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MINING: Copper isn’t being mined quickly enough to keep up with U.S. policies for transitioning to electric vehicles and clean energy, creating a potential bottleneck for Michigan automakers unless recycling improves and deeper mines are tapped, a University of Michigan researcher says. (Bridge)
OIL & GAS:
PIPELINES:
CLIMATE: For the Great Lakes region, a repeat of 2023 this year is possible as wildfire smoke threatens to continue undoing decades of progress on air quality improvement. (Bridge)
COAL: The USDA hosts a two-day workshop in southern Illinois aimed at helping the region find new economic opportunities amid the decline of coal plants and mining. (WPSD)
CLEAN ENERGY:
EMISSIONS: American Electric Power is among the latest electric utilities to join a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s new rules for cutting pollution from coal and gas plants. (E&E News, subscription)
GRID: Wisconsin utility We Energies deploys high-tech acoustic cameras that scan distribution grid equipment to identify potential problems and improve reliability. (WISN)
UTILITIES: American Electric Power sells its distributed resources business that owns more than 300 MW of solar and storage projects across the U.S. for what will amount to about $315 million. (Utility Dive)
SOLAR: The U.S. has surpassed 5 million solar installations, with more than half of those coming online since 2020, according to a new industry report. (Power Magazine)
ALSO:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
OIL & GAS:
CLIMATE:
WIND: The developers behind the 704 MW Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island install the first foundation needed for the facility’s 65 turbines. (Providence Journal)
TRANSMISSION: Nevada advocates criticize the federal Bureau of Land Management for proposing that the Greenlink West transmission line run through a national monument while avoiding a mining site. (Nevada Independent)
JOBS: Community colleges around the country are offering training programs in clean energy technology, in response to a surge in job demand since the passage of federal climate legislation. (Associated Press)
CLEAN ENERGY: Midwest states have received nearly $30 billion in private investments to boost clean energy manufacturing since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in late 2022. (Inside Climate News)
UTILITIES:
POLITICS: Ohio’s HB 6 scandal remains politically fraught for GOP Attorney General Dave Yost, who helped to prosecute four people involved but has ignored questions about his name surfacing in a federal trial and remained silent about the law itself. (Ohio Capital Journal)
OIL AND GAS: North Dakota’s top oil and gas regulator, Gov. Doug Burgum and former President Trump during an oil and gas event Thursday railed against government regulations’ potential to hold back the industry. (North Dakota Monitor)
SOLAR:
TRANSPORTATION: The influx of electric bikes in Minnesota and elsewhere are challenging cities and transit agencies to improve bike parking, bus bike racks and more. (MinnPost)
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Michigan officials announce $12 million more in funding to improve local health, monitor pollution and improve indoor air quality in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. (Michigan Advance)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announces nearly $16 million more for electric vehicle charging stations that moves the state closer to a goal of having public stations available every 50 miles. (WLWT)
WIND: The supervisor of a northwestern Iowa airport raises concerns about a proposed wind farm’s potential to disrupt helicopter ambulances and other flights. (Radio Iowa)
STORAGE: Ohio regulators approve plans for an 85 MW battery storage facility outside Dayton. (Daily News)
NUCLEAR: The company working to reopen a shuttered southwestern Michigan nuclear plant has hired about 150 people since the effort began and now employs more than 360 people at the site. (WOOD-TV8)
COMMENTARY: An Ohio clean energy advocate says utility-scale solar projects can play a vital role in helping the state meet a forecasted spike in electricity demand. (Columbus Dispatch)
COAL: The federal Bureau of Land Management proposes ending new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana following a court order requiring the agency to redo a Trump-era land use plan. (WyoFile)
ALSO: Utah lawmakers hold a special session to tweak a new bill allowing the state to buy a retiring coal plant to extend its life. (Utah State Dispatch)
TRANSITION: New Mexico advocates urge regulators to require the state’s largest utility to develop a large-scale solar array in the northwest part of the state to replace generation and school funding lost with the 2022 closure of the San Juan coal plant. (Albuquerque Journal)
UTILITIES: California lawmakers kill a bill that would have required legislators to review a controversial new fixed electric utility fee. (Los Angeles Times)
EFFICIENCY: Portland, Oregon’s climate action fund plans to invest $140 million over the next five years on efficiency upgrades for low-income households. (Washington State Standard)
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS:
MINING:
TRANSPORTATION: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signs several bills creating new channels to fund public transit, including an oil production and a rental car fee. (Loveland Reporter-Herald)
HYDROGEN: An Oregon natural gas utility unveils a blue hydrogen-fuel production project that incorporates captured carbon into asphalt. (news release)
POLICY: Vermont lawmakers pass a bill making utilities purchase only renewably sourced power by 2035, though the governor is expected to veto the bill over cost concerns. (Seven Days)
ALSO: A top Connecticut Democrat says he intends to force a vote on two bills that Republican lawmakers want to block, including one that declares a climate crisis in the state. (CT Mirror)
FOSSIL FUELS:
SOLAR:
BUILDINGS: Pennsylvania lawmakers advance minimum appliance efficiency standards that would conserve enough energy to power more than 56,000 homes in a year. (WTAJ)
BIOENERGY: A trio of developers detail plans to bring a combined heat and power system to northern Maine that would be fueled by waste wood from the state’s forest industry and “enabled by super-critical carbon dioxide.” (Mainebiz)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Six newly installed electric vehicle fast chargers at a New York City wastewater facility help the city reach 2,000 municipal chargers. (news release)
TRANSIT: Although New York City is poised to kick off traffic congestion pricing next month, similar ideas in Boston are having a tough time getting off the ground. (Boston Globe)
WIND: The head of an anti-wind group files an open meetings law complaint against Nantucket over a wind development working group’s meeting that she says should’ve been public. (Nantucket Current)
RENEWABLE ENERGY: New York energy officials grant $175,000 to a Finger Lakes-area town to help it continue undertaking renewable energy and decarbonization projects. (Finger Lakes Times)
COMMENTARY:
SOLAR: A northern Maine community of around 11,400 homes and businesses was able to run on only solar power last week for about 12 cumulative hours, a first-ever occurrence for utility Versant. (Maine Public Radio)
OFFSHORE WIND: New Hampshire lawmakers and business leaders want state energy officials to take a more active role in encouraging offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine compared to the “market-based approach” to electricity decarbonization being used. (NHPR)
GRID:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
TRANSPORTATION:
GAS: A Connecticut county’s farm bureau wants the state to support more anaerobic digesters on farms to turn wasted food into electricity, heat and fertilizer. (CT News Junkie)
CLIMATE:
UTILITIES: A consortium of four southeast Pennsylvania counties signs a five-year deal with a retail energy supplier to help them purchase more renewable power. (WHYY)
HYDROPOWER: Both federal- and state-level public comment periods are open this summer as the lengthy relicensing process draws closer to an end for three hydropower dams in Massachusetts’ Franklin County. (Mass Live)
TIDAL: Federal energy regulators grant an eight-year license to a nonprofit firm to test out tidal energy turbines in the Cape Cod Canal. (Cape Cod Times)
COMMENTARY: The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s former president encourages Marylanders to ditch gas-powered landscaping equipment to reduce emissions and noise pollution. (Baltimore Sun)
SOLAR: While a federal database shows around 0.02% of U.S. cropland is used for large solar projects, an analysis of four Midwest counties reveals much higher penetrations, worrying some farmers and advocates. (Reuters)
WIND: Wind turbines only take up about 5% of the land where they’re built, meaning there’s room to co-locate farms and other facilities below them, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Washington Post)
OIL & GAS: Advocates suggest establishing a new tax on oil and gas production in the world’s wealthiest countries, with a report finding the charge could raise $720 billion for climate mitigation by 2030. (Guardian)
POLITICS:
GRID: The U.S. power grid performed better during cold snaps this January than it did during winter storms over the past few years thanks to grid operators’ improvements, a report finds. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GEOTHERMAL: A Texas company uses software and sensor-equipped drilling tools to install geothermal heating and cooling systems in spaces previously considered too small to house such projects. (Canary Media)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CLIMATE: The Southeast faces one of the most rapid sea level surges in the world, an analysis finds, combining with increasingly severe storms to create epic floods. (Washington Post)
EFFICIENCY: Advocates laud a new Virginia law that strengthens energy efficiency standards and mandates the development of a standardized test to measure the cost effectiveness of proposed efficiency programs. (Energy News Network)
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration unveils new federal permitting rules designed to prioritize projects with environmental benefits while adding reviews for ones that could worsen climate change. (New York Times)
FOSSIL FUELS:
NUCLEAR:
GRID: The U.S. Energy Department starts preparing for the rise of artificial intelligence and its projected energy demand, and begins exploring ways that AI could make power delivery and energy project permitting more efficient. (Axios)
EMISSIONS: Companies’ return-to-office plans are often out of line with their own climate pledges, as multiple peer-reviewed studies find working from home can significantly reduce a worker’s emissions impact. (Grist/Fast Company)
STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
UTILITIES: Several New England utilities plan to seek federal funds for a regional energy data platform to make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that would make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies.
Clean energy advocates see this kind of service as key to supporting the rollout of Inflation Reduction Act rebates and, more broadly, to controlling costs and demand on a lower-carbon power grid.
Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities are working with several subsidiaries and state groups and agencies to propose the new data platform to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) grant program, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Their $29 million data hub concept, with half the funding requested from the Department of Energy, builds off a similar state-level platform that’s been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019. Proponents say federal funding is needed in part to encourage that state’s regulators to give final approval for the project.
Launched over the next four years, the regional data hub would provide standardized access to “very minute usage information” for millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, according to Unitil.
“With this data more readily available, customers could better understand their energy consumption, which would help them make decisions about energy conservation steps they may want to take at home or in the workplace,” Unitil said in a statement. “For instance, the information could be used to obtain a price quote from a rooftop solar provider, a competitive supplier to receive a price estimate, or a storage provider to determine the appropriate size of behind-the-meter battery storage.”
Multi-utility data platforms currently exist in Texas and New York, both states with unified electric grids, proponents said — but in New England and many other places, customers’ data access is inconsistent.
In a concept paper on their data hub proposal filed with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, the Northeast utilities say costs for efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources or DERs, can be inflated by the “idiosyncratic processes” and “bespoke electronic interfaces” needed to work with each customer’s data.
“Today, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs, while others install monitoring packages with their solar and storage applications that are functionally duplicative of the utility’s advanced meters, driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation,” the proposal says.
To estimate cost savings in a quote for rooftop solar, for example, a homeowner may have to provide a year’s worth of paper or electronic bills for their prospective installer to compile and analyze by hand — an “incredibly silly manual process,” said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that’s participating in the regional data hub proposal.
“And that’s just the single homeowner level — think about a multi-family housing project, where you have forty, fifty, a hundred units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It’s just a total nightmare.”
An automated system would access customers’ data on demand in a standardized format and could spit out expected project savings at essentially the push of a button, he said. Contractors he’s spoken with, he said, call this approach “transformational for the way that we interact with customers.”
The data hub could also support energy dashboards, especially for environmental justice areas, to help visualize progress toward climate targets with a goal of “reducing the energy burden for historically disadvantaged communities,” said Eversource spokesperson Sarah Paduano in a statement.
“By breaking down the walls of historically utility-housed and owned data, Unitil believes this would remove a significant barrier for a variety of stakeholders that would be able to leverage the data in a meaningful way and towards advancing an equitable clean energy transition,” Unitil’s statement said.
Estimated savings from individual energy projects aren’t just nice to have, said Michael Murray, president of Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit working on the hub project — they are often required. Certain Inflation Reduction Act rebates are only offered to projects that can prove at least a 20% energy savings.
“The legislation was really intended to be the first sort of fusion between making an efficiency project a smart grid asset,” Murray said. “It’s no longer just, ‘efficiency is in its own silo and all you care about is annual energy savings.’ The question is, how does it become interactive and part of a ‘virtual power plant’ kind of concept?”
Better data on individual projects could help customers access savings from new rate designs that incentivize less usage at times of peak demand, the proposal says, improving resilience and lowering costs on a more variable, renewables-powered grid.
“Energy data is increasingly going to become the currency of a modern grid,” said Evans-Brown. “It’s really difficult to manage our peaks if you have no idea where they’re coming from, like what’s causing them all the way down to the consumer level.”
Without standardized, streamlined access to energy data, Murray said, contractors trying to work with IRA rebates in states that choose to offer them will face a costly and time-consuming burden of iterating individualized manual processes thousands of times.
“(The IRA) is going to touch millions of American homes. Each one of these is multiple data requests and processing. And so we need to figure out a way to do it in a streamlined way,” he said. Otherwise, “all that federal money gets drained into stupid overhead as opposed to actually delivering value for people.”
Not every New England state or utility is participating in the grant proposal. Connecticut-based Avangrid, with subsidiaries like Central Maine Power or CMP, is one that declined to join.
CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program’s first round last year for technology to reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and plans to seek additional GRIP funding on its own this year.
“Our decision for round two was to focus on reliability and load capacity grid improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” said spokesperson Jon Breed in a statement. “We are aware of the concept of the Regional Joint Utility Energy Data Hub and will be monitoring the performance of the program if it receives funding.”
For Murray, the long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the six states’ regional grid manager. He said utilities — and their customers — that don’t get on board, if the project moves forward, could risk becoming siloed and left behind in older systems.
“The whole industry is moving towards an automated system, which New Hampshire is building,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately need to go.”
More than 100 megawatts of planned solar projects throughout southeastern Massachusetts are facing lengthy delays as needed grid upgrades wait for state approval.
Arrays at Cape Cod schools, installations on an affordable housing complex on Martha’s Vineyard, and residential solar arrays for low-income homeowners are among the planned renewable energy developments that have been held up or reconfigured as regulators consider utility requests to upgrade substations and spread out the cost among customers. Until these improvements are approved and executed, no solar developments larger than 15 kilowatts for single-phase systems or 25 kilowatts for triple-phase systems can be connected to the grid in many of the covered areas.
“This stalling runs counter to the state’s climate goals,” said Kate Warner, energy planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the regional planning agency for Dukes County. “The Vineyard wants to do our part, but we can’t because we can’t add any more significant solar to the grid.”
These delays are one more twist in the ongoing growing pains the state — and many places across the country — is experiencing as the move away from fossil fuels changes the flow of power through the system. As Massachusetts aims to go carbon-neutral by 2050, the transition to home heat pumps and electric vehicles is ramping up the need for electricity. At the same time, growing numbers of solar arrays are sending more and more power to the grid. The surge in both supply and demand has utilities and regulators scrambling to expand and strengthen the grid as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Under previous rules in Massachusetts, a distributed generation project such as a new solar development would find itself on the hook for any expensive grid upgrades needed to connect the new power source to the system. Even though these improvements would benefit future projects, the development that triggered the need for the upgrades would have to bear the cost.
To remedy this imbalance, the state energy department created a process that lets utilities propose plans to spread the cost burden of some grid upgrades among ratepayers, then recoup some of this money from future distributed generation projects and use it to reimburse ratepayers. These capital investment project proposals must be approved by utilities regulators. Massachusetts is the first state to create such a process.
In April 2022, Eversource — which covers 140 towns around Boston and in the southeastern and western parts of the state — filed six such proposals relating to improvements in regions throughout southeastern Massachusetts. One of the proposals has been approved; the other five remain pending, raising questions about what happens next — and when.
“The thinking was that it was going to be pretty quickly reviewed and approved — and that has not been the case,” said Mariel Marchand, power supply planner for the Cape Light Compact, the regional energy administrator that serves the 15 towns of Cape Cod and the six on Martha’s Vineyard.
The Department of Public Utilities was unable to share any concrete timeline, noting that it intends to consider each application in detail. Because the process is new — in Massachusetts and beyond — there is no precedent for how long such deliberations should or usually do take.
The capital investment project proposal for Cape Cod, which also impacts Martha’s Vineyard, calls for upgrading the distribution lines connected to five substations and additional equipment on three substations.
The goal is to make the infrastructure ready for a significant amount of solar and wind power to come online in coming years as part of the state’s push toward decarbonization and electrification, said Eversource spokesperson William Hinkle.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the wait for these improvements means a 20-unit affordable housing development originally designed to maximize its solar production has had to go back to the drawing board. The project, intended to provide solar power and the associated savings to low-income residents, will now have to be configured as 10 smaller systems, each with its own interconnection. This arrangement, however, raises other regulatory questions about having more than one system on a single parcel of land, creating another delay.
“That project probably could’ve been built by now, but it’s now held up in this more complicated planning process,” said Ben Underwood, co-founder and co-CEO of Resonant Energy, the solar developer on the project.
On Cape Cod, the delays are slowing the deployment of a pilot program that provides low-income houses with solar panels, battery storage, and heat pumps. While many residential projects fall under the 15-kilowatt cap and can still be connected, the addition of batteries can increase the system size close to or over the limit, Marchand said.
“Before we recommend that this customer should have a battery, we have to make sure it can be installed,” she said. “It’s more work on our end, but we’re making it work.”
If the pending plans are rejected, the old system that would impose prohibitive costs on a small number of projects will remain in effect. If they are approved, it will still take significant time to complete the upgrades. At the moment, therefore, all anyone can do is wait.
“Right now we are dead in the water,” Warner says.
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