the latest generation of chargers requires even more power to charge vehicles faster. Electrify America’s flagship indoor charging station in San Francisco, which houses 20 high-speed chargers, required PG&E to deliver high-voltage power typically reserved for transmission grids and major industrial customers.
Public fast chargers aren’t the only option, of course. Slower Level 2 chargers can be installed in garages, along curbs, or into street lights. Even slower Level 1 chargers could offer overnight charging options for multifamily buildings.
But fast chargers that replicate the experience of fueling up at a gas station are widely seen as a vital amenity to expand the pool of people willing to switch to an EV. “Without widespread, easy to use, convenient, reliable fast charging, dreams of EV adoption are just that — dreams,” Suhey said.
Congressional Republicans are taking aim at the Inflation Reduction Act as they seek to slash federal spending.If they choose to repeal the law’s clean-energy tax credits entirely, it could cause energy bills around the country to rise significantly over the next five years, according to a new report by the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization. A repeal would affect some states more than others, with the deep-red state of Texas projected to get hit the hardest.
Rhodium’s report is not the only one to find that bills would rise with the repeal of key IRA tax credits. Research firm Energy Innovation conducted an analysis of several recent studies on the topic and found that repeal would cost households a total of $6 billion per year by 2030. By 2040, costs would balloon to $25 billion annually.
It’s not just households that would feel the pain. Industrial customers as a whole would spend between $8 billion and $14 billion more for energy each year if Inflation Reduction Act incentives are repealed.
Utility bills are already climbing across much of the country. Service shutoffs are on the rise. The Trump administration just eliminated the entire staff of a program that helps low-income households pay for heating and cooling.
Cutting IRA incentives that encourage the construction of solar, wind, and batteries would exacerbate these problems even as the Trump administration touts its commitment to affordable energy. That’s because clean energy is now the cheapest form of energy, and it’s only getting less expensive. There’s a reason that 93% of the power plants developers plan to build this year are carbon-free.
Congressional Republicans are divided on the issue of IRA tax credits, making it unclear exactly how things will play out. But it’s widely expected that the law will be modified to some extent.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the approach will be “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.” But attacking the law may be too appealing for GOP lawmakers to pass up; it’s an opportunity to cut federal spending, please Trump, and win culture-war points against clean energy all at once.
Still, there is growing support for the IRA among some of the Republican representatives whose constituents benefit most from the law. We’ll know soon if that’s enough to save key parts of it — and avoid spiking utility bills further.
On Wednesday, President Trump unveiled a suite of new tariffs that target pretty much every country and territory in the world — including some where nobody even lives. The full extent of the tariffs’ reach remains unclear, but wind developers, solar manufacturers, tech companies, automakers, and even fossil-fuel producers are already sweating.
The wind industry, already suffering under the Trump administration, is likely to face further setbacks. Wind turbines rely on components from around the world, even if they’re usually assembled in the U.S. The same is true for solar panels and batteries. Endri Lico, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie, told The New York Times that a 25% tariff on imports could raise the cost of building onshore wind turbines by 10% and renewable energy overall by 7% — and many of Trump’s tariffs exceed that 25% threshold.
Higher clean energy costs will pose a big challenge for tech companies looking to expand energy-hungry data centers to power AI, Semafor reports. Renewables are the cheapest, quickest way to add new power to the grid, especially amid yearslong waits for new gas turbines.
The EV industry is also at risk. Most auto factories being built in the U.S. are focused on EVs and batteries, but they still rely on foreign metals and materials. Manufacturers and dealers fear sticker prices on cars could rise as much as $10,000 under the tariffs, Politico reports, exacerbating one of the biggest deterrents to EV adoption: high up-front costs.
The White House exempted imports of oil, gas, and refined products from the tariffs, alleviating fears for refiners that rely on crude oil imports. But oil prices still plunged Thursday morning, as investors worry the tariffs will slow economic growth and lower fuel demand around the world.
The potential slump in overall economic activity could result in one climate upside: a drop in emissions. “In the short-term, any decline is likely to have a positive impact on emissions reduction,” writes finance professor Rakesh Gupta in The Conversation. “We saw this effect during the COVID-19 pandemic, when global production and trade fell.”
But longer-term progress on U.S. clean energy manufacturing and deployment will likely stall if the announced tariffs hold, with implications that go far beyond decarbonization. Here’s how Vanessa Sciarra, vice president of trade and international competitiveness for American Clean Power, put it in a Thursday statement:
“The policy whiplash from these tariffs will ultimately undermine the ability to realize a domestic supply chain and will constrain efforts to deliver energy security and reliability for Americans.”
Illinois pushes for stronger vehicle emissions rules, despite House threats
Illinois advocates are pushing their state to embrace California’s nation-leading vehicle emissions standards, Canary Media’s Kari Lydersen reports — even as President Trump and House Republicans threaten to eliminate the rules.
Sixteen states and D.C. have adopted California’s zero-emission vehicle rules, and 10 have followed its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations. But to be enforceable, those rules needed a waiver from the U.S. EPA. President Trump has called for “terminating” those waivers. On Thursday, House Republicans introduced legislation that would roll the waivers back, even though the nation’s top legislative auditor ruled that they aren’t subject to congressional review.
Crushing the rules would be a setback not only for efforts to decarbonize transportation but to clean up local air quality, too. Illinois advocates said a key reason they’re pushing these rules is to rid places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood of the air pollution caused by diesel trucking.
Offshore wind’s future keeps getting murkier
It was another bad week for offshore wind. Contract negotiations for the SouthCoast Wind project, planned for off Massachusetts’ coast, were delayed for a third time. And the developer of Maine’s first offshore wind array paused the floating project, citing industry uncertainty.
More setbacks could be on the way. Last month, the U.S. EPA revoked a permit for the Atlantic Shores development off the New Jersey coast — essentially delaying the project for years given the Trump administration’s pause on new offshore wind permitting. Wind opponents could take advantage of the Republican-run EPA to get more projects canceled, with some anti-wind groups telling Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler that agency head Lee Zeldin may be sympathetic to their cause.
Tesla’s sales slump: Chinese EV giant BYD’s sales grew 60% in the first quarter as it makes inroads beyond its home country, while Tesla’s global deliveries fell 13% over the same period amid consumer backlash against Elon Musk. (CNN, New York Times)
Home energy assistance gutted: The Trump administration fires the entire staff in charge of administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides roughly $4 billion annually to help families cover home heating and cooling costs. (Latitude Media)
Cleaning up landfills: In the absence of federal action on curbing landfill methane emissions — the U.S.’s third-largest source of methane pollution — Colorado, Michigan, and other states are stepping up with their own plans. (Canary Media)
Grading the grid: The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the U.S. electric grid a D+, down from the C- it got in 2021, amid a shortage of transformers, increase in severe weather, and lack of transmission capacity. (Utility Dive)
Congress’ rare climate win: The U.S. House overwhelmingly passes a bipartisan bill that would juice development and deployment of clean building materials — a rare win for emissions reduction efforts in Republican-held Congress. (Canary Media)
EV factories falter: More EV and battery factories were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than were in the past two years combined, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy. (Washington Post)
Reduce, reuse … reconsider? Battery recycling company Li-Cycle, which last year received a $475 million federal loan to build a factory in New York, announces it could go out of business and doesn’t have enough money to meet the requirements to access the loan. (E&E News)
DOGE cuts catch on: Republican-led states look to mirror the federal Department of Government Efficiency’s approach to funding cuts, including by slashing regulators that oversee the oil and gas industry. (E&E News)
This story was originally published by Stateline.
WATER VALLEY, Texas — On a recent day when the wind gusted close to 40 miles per hour, 82-year-old George Neill was making repairs on his ranch, oblivious to the nearby cluster of wind turbines churning the sky behind him.
“After about a year, you never know the things are here,” said Neill, who leases part of his West Texas property to an East Coast–based renewable energy company that placed three wind turbines on it four years ago.
Hundreds of other wind turbines stretch across this landscape, instantly visible to motorists traveling to nearby San Angelo and other towns. The turbines aren’t the only renewable energy producers amid the mesas: From a distance, a glistening array of solar panels resembles a small lake.
Texas is famous for producing oil and gas, but renewable energy has become deeply embedded in the state’s culture and economy. Texas led the nation in generating electricity from wind power and utility-scale solar power in 2023, and wind and solar energy projects contribute tax revenue to local governments and struggling school districts. Texas landowners are expected to receive nearly $30 billion in lease payments under current and expected projects, according to an industry study.
But in recent years, Texas has loosened its political embrace of alternative energy. For the second legislative session in a row, many Texas lawmakers are trying to derail or curb future renewable energy projects.
The shift is rooted in a number of factors, including the second Trump administration’s antipathy toward renewables and an aggressive recommitment to fossil fuels in Texas energy policy. There is lingering concern over the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, after all types of power sources failed during a devastating 2021 winter storm. Some people object to the aesthetics of wind and solar farms, or note that turbines and panels can harm some wildlife.
Texas is not alone. Once focused on stopping individual projects at the local level, renewable energy opponents have been making inroads in other state legislatures, too. They have received backing from the oil and gas industry. And they’ve been galvanized by the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest-ever attempt to speed the transition to clean energy.
In neighboring Oklahoma, for example, hundreds of people rallied at the state Capitol in January to urge Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to issue an executive order halting new wind and solar projects. Like Texas, Oklahoma is a major oil and natural gas producer, but it generated 45% of its total in-state electricity from renewable resources in 2023.
Stitt, a strong supporter of renewable energy, is highly unlikely to issue such an order. But he will leave office in two years, and several Republicans discussed as possible successors appeared at the rally. One of them, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, last month on social media criticized what he called “the green energy scam” and urged Stitt and state lawmakers to tighten wind farm rules during the current session.
In Arizona, the House earlier this year approved a bill that would bar wind farm projects within a dozen miles of any property zoned for residential use — a restriction that would apply to about 90% of the land in the state, according to an analysis by the Arizona Republic.
In Ohio, a 2021 law allowing county commissioners to create restricted areas where utility-scale solar and wind projects can’t be built has had a huge impact, as 26 Ohio counties have banned renewable energy projects. This year, GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation that would end all state solar subsidies.
And in Missouri, Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would raise taxes on farmers who lease their land for wind or solar energy projects.
The expanding opposition to renewables isn’t unexpected, said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the power grid. He noted that wind, solar, and battery storage have rapidly become the “cheapest way to put more energy on the grid.”
“They’re victims of their own success,” he told Stateline. “They are relatively new players to the market, so there’s going to be pushback from incumbents.”
At the center of the current debate in Texas is state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican committee chair who has resurrected a 2023 bill that would require new utility-scale solar and wind projects to get permits from the state’s Public Utility Commission, regulations that aren’t imposed on projects for natural gas and other energy sources. The bill also calls for set-back requirements and cleanup funds.
Kolkhorst, in a statement to Stateline, called the legislation “a common-sense approach to the encroachment of wind and solar facilities being scattered across our great state with no consideration or safeguards for landowners or the environment.”
At an hourslong Senate committee hearing recently where opponents of Kolkhorst’s bill outnumbered supporters, farmers, ranchers, and small-town Texans sometimes found themselves on opposite sides, either arguing that sprawling wind farms and solar arrays are a lasting source of economic vitality or a threat to a beloved way of life.
“The land isn’t just a piece of property to us,” said Laurie Dihle, who lives on 154 acres in Franklin County with her husband. “It’s our home, our sanctuary, and a big part of who we are. When we look out across the road, we see rolling green pastures and trees. Now we’re facing the possibility of that view and so much more being replaced by a sprawling solar farm.”
Environmentalists and industry representatives view Kolkhorst’s bill as a roadblock in the march toward green energy. Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said the bill would open the door to “a really arbitrary discriminatory permitting regime,” requiring wind and solar developers to get permits that other energy producers do not have to have.
Describing herself as a “lifelong wildlife conservationist,” Kolkhorst said she introduced the bipartisan bill with nine other senators in an effort that “looks past the billions in wind and solar subsidies to instead focus on the total impact of these projects on our land, people, and wildlife.”
But oil and gas projects also can harm wildlife, and scientists note that the emissions released by fossil fuels worsen climate change disasters.
Insiders following the legislation, including Metzger, identify one of the bill’s major supporters as Kolkhorst donor Dan Friedkin, a billionaire Houston businessman.
Friedkin, chairman emeritus of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, is owner and CEO of The Friedkin Group, a consortium of businesses and investments that includes Gulf States Toyota. Gulf States is one of the world’s largest distributors of Toyota vehicles and parts, with exclusive rights to sell Toyotas in Texas and four other states. Gulf States Toyota Inc. State PAC made four donations totaling $42,500 to Kolkhorst from October 2020 to October 2024, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.
Friedkin is a stunt pilot and outdoorsman with a ranch in South Texas. Neither he nor his lobbyist, Laird Doran, senior vice president for public and legal affairs at The Friedkin Group, returned phone calls from Stateline.
Texas lawmakers have filed dozens of wind- and solar-related bills this session, including measures aimed at restricting the placement of battery-storage facilities, curbing tax breaks and subsidies for renewable companies, and limiting the amount of electricity solar and wind projects contribute to the state’s power grid.
Republican state Sen. Phil King, for example, is pushing a bill that would mandate that 50% of all new electricity must come from natural gas, nuclear, or battery storage. King said solar and wind power should be part of the state’s energy mix, but he claims they aren’t reliable enough to serve as the foundation.
State Rep. Don McLaughlin, a Republican, has introduced legislation mandating a study of the economic impact of wind and solar projects on local communities, as well as noise and health effects, threats to wildlife, and the challenges of disassembling worn-out systems. Sweetwater, Texas, has thousands of composite blades piled up in “a windmill graveyard.”
But many rural GOP lawmakers whose districts long ago sprouted oil rigs and pumpjacks are now strong supporters of wind and solar power.
“It’s nonstop windmills on both side of the road for 70 miles,” said state Rep. John Smithee of Amarillo, describing a typical drive from his hometown in the Texas Panhandle to the Capitol in Austin. “Almost all of those [constituents] have benefited.”
State Rep. Drew Darby, whose northwest Texas district includes San Angelo and Water Valley, an unincorporated community of around 300, said revenue from wind power has resulted in countywide improvements and lease payments to property owners.
“It’s been a positive impact on rural effectiveness,” said Darby. “Landowners … are receiving nice payments for leasing the property.”
In Water Valley, taxes from the increased revenue paved the way for a tax-free bond election that enabled the town’s K-12 school to add an upscale weight room, a technical educational facility, and a “cafetorium” that serves as a dining room and performance hall. The school building had previously been so small that students had to eat in shifts.
The wind farm is expected to generate $123 million in local taxes over the 30-year life of the project, as well as more than $100 million in payments to landowners.
Neill, the West Texas rancher, said he takes the wind turbines in stride as he roams across his 1,700-acre spread.
He’s not at liberty to reveal the amount of his payments. He’s not getting rich, he said, but the money “makes a difference when you’re trying run a ranch.”
Another proposed energy-saving program is on the chopping block in Ohio.
Duke Energy Ohio quietly dropped plans late last year to roll out a broad portfolio of programs that would have boosted energy efficiency and encouraged customers to use less electricity during times of peak demand. The plans, which would have saved ratepayers nearly $126 million over three years after deductions for costs, were part of a regulatory filing last April that sought to increase charges on customers’ electric bills.
The move came after settlement talks with other stakeholders, including the state’s consumer advocate, which opposes collecting ratepayer money to provide the programs to people who aren’t in low-income groups.
State regulators are now weighing whether to approve the settlement with a much smaller efficiency program focused on low-income neighborhoods.
The case is the latest chapter in a struggle to restore utility-run programs for energy efficiency after House Bill 6, the 2019 nuclear and coal bailout law that also gutted the state’s renewable energy standards and eliminated requirements for utilities to help customers save energy.
Studies show that utility-run energy-efficiency programs are among the cheapest ways to meet growing electricity needs and cut greenhouse gas emissions. Lower demand means fossil-fuel power plants can run less often. Less wasted energy translates into lower bills for customers who take advantage of efficiency programs. Even customers who don’t directly participate benefit because the programs lower peak demand when power costs the most.
Energy efficiency can also put downward pressure on capacity prices — amounts paid by grid operators to electricity producers to make sure enough generation will be available for future needs. Due to high projected demand compared to available generation, capacity prices for most of the PJM region, including Ohio, will jump ninefold in June to about $270 per megawatt-day.
“At a time when PJM is saying we’re facing capacity shortages, we should be doing everything we can to reduce demand,” said Rob Kelter, a senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
Since 2019, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has generally rejected utility efforts to offer widely available, ratepayer-funded programs for energy efficiency. Legislative efforts to clarify that such programs are allowed under Ohio law have been introduced but failed to pass.
In the current case, Duke Energy Ohio, which serves about 750,000 customers in southwestern Ohio, proposed a portfolio of efficiency offerings that would have cost ratepayers about $75 million over the course of three years but created net savings of nearly $126 million over the same period.
The package included energy-efficient appliance rebates, incentives for off-peak energy use, education programs for schools, and home energy assessments. The company also proposed incentives for customers who let it curtail air conditioning on hot days through smart thermostats.
In November, Duke Energy Ohio filed a proposed settlement with the PUCO staff, the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, industry groups, and others. The terms drop all the programs for energy efficiency, except for one geared toward low-income consumers at a cost of up to $2.4 million per year. The Environmental Law & Policy Center and Ohio Environmental Council objected, as did a consumer group, the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio.
The PUCO will decide whether to approve the settlement plan by evaluating whether it benefits ratepayers and the public interest, whether it is the result of “serious bargaining” among knowledgable parties, and whether it violates any important regulatory principles or practices. Witnesses testified for and against the settlement at a hearing in January. Parties filed briefs in February and March.
Duke Energy Ohio argued in its brief that the settlement will still benefit customers and serve the public interest, even without the energy-efficiency programs for consumers who aren’t low-income. It also suggested that cutting out most of the energy-efficiency measures was needed to reach a deal with other stakeholders and the PUCO.
Staff at the PUCO said the settlement would benefit customers by cutting some projects and limiting how high other charges could go. They dismissed objections about dropping broadly available programs for energy efficiency. “[T]he standard is whether ratepayers benefit, not whether they could have benefitted more,” state lawyers wrote in their brief.
The Environmental Law & Policy Center, Ohio Environmental Council, and Citizens Utility Board of Ohio all argued there is no evidence to support dropping the energy-efficiency programs. They questioned the approach by a Consumers’ Counsel witness of counting only avoided rider costs as benefits, without considering the projected savings from energy efficiency.
The Consumers’ Counsel defended its perspective in an email to Canary Media. “We oppose subsidizing energy efficiency programs through utility rates when those products and services are already available in the competitive marketplace,” the office’s statement said. “And when the programs are run by the utility, there are added charges to consumers, such as shared savings and lost distribution revenue.” The statement also noted that other PUCO decisions have refused to allow energy-efficiency programs that would serve groups other than low-income households.
Last year, for example, the PUCO allowed FirstEnergy to run a low-income energy-efficiency program but turned down its proposal to include generally available rebates in a rider package. Those are “better suited for the competitive market, where both residential and non-residential customers will be able to obtain products and services to meet their individual needs,” the commission’s opinion said. The commission did, however, say the company should develop a rebate program for smart thermostats to help customers manage their energy use. FirstEnergy included that in its latest rider plan filed on Jan. 31.
Ohio has been particularly devoid of programs like those dropped in Duke’s settlement since HB 6 took effect, said Trent Dougherty, a lawyer for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. Calculations as of 2019 estimated the law’s gutting of the state’s energy-efficiency standard costs each consumer savings of nearly $10 per month.
“Continuing a pattern of wish-casting, that the market will provide the savings that HB 6 took away, is not a solution,” Dougherty said.
The world needs to move away from fossil fuels to low-carbon power if we’re to reduce our carbon emissions and tackle climate change.
There are two key sources of low-carbon power: renewables (which include solar, wind, hydropower and others) and nuclear.
While rapid growth in solar and wind has increased the amount of power coming from renewables, a lack of enthusiasm for nuclear means it’s playing a shrinking role in the global electricity mix.
In the chart, you can see the share of global electricity coming from fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear since 1985. Since 2000, nuclear and renewables have followed very different trajectories. Back then, both categories made up a similar share of global electricity, but today, renewables make up more than three times as much: 30% compared to 9%.
The total amount of electricity produced by nuclear plants is almost exactly the same as it was two decades ago. But because the world produces much more electricity overall, its share of the electricity mix has declined.
Explore the electricity mix of different countries in our Energy Data Explorer →
A simple principle has shaped Texas’ electricity system for the last two decades: Developers should build the types of power plants they think will compete best on the state’s open market.
As the cost of solar, wind, and grid batteries has plummeted in recent years, developers in the Lone Star State have increasingly opted to build clean energy projects — a whole lot of them. The state generated the most clean power in the nation last year, and solar and storage dominate new power capacity forecast to come online in 2025.
That principle — and Texas’ rapidly expanding clean energy industry — could be thrown out the window if a bill that recently passed the state Senate becomes law, Julian Spector reports for Canary Media. The legislation would require 50% of new power plant capacity in the state to be“sourced from dispatchable generation other than battery energy storage,” penalizing solar and wind power, which pair best with batteries.
An earlier iteration of SB 388 explicitly called for half of new power plants to “use natural gas,” and though the bill text no longer says that, the outcome would be the same: Gas would be the key beneficiary.
But developers aren’t exactly lining up to build gas plants. It can take years to source the specialized parts needed to get gas power plants built and running, while solar panels and batteries are mass-produced and can be installed far more quickly and cheaply. In fact, back in 2023 Texas created a $5 billion fund to issue low-interest loans to companies building gas power plants — but last month a developer that had applied for loans for two such projects withdrew them due to “equipment procurement constraints.”
An SB 388–driven slowdown of renewable deployment would meanwhile pose reliability challenges for the state, which famously suffered major blackouts in 2021 in large part because of challenges in the gas system. Since then, solar and batteries have repeatedly helped the state avoid weather-related outages. And with data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, and new manufacturing all slated to boost Texas’ energy demand, the state is going to need more cheap, fast, clean power — not less.
Put reliability over politics, power grid leaders say
Leaders of the country’s seven power operating systems told Congress on Tuesday that it should prioritize reliability over politics as it considers the future of the U.S. energy system. Electricity demand is set to rise dramatically as more data centers and other power-hungry facilities come online and people adopt EVs and electric appliances. Pitting clean energy against fossil fuels will only lead to power shortages and higher prices, the executives said.
New England in particular faces a “serious challenge” if political battles over clean energy continue, the head of its grid operator said. The region is counting on offshore wind to meet growing demand, but President Donald Trump’s attacks on the industry throw that future into uncertainty.
Hyundai brings ‘low-carbon’ steel, EV manufacturing to the U.S.
Hyundai Motor Group announced a $21 billion investment on Monday that will amp up its U.S. manufacturing presence. Nearly $6 billion will go toward a “low-carbon” steel plant in Louisiana that will supply the company’s Alabama and Georgia auto factories, Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Canary Media. The low-carbon claim comes from Hyundai’s plans to use an electric arc furnace. But it’s only a small step toward greener steel, one environmental advocate told Canary, since Hyundai will likely still use fossil gas in its process.
Also this week, Hyundai opened a giant plant outside of Savannah, Georgia, where it’ll manufacture its increasingly popular Ioniq EVs.
Renewables on the rise: Wind, solar, and other renewables were installed at an astonishing pace last year — but energy emissions still increased as demand for electricity soared. (Canary Media)
Tesla’s global challenges: Tesla faces more setbacks as Chinese EV firm BYD reports 2024 revenue that exceeds the U.S. company’s, and as its market share continues to fall in Europe. (CNN, Reuters)
Energy dominance?: Energy executives express deep concerns about the oil and gas sector’s outlook in a new Dallas Fed survey, pointing to President Trump’s trade and tariff policies as headwinds that will drive up drilling costs. (Reuters)
Building to decarbonization: A new report details the many ways buildings must decarbonize — from the materials they’re built with to how they’re powered and heated — and the massive amount of coordination it’ll take to make that happen. (Canary Media)
Recycling revolution: The need for metals and minerals for the clean energy transition poses a huge environmental toll, but the U.S. can combat that by accelerating recycling, which has stalled in comparison to some other countries. (Grist)
Coal’s comeback: The Trump administration rolls back coal plant regulations as utilities move to extend the life of facilities to meet an anticipated spike in power demand from tech companies, though critics warn hopes of a coal comeback are “wishful thinking.” (Washington Post)
Get-out-of-pollution-free card: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will no longer “shut down any stage of energy production” that doesn’t pose an imminent health threat, a move a former Biden EPA official says amounts to the agency telling companies, especially those selling fossil fuels, that it will let them break the law. (New York Times)
Fossil-fueled feedback loop: Hotter weather is driving increased fossil-fuel use as it spurs people to run air conditioners more often, creating a vicious cycle of climate change, the International Energy Agency finds. (New York Times)
Two opposing forces are tugging at the global energy transition: the inexorable rise of clean energy and the insatiable demand for electricity.
Last year, over 700 gigawatts of clean energy capacity were installed worldwide, per a March International Energy Agency report. That’s more than double the amount built in 2022.
Despite the blistering growth of carbon-free power, global emissions from the power sector rose by 1.7%.
Renewable resources produced 32% of the world’s electricity last year. That’s just shy of coal’s share of 35%. Taken together with nuclear power, carbon-free sources met over 40% of global electricity demand in 2024 — a record high.
The reason clean energy is producing more power than ever is simple: The world is building staggering amounts of new clean capacity. Most of this is happening in China, and the vast majority of what’s being built is solar power. In 2024 alone, 553 GW of solar panels were installed worldwide; the sun-powered resource is growing so fast that it keeps forcing industry analysts to revise their forecasts upward.
So, why aren’t power-sector emissions falling? Because global electricity use is surging.
Power demand rose by 4.3% last year, per the IEA, nearly double the average annual growth rate over the past decade. And while clean energy’s slice of the electricity production pie is bigger than ever, the overall pie itself is growing. The net effect: Power plants ultimately burned through 1% more coal, gas, and oil last year than they did in 2023, even though the global share of electricity produced by fossil fuels actually declined.
Air conditioning was a key driver of this uptick in demand, thanks to a devastating feedback loop: As emissions from burning fossil fuels push global temperatures to record heights, people use more AC — in turn creating more demand for electricity that is still produced using mostly fossil fuels. Data centers and other industrial customers are also boosting demand.
The only way to meet the urgent need for more power and bring down emissions at the same time is to build clean energy — solar, wind, batteries, or hydropower and nuclear — faster than even last year’s record-setting pace.
This story was updated on March 28 with details about global power sector emissions in 2024.
When ecologist Anthony Bicknell went looking for fish around the foundations of wind turbines a dozen or so miles off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea, he wasn’t sure what he’d find.
But he was ready for something surprising. Around that time, some European lobsters were catching researchers off guard by taking up residence in wind turbine foundations in the waters off of the British Isles. Sure enough, Bicknell and his team counted two more sea creatures that scientists had never documented congregating around wind turbines: a flatfish known as a dab and, most strikingly, haddock.
Haddock is one of Scotland’s highest-value commercial fish, ranking above cod and just below herring in total number of fish caught annually. Unlike cod, haddock don’t usually hang out around shipwrecks and other human-made structures on the seafloor.
The discovery that these sleek silvery fish are utilizing wind foundations, described in a study published earlier this year, demonstrates how much researchers are still learning about the potential benefits of installing wind structures in the ocean floor.
Offshore wind is growing rapidly in some parts of the world, particularly in northern Europe and China, as nations look to complement other carbon-free resources like solar.
In the U.S., the industry has faced opposition from the fishing industry, environmentalists, and other anti-wind groups who have raised concerns about how turbines will affect marine life. False claims about offshore wind’s impact on ocean animals — especially whales — have been spread by opponents including President Donald Trump, who issued an executive order on his first day in office that has slowed the industry to a crawl.
The new study from Bicknell, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, is the latest in a growing body of research that suggests offshore wind turbines, like other hard structures introduced to the seabed, can not only coexist with marine life but potentially benefit certain species.
Scientists have repeatedly found, for example, that an oil rig or oil platform can become an oasis of hard structure in ocean expanses devoid of much else but sand. They attract barnacles, shellfish, invertebrates, and, eventually, the fish that like to eat those creatures. An entire food web can grow.
Studies like Bicknell’s find the same phenomenon is playing out around some wind turbines installed on the seafloor of the North Sea. Except, unlike oil rigs, these massive pieces of infrastructure are helping to reduce the carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels, which is rapidly warming the ocean and devastating marine life worldwide.
Bicknell and his coauthors discovered that the older the wind foundation, the more fish — and sometimes bigger fish — like to call it home. This is true, they found, for many demersal fish like flatfish, haddock, and cod, which sit lower on the food chain. His team focused on the U.K. offshore wind farms known as Beatrice and Moray East; some of the studied turbines were built in 2017, while others went in around 2020.
These studies also underscore that offshore wind farms are clearly changing the ocean. Scientists are still debating which species are most feeling the change.
“Are they good or bad for fish? The caveat is, well, what fish?” said Bicknell.
Take the case of the European lobsters that like to turn wind foundations into homes. In 2021, researchers tagging lobsters around turbines installed off the coast of North Wales found that almost half of tagged animals hung out around a turbine’s base to find food or hide from predators. The doughnut of rocks and boulders deposited around a turbine’s base may also protect the lobsters. At least one tagged lobster ended up in a local fisherman’s trap, providing the first anecdotal evidence that turbines can support lobsters that also feed people.
For haddock, the turbines are more like a buffet. Bicknell described the fish as enjoying what he and other scientists call “indirect benefits.” Because haddock don’t usually hang around hard structures, preferring instead the sandy sea bottom, the groups that showed up on the researchers’ underwater cameras likely come there to feed and then leave. His study provides more evidence that wind foundations may increase the availability of food for many fish.
Some of these discoveries are helping researchers in the U.S., where offshore wind has been slow to catch on. Five projects are actively under construction in the country, but only one commercial-scale offshore wind project, South Fork Wind, is in operation today. Meanwhile, the U.K. has over 40 offshore wind installations with a total capacity of 15 GW plugged into its grid.
“I think when it comes to surveying offshore wind infrastructure for fish, yes, we are a little bit behind,” said Brendan Runde, a marine ecologist with The Nature Conservancy who is based in Virginia.
Runde is part of an ongoing research project to understand how fish use two wind turbines installed off the coast of Virginia as part of a 2020 pilot by Dominion Energy. This installation — and the fish that use it — serve as a glimpse of what’s to come in the region’s waters. Less than a mile away, the state’s first commercial-scale project is under construction and, according to its developer Dominion, on track to be completed in 2026.
During construction, wind farms could have negative effects on fish, said Runde.
Artificial noise, changes to seafloor sediment, and newly laid cables that emit electromagnetic fields can all impact fish in the short-term. However, his team’s research has found that the Atlantic sturgeon, an endangered species, and a variety of sharks are not avoiding the area even during ongoing construction.
At least 78 wind foundations have already been installed off the coast of Virginia, according to Dominion, while new ones continue to be built in spite of federal headwinds from Trump. In Virginia, offshore wind has a history of bipartisan support, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, is a vocal supporter of Dominion’s 2.6-gigawatt, 176-turbine project.
Runde’s research is ongoing and must now endure a challenging political moment for the offshore wind sector. In addition to calling wind farms “garbage” and vowing to halt the construction of new turbines, President Trump has gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of staff and resources in recent months. Runde actively collaborates with NOAA scientists on this research, and his project itself is funded by the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
When it comes to measuring the long-term benefits of these structures, Runde and his team use some of the same methods as their British counterparts: baited remote underwater video, which measures fish abundance, size, and diversity at the pilot turbines. The foundations they explore can reach depths of 120 feet below the water’s surface.
Black sea bass are already making homes out of these foundations. Runde said that one fish that was tagged at a Virginia wind foundation in February 2024 was still there seven months later when he returned.
“We know that, for many species of fish, this wind foundation is a really big deal,” said Runde.
It’s become the animating question in the U.S. electricity industry: How can power-hungry data centers get the energy they need?
The obvious answers have proven insufficient. Solar and wind power projects face yearslong wait times to interconnect to constrained grids. Moves to siphon off existing nuclear power to avoid these grid bottlenecks have proven controversial. And building new fossil gas–fired power plants will not only worsen climate change but may simply be impossible on the timeline that data centers require given current gas turbine backlogs.
But there may be faster and cheaper ways to bring lots of clean energy online to match new data center demand — it just requires some creative thinking.
One idea is to couple new clean power with some of the dirtier, if only rarely used, fossil-fuel power plants already connected to the grid — an approach that, counterintuitively enough, could end up not just faster but cleaner than alternatives.
That’s the proposition think tank RMI lays out in a recent paper describing the potential for so-called “power couples,” which the authors define as lots of new solar, wind, and batteries connected to existing fossil gas–fired “peaker” plants, which basically act as emergency generators for the grid at large, all in service of a data center or other facility that uses large amounts of power.
The biggest data centers now being planned across the country by tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft can use hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of electricity. In some of the country’s biggest data center hot spots, there simply isn’t enough capacity left to connect that much new load right now.
But in the “power couple” structure, those data centers wouldn’t even draw from the grid, explained Uday Varadarajan, a senior principal at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program and co-author of the report. Instead, they’d be connected to clean power behind the “point of interconnection” between peaker plants and the grid at large.
That could also allow new large-scale clean power projects to connect directly to the data center. Some of those solar, wind, and battery developments are already permitted and awaiting grid interconnection — and all of them can be built much faster than new gas-fired power plants, according to industry experts. Allowing some of these projects to avoid the interconnection backlogs and grid upgrade costs would get clean power online much faster.
Of course, few if any data centers can rely solely on the sun and wind to serve their round-the-clock power needs, even with batteries to store some of that power for when demand is highest. That’s where the peaker plant comes in, Varadarajan said.
Peaker plants can serve as a circuit breaker of sorts between the grid on one side and the new data center and all its clean power and batteries on the other side. When there’s not enough clean power for the data center, “we allow the new load to draw from the existing gas plant in a limited way,” he said. The key is making sure the data center doesn’t impinge on when the grid needs that peaking power.
In that sense, the peaker plants are more like gas-fired backups for a largely clean power mix. It’s a natural fit: Peaker plants are designed to fire up only when the grid really needs them, largely during summer heat waves or winter cold snaps when demand for electricity peaks (hence their name).
That leaves a lot of hours when those plants aren’t using their connections to the grid at large — which creates an opening for clean power to use them, Varadarajan said. Developers will probably want to “overbuild” the amount of dedicated solar, wind, and batteries supplying data centers, so they can rely on those resources during more hours of the year. That means the renewables will often generate more than the data center needs at a particular moment, but in the power couple arrangement that extra power wouldn’t go to waste — it’d flow to the grid using the peaker plant’s oft-idle grid connection.
Importantly, from the perspective of a utility or grid operator, this setup is potentially far less disruptive than adding a big new load or trying to interconnect a brand-new source of generation, Varadarajan said. Many U.S. grid operators already have rules to allow sites that have grid connections to add different types of generation capacity or to use a power plant’s existing capacity more frequently.
And because the data centers will have all the power they need behind the interconnection point, power couples won’t have to enter the complicated technical and regulatory realm of projects that both inject and draw power from the grid — a status that can be a significant hangup for battery and “hybrid” battery-solar or battery-wind projects in some regions.
RMI mapped the lower 48 states for suitable power-couple sites, looking for peaker plants with enough available land within a 10-kilometer radius to be able to build solar power that can cover at least 60% of an accompanying data center’s annual electricity needs. But the sites identified in its analysis could add significantly more clean power than that — about 88% of the modeled data centers’ annual power consumption on average.
RMI’s analysis wasn’t limited solely to peaker plants. Of the roughly 160 power plants in its final report, just over 40 were combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants, a more efficient type of gas-fired power plant. Most CCGTs tend to operate regularly throughout the year to provide “baseload” grid power, but RMI looked at some “load-following” CCGTs, which ramp up and down as grid demand rises and falls, and are therefore idle often enough to supply a power couple’s data center needs.
As for cost, RMI’s analysis found that more than 50 gigawatts of new data center or “other concentrated loads” could be supported by power couple developments at an all-in price of no more than $200 per megawatt-hour. More than 30 gigawatts of that new construction could be powered at less than $100 per megawatt-hour.
Those prices are higher than what data center developers might expect to secure from utilities with low-cost power, ample grid capacity, and an eagerness for the economic development such customers could bring. They’re also higher than recent average prices for solar and wind power purchase agreements in the U.S.
But for the tech giants and data center developers competing for scarce space on crowded grids, price could no longer be as significant as being able to get power quickly. Industry analysts have calculated that Microsoft may be offering more than $100 per megawatt-hour for the power it will get from a deal with Constellation Energy to restart a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania — and that’s for power that won’t be delivered until near the end of the decade at the earliest.
Faster routes to getting clean power online could be worth an even greater premium, Varadarajan said — and “a lot of the data centers aren’t particularly price-sensitive to begin with.” So the price ranges for the power couples RMI analyzed are “not completely crazy.”
The price points also vary widely across the sites that RMI modeled. In some cases, they can drop into the $60 per megawatt-hour range, well within striking distance of plain-vanilla power purchase agreements for clean energy — although those lower-cost options also tended to yield less annual clean energy supply.
Even at higher prices, solar and wind power that flows directly to data centers could be attractive for tech companies like Google and Microsoft that are striving to achieve 24/7 clean energy targets. “This is a product that’s giving you bundled capacity, energy, and clean power,” Varadarajan said.
In fact, the concept laid out in RMI’s report looks a bit like what Google and partners Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate are undertaking in a plan to invest $20 billion through 2030 in newly built wind, solar, and batteries to mostly power new data centers.
Intersect Power CEO Sheldon Kimber has proposed that this is a better way to meet growing demand for industrial-scale electricity, rather than trying to negotiate the complex and sometimes contradictory regulatory and economic hurdles required to add generation and loads to utility grids.
Intersect Power has proposed building its own gas-fired generation instead of relying on existing peaker plants. Whatever the fossil-fuel backup source, Kimber told Canary Media that parts of the country with good solar and wind resources can probably power a big load like a data center with electricity that’s carbon-free about 80% or more of the year.
A power couple also looks something like the “energy parks” concept that think tank Energy Innovation put forth in a December report. Energy parks are combinations of large loads like data centers powered by new solar, wind, and batteries — and some fossil-fuel backup power — all connected to the grid at a single point.
For clean energy developers, the ability to secure a major customer and avoid grid interconnection wait times and grid upgrade cost uncertainties takes away a lot of risk, said Eric Gimon, Energy Innovation policy adviser and a co-author of the group’s recent report. “You still need permits — but you’re not waiting for years to learn if you can interconnect or not. And you’ve got a committed buyer” for the newly built power.
That’s not to say that current regulations make these kinds of projects easy. It’s probably simplest in Texas, where a deregulated energy regime has allowed clean energy and batteries to thrive. That’s where Google and Intersect Power are planning their first projects.
The situation is more mixed in other parts of the country, depending on the rules that apply. For example, RMI has tracked gigawatts of new generation added to existing power plants’ grid connections under so-called “surplus interconnection service” rules across the territories of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two entities that manage transmission grids and energy markets across a swath of Midwestern and Great Plains states.
But PJM Interconnection, which manages the transmission grid and energy markets providing power to about 65 million people from Washington, D.C., and 13 states from Virginia to Illinois, has only recently started amending its regulatory regimes to allow this surplus interconnection option in ways that energy developers say they can work with.
In many parts of the country where utilities retain monopolies over the right to build generation, operate power grids, and sell electricity to all customers in their service territories, pathways for other companies to build and own clean energy remain largely untested.
But those “vertically integrated” utility territories could also be a key venue for energy parks, according to Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative.
Peskoe co-wrote a recent paper laying out the risk that utilities may build power plants and expand their grids to serve gigawatts of new data center demand and then pass on a disproportionate share of those costs to ratepayers.
Energy parks could help insulate everyday customers from these potential rate hikes, he wrote, since only the companies building the data center and the new generation would be responsible for the costs involved. But for that to happen, state lawmakers will have to make these arrangements legal.
Or utilities could build power couples themselves. RMI’s analysis finds that opportunities exist in the deregulated market of Texas and the backed-up grids managed by PJM but also across much of the Southeastern U.S. where utilities largely retain monopoly status over generation, grids, and retail customers. Those utilities face massive demand growth from prospective data centers — and pressure from tech companies to find cleaner options than gas-fired power plants.
The technical potential for using existing grid connections to boost clean power capacity is enormous. A report from think tank GridLab and the University of California, Berkeley found surplus interconnection sites across the country that could support nearly 700 gigawatts of new generation.
To be sure, that’s a theoretical maximum that’s almost certain to remain unrealized due to real-world constraints and basic energy economics. “But a screaming success would be that we could unlock 10% of that opportunity” over the next decade, said Ric O’Connell, GridLab’s founding executive director.
That won’t be simple to achieve. One early hurdle is setting up the contractual structures between existing power plant owners and the developers of data centers and clean energy, O’Connell said. Even when those are done, conflicts could arise between power-couple project partners and incumbent generators, transmission grid owners, and utilities.
“There’s a lot of regulatory risk behind this approach that I hope can be mitigated because the benefits are really strong,” he said.
Varadarajan agreed that power couples are “not an easy transaction to do. I’m not saying it won’t be complicated.” But as reports like those from RMI, GridLab, and Energy Innovation indicate, “this is a good opportunity for everyone to take a look at what they’ve got and use their interconnection rights to the greatest value.”
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