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Seventeen days after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, tearing down power lines, destroying water mains, and disabling cell phone towers, the signs of relief were hard to miss.
Trucks formed a caravan along Interstate 40, filled with camouflaged soldiers, large square tanks of water, and essentials from pet food to diapers. In towns, roadside signs — official versions emblazoned with nonprofit relief logos and wooden makeshift ones scrawled with paint — advertised free food and water.
And then there were the generators.
The noisy machines powered the trailers where Asheville residents sought showers, weeks after the city’s water system failed. They fueled the food trucks delivering hot meals to the thousands without working stoves. They filtered water for communities to drink and flush toilets.
Western North Carolina is far from unique. In the wake of disaster, generators are a staple of relief efforts around the globe. But across the region, a New Orleans-based nonprofit is working to displace as many of these fossil fuel burners as they can, swapping in batteries charged with solar panels instead.
It’s the largest response effort the Footprint Project has ever deployed in its short life, and organizers hope the impact will extend far into the future.
“If we can get this sustainable tech in fast, then when the real rebuild happens, there’s a whole new conversation that wouldn’t have happened if we were just doing the same thing that we did every time,” said Will Heegaard, operations director for the organization.
“Responders use what they know works, and our job is to get them stuff that works better than single-use fossil fuels do,” he said. “And then, they can start asking for that. It trickles up to a systems change.”
The rationale for diesel and gas generators is simple: they’re widely available. They’re relatively easy to operate. Assuming fuel is available, they can run 24-7, keeping people warm, fed, and connected to their loved ones even when the electric grid is down. Indubitably, they save lives.
But they’re not without downsides. The burning of fossil fuels causes not just more just more carbon that exacerbates the climate crisis, but smog and soot-forming air pollutants that can trigger asthma attacks and other respiratory problems.
In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, generators were so prevalent after the electric grid failed that harmful air pollution in San Juan soared above the safe legal limit. The risk is especially acute for sensitive populations who turn to generators for powering vital equipment like oxygenators.
There are also practical challenges. Generators aren’t cheap, retailing at big box stores for more than $1,000. Once initial fuel supplies run out — as happened in parts of Western North Carolina in the immediate aftermath of Helene — it can be difficult and costly to find more. And the machines are noisy, potentially harming health and creating more stress for aid workers and the people they serve.
Heegaard witnessed these challenges firsthand in Guinea in 2016 when he was responding to an Ebola outbreak. A paramedic, his job was to train locals to collect blood samples and store them in generator-powered refrigerators that would be motorcycled to the city of Conakry for testing. He had a grant to give cash reimbursements to the lab techs for the fuel.
“This is so hard already, and the idea of doing a cash reimbursement in a super poor rural country for gas generators seems really hard,” Heegaard recalled thinking. “I had heard of solar refrigerators. I asked the local logistician in Conakry, ‘Are these things even possible?’”
The next day, the logistician said they were. They could be installed within a month. “It was just a no-brainer,” said Heegaard. “The only reason we hadn’t done it is the grant wasn’t written that way.”
Two years later, the Footprint Project was born of that experience. With just seven full-time staff, the group cycles in workers in the wake of disaster, partnering up with local solar companies, nonprofits and others, to gather supplies and distribute as many as they can.
They deploy solar-powered charging stations, water filtration systems, and other so-called climate tech to communities who need it most — starting with those without power, water, or a generator at all, and extending to those looking to offset their fossil fuel combustion.
The group has now built nearly 50 such solar-powered microgrids in the region, from Lake Junaluska to Linville Falls, more than it has ever supplied in the wake of disaster. The recipients range from volunteer fire stations to trailer parks to an art collective in West Asheville.
Mike Talyad, a photographer who last year launched the collective to support artists of color, teamed up with the Grassroots Aid Partnership, a national nonprofit, to fill in relief gaps in the wake of Helene. “The whole city was trying to figure it out,” he said.
Solar panels from Footprint that initially powered a water filter have now largely displaced the generators for the team’s food trucks, which last week were providing 1,000 meals a day. “When we did the switchover,” Talyad said, “it was a time when gas was still questionable.”
Last week, the team at Footprint also provided six solar panels, a Tesla battery, and charging station to displace a noisy generator at a retirement community in South Asheville.
The device was powering a system that sucked water from a pond, filtered it, and rendered it potable. Picking up their jugs of drinking water, a steady flow of residents oohed and aahed as the solar panels were installed, and sighed in relief when the din of the generator abated.
“Most responders are not playing with solar microgrids because they’re better for the environment,” said Heegaard. “They’re playing with it because if they can turn their generator off for 12 hours a day, that means literally half the fuel savings. Some of them are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on diesel or gas. That is game changing for a response.”
Footprint’s robust relief effort and the variety of its beneficiaries is owed in part to the scale of Helene’s destruction, with more than 1 million in North Carolina alone who initially lost power.
“It’s really hard to put into words what’s happening out there right now,” said Matt Abele, the executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, who visited in the early days after the storm. “It is just the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen — whole mobile home parks that are just completely gone.”
But the breadth of the response is also owed to Footprint’s approach to aid, which is rooted in connections to grassroots groups, government organizations, and the local solar industry. All have partnered together for the relief effort.
“We’ve been incredibly overwhelmed by the positive response that we’ve seen from the clean energy community,” Abele said, “both from an equipment donation standpoint and a financial resources standpoint.”
Some four hours east of the devastation in Western North Carolina, Greentech Renewables Raleigh has been soliciting and storing solar panels and other goods. It’s also raising money for products that are harder to get for free — like PV wire and batteries. Then it trucks the supplies west.
“We’ve got bodies, we’ve got trucks, we’ve got relationships,” said Shasten Jolley, the manager at the company, which warehouses and sells supplies to a variety of installers. “So, we try to utilize all those things to help out.”
The cargo is delivered to Mars Hill, a tiny college town about 20 miles north of Asheville that was virtually untouched by Helene. Through a local regional government organization, Frank Johnson, the owner of a robotics company, volunteered his 110,000-square-foot facility for storage.
Johnson is just one example of how people in the region have leapt to help each other, said Abele, who’s based in Raleigh.
“You can tell when you’re out there,” he said, “that so many people in the community are coping by showing up for their neighbors.”
To be sure, Footprint’s operations aren’t seamless at every turn. For instance, most of the donated solar panels designated for the South Asheville retirement community didn’t work, a fact the installers learned once they’d made the 40-minute drive in the morning and tried to connect them to the system. They returned later that afternoon with functioning units, but then faced the challenge of what to do with the broken ones.
“This is solar aid waste,” Heegaard said. “The last site we did yesterday had the same problem. Now we have to figure out how to recycle them.”
It’s also not uncommon for the microgrids to stop working, Heegaard said, because of understandable operator errors, like running them all night to provide heat.
But above all, the problem for Footprint is scale. A tiny organization among behemoth relief groups, they simply don’t have the bandwidth for a larger response. When Milton followed immediately on the heels of Helene, Heegaard’s group made the difficult choice to hunker down in North Carolina.
With climate-fueled weather disasters poised to increase, the organization hopes to entice the biggest, most well-resourced players in disaster relief to start regularly using solar microgrids in their efforts.
As power is slowly restored across the region, with just over 5,000 remaining without electricity, there’s also the question of what comes next.
While there’s a parallel conversation underway among advocates and policymakers about making microgrids and distributed solar a more permanent feature of the grid, Footprint also hopes to inspire some of that change from the ground up. Maybe the volunteer fire station decides to put solar panels on its roof when it rebuilds, for instance.
“We can change the conversation around resilience and recovery by directly pointing to something that worked when the lights were out and debris was in the street,” Heegaard said.
As for the actual Footprint equipment, the dream is to create “lending libraries” in places like Asheville, to be cycled in and out of community events and disaster relief.
“The solar trailer or the microgrid or the water maker that went to the Burnsville elementary school right after the storm – that can be recycled and used to power the music stage or the movie in the park,” Heegaard said. “Then that equipment is here, it’s being utilized, and it’s available for the next response, whether it’s in Knoxville or Atlanta or South Carolina.”
A year ago, the U.S. announced ambitious plans to build large-scale clean hydrogen hubs. Now, 12 months later, those plans have advanced little and are still shrouded in uncertainty.
Last October, the U.S. Department of Energy picked seven consortiums across the country to receive up to $7 billion in federal grants. The goal of this startup money? To help the hubs attract tens of billions more in private-sector investment to pay for construction costs. These projects, located around the country, aim to bring together a wide array of organizations to scale up the production, storage, and transport of low- and zero-carbon hydrogen, which some experts view as a way to replace fossil fuels in industries such as steelmaking and aviation.
There’s still little publicly available information to indicate whether these “clean hydrogen hubs” are likely to attract the needed private sector investment, however. Just as opaque are their potential community and climate impacts.
Environmental groups, community advocates, and energy experts have grown concerned that the projects are off track — and increasingly dismayed that the DOE and the hub projects are not giving them the transparency needed to confirm or deny these worries.
This puts the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the agency responsible for the H2Hubs program, in a tricky position.
The $7 billion in H2Hub awards is being doled out in phases, over the course of many years. It’s OCED’s job to make sure the hubs are hitting the technical, financial, and community-benefit milestones needed to earn these disbursements.
The hydrogen hubs are a cornerstone of not only the Biden administration’s clean hydrogen strategy, but its overall approach to clean energy. Without the hubs, the U.S. may not be able to supply the tens of millions of tons per year of clean hydrogen needed to decarbonize key industries in the decades to come.
“We know that jump-starting a new clean energy economy in the U.S. is going to take time and public and private sector investment,” Kelly Cummins, OCED’s acting director, told Canary Media in an October interview. “To do that right and make sure it’s sustainable, we need to engage communities in a new way.”
However, community and environmental groups hounding the hydrogen hubs and DOE for information over the past year say that engagement isn’t happening. The Natural Resources Defense Council reported in May that “environmental justice advocates and frontline communities have largely been kept in the dark on key details and basic information about many of these projects.”
Since then, relatively little additional information has emerged. “We’re still struggling at this point to understand what’s really going on with the hubs,” said Morgan Rote, director of U.S. climate at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another nonprofit group that’s been tracking the disconnect between hydrogen hubs and communities.
“I don’t think DOE is sitting on a whole wealth of information they’re not sharing,” Rote said. “But that makes it even more challenging — and it’s no wonder communities feel like they don’t have information, if the DOE doesn’t have information.”
Cummins acknowledged these frustrations.“The tension here is that we’re still in early days,” she said. “We’ve been working to engage communities and special interest groups. But we’re just at the start of this learning process.”
The initial planning grants are just the first step in what OCED expects to be an eight- to 12-year pathway to full-scale ramp-up and operations. Each stage will involve its own series of “go/no-go” decisions, with a “long list of deliverables and criteria,” Cummins said.
To date, only three hubs have been awarded first-phase planning grants of about $30 million each: the ARCHES hub in California; the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association(PNWH2), which includes Oregon, Washington, and Montana; and the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2), which includes Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The remainder are still in the process of negotiating final approval for their first-phase funding.
“We’ll go through a review of all that — the financing, the technology, the community benefits — and then make a decision if they’re ready to move from Phase One to Phase Two,” she said. “And there are some instances where we might decide they are not moving to Phase Two.”
Less than 1 percent of global hydrogen production today is low-carbon. Of the roughly 90 million tons per year produced globally and 10 million tons per year in the U.S., almost all is derived from fossil gas.
Right now, the two main methods for making low- or zero-carbon hydrogen are far more expensive than dirty hydrogen — and also untested at scale. Those include so-called “blue hydrogen,” which is made from fossil gas combined with carbon capture, and “green hydrogen,” which is made by splitting water in electrolyzers powered by zero-carbon electricity.
The hydrogen hubs need about $40 billion in private-sector investment to match DOE’s $7 billion. That’s a tough sell for investors, given the uncertain economics involved both for would-be clean hydrogen producers and for the industries that must invest in retrofitting facilities, building new infrastructure, and reconfiguring how they do business in order to use it.
What’s more, the rules for a subsidy that could make clean hydrogen cost-competitive with dirty hydrogen — the 45V production tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act — have yet to be finalized.
Last December, the U.S. Treasury Department proposed rules that would require green-hydrogen producers to source newly built and consistently deliverable clean electricity — restrictions that energy analysts say are vital to ensure hydrogen production doesn’t end up increasing carbon emissions.
But those proposed rules are being challenged by a number of industry groups and politicians who say they’ll stifle the nascent industry — including the seven hydrogen hubs themselves. The Treasury Department aims to finalize the rules by January.
The regulations for blue hydrogen remain another point of contention. Only the California and Pacific Northwest hubs have pledged to not make hydrogen from fossil gas. Some hubs, such as the Appalachian hub, have made blue hydrogen a focus. But blue hydrogen has yet to be proven to be cost-effective at scale, and in some cases could lead to more carbon emissions than simply using fossil gas.
The unresolved nature of these regulations — and the projects themselves — makes it impossible to tell at this point whether the hubs will actually help fight climate change.
In a May letter to DOE, U.S. Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) and Donald S. Beyer Jr. (D-Virginia) complained that the agency has touted the potential for hydrogen made by the hubs to reduce carbon emissions by 25 million metric tons per year, but has “yet to publish the projected lifecycle emissions linked to the production of hydrogen.”
That information is “overdue and critical for us to fully understand the precise climate and public health impacts of the H2Hubs program,” the lawmakers wrote. “Scientists have warned that high levels of lifecycle emissions from hydrogen production could entirely cancel out any climate benefits from replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen.”
Cummins noted that DOE has responded to this request for information. “But the response was focused on the fact that we are evaluating every aspect of the production and use of hydrogen so that we can understand the impact on the environment,” she said — and much of that work remains to be done.
Though it may be early days for the hubs, advocates say the projects could be operating in a much more transparent way.
OCED released summaries of each hub’s commitment to community benefits immediately after the hubs were selected last October. Since then, OCED has held more than 70 meetings with more than 900 individuals and groups participating, Cummins said. The office has also briefed about 4,000 individuals and groups, including community members, environmental justice organizations, labor and workforce organizations, first responders, local businesses, energy professionals, elected tribal leaders, and local, state, and federal government officials.
The feedback from those meetings has led OCED to add new requirements for the hubs. The projects now must create public data reporting portals to share information as it’s finalized. They must develop community advisory structures that allow groups to provide feedback on plans as they’re developed. And they must “jointly evaluate or pursue negotiated agreements” on labor, workforce, health and safety, and community benefits plans.
“We’re really focused on three-way communication” between OCED, hub participants, and affected communities and other groups “to make sure anything we’re hearing back from the community is adequately addressed,” Cummins said. “That will determine whether we move forward to the next phase of the process.”
Environmental and community groups worry these requirements may still not prevent hub participants from running roughshod over communities, however.
In particular, many fear that participants — including oil and gas giants such as bp America, Chevron, Enbridge, EQT, ExxonMobil, Sempra Energy, and TC Energy — will subject communities already burdened with fossil fuel pollution to further harms from hydrogen production.
Communities have “questions around the transparency for the selection and planning process, how to monitor and evaluate community benefits plans, and to ensure there are sustained community benefits after the duration of the grants,” said Cihang Yuan, a senior program officer at the environmental nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. Other concerns include “more local impacts, such as hydrogen leakage or chemical disasters,” she said. “It’s definitely important for these hubs to have a solid plan for safety of operations.”
The secretive approach that hubs have taken to sharing information with potentially affected communities has added to these concerns. In California, the ARCHES hub requires meeting participants to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from sharing information about the hub’s activities under threat of legal penalties.
“That’s something we can’t do,” said Theo Caretto, associate attorney at California-based environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), since it would bar community groups from sharing information with their constituents.
Those non-disclosure rules have remained in place at ARCHES and other hubs despite continual protests, forcing groups like CBE to wait for public information to dribble out. But one year in, “we’re having difficulty getting specifics on which projects are being funded,” Caretto said. “They’ve given out fact sheets and publications,” such as the map and chart below in a May report from ARCHES to DOE. “But those are still quite general and don’t give specifics about what each project is.”
The Ohio River Valley Institute has raised similar concerns about the ARCH2 project in Appalachia. In a May letter to DOE signed by 54 nonprofit and community groups, Tom Torres, the institute’s hydrogen campaign coordinator, said communities have had “no substantive opportunity to shape this proposal while negotiations continue behind closed doors.”
The saving grace, he wrote, is that “nothing so grievous has been done that cannot be undone. Money has yet to flow to these projects and ground has not been broken.”
Giving communities authority over how major energy infrastructure is planned and built would be a departure from how large industrial projects have historically been pursued.
“There is this dichotomy, this tension, between the project development deadlines and long-term robust engagement processes that will be needed to meet these community benefits plans obligations and gain community trust,” said Mona Dajani, global co-chair of energy, infrastructure and hydrogen at law firm Baker Botts and lead counsel for the HyVelocity hub in Texas.
DOE’s commitment to ensuring that hubs will meet the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative — its pledge to direct at least 40 percent of climate-related federal spending to communities “historically impacted by energy development and burdened with policies of exclusion and disinvestment,” as Dajani put it — heightens the importance of community involvement.
This will “add a lot of complexity to development processes. But they’re doing their best.
It’s definitely going to be challenging to be transparent when it’s not all finished,” Dajani said.
Amidst questions around community benefits and lifecycle carbon emissions, much of the hype that fueled oversized clean-hydrogen projections in the past few years has started to deflate. Major project announcements have been delayed or put in limbo, leading analysts to question whether ambitious government clean-hydrogen production targets can be reached in the coming decade.
This retrenchment is also a threat to U.S. hydrogen hubs, which must convince companies and their financial backers to commit to the tens of billions of dollars of investment needed to scale up clean hydrogen to compete against the fossil fuels it is meant to displace.
That challenge is already rearing its head at the Appalachian ARCH2 hub, a pet project of a lawmaker key to getting the hydrogen hub program passed as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — retiring Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Manchin praised the ARCH2 hub’s potential to revitalize the economy of his home state and the greater Appalachian region at an August event marking DOE’s approval of its first-phase grant. “I’m happy to know that I was able to play a part in this to be able to have a future for my children and grandchildren,” he said.
But, as is true for all of the hub projects at this point, it’s far from clear that ARCH2 will deliver on its promise of becoming a clean energy economic engine for the region.
In a report released this week, the Ohio River Valley Institute noted that several projects initially identified as part of the ARCH2 plan have since dropped out. Those include Canadian gas producer and pipeline owner TC Energy and industrial chemicals giant Chemours, which canceled plans to develop two green hydrogen production sites in West Virginia.
“The various hydrogen hubs and their individual projects are much more tenuous than many people imagine,” Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute and the author of the report, told Canary Media. “These projects are still heavily dependent on private markets to come up with the funds.”
In an attempt to fill the gap left by those departures, ARCH2 recently issued a call for companies to propose projects, which could receive up to $110 million if selected. “Originally you could argue that we had projects that were seeking federal funds,” O’Leary said. “Now, we have federal funds seeking projects.”
Cummins said that OCED has anticipated that hub participants may drop out or be added throughout the early stages. “That’s OK. We don’t want a company that for any reason doesn’t want to participate to be stuck in something they don’t see as economically viable.”
At the same time, OCED will vet new entrants on the same criteria applied to those that initially applied: “Are they technically feasible? Do we see a path to financial viability? What does their workforce plan look like? And finally, what do their community benefits look like?”
In an email to Canary Media, T.R. Massey, spokesperson for Battelle, the research organization managing the ARCH2 hub, echoed a key refrain about the projects: “The important context to remember is these new hydrogen hubs, including ARCH2, have just entered the first phase.”
More Minnesota cities are turning to utility customers to fund climate and sustainability projects.
The Twin Cities suburb of Eagan is among the latest municipalities to begin collecting what’s known as a “franchise fee” from gas and electric companies in exchange for allowing pipelines, power lines and other infrastructure in public rights-of-way. The charges are typically passed on to customers in the form of a small monthly line item on their utility bills.
As is the case with a growing number of cities, Eagan leaders last year decided to dedicate funds from its franchise fees toward its climate and sustainability efforts. It hired its first sustainability coordinator and is drafting a climate action plan that will be implemented in part with the expected $1.5 million in annual franchise fee revenue.
“It’s hard to launch a sustainability initiative without a way to sustain it,” said Gillian Catano, the city’s sustainability coordinator. “This helps us with long-term planning and allows us to work on projects supporting our operations and to support projects in the community.”
Cities have collected franchise fees from public utilities for decades, but today the charges are emerging as a potentially important revenue source to help budget-strapped local governments make progress toward climate targets. In the Twin Cities, Minneapolis has long used the fees to fund sustainability work, and St. Paul is considering a plan to do the same. Other examples include the suburbs of Edina and Hopkins.
“We’ve seen a growing number of cities, across Minnesota and nationally, leveraging utility franchise fees as a tool to fund climate action and sustainability efforts,” said Julia Eagles, associate director of utility and regulatory strategy for the Institute for Market Transformation, a national nonprofit that promotes public policy to reduce building emissions. “It reflects a broader shift towards cities seeking stable, locally controlled funding sources for urgent climate priorities.”
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory research paper in 2021 found over 3,600 municipalities collect franchise fees from their utilities and 13% use part of that money for clean energy-related projects. The work being funded by franchise fees include energy efficiency programs, municipal fleet electrification, solar panel installations, and other clean energy-related investments.
Abby Finis, a consultant who works with local governments on climate action, said in the past, many cities added the fees into the general fund to pay for various city services. What’s different now, she said, is that more communities are tying them to sustainability staff and projects.
“The franchise fee is something that’s already set up, and you can increase it a little bit without hurting people’s wallets too much,” Finis said.
However, Finis cautioned that the money doesn’t “get anywhere near the amount needed to reach our goals.”
Sometimes cities are maximizing those dollars by using them to leverage additional funds, such as through the federal Inflation Reduction Act or Minnesota’s ECO (Energy Conservation and Optimization) Act, she said.
Minneapolis uses its franchise fees to fund a unique partnership between the city and utilities Xcel Energy and CenterPoint Energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s research highlighted the partnership, which was intended to accelerate progress toward the city’s climate goals but has faced questions about its effectiveness. The city increased its franchise fee in 2023, a per-household increase of about $12 per year, according to Patrick Hanlon, the city’s deputy coordinator for sustainability.
“It was a pretty minimal increase for residential customers,” Hanlon said. Projects funded partly by franchise fees have saved city residents more than $150 million annually in energy costs and helped weatherize more than 5,000 low-income units, he added.
Hanlon is also mayor of the nearby suburb of Hopkins, which recently started using its franchise fees to pay for solar, e-bike and electric vehicle charging initiatives.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter recently proposed charging residential franchise fees to fund weatherization, tree planting, and pay the salary of a new climate action coordinator.
In the past, St. Paul’s climate action budget has come from general funds and grants.
“This would be the first uniquely dedicated funding for the city’s broad portfolio of climate work,” said Russ Stark, the city’s chief resilience officer.
Edina began using franchise fees for clean energy projects in 2015. Today, according to sustainability manager Marisa Bayer, the suburb commits about $950,000 annually from franchise fees for its sustainability programs, most of which is invested in city operations to improve efficiency, add renewable energy, and electrify municipal buildings and transportation. The money also funds a sustainable building ordinance and other policy measures.
“The great thing is that because we have this dedicated funding source, we can move forward with projects, either identified in our capital improvement plans or supported by our community,” Bayer said. “We don’t have to go to council every year or rely solely on grants to help fund this work.”
Correction: Edina commits $950,000 annually from its franchise fees for sustainability programs. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the number.
EMISSIONS: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to pause the Biden administration’s power plant emissions rule as it faces legal challenges, though Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion suggests those challenges may ultimately be successful. (Associated Press, E&E News)
ALSO:
NUCLEAR:
CLEAN ENERGY: A growing number of cities across Minnesota and the U.S. are funding climate and clean energy projects with franchise fees collected from utilities using public rights-of-way for infrastructure. (Energy News Network)
COAL: An Alabama coal-fired power plant is named as the U.S. EPA’s top greenhouse gas polluter for the ninth year in a row, but owner Alabama Power has no plans to retire the plant or convert it to natural gas. (Inside Climate News)
LITHIUM: General Motors pledges $625 million to help fund the contested Thacker Pass lithium mine under development in Nevada in an effort to boost battery material’s domestic supplies. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
SOLAR: Homeowners looking to install rooftop solar panels often run into a dilemma when they learn their roofs will need to be replaced before the lifespan of their array expires. (Grist)
HYDROGEN: A large hydrogen fuel production facility in upstate New York was expected to make the state an industry leader, but work on the project has halted and its future is uncertain. (Heatmap News)
BIOFUELS:
RENEWABLE ENERGY: The New York Power Authority seeks proposals to deliver as much as 575 MW of renewable energy to New York City through an existing transmission line. (Utility Dive)
ALSO: Environmental activists claim the New York Power Authority’s draft plan to create 3.5 GW of renewable power fails to do enough to help the state meet its clean energy goals. (City and State New York)
OFFSHORE WIND:
BIOMASS: The Burlington Electric Company in Vermont is negotiating to acquire full ownership of the state’s largest power producer, a wood-burning plant that has been controversial in recent years. (VT Digger)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Pennsylvania legislators consider measures that would legalize the use of e-scooters on public streets and create rules of the road for the vehicles. (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
HEAT PUMPS: A Massachusetts town pilots a new way of financing heat pump installations that could be scaled up to speed adoption statewide. (MassLive, subscription)
COMMUNITY CHOICE: Customers of Providence, Rhode Island’s community choice aggregation program will pay less this winter for a power supply that includes more renewable energy than the default utility product in the state. (Boston Globe)
GRID:
TRANSMISSION: Baltimore City Council considers whether to pass a resolution opposing a proposed 70-mile transmission line that some councilors say would damage farmland and hurt property values. (Baltimore Sun, subscription)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
COMMENTARY: Wind energy could lower electricity costs for Connecticut residents by lessening the impact of natural gas price spikes, says an energy analyst. (CT Mirror)
When farmer Trent Gerlach found out a solar farm would be built on the land he had long worked in northwestern Illinois, he was disappointed.
“As a farmer, seeing that land taken out of production is difficult, when you farmed it for many years, you’ve been stewards to that land, fertilized that land, taken care of it as if it was your own,” he said.
Gerlach’s family had been raising corn, soybeans and livestock since 1968, and like many farmers, they leased farmland in addition to working their own land. And when the owner of one of those leased parcels decided to work with Acciona Energia to help site its High Point wind and solar farm, Gerlach initially was not enthusiastic.
“The thought of taking productive farm ground out of production with solar panels was not, in my personal opinion, ideal,” he said.
But Gerlach was determined to make the best of the situation.
Ultimately, that meant a win-win arrangement, where Acciona pays him to manage vegetation around the 100 MW array of solar panels that went online in early 2024. Gerlach does that with a herd of 500 sheep.
“We don’t own the land, we don’t get a say — that’s landowners’ rights, and I’m very pro that,” Gerlach recounted. “In U.S. agriculture, the biggest thing that gets farmers in trouble is saying, ‘that’s how we’ve always done it so that’s what we’re going to do.’ Renewable energy is probably not going anywhere, whether you’re for or against it, it’s coming, it’s what’s happening. As an agriculture producer, we’re going to adapt with it.”
Researchers around the country are exploring agrivoltaics, or co-locating solar generation with agriculture in a mutually beneficial way. Projects range from growing tomatoes in California to wild blueberries in Maine, with varying levels of success.
Acciona regional manager Kyle Charpie said that sheep grazing appears an especially promising form of agrivoltaics, and one that the company is likely to continue exploring globally. Solar operators need to keep vegetation controlled, and sheep are a more effective and ecological way to do it than mechanized mowing. Acciona has long had a sheep agrivoltaic operation in Portugal, Charpie noted, and two projects in Texas are underway.
“It’s incredibly cost-effective — sheep don’t break down like a tractor; if a tractor blows a belt, you’ve lost a whole day of cutting,” he said. “These grasses grow wickedly fast, it’s that constant presence of the sheep that’s been super super effective. It aligns with our sustainability goals.”
“It’s tough to say we’re the greatest renewable company in the world [if] we have a bunch of tractors running up and down our fields belching out CO2,” he continued.
Another advantage, Charpie said, is that at the end of the solar array’s lifespan, the land beneath it will be restored and refreshed.
“We have all these sheep now who will spend 30-plus years breathing, living, using their hooves to churn up ground, even dying; it’s the circle of life,” he said. “When these farms get turned back to the families, that soil condition will be wonderful.”
Gerlach’s family had about 50 ewes when the idea for grazing around the solar panels struck. He “hounded” Acciona, in Charpie’s words, to bring an agrivoltaic deal to fruition.
“He saw an opportunity here, and he has been his own best advocate, banging down the door, checking how close are we, when will we get our sheep here,” Charpie said.
Gerlach ultimately bought about 500 sheep of two types: Dorper and Katahdin, small breeds that can fit easily under solar panels.
“The panels create lots of shade — during the heat of the day, they’ll all be underneath the panels for shade,” Gerlach said. “In early mornings, late evenings they’re out grazing aggressively. They don’t bother the panels one bit.”
Gerlach said his family “used to raise livestock like everybody did back in the day,” and his farm has won awards for its cattle, but raising livestock has become less profitable in recent years. Agrivoltaics offer an opportunity to delve back into raising sheep, something Gerlach loves. A commercial sheep operation would only be possible with the payments for vegetation management, he said.
“Raising sheep in the United States is challenging because the market for sheep is not very high,” he said. There’s not much of a domestic wool market, and “the meat side of sheep and lamb never really caught on in the U.S. — we’re a beef, pork, poultry-consuming country.”
Gerlach sells the bulk of his lambs around the Easter season, and largely for kosher and halal consumption. Since that market is so limited, the ewes largely earn their keep being paid to graze.
“We love providing stewardship to the animals. That’s what U.S. agriculture was built on hundreds of years ago,” Gerlach said. “It marries really well with our crop production” on nearby land. “In agriculture you need diversification. By bringing sheep and livestock production in, we can afford to hire more full-time employees.”
Sheep are the livestock best suited to agrivoltaics, stakeholders agree.
“You can’t use cattle because they’re too large, they would rub on the panels and break them,” Gerlach said. “You can’t use goats because goats would climb on the panels, and they’re natural chewers, they would chew on the wires.”
The High Point solar array is divided up into separate plots with fences, “like perfect little pens for the sheep,” added Charpie.
In a bigger uninterrupted plot, a farmer would likely need to move water sources for sheep strategically around the area to make sure the animals cover the entire plot. Gerlach’s flock only grazes about a fifth of the Acciona solar array. He’s hoping to expand, though feeding and sheltering sheep during the winter when they can’t graze is costly.
“I’ve got three young kids. Hopefully we raise them in agriculture. It’s such a good practice for our young people to learn responsibility and stewardship,” Gerlach said.
“[The animals] come first, they get fed and watered and taken care of before us. Sometimes agriculture gets portrayed in a poor light, especially larger production agriculture. I try to really push that that’s not everybody. Talk to a local farmer, a local person — you generally see that we’re stewards of the land, we want healthy ground and livestock. That can marry in fine with clean energy.”
HEAT PUMPS: Maine has spent $135 million on heat pump incentives so far, with another $125 million expected in coming years, though none of the money has come from state tax revenue. (Portland Press Herald)
CLEAN ENERGY: The governor of Pennsylvania proposes redirecting $2.6 billion in unused tax credits to a new program to incentivize production of electricity that meets certain clean energy standards. (Spotlight PA)
OFFSHORE WIND:
WORKFORCE: A Philadelphia nonprofit trains people from low-income communities to work in clean energy trades. (Associated Press)
DECARBONIZATION:
SOLAR: The first commercial solar development in Erie County, Pennsylvania, is coming online this fall, leading the way for three more projects in the works. (Erie Times-News)
BUILDINGS: Building performance standards like those in place in New York City and Boston can help accelerate building decarbonization, according to a new road map from the Sustainable Markets Initiative. (Utility Dive)
HYDROPOWER: An environmental group offers to buy four hydropower dams on the Kennebec River in Maine with the goal of removing or modifying the structures to improve the river for Atlantic salmon. (Bangor Daily News, subscription)
EMISSIONS: Portland, Maine, explores ways to reduce the emissions of large cruise liners docked in port by strengthening transmission so ships can shut down engines and draw power from the grid. (Maine Public)
COMMENTARY: Maryland officials’ trip to Sweden offers valuable lessons in infrastructure development and the need for more education in the fight against climate change, writes the mayor of Annapolis. (Capital Gazette, subscription)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
DETROIT—In 1913, Henry Ford unveiled the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, reducing the time it took to make a Model T from 12 hours to 93 minutes and igniting a revolution in modern manufacturing. He later perfected the intricate choreography of worker and machine at the 600-acre Rouge plant, which opened in 1920.
On a sunny late-summer afternoon, I stood on a catwalk at the Rouge, peering down at the modern incarnation of that century-old industrial system. Half-built F-150 pickups rolled from station to station at four miles per hour. Each employee had about 45 seconds to perform their task — install a center console, affix a windshield, hook up the truck-bed door.
Ford’s industrial efficiency helped convert America, and eventually much of the world, to automotive transportation, and his factories attracted thousands of workers to Detroit. By the 1920s, it was the nation’s fourth largest city; in 1950 its population peaked at nearly 2 million. Early-20th-century Ford Motor Company casts a mythic aura over Detroit to this day.
“We’re steeped in our heritage,” said Liesl Clark, an architect of Michigan climate policy who now teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “We think a lot about being the state that put the world on wheels. We take a lot of pride in that.”
But Detroit’s industrial joyride hit speed bumps in the second half of the 20th century as the auto industry grappled with technological change, globalization, automation, and supply chains shifting south, Jonathan Smith, senior chief deputy director at the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, told me. As the jobs disappeared, Detroit’s population began emptying out; last year, it stood at just 633,218.
Now something new is stirring along the banks of the Detroit River. The city just notched its first year of population growth since 1957. A few buildings over from the clockwork marvel of Ford’s F-150 plant, another operation cranks out the electric version of the truck, loaded with a battery pack so powerful it can run a whole home. Farther afield, nascent battery plants are in the works, aiming to supply the Big Three automakers with American-made components for their emerging EV lineups.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat elected in 2018, has launched an ambitious effort to reinvigorate Michigan’s remaining industrial base by retooling it for the low-carbon era. Crucially, Whitmer led her party to win majorities in the House and Senate in 2022, giving Democrats full control of state government for the first time in nearly 40 years. They used that popular mandate to pass a series of climate laws last fall, including one of the nation’s most ambitious clean electricity targets. Whitmer has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds to a slew of cleantech factories where workers will make batteries for electric vehicles and new technologies to clean up buildings and electricity production.
Michigan is not the only state actively pursuing new factory investment; its efforts coincide with a generational shift in the nation’s capital, where politicians of both parties are disavowing neoliberal offshoring and embracing policies intended to bring manufacturing back to American shores. President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, incentivizes domestic production of electric vehicles and other energy technologies. But given its industrial legacy and highly trained workforce, Michigan is arguably the state best positioned to make the most of this new economic era.
“It was hard to find a lot of benefit for Michigan workers in … the globalization of some of these key industries, whereas Michigan workers absolutely can benefit from the reshoring and onshoring of existing critical technologies and new technologies of the future that there’s now a policy commitment to see built here in the United States,” Smith told me.
If Michigan’s bet on new clean energy manufacturing works out, it would offer the clearest test case nationally of the Biden-Harris strategy to make clean energy the engine of manufacturing revival. Of the top five states leading the climatetech factory buildout, per a tally by researcher Jack Conness, it’s the only one with unified state Democratic control, not to mention a strong and historically powerful union presence.
“Michigan’s package [of climate legislation] is really significant because it’s in a manufacturing state, it’s in a state where we understand industry,” said Clark, who previously ran Michigan’s environmental regulatory body for Whitmer. “We know we’re going to have to squeeze all the carbon we can out of industry, and we’re going to do that in a partnership with industry, so that we’re also getting the economic-development advantage as we’re moving along that road.”
At the same time, Michigan is one of the most closely divided swing states likely to decide the election between Vice President Kamala Harris, who vows to continue the clean energy policies she helped pass, and former President Donald Trump, who has threatened to undo them.
Michigan broke for Trump in 2016 by around 11,000 votes, part of the shattered “blue wall” that ushered him into the White House. In 2020, Michigan rejected Trump by 150,000 votes. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in the state’s September polling. Democrats may be ascendant in Lansing, but among the waterfront palaces of Grosse Pointe and the lakeside cornfields of the Thumb, the Trump-Vance signs come out in force.
I wanted to assess just how far Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing transformation has come ahead of the 2024 election. After a week of factory visits and interviews with business leaders and policymakers, it was clear that this revolution is further along in Michigan than almost anywhere else in the U.S. It’s also barely getting started.
Private companies have pledged more than $11 billion to build clean energy factories and projects in Michigan, by Conness’ count. Advocacy group Climate Power tallies more like $18 billion for cleantech factories, not counting clean power-plant commitments — money that’s expected to produce nearly 22,000 jobs.
But many of the big-ticket factories announced so far have yet to break ground. Michiganders are feeling only a fraction of the benefits the clean manufacturing boom could furnish; the full effects won’t come until long after the 2024 election is decided. That delay could jeopardize the whole project. For this battery-powered economic revival to succeed, the supporting policies that kicked it off need to stay on the books.
Detroit emanates from its namesake river like half a wheel, spokes flaring from the cluster of art deco skyscrapers at its center. I followed one of those spokes west past Dearborn, home to Ford and now a thriving Yemeni community, to a flat green land dotted by factories that look like oversized boxes. One of the largest of these houses Our Next Energy, a startup founded in 2020 by materials scientist Mujeeb Ijaz to bring back domestic production of the lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry.
This technology uses cheaper, more widely accessible materials and operates more safely than the nickel-based battery chemistries that have reigned in the EV market. But the first major U.S. company to commercialize it, A123 Systems, went bankrupt more than a decade ago when, among other setbacks, actual demand for EV batteries lagged behind industry hopes. A123 was ultimately sold to a Chinese firm, and several Chinese companies successfully scaled up LFP production, making it a viable choice for EV batteries even though it lacks the cell-level energy density of the nickel chemistries. Ijaz saw this unfold firsthand while leading vehicle battery development for A123. Years later, he thought the time was ripe to try again.
It took me a few tries to find the right door at Our Next Energy’s enormous complex. Once inside, an operations manager for the plant had me cover up my hair, don a dark blue lab coat, and slip on little coverups for my leather shoes. Just before we walked onto the factory floor, he instructed me to tell him if I felt dehydrated, because we were entering a controlled zone of near-zero humidity.
Our first stop was the anode room, where Our Next Energy makes the negative end of the battery. Inside a tall, shiny, 100-liter metal tank, a dough hook mixes a sludge of gray metal powder; a separate machine extrudes this graphite slurry onto a roll of copper, printing an anode.
A parallel system across the room does the same for the lithium iron phosphate cathode, which goes on aluminum foil. Both the anodes and the cathodes then go through an oven that solidifies and dehydrates them, after which they’re sliced into uniform sheets. Then comes assembly: An automated machine stacks alternating sheets of anode and cathode with a separator weaving in between. The resulting stack gets stuffed into a metal box and filled with a liquid electrolyte. After some quality checks, it’s ready to power a car.
And that’s where the tour ended. The 10 megawatt-hour “proto line” I saw was fine-tuning samples for potential customers; it occupied a mere corner of the 660,000-square-foot factory, which sat mostly empty.
The mini-factory proves that American workers are capable of producing the up-and-coming LFP batteries. But the battery market, like the solar-panel market, is all about scale, and that’s what Our Next Energy currently lacks.
The company has suffered a series of recent financial setbacks. It went out for Series C venture funding last year, but couldn’t close the deal (that was a tough time for climate venture capital broadly). To keep things running, management laid off 128 staff in November, roughly 25 percent of the workforce. In December, the board booted founder Ijaz from the CEO spot (but kept him around as chief technology officer) and replaced him with board member Paul Humphries, who held multiple executive roles at Flex, the global manufacturing specialist.
Earlier this year, Humphries fired more staff and convinced existing investors to fund the company’s operations through the end of this year. That pushed off the startup’s nagging existential questions for a while.
After the factory tour, I drove half an hour to the small city of Novi to visit Our Next Energy’s corporate headquarters, a glassy, open-floor-plan affair tucked into the wooded, pond-dotted Michigan landscape. Head of Strategy Deeana Ahmed acknowledged the company’s financial challenges and laid out a clear-eyed view of the tough road ahead.
Any would-be U.S. battery manufacturer has to confront the fact that imported cells and packs from China are far cheaper than anything made in the U.S., even with the current 25 percent tariff. Battery prices were higher when Congress drafted the IRA incentives, but since then, Ahmed told me, China’s battery industry has dumped product into the global market in what she considers an unsustainable effort to depress prices and smother emerging battery factories in the U.S. (Solar panel makers complain of a similar dynamic in their market.)
“Right now, what we’re seeing with the IRA is that it barely is enough to keep us competitive,” Ahmed said. “I was meeting with an investor recently, and they asked this question: ‘What happens if the IRA goes away?’ And it’s like, this is not feasible.”
Our Next Energy has already ordered machinery for its first gigawatt-hour-scale production line, which will make cells for stationary grid storage. But the real prize will be landing a large-scale EV supply contract, which would help secure financing for the full $1.6 billion factory expansion that the company has advertised (and which landed a $200 million grant from the state of Michigan, based on a forecast of creating 2,000 jobs). That would fill out the building I saw with 7 gigawatt-hours of annual production, using machines 25 times larger than the ones I saw, plus another 13 gigawatt-hours somewhere even larger.
“You have to spend $1 billion to $2 billion, minimum, to have a scale that is competitive,” Ahmed said. “Anything below that, you’re just losing money.”
If that investment comes through, Our Next Energy will offer entry-level jobs paying $20 to $35 per hour. The company’s preliminary workforce hasn’t unionized, Ahmed said, but “we respect the right of our workers to collectively bargain.”
Two years after the IRA passed, it’s still too early to see Our Next Energy in the full swing of domestic battery production. The factory holds great promise but lingers in a vulnerable, incomplete state, a dynamic that characterizes much of Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing buildout. Ford is still constructing its $2.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Calhoun County, to employ 1,700 workers, while GM builds a $2.6 billion battery plant in Lansing. Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese battery company, has received regulatory approval to build a $2.4 billion facility in western Michigan, which would employ more than 2,300 people. Gotion had to go to court to defend the project after a new slate of local leaders tried to block it based on the company’s ties to China.
Concerted state and federal policies have produced this flurry of factory commitments, but few of those 22,000 promised jobs have materialized yet. Market conditions are daunting, even with full-throated federal support; if that support wavers, the whole endeavor might crumble.
In between factory tours, I stopped in at the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the famous Diego Rivera mural of the Rouge plant’s Depression-era V8 production. Henry Ford’s son Edsel Ford commissioned the stirring work in 1932 — a scion of American capitalism partnering with a prominent Mexican communist.
In one panel, Henry Ford instructs engineers on the newly designed V8, an engine so powerful that he named the new car model after it. (Ford received letters from notorious bank robbers Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger thanking him for designing such a capable getaway vehicle, though some specialists doubt their veracity.) The museum docent told me that Rivera casts the formidable new engine in the guise of a pre-Columbian dog sculpture, with Ford as the high priest interpreting it for his flock.
Elsewhere in the soaring atrium, furnaces glow like volcanoes while muscular men of various races heave mighty engines onto carts and assemble the cars with freshly stamped chassis, radiators, and tires.
Now Ford is attempting to reconjure this legendary alchemy of invention and productivity for the electric era. The company has electrified two of its most iconic brands: the Mustang, which transformed from muscle car to nearly silent electric crossover SUV, and America’s best-selling pickup truck, the F-150, now available as the Lightning.
But, even with unprecedented state and federal support, Detroit’s automakers are having trouble recapturing the innovative breakthroughs that put them on the map a century ago.
The problem is, Ford hasn’t yet achieved its own century-old standard of a better car at a cheaper price. The cost of a Lightning can easily hit $90,000 with add-ons. Even at these exorbitant prices, Ford’s electric division lost $1.3 billion to earn $100 million in revenue during the first quarter this year. And it only sold 10,000 vehicles. Expenses will naturally be higher at the beginning of the clean energy buildout, but that’s not a sustainable way of doing business.
I had hoped to see how those electric pickups were made, to view the synthesis of American muscle and quiet efficiency. As it happened, my August visit to Michigan coincided with the Lightning factory’s regular summer shutdown to retool equipment for the fall production season, Ford representatives told me. That same week, Ford announced it had canceled its next EV release because it couldn’t make the economics work for a three-row electric SUV.
Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told the Financial Times, “These vehicles need to be profitable, and if they’re not profitable based on where the customer is and the market is, we will … make those tough decisions.” Henry Ford’s genius was to imagine new and better possibilities beyond what customers and the market could imagine; his present-day successors seem unwilling to push those boundaries.
Ford’s peers in Detroit’s Big Three have even less to show for their EV efforts. GM built the popular Bolt, which sold well at accessible prices, but recalled thousands of them to replace batteries, then abruptly discontinued the model. (GM later changed course, un-canceling the cancellation, but the Bolt still isn’t back in production.) GM’s current EV lineup swings hard into luxury, with Cadillacs and Hummers; its most affordable model is the recently released Chevy Equinox, starting at $33,600. Stellantis, corporate parent of Chrysler, only got around to introducing its first all-electric model in North America this year despite claiming that EVs will comprise half its sales by 2030.
The auto industry’s halting progress notwithstanding, the Whitmer administration has thrown its full-throttled support behind the shift to electric mobility.
Whitmer’s Healthy Climate Plan calls for 2 million EVs on the roads by 2030, served by 100,000 public charging ports (up from around 3,000 in the state today), said Justine Johnson, the former Ford mobility strategist who now helms the state’s new Office for Future Mobility and Electrification. The state government will transition all light-duty vehicles in its fleet to electric by 2033 followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2040.
Over the long term, though, the transition to clean vehicles will require dialing back production of automakers’ highly profitable gas-powered trucks and SUVs, and that will scramble the employment landscape in Detroit.
For the Whitmer team, the multi-decade planning horizon for the transition to electric mobility offers more time to prepare and manage the economic transition than, say, the sudden shocks of the Great Recession or the dot-com bubble bursting. The Big Three automakers responded to those crises with mass layoffs and cutbacks on benefits for remaining workers. In contrast, the EV transition can be one that Michigan workers and communities plan for and truly benefit from, Smith said.
“Nobody’s talking about phasing out ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles in the next year or two,” he added. “We’re going to continue to have a lot of stability in our auto sector in Michigan in the years to come.”
Some researchers have concluded that this shift will ultimately reduce the number of jobs in the sector, because EV drivetrains are more streamlined and less labor-intensive than ICE engine fabrication. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently analyzed all the steps and labor hours required to make electric and gas-powered vehicles and concluded that EVs can result in greater labor demand if you include the work of battery production. The latest data, published in March, seems to corroborate Whitmer’s theory that EVs can result in economic gains for Michigan, though the location of the battery factories will influence legacy autoworkers’ ability to transition.
Michigan’s battery and EV bets still look unsteady, but the state’s portfolio of new factory investments stretches well beyond the automotive sector.
In a different boxy building not far from Our Next Energy, I met Jose Nunez-Regueiro, the chief technology officer of Nxlite, a startup that has developed a novel way to make windows significantly more energy-efficient. Out on the factory floor, he opened up a porthole into a large metal chamber: A glowing pink haze filled the space, with twin lines of pulsing lavender tracking along two pipes at the top.
Nunez-Reguiero explained the pipes are hollow tubes of silver stuffed with magnetic filling. The machine ignites argon, oxygen, or nitrogen under intense pressure, turning it into cosmic pink plasma, which then collides with the magnets. That impact dislodges a plume of atoms, which sputter down onto a panel of glass at a thickness of 10 to 40 nanometers — a technique known as physical vapor deposition.
The transparent, ultra-thin coating blocks select infrared wavelengths, keeping heat out of a building or vehicle in the summer, or keeping it in during the winter. Upgrading windows this way could cut a house’s energy use by 40 percent, Nunez-Reguiero said. Better energy efficiency is an essential component of decarbonizing home heating and cooling, a major goal of both the Michigan climate plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Nxlite had the good fortune to move into a fully built and equipped glass factory. Like Our Next Energy, the startup is running pilot operations now before scaling up to full commercial production.
Over in Litchfield, about 100 miles west of Detroit, Whitmer had celebrated the early August opening of LuxWall, which fabricates gas-insulated window panes, another tool for decreasing building energy consumption. The company called this factory “the world’s first high-volume vacuum-insulating glass production facilities,” and announced plans to invest far more money in growing its operations in Michigan. LuxWall employs 87 people now but plans to eventually employ 450, aided by $6 million in state grants and over $31 million in federal money.
And last year, Michigan leaders were proud to close a $400 million factory commitment from Nel, a Norwegian company that makes high-tech electrolyzers for turning clean electricity into hydrogen. Electrolyzers could soon become the picks and shovels of the clean hydrogen gold rush, which promises to decarbonize tricky sectors like long-distance shipping and freight, steelmaking, and chemicals.
Michigan leaders hustled to make it happen. “It came down to two states — I’m not going to name the second state, but the governor of the second state said, ‘Hey, I’m too busy,’” Quentin Messer, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, recounted from his office in Lansing. “And Gov. Whitmer said, ‘Look, this is an opportunity. This is my responsibility, as leader of the state, to be closer-in-chief.’”
Whitmer flew out to Oslo herself and sealed the deal. Messer said it ended up being the largest foreign direct investment announced at the 2023 SelectUSA Investment Summit, the Department of Commerce’s annual conference to facilitate foreign investment in the U.S. economy.
That factory, though, hasn’t broken ground yet — one of many projects held up until the Internal Revenue Service decides how to structure its hydrogen tax credits.
Other manufacturers have operated in Michigan’s industrial landscape for decades, but added new lines in response to new federal and state incentives. Up in Saginaw, Hemlock Semiconductor has for years produced among the highest-grade polysilicon in the country. After Congress passed policies to encourage onshoring of microchip production and the solar supply chain, Hemlock broke ground on a $375 million expansion in October 2022.
Armstrong International’s history in the state dates back even further than Hemlock’s. In 1900, Adam Armstrong answered a newspaper ad offering free land and a building in Three Rivers, a farm town nestled among the cornfields south of Kalamazoo, to any company that could hire 15 people over five years. He relocated his machine shop from Chicago, and got to work in a 40-by-100-foot building crafting bicycle spokes, potato diggers, and railroad repair buggies. His great-great-grandson, Kurt Armstrong, told me the company no longer makes potato diggers, but the inverted bucket steam trap it commercialized in 1911 kicked off a thriving business in industrial thermal equipment that now spans 20 factories and offices worldwide.
Armstrong recently started construction on a 29,000-square-foot expansion in Three Rivers to produce industrial-grade heat pumps within 12 months, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. The company’s design captures heat in industrial facilities that would otherwise escape as waste, and concentrates it to recirculate into factory processes. It plays in the range of 150 to 200 degrees Celsius, assisting tasks like drying out pet food, distilling bourbon, pasteurizing soft drinks, and operating commercial-scale laundries.
Armstrong said the factory addition will employ 10 to 15 people to start, and that could grow based on demand.
“The reason why we stayed in that Michigan location is because there’s such a deep tie-in to the culture and community there,” Armstrong told me. “It’s the employees who make the company great, and you can’t just recreate that somewhere else.”
Armstrong’s expansion is a lot smaller than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory, but it’s bigger than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory that doesn’t yet exist. Michigan’s big-ticket factory commitments drive up the counts of dollars invested and jobs created, but they also require more diligence and risk assessment from their corporate backers, not to mention longer construction times. Meanwhile, the smaller-dollar expansions are putting people to work building tools most people have never heard of, but which serve the climate transition in tangible ways.
Michigan’s clean energy factories are slowly materializing, but the best is yet to come — assuming the underlying policies to support battery and solar manufacturing remain in effect. Michiganders are uniquely positioned to influence that outcome, by voting in a crucial swing state this November.
One of the big questions facing Democrats broadly in 2024 is whether their efforts to reinvigorate American industry will resonate with voters concerned about the nation’s economic outlook. When Joe Biden was the candidate, swing-state voters weren’t swayed. But the arrival of Harris on the ticket turned states that looked all but lost into toss-ups again. That creates room for a clean energy message to make a difference: Persuading tens of thousands of voters to support a domestic economic platform is more doable than swaying millions.
Measuring voters’ receptiveness to clean energy onshoring is tough to do, especially when, as in Michigan, the most exciting factories aren’t yet boosting local tax revenues and putting thousands of people to work in high-tech jobs. I wasn’t able to find a northern analogue to Dalton, Georgia, where an existing Qcells solar-panel factory used IRA incentives to rapidly grow to 2,000 full-time workers, and the benefits are already cascading across the city.
But Michigan brings two things to the effort that are hard to find together in the other states leading the factory boom: a fired-up state Democratic establishment that’s running on climate action and related jobs, and a newly galvanized union base.
Many of the top winners in clean energy manufacturing dollars have been states led by Republican governors or legislatures, who like the jobs but not the Democrats’ broader policy agenda — places like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Ohio.
Michigan, on the other hand, has a deep bench of liberal state leaders who ran on climate last cycle and won a historic majority.
“The governor had talked about it quite a bit before the election, and had worked with people across the state to develop the Michigan climate action plan,” state Senator Sue Shink, a Democrat from the Ann Arbor area, told Canary Media. “It had all the policies we [ultimately] enacted laid out in it, and talked about pathways to attaining those goals.”
After winning the statehouse, Whitmer and her allies passed a series of high-profile climate policies last year. Michigan committed to produce carbon-free electricity not by 2045, like California and New York, but by 2040. Other laws added labor standards and energy-justice provisions to the clean energy buildout, and created a Community and Worker Economic Transition Office to look out for the workforce amid the shifts to lower-carbon industry.
Knocking on doors for the 2022 election, Shink found that climate and clean energy were on voters’ minds. Weather fluctuations had messed with farmers’ planting schedules. Huge rainstorms had overwhelmed aging infrastructure and flooded homes. The 100-year-old Edenville Dam burst in May 2020. Diminished snowfall had been curtailing the cherished ski season.
While seeking to address carbon emissions, the politicians kept their focus on “making sure the quality of life in Michigan is as good as it can be,” Shink said.
Residents in her district, for instance, struggled with under-insulated homes, which drive up heating and cooling bills. The state laws created programs to take advantage of federal weatherization funds from the IRA, and “it’s making a huge difference in their lives, because they’re warmer, their house is more comfortable,” Shink said. This approach tracks neatly with how progressive data crunchers have advised Democrats to describe the massive and complex Inflation Reduction Act to voters.
Now Michigan Democrats have a package of legislative achievements to run on in November, which happens to complement the principal policy achievements of Harris’ vice presidency. In fact, Michigan politicians are pushing the Harris campaign to speak up more on the domestic manufacturing push, which Biden prioritized in his campaigning, per a recent Politico article. (Neither the Harris campaign nor the Trump campaign responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment for this article.)
Michigan also has another ascendant political force at work: unions.
Much of the country’s recent EV and battery factory investment has gone to Southeastern states, which attract companies with their “business-friendly environment” that includes decades of undercutting the power of organized labor. But unions have played a defining role in Detroit since Henry Ford, after some convincing, recognized the United Auto Workers in 1941.
Democratic state officials are vocally supportive of Michigan’s union heritage.
“We benefit a lot from the fact that we’ve had the UAW, IBEW, and others investing in workforce and helping with workforce training,” said Smith from the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. “I think most employers recognize that’s an asset to them and an asset to the state, not necessarily something that’s going to be a threat to their business model.”
Shawn Fain won the presidency of the UAW last year by running as a reform candidate who wanted to clean up after a string of corruption scandals took down leaders of the union’s long-reigning faction. He proceeded to rally the biggest autoworker strike in decades, and win concessions from the Big Three, including a clear pathway for workers to unionize at battery plants. The UAW has since organized workers at two Ultium battery plants, in Lordstown, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, winning wage increases and other benefits.
Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to appear on a picket line last year when he joined Fain at a GM plant near Detroit. Fain later appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and rallied behind Harris, countering Trump’s recent outreach to working-class voters by labeling him a “scab.”
If winning begets more winning, the political mobilization that’s starting to generate clean energy jobs in Michigan will be an asset for Democrats at the polls in November, something that wasn’t there in 2016 or 2020. If these forces keep Michigan in the Democratic column, that could help ensure the clean industrial policies stay on the books in Washington, giving Michigan’s factories more time to overcome headwinds and deliver on their promises of jobs and community revitalization.
From the World Economic Forum to utility industry magazines to the US Department of Energy, in recent years there’s been a growing refrain: how batteries can enable a net-zero electricity grid. Implicit in that statement is the idea that batteries can (and should) help lower grid emissions, increase the integration of zero-emissions renewable energy sources, and support overall power sector decarbonization. Yet battery energy storage is sometimes finding itself in the hot seat for exactly the opposite reason.
Earlier this year, a University of Michigan study focused on the PJM market (the large regional transmission organization covering all or part of 13 U.S. states plus Washington, D.C.) found that batteries sometimes increased grid emissions. While the U-M study was based on older data (from 2012 to 2014), its takeaways echo concerns we’ve heard before.
In the early 2010s, California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) — a major driver of the state’s behind-the-meter battery energy storage market — shifted its focus to specifically prioritize greenhouse gas reductions for the Golden State’s power grid. But then circa 2018 and 2019, analysis found that batteries were often increasing, rather than decreasing, grid emissions.
For the better part of a decade, batteries have been described as a Swiss Army knife of the power grid, capable of performing myriad functions — from customer-centric services such as backup power, peak shaving, solar self-consumption, and time-of-use energy arbitrage to grid-centric services such as frequency and voltage regulation, demand response, and mitigating renewables curtailment.
Ultimately, doing all of that involves software algorithms that dictate when a battery energy storage system charges and discharges. Those algorithms typically co-optimize around various price signals. But it’s the marginal emissions of the power grid at the times a battery is charging vs. discharging that determines whether the battery causes a net decrease (or increase) in grid emissions.
Unless energy storage considers emissions in their control approach, there’s no guarantee that they’ll help decarbonize power grids. Energy journalist David Roberts summed it up well: “It’s a mistake to deploy batteries … as though they will inevitably reduce emissions. They’re a grid tech, not a decarbonization tech,” more akin to transmission lines that can equally carry dirty or clean power, agnostic to the electricity’s generation source and the associated carbon emissions. So, too, with batteries in the absence of the right signals.
To address the emissions increase caused by energy storage participating in SGIP, the rules of the program were revised with the goal of enabling the state’s participating behind-the-meter commercial and residential batteries to live up to their emissions-reducing promise. Almost immediately after the rule change, we started to see positive outcomes. A detailed impact evaluation published earlier this year by CPUC with analysis by Verdant gives a longer-term view of SGIP’s turnaround story.
Between 2018 and 2022 (the period covered by Verdant’s analysis), battery systems in California’s SGIP fully reversed course, flipping from causing a net increase in grid emissions to causing a significant net decrease in a resounding decarbonization success.
Now, energy storage has cemented its central role supporting California’s goal of achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. The state boasts more than 10 GW of installed battery capacity, and earlier this year, batteries became the single largest contributor to the state’s grid briefly during the evening peak. Grid-scale batteries charged on excess daytime solar are starting to displace natural gas power plants. And during this year’s solar eclipse, batteries charged on excess renewable energy carried California’s power sector through the temporary slump in solar PV generation.
California may be the country’s most-prominent example, but it’s hardly the only US state setting combinations of both emissions-reduction / net-zero emissions targets as well as energy storage goals. For just four examples, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — all members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — each have robust energy storage targets tied to 100% clean energy and GHG reduction goals. So does Michigan.
For energy storage to help these and other states achieve their clean energy goals, it will be crucial to learn from California’s SGIP growing pains — and using a true marginal emissions GHG signal, rather than a proxy metric, to inform batteries’ duty cycles. Just look at what has transpired in Texas and the ERCOT market.
The Lone Star State has been called “the hottest grid battery market in the country.” But analysis from Tierra Climate published in June 2024 in collaboration with REsurety, Grid Status, Modo Energy, and WattTime found that 92% of batteries in ERCOT increased grid emissions in 2023. This is largely because those batteries are not co-optimizing their operation in coordination with a carbon signal like SGIP’s GHG signal. That same report found that co-optimization with a carbon signal (or a carbon price) would move these battery energy storage assets from carbon increasing to carbon decreasing.
The US energy storage market is growing fast, with record-setting capacity additions in Q1 2024 and a staggering 75 GW of cumulative new capacity forecasted to come online during the period 2024–2028. If battery energy storage is to continue living up to its promise of enabling a net-zero grid, it’s more important than ever that state policies and battery control algorithms include a marginal emissions signal as part of their intelligence under the hood.
OFFSHORE WIND: A newly completed, $42 million commercial port on the New Bedford, Massachusetts waterfront could host offshore wind operations. (Cape Cod Times)
ALSO:
FOSSIL FUELS: A Philadelphia refinery agrees to pay a settlement of $4.2 million, after the U.S. EPA found the owners failed to remedy corrosion that caused an explosion and fire in 2019. (Associated Press)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: New York is one of 40 cities in which ride-sharing option Uber Green will go fully electric, removing hybrid vehicles from its lineup. (NBC New York)`
AGRIVOLTAICS:
UTILITIES: FirstEnergy — a utility serving New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania — receives poor marks in a new Sierra Club report tracking utilities’ progress toward decarbonization. (Canary Media)
EQUITY: Energy efficiency contractors in Connecticut call on the state and private companies to improve the treatment of workers of color in the industry. (CT News Junkie)
NUCLEAR: A Maryland startup raises $45 million for its plan to build modular nuclear reactors at shipyards using existing labor and infrastructure. (DCInno, subscription)
RENEWABLES: The New York State Power Authority releases a draft plan identifying potential renewables projects across the state totaling as much as 3.5 GW of capacity. (news release)
TRANSIT: A new study recommends reviving a little-used rail line in Boston and adding electric train service to make commuting easier and attract more riders. (CommonWealth Beacon)
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