Back
SOLAR: A conservation group’s new report identifies roughly 300,000 acres of polluted brownfield properties and former coal mining sites in Indiana that could host solar projects. (WFYI)
ALSO: Scientists at Iowa State University and elsewhere look for ways to blend solar power and agricultural production, such as at a project outside Lawrence, Kansas, where developers plan to incorporate sheep grazing. (Harvest Public Media)
OHIO:
GEOTHERMAL: A Minnesota school district is reducing its energy use with a geothermal system even after installing air conditioning for the first time. (Sahan Journal)
OIL & GAS: An Ohio nonprofit oil and gas watchdog group says the industry is increasing water withdrawals and waste production during hydraulic fracturing, becoming less efficient as well production declines. (Times Leader)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
EMISSIONS: Michigan agriculture regulators will monitor ozone levels in eight counties to help avoid elevated smog levels during the summer. (Bridge)
CLEAN ENERGY: Former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes forms a new organization to help connect residents and businesses with clean energy funding available under the Inflation Reduction Act. (UpNorthNews)
COMMENTARY:
GRID: Amid concerns about how data center growth will affect the grid, Microsoft says it is committed to “paying its own way” when it comes to potential upgrades to power a planned Wisconsin facility. (WPR)
ALSO: Ohio regulators approve new transmission charges for AEP Ohio that consumer advocates say will sharply increase residential customers’ bills. (Dayton Daily News)
HYDROGEN: Minnesota-based 3M is investing in research that aims to lower the costs of producing green hydrogen and make it more competitive with renewables and fossil fuels. (Star Tribune)
OIL & GAS: Marathon seeks to remove air pollution permit limits and increase production at a Detroit refinery that has previously violated air quality laws multiple times. (Bridge Detroit)
CLIMATE: Michigan Republicans criticize the state attorney general’s effort to recruit private-sector attorneys to help pursue climate lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies. (Michigan Public)
PIPELINES: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is holding a pair of hearings today in Wisconsin on Enbridge’s request to reroute a portion of Line 5 around tribal land in northern Wisconsin. (Journal Sentinel)
POWER PLANTS:
SOLAR: Converting farmland to commercial solar projects could be a sticking point in the upcoming federal Farm Bill, though advocates say solar and farming can coexist under agrivoltaics practices. (E&E News, subscription)
EFFICIENCY:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
Solar developers will pay a premium to build projects on prime farmland under new rules in the works in Maine.
The state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry is drafting the rules based on a 2023 law that authorized it to collect extra fees from developers whose projects impact at least 5 acres of “high-value agricultural soils,” which regulators will define in rulemaking underway this summer.
The program could involve a range of new fees for different kinds of farmland and project impacts, with money being set aside for “farmland conservation and solar mitigation projects.” Proponents hope the rules will push renewable energy development toward areas with less conservation value.
“We would much rather see balanced solar siting than full-out moratoriums on solar energy development,” said Shelley Megquier, the policy and research director for Maine Farmland Trust, which supported the legislation authorizing the new rules.
Critics, though, say the rules unfairly single out solar based only on anecdotal evidence of the industry’s impact on farmland. A recent report by the American Farmland Trust projected that low-density housing and other types of urban sprawl threaten to swallow more than 53,000 acres, or 5% of all Maine farmland, by 2040.
The law also authorized the development of a similar scheme for wind and transmission projects that affect certain kinds of fish and wildlife habitat.
Some advocates say the new fees single out renewables without clear evidence that a use like solar puts prime farmland more at risk than any other kind of development.
“The narrative around this has really been: how can we protect high-value farmland from solar development?” said Lindsay Bourgoine, the policy director for ReVision Energy, a major New England solar developer. “ReVision has a really big concern about the lack of data around that narrative.”
Maine’s climate plan includes a goal of moving to 100% renewable electricity by 2040, and also aims to put 30% of the state’s land into conservation easements, including for farming, by 2030.
The state has already built close to a gigawatt of solar, most of it in smaller-scale projects. The five-acre minimum covered by the new compensation fees can support about a megawatt of solar.
Bourgoine’s company estimates that even if all of Maine’s existing solar projects under 5 megawatts had gone on prime agricultural lands, it would cover less than half a percent of all such land across the state. A recent report from the Center for Rural Affairs estimated a similar proportion for solar in Midwest states.
Groups that supported Maine’s new fee rules agreed that they hope legislators and state policymakers will turn their focus in the near future to both gathering more land-use data, and to considering expanding mitigation tools to uses that may be more common, such as housing, commercial development or roads.
“If we’re talking about environmental impacts, we’re requiring mitigation of the one type of development that is benefiting the environment,” said conservation biologist and GIS manager Sarah Haggerty of Maine Audubon, which supported the bill to create the clean energy fee programs.
Absent better data, Megquier said farmers and farm conservation groups like hers can only go on what they observe — which is “farmland being converted for solar production in pretty large amounts,” she said.
“Some of that (is) what we would categorize as really high-value farmland, where unfortunately it’s being lost to agricultural production,” she said. “There may be farmers that would be interested in accessing that land to grow food for our communities.”
Andy Smith and his partner run The Milkhouse dairy farm in Monmouth, Maine. They have their own small solar array and sit close to a power substation, and so have fielded extensive interest from solar developers who want to rent and build on some of their land. Some have offered more than $1,000 an acre for a 30-year lease, he said.
Smith said he’s strongly supportive of an energy transition and sees frequent effects of increasing weather extremes on his farm. But he said solar is tough competition for farmers who lease or buy space from other landowners, often to grow hay to feed dairy cows like Smith’s.
“If young people are trying to buy farmland, and they’re competing with solar developers, they’re not going to be able to buy farmland,” he said.
For farmers that affirmatively want solar on their land, Megquier’s group hopes the new fee structure will incentivize projects to go on “marginal” land that’s less productive, unforested or disconnected from large active growing areas.
“We hope that … this rulemaking takes those sorts of complexities into account,” she said. “We would want to see permitting for a solar development that supports current agricultural operation as sort of fast-tracked or, in some way, expedited.”
ReVision supports a similar outcome.
“We would just say that a landowner should have the default ability to be able to site solar on their property if the purpose of it is for revenue diversification to keep the farm in operation,” Bourgoine said.
Evelyn Norton is one such landowner. Her father raised dairy cows and harvested hay to feed them on her family’s farm in Livermore Falls, Maine. As that business declined and her dad got older, Norton said she realized, realistically, that she and her sister “were not going to be out on the tractors haying… and so we realized we needed to figure out what else we could do to bring income into the farm.”
Numerous solar developers had contacted the family about putting an array on their land. Many were eyeing a particular flat, treeless area, close to grid infrastructure, with sandy soil. It had been the least productive plot for hay on the farm, Norton said.
“Someone referred to it as a Walt Disney solar farm property,” Norton said. “It was just like it was designed to be a solar array.”
Her family worked with ReVision to build a community solar array on that 20 acres, covering about 15% of the farm’s total area. The grass beneath the panels is grazed by sheep, and the array provides power to five school districts — a nod to Evelyn’s mother, who was a long-time teacher.
Annual lease payments now provide the farm’s largest source of revenue, supplemented by various other agricultural uses, such as tree-growing and a farmer who rents space for his cattle.
“We’re still wanting to stay as a one-unit farm and not have to sell off piece by piece. This allows us to do that,” Norton said. “It gives us the security to know that 135 acres is protected because of the 20 acres.”
Norton worries that the new fee structure, if not designed with the right exceptions, could prevent some farmers from using solar as she did to keep her farm viable.
Some advocates said they hope the rules will primarily help balance solar development costs so that farmland isn’t automatically the cheapest option.
Smith, the dairy farmer in Monmouth, said he hopes at least the new fees will encourage development on “lower-quality soils.” But it’s easier said than done — these soils may be less well drained, for example, and contain areas classified as wetlands, leading to more regulatory complications.
“It just often feels like, you know, a (good) solar site is going to be on well drained soil with southern exposure, which is also the best farmland there is,” he said.
“We sincerely hope that this effort will not have a chilling effect… and, in some cases… could assist solar companies in terms of the predictability,” Megquier said. “The current structure is really not a structure. It’s very … project-to-project. And that is not to the benefit of advancing our conservation goals, nor is it to the benefit of advancing our renewable energy goals.”
Under the new rules, regulators will have to define “dual-use agricultural and solar production,” such as agrivoltaics projects where crops and solar are co-located. Megquier hopes the new fees will incentivize this approach.
For Smith, dual-use methods are the best hope for easing rural and neighbor backlash to solar energy, which he worries will slow its growth as a tool for fighting climate change.
“It would really suck if the whole solar industry got like a black eye because of developing these open spaces,” he said.
Haggerty, with Maine Audubon, said increasing costs for building on farmland could make more costly solar sites — including brownfields and developed spaces — more appealing for builders by comparison.
“It may very well be that this legislation balances out some of those costs, you know — if you’re gonna have to mitigate… ag land or wildlife habitat, maybe it makes that brownfield more affordable, and it’s not as much cheaper to go elsewhere,” she said. “That’s one of the things that we hope to see.”
The state is currently gathering stakeholder input on a draft farmland rule expected out this summer. The Maine legislature will have to approve the eventual fee structures, which will apply to solar arrays that begin construction after Sept. 1, 2024.
WIND: An energy and port services company says the state won’t consider their alternative offshore wind port plan, which they say would be cheaper and not have land use concerns like the state’s preferred site on Sears Island. (Portland Press Herald)
ALSO:
GAS: A Massachusetts firm wants to invest $100 million to build an anaerobic digestion facility in Pennsylvania’s Adams County to turn food waste into gas. (Fox 43)
SOLAR:
GRID:
TRANSPORTATION:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
BUILDINGS: A Maine firm will soon open a new assembly line process to manufacture 25 – 50 prefabricated homes that meet passive house standards every year. (Bangor Daily News)
WORKFORCE: Three Massachusetts schools will share a $3.4 million grant to provide clean energy job exposure and training to underserved students . (Mass Live)
SOLAR: Florida installed 2.7 GW of new solar capacity and Texas 2.6 GW in the first quarter of 2024, leading the U.S. in a record-breaking quarter that saw a 71% increase in solar manufacturing capacity from late 2023. (PV Magazine)
ALSO: A new report finds Texas is set to more than double its solar capacity to nearly 80 GW by 2030. (San Antonio Express-News)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
OIL & GAS:
NUCLEAR:
COAL: Congressional Democrats announce legislation to restart a study of how surface mining affects health in central Appalachia. (E&E News, subscription)
EFFICIENCY: A Kentucky utility rolls out nine energy efficiency programs, with more set to come before 2026. (Louisville Courier Journal)
CYBERSECURITY: The University of Arkansas participates in a multi-partner initiative to fortify the cybersecurity of solar inverters. (news release)
UTILITIES:
COMMENTARY:
SOLAR: A two-year pause on federal solar import tariffs from Southeast Asia ends, which experts say could drive a solar installation boom as developers use up components they’ve imported duty-free. (Reuters)
ALSO:
EMISSIONS:
POLITICS: The debate over federal permitting reform has divided clean energy and environmental justice advocates, with some worried that speeding deployment of renewables and transmission will also benefit fossil fuels and weaken environmental protections. (Utility Dive)
NUCLEAR: The U.S. Energy Department issues grants to eight fusion technology companies looking to produce emissions-free power with the unproven technology. (E&E News)
BATTERIES: Republican Congress members cite forced labor allegations as they push the Biden administration to block imports from two top Chinese battery makers that are working with Ford and other electric vehicle manufacturers. (E&E News)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WIND:
CLIMATE: The Biden administration’s youth climate corps program begins this month, sending workers to take on climate and environmental jobs, largely across Western states. (High Country News)
TRANSMISSION: A federal judge dismisses a lawsuit from a tribal nation and environmentalists seeking to block construction of a segment of the SunZia transmission line through a culturally significant valley in southern Arizona, saying the plaintiffs’ challenge came too late. (Associated Press)
TRANSPORTATION: As New York’s governor halts a traffic congestion plan in New York City, cities around the world have kept similar policies in place — even in areas where it was initially unpopular. (Washington Post)
WIND: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee rejects a recommendation to slash the proposed Horse Heaven wind farm in half to protect wildlife and cultural sites in the southern part of the state, and suggests approving it at its original size. (Associated Press)
ALSO:
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY:
NUCLEAR: A data center under development in a remote part of Wyoming agrees to purchase 100 MW of power from small modular nuclear reactor startup Oklo. (Data Center Dynamics)
ELECTRIFICATION: California advocates call on regulators to amend state energy codes to strongly encourage homeowners to replace broken or aging air conditioners with electric heat pumps. (Canary Media)
STORAGE: California residents push a ballot measure aimed at blocking a 600 MW battery energy storage system at a shuttered power plant in a tourist town on the state’s central coast. (Inside Climate News)
GRID: An NV Energy executive indicates the Nevada utility is poised to choose the California grid operator’s regional day-ahead power market over SPP’s competing one. (RTO Insider, subscription)
OIL & GAS:
GEOTHERMAL: Colorado awards 35 projects $7.7 million to research and develop geothermal energy. (Colorado Sun)
UTILITIES: Federal legislation that would exempt wildfire damage settlements from federal taxation stalls, potentially leaving some Oregon residents with high bills. (Oregonian)
MINING: The federal Bureau of Land Management seeks public input on a proposed copper mine expansion in southeastern Utah’s Lisbon Valley. (news release)
When the nonprofit Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) began tracking where financial incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act were spurring clean energy manufacturing growth and jobs nationwide, Zach Amittay figured Virginia would snag the top slot in the Southeast.
So he was startled that the state has consistently lagged behind South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia since E2 began its research after the IRA became law in August 2022.
“Overall, Virginia pales in comparison to its neighbors, especially those farther South,” said Amittay, Southeast advocate for E2. “And that’s kind of an irony considering how Virginia’s framework for clean energy policies is driving demand for solar, electric vehicles, battery storage and offshore wind.”
Through April, companies have announced at least 305 major clean energy projects in 40 states and Puerto Rico, according to data E2 has gathered. Those projects are tied to 105,400-plus jobs and more than $123 billion in capital investments.
Of those 305 projects, just four — two connected to offshore wind, one to hydrogen and one to modernizing the electrical grid — have Virginia connections.
Meanwhile, Georgia has lured 27 projects, South Carolina, 24, and North Carolina, 19.
“North and South Carolina and Georgia are doing everything in their power to attract companies,” Amittay said. “They’re launching a full-court press by recruiting, offering state incentives and reducing tax liabilities. It shows they recognize this is the future of the economy and they want to be a part of that.”
E2, a national, nonpartisan group of investors, business leaders and professionals, launched its research project to bring more clarity to the IRA allocation process.
“For the average layperson, it’s inscrutable,” Amittay said. “We figured we could dedicate staff time to aggregating information and making it more digestible.”
Virginia has its share of success stories but needs to double down on efforts to entice more manufacturers that are part of the renewable energy supply chain, he noted. Deploying solar panels and wind turbines is only half of the clean energy equation.
“When it comes to attracting investments, the state is missing out by doing the opposite and, it seems, pushing them away.”
Christian Martinez, spokesman for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, countered that take.
He pointed to the administration’s 2022 all-of-the-above Energy Plan as underscoring Virginia’s commitment to being a premier business location while also recognizing energy as a crucial productivity driver.
Without citing specifics, Martinez noted that Youngkin “looks forward to sharing details on several economic development opportunities … when they are ready.”
While state leaders can’t control company whims, Amittay and other clean energy advocates do directly blame Youngkin for nixing a proposal by Ford Motor Co. in late 2022 to build a plant to manufacture electric vehicle batteries on an industrial site in Pittsylvania County on the North Carolina border.
The automaker’s decision to partner with a Chinese company posed too high of a security risk, Youngkin said at the time.
“Virginians should be wary of Chinese communist intrusion into Virginia’s economy,” he said at his January 2023 State of the Commonwealth address, directing legislators to “send me a bill to prohibit dangerous foreign entities tied to the CCP from purchasing Virginia’s farmland.”
Youngkin’s concerns about China’s influence in this country could have been navigated so Virginia’s opportunity for the battery facility didn’t go up in smoke, Amittay said.
“At the time, he was trying to establish a national brand because he had bigger political ambitions,” he said about Youngkin’s presidential aspirations.
In February 2023, Ford announced that the battery plant would be built in Marshall, Michigan.
That loss not only hurt Virginia, Amittay said, but also cued companies that the state might be wary of rolling out the welcome mat to clean energy innovation.
Martinez said Youngkin’s concerns “that the Chinese Communist Party aims to dominate the world at the expense of the United States” were validated when Ford said last November it was scaling back its Michigan plans.
However, Ford explained it was curbing production capacity and employment expectations in Marshall — from 2,500 jobs 1,700 jobs — because of rising labor costs and consumers’ hesitancy to shift to electric vehicles.
At its core, the Inflation Reduction Act is a massive package that dedicates $369 billion over 10 years to clean energy innovation via tax credits, rebates and other incentives. Many of its programs are designed to boost domestic manufacturing jobs as the country transitions away from fossil fuels.
The latter is a signal to stateside and international businesses, Amittay said, that the United States is serious about tamping down the emissions of heat-trapping gases that are causing climate change.
Thus far, the pull of the IRA’s promise has convinced four companies, Hitachi Energy, Fugro, Lyon Shipyard and Topsoe, to either expand or put down roots in Virginia, according to E2’s database.
Topsoe, a Danish company that focuses on emissions reduction technology, is the latest entrant.
In mid-April, it released plans to spend $400 million on a factory in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond, to manufacture specialized solid oxide electrolyzer cells essential for producing green hydrogen. It would employ 150.
While Topsoe has started the permitting and design process, company spokesman Gabriel Martinez said no timeline is set yet.
“The final investment decision will be dependent on market demand and regulatory developments,” he said, adding that the green hydrogen would be produced by Topsoe’s customers, not on-site in Virginia.
If built, Topsoe’s largest U.S. investment would be eligible for up to $136 million in IRA incentives, Gabriel Martinez said.
Another European company, Fugro, is in the midst of bumping up the workforce at its Americas Center of Expertise for Offshore Wind in Norfolk. The Dutch geo-data business first landed in Virginia in 2007 when it was hired to help expand nearby Portsmouth’s Craney Island Marine Terminal operated by the state Port Authority.
A few years later, Fugro began pivoting to offshore wind as possibilities for the industry took shape in coastal Virginia and beyond, said Peter Tattersfield, who directs wind business development in the Americas.
Dominion Energy is on the verge of beginning offshore construction on its 176-turbine wind farm 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. At peak capacity, it will generate 2.6 gigawatts of power.
Fugro deploys specialized equipment such as buoys, sensors and robots to capture information about water currents, wind speeds, wave heights and soil types to create detailed maps of the ocean floor and the surrounding maritime environment. Scientists also study sea mammal and fish habitat.
“Wind developers need to know what they’re building their turbines on and where they should be installing cables,” Tattersfield said. “Basically, we build an earth model so they can feel confident about their projects.”
Fugro will steadily add professional jobs to keep pace with the Biden administration’s goal of achieving 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, he said. The company isn’t in line to receive IRA money directly. Instead, business will grow as more and more wind developers take advantage of generous IRA incentives.
“Our industry is still in its infancy, but we’re strategically positioned in Virginia,” Tattersfield said. “A wind developer is like a general contractor who has all the incentives to get the house built. If he’s successful, then all the subcontractors are pulled along toward success too.”
Relatedly, Norfolk-based Lyon Shipyard announced last fall that it would be spending $8.5 million to increase its capacity so it can provide a range of services for the commercial ships and vessels that attend to offshore wind farms. The ship repair company, active along the Elizabeth River since 1928, expects to add 134 jobs.
Meanwhile, Hitachi Energy is investing $37 million to add 26,000 square feet of production space to its power transformer building in Halifax County to support the manufacture of bigger transformers specifically designed for utility and renewable energy markets.
Transformers are a crucial piece of grid resiliency because they stabilize voltage to ensure power flows efficiently and reliably.
Steve McKinney, the head of Hitachi’s transformer business in North America, said he expects the addition to the existing 607,000 square foot plant in South Boston to be online by the end of 2025. Hitachi will hire 165 employees to its current on-site workforce of 450.
McKinney said there’s a “good possibility” Hitachi would tap into IRA incentives to offset equipment costs, but didn’t yet know a dollar figure.
The Virginia investment is just a tiny slice of the $1.5 billion Hitachi is pouring into its transformer capacity globally as demand for electricity explodes because of the growth of everything from data centers to electric vehicles.
“A lot of the grid network was built decades ago, and it’s time to upgrade,” he said. “Who would have thought five years ago we would be having this conversation about this level of investment in clean energy provided by the IRA?”
“We’re still in the early innings, but this is going to be transformational for the U.S.,” Amittay said about IRA infusions. “It’s complicated because there are a lot of technical details, a lot of agencies involved and some funding programs haven’t been rolled out yet.”
Despite those hurdles nationwide, Kim Jemaine, Virginia director for Advanced Energy United, isn’t confident that Youngkin has the will or the wherewithal to catch up with other states in the Southeast.
Her organization represents businesses intent on accelerating a clean energy transition.
In her eyes, the governor has spent too much time undermining the Virginia Clean Economy Act and promoting far-off energy sources such as small modular nuclear reactors.
“By touting an all-of-the-above policy, he’s missing research and development and manufacturing opportunities in other investment spaces,” Jemaine said. “What about batteries and long-term storage? There’s a ton of untapped potential there.”
She’s also worried that some of the initial excitement about transforming the Hampton Roads region into an offshore wind hub has fizzled since Youngkin took office in 2022. That political landscape means it’s easier for existing companies to expand than for new ones to move in.
With so much ground to make up, Amittay agreed, waiting around isn’t an option.
“We all know that the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago, but the next best time is today. It’s time for Virginia to think about how it can plant some trees.”
WIND: A federal judge denies a request to halt Dominion Energy’s construction of a 2.6 GW offshore wind farm near Virginia by conservative groups who argue it will threaten endangered whales. (WHRO)
ALSO:
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS:
PIPELINES: A growing number of groups ask federal regulators to delay approval for the Mountain Valley Pipeline to begin service as construction crews continue to inch toward completion. (WDBJ)
OVERSIGHT: A Georgia energy regulator is criticized for bragging the state’s energy mix is “the cleanest and most reliable of any state in the nation” (it’s actually Vermont), even though its largest utility produces 60% of its power from fossil fuels. (Savannah Morning News)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The Biden administration announces nearly $1 billion will go to about 530 school districts across the U.S. to fund the purchase of electric school buses. (States Newsroom)
HYDRO: The Tennessee Valley Authority rehabs a 10-acre island downstream from the site of its first hydroelectric dam and power plant. (Knoxville News Sentinel)
GRID:
CLIMATE:
COMMENTARY: Texas’ recent brush with severe storms should remind state lawmakers that climate change is worsening and they should back carbon-free energy instead of further incentivizing new natural gas-fired power plants, writes an editorial board. (Dallas Morning News)
As president and CEO of Green Mountain Power in Vermont, Mary Powell developed the first utility partnership with Tesla to attach residential Powerwall batteries to the grid, providing backup clean power for the utility when needed. Customers could earn money by essentially filling the batteries at night and dispatching them during the day, Powell explained in a 2016 interview with Energy News Network.
Today, such arrangements are increasingly promoted by clean energy advocates, who’ve dubbed distributed grid-connected batteries — plus solar — “virtual power plants” that allow homeowners and businesses to help out utilities during times of high demand. They’re also central to Powell’s current mission as head of the nation’s largest residential solar company.
Powell left Green Mountain in 2019 after two decades with the company, and in 2021 she became CEO of Sunrun. In an interview during a recent conference near Chicago, she spoke about how the culture of her former industry can slow the pace of innovation that’s much needed to address climate, cost and reliability concerns.
“You’re talking about a 100-plus-year-old system and way of thinking, and you compound that with the fact that utilities’ whole culture is built for ‘slow and no’ and ‘protect, preserve, defend.’ For so many years, it’s been a one-way system,” Powell said.
Virtual power plants are a prime example of the coming change. Powell said utilities’ experience with energy efficiency in recent decades provides a look at what might be coming for such pairings of solar and storage.
“I would say energy efficiency was the disruption — the first opportunity for utilities to start to think differently about their role and their mandate. And as we know, that took like 20 years, even for the most progressive utilities, to embrace.”
Utilities can generally choose to incorporate virtual power plants into their rate structures and grid services, and state regulators and legislatures can facilitate the concept through decisions, laws and policies that create incentives and provide standards. The Illinois legislature is considering a bill that would essentially allow the agency that procures power on behalf of utilities to contract with virtual power plants.
Green Mountain Power was an early adopter of energy storage under Powell’s leadership, and broader adoption of the technology is ramping up quickly. The U.S. Department of Energy noted in a 2023 report that, “deploying 80-160 GW of virtual power plants (VPPs) — tripling current scale — by 2030 could support rapid electrification while redirecting grid spending from peaker plants to participants and reducing overall grid costs.”
That means utilities will have to adapt quickly, and Powell sees a significant role for private developers in that transition. Powell describes Sunrun as a “clean energy lifestyle company,” branching into technologies like smart electric panels and EV charging.
“When you think about customers having heat pumps, when you think about them having electric vehicles, you make sure that you’re leveraging all of that in a way that’s beneficial for the grid and beneficial for the customer.”
That focus on the end users of electricity is in part a bet that utilities’ need for solar power will eventually catch up to consumer demand.
“When I went to Sunrun I said to the team, ‘We’ve got to stop wandering around trying to convince every Tom, Dick and Harry utility to utilize our resources.’ We’re doing it, we just need to scale as fast as we can.
“Because guess what, utilities are going to hit the wall, they are hitting the wall in some parts of the country, and they don’t have the ability to meet the kind of capacity demands that are projected over the next five years. They’re going to need our resources.”
Despite that expected market demand, Powell said legislative and regulatory bodies also have a role to “nudge utilities in the right direction.” Illinois in particular, she said, provides a strong example.
“Illinois has done an amazing job. Making sure that rooftop solar is considered as part of the RPS [Renewable Portfolio Standard] is really thoughtful policy. And I am encouraged with a lot of the conversations about how we could leverage storage more. So yeah, we’re very bullish about Illinois.”
Powell also said she has no regrets about leaving the utility sector to work at Sunrun.
“Frankly, even the fastest-moving utility was moving a little too slow for me. We weren’t scaling as fast as I would have loved us to be able to scale. It’s awesome to work on mission-driven work that you feel is valuable for the people you serve and for the planet at the same time.”
.svg)
