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EMISSIONS: The U.S. EPA is set to release new methane regulations tomorrow as the oil and gas industry contends the proposed rules clash with other federal and state standards. (E&E News)
SOLAR: California rooftop solar installations have plummeted by up to 85% since regulators slashed net-metering rates in April, putting some 17,000 jobs at risk by the end of the year, according to an industry group. (Canary Media)
CLIMATE: Environmental advocates release a to-do list of climate actions they want President Biden to take in the last year of his term, including a slew of EPA regulations and other Cabinet-level actions. (Washington Post)
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken steps toward including environmental justice in its decisions but still has further to go, advocates say. (Utility Dive)
WIND:
POLITICS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: General Motors’ chief financial officer expects the automaker to start making a profit on electric vehicle sales in 2025 as it produces higher-margin models. (Associated Press)
COAL: West Virginia’s fund to clean up abandoned coal mines is sagging so badly that even one bankruptcy by a significant mining company could wipe it out and leave state taxpayers stuck paying for cleanup costs. (Mountain State Spotlight/ProPublica)
OIL & GAS:
STORAGE: Georgia leans into battery storage to leverage around-the-clock power from its rapidly growing solar energy sector, highlighted by Georgia Power’s impending completion of a 65 MW battery facility. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
GRID: Utility regulators in PJM’s region urge the grid operator to shift from a reactive planning approach to more proactive and affordable ways of planning grid reliability. (Utility Dive)
NUCLEAR: TerraPower and a mining company partner on an effort to restore domestic uranium supply chains and to fuel the Bill Gates-backed firm’s proposed advanced nuclear reactor in Wyoming. (Cowboy State Daily)
SOLAR: Data show new California rooftop solar installations have plummeted by up to 85% since regulators slashed net-metering rates in April, potentially wiping out some 17,000 jobs by the end of the year. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
WIND: California officials remain confident in offshore wind’s future in the state even though the industry is experiencing setbacks on the East Coast. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
TRANSMISSION: The federal Bureau of Land Management seeks public input on proposed changes to designated Western energy corridors aimed at expediting clean energy transmission development. (RTO Insider, subscription)
TRANSPORTATION: Colorado transportation officials say proposed passenger rail in the northwestern part of the state could be operational in less than a decade. (CPR)
UTILITIES:
NUCLEAR: TerraPower and a mining company partner on an effort to restore domestic uranium supply chains and to fuel the Bill Gates-backed firm’s proposed advanced nuclear reactor in Wyoming. (Cowboy State Daily)
STORAGE:
CARBON CAPTURE: New Mexico researchers study the feasibility of geologically sequestering captured carbon in the San Juan Basin oil and gas fields in the northwestern part of the state. (Santa Fe New Mexican)
HYDROPOWER: California lawmakers work to expedite wave energy development, but industry analysts say grid-scale implementation is at least a decade away. (CalMatters)
GEOTHERMAL: A western Colorado town begins studying the feasibility of developing a geothermal loop district heating system. (Aspen Times)
A group of Massachusetts solar installers are working with the state to modify fire codes that they say are too restrictive and are limiting the scale of residential solar arrays.
“We are not at the finish line, but both sides have been extremely cooperative and collaborative,” said Nick D’Arbeloff, vice president of commercial for SunBug Solar and the vice president of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England. “The dialogue is producing good results.”
At the heart of the debate are provisions of the most recent state fire code, which went into effect in December 2022.
For the first time, the code includes restrictions on the positioning of rooftop solar arrays intended to make it easier and safer for firefighters to move around on top of burning houses. The code calls for a setback from the ridgeline of a roof, leaving enough space for firefighters to cut into the roof to ventilate the home and allow smoke to escape. It also requires pathways through and around panels so firefighters can get where they need to go.
“It sets requirements on how much space is necessary or required to be there so firefighters can travel unimpeded by solar panels,” said Jake Wark, spokesman for the state Department of Fire Services.
The solar industry objected to the changes for a few reasons. The setbacks and pathways required mean reducing the total area of just about every rooftop array from 10% to 20%, and smaller arrays mean less revenue for installers. Some potential customers even pulled out entirely because the economics of the system didn’t work for them with fewer panels.
Some installers also objected that clearing so much room for firefighters isn’t necessary. All modern solar installations, they said, include a switch that can instantly stop the flow of any electricity through the panels, which would allow firefighters to easily and safely break through with a swing of an axe. The state, however, was not convinced these switches could be thrown quickly enough or provide enough safety.
“Panels always provide an electrocution hazard,” Wark said.
The suddenness of the new code also made for a rough transition, installers said. For years, similar rules have been part of the national model code many states use as a template for their own codes. In Massachusetts, however, the solar provisions had always been removed, with the understanding that the state building code would eventually address the issue, Wark said. So the solar rules in the new fire code were unexpected by many in the industry.
“The transition was absolutely awful, and we ended up having to redesign a lot of arrays,” said Mark Durrenberger, president of solar installation company New England Clean Energy. “The code we’re answering to is not entirely clear, so it leaves lots of room for interpretation”.
The municipal code officials in charge of inspecting solar installations were also caught somewhat unprepared. From town to town, building and fire inspectors interpreted the rules with different degrees of stringency. Sometimes, Durrenberger said, they just got it plain wrong – in one case applying the rules for residential installations to an array atop a barn – for example. For installers working on projects in multiple towns, the whole situation was rife with uncertainty.
“Fire chiefs weren’t necessarily as prepared as they perhaps should have been with regards to how best to review designs and enforce this new code,” D’Arbeloff said.
In the face of this upheaval, the Solar Energy Business Association of New England, MassSolar, and the Northeast Clean Energy Council reached out to the state to see if they could find a compromise. The Department of Fire Services agreed to create a working group, including representatives of the solar industry, to look for solutions. Several months in, the participants have made significant headway, and the solar industry has accepted the need to make some concessions.
“The solar industry’s concern was that we would be unable to put in place a system capable of offsetting the full load of the household as a result of these setbacks,” D’Arbeloff said. “While that still may be the case, we fully understand why compromise is called for here.”
Whatever adjustments to the rules come out of the process, both sides will have to take responsibility for making implementation go as smoothly as possible, D’Arbeloff said. The Department of Fire Services will need to offer additional training in the new code, but installers will also have to make sure their designs and drawings clearly communicate the ways in which their plans adhere to the rules.
There is still plenty of work to do, but Durrenberger is hopeful that a modified code will be in place some time next year.
“I suspect that there will be a lot of back-and-forth to try to refine the language,” he said “With luck, maybe at the beginning of next year, we’ll have a revised fire code that can take back some of the roof we lost.”
New Hampshire’s Department of Energy has requested a $70 million federal grant to expand community solar programs for low-income residents, an infusion of funds that supporters said could lower energy bills, accelerate decarbonization, and perhaps even catalyze the development of much-needed affordable housing.
“It’s just going to be life-changing for the communities we do this with,” said Jeannie Oliver, a senior director at the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, which partnered with the state on the proposal.
The request is part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar for All competitive grant program, created under the umbrella of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The goal of the $7 billion program is to increase access to solar for people living in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Up to 60 grants will be awarded.
Community solar is a model in which energy consumers own a stake in or subscribe to a share of output from a solar development. They then receive credits for a portion of the power sold back to the grid, offsetting their utility bill. Community solar is often considered an option for consumers who can’t or don’t want to install solar on their own home, but who still want to participate in the environmental or financial benefits of renewable energy.
New Hampshire authorized community solar in 2013, but it hasn’t gotten much traction. In the state, larger, non-municipal solar projects are only credited for generation on projects up to 1 megawatt in capacity. At that size, however, the finances just don’t work for developers, said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Energy New Hampshire. It’s not until an array reaches around 3 megawatts – with net metering – that the economics start to make sense.
Reaching lower-income residents with community solar is even trickier. There are no easily available lists of what households qualify as low or moderate income, so acquiring customers can be prohibitively difficult.
An influx of federal money could change that equation. The grant money would be used to expand the existing program and to create new ones targeting affordable housing and resident-owned manufactured housing communities. The proposal calls for funding to be split between the state energy department, the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, and New Hampshire Housing.
If the grant is awarded, these partnerships will be key to maximizing the impact the funds can have on low- and moderate-income residents, said Joshua Elliott, director of the division of policy and programs at the New Hampshire Department of Energy.
“It made sense to leverage existing relationships,” he said. “We thought meeting people where they are rather than having them come to us whenever possible would make for an attractive proposal.”
The portion of the money going to the state energy department would be used to expand the existing program for low-to-moderate-income community solar. The program will fund some of the project if a majority of the power generated benefits low-income households and up to 100% of a new development if at least 80% of the participating households qualify as low-income.
The state program has awarded $1 million each of the last two years. Last year, it funded four developments with a total of 61 households participating. More money could help both by funding more projects, and making it easier for potential developers to plan, Elliott said.
“Having additional funding available consistently helps these organizations as they are trying to sketch out a project and figure out if it works,” Elliott said.
The Community Loan Fund’s portion would be used to help resident-owned manufactured home communities build solar arrays to service residents. A resident-owned community is a manufactured home park in which the residents have come together as in a cooperative to buy the land on which their homes sit, creating for themselves a more stable housing future.
The community loan fund has been working on developing community solar with these groups since 2018 when it led the creation of an array in the western New Hampshire city of Lebanon. Today, they have four projects either in operation or under construction.
“The reason that has been slow is that the financial barriers to low income solar are pretty immense,” said Oliver, who leads the organization’s resident-owned communities program. “What the Solar for All program would do is really help us scale up.”
The remaining money would flow through New Hampshire Housing, a public corporation that promotes housing affordability and access throughout the state. It already works closely with the state’s 18 public housing authorities, so it has relationships and experience with the low-income population the funded programs would be targeting.
Much of the New Hampshire Housing money would be used to connect renters in multifamily buildings with community solar.
Traditionally, bringing solar to renters has been difficult because of what is often called the split incentive – if tenants pay their own electricity bills, landlords have little motivation to spend money on solar panels when the renters will reap the financial benefits. The grant proposal would encourage landlords to take over tenants’ utility bills, and roll the cost into the rent, reflecting the discounts community solar would create.
“The Solar for All proposal takes a huge step in moving things in a more positive direction,” Evans-Brown said. “It’s giving landlords a carrot to figure this out.”
The EPA should be announcing the grant recipients in March 2024 and distributing the funds in July, Evans-Brown said. Solar projects using the money should start popping up by 2025.
If New Hampshire receives the grant, it could be transformative, supporters said, by both accelerating the state’s decarbonization efforts and making a significant difference for financially struggling households. In concert with other federal programs pouring money into home electrification and energy efficiency, the Solar for All funds could jumpstart significant and much-needed growth in green housing development, Evans-Brown said.
“The thing I am excited about is this influx of money is going to result in a large amount of multifamily, sustainable housing getting built that’s going to be really affordable,” Evans-Brown said. “I am really optimistic.”
A pair of community microgrid projects in Massachusetts are already helping to inspire similar projects in the state before construction has even begun.
The city of Chelsea and Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood are each developing projects that supporters hope can become powerful case studies for the potential of microgrids to increase resilience and create other benefits for residents.
Chelsea has ordered equipment for a microgrid that will connect municipal facilities, and is targeting a construction date in the second half of 2024. Chinatown is finalizing plans for a system to provide solar power and backup energy storage to a 200-unit affordable housing apartment building.
“We do see this serving as a model for the nation if we can pull it off,” said Alexander Train, Chelsea’s director of housing and community development.
The list of communities considering whether to follow their lead includes Cambridge, Lynn, and Milton.
In the broadest sense, microgrids are small-scale energy systems in which power is produced, distributed, and consumed, typically all within a self-contained area such as a college campus or hospital complex. Microgrids can often operate independently from the main grid, providing continuous power, even in case of disruptions to the regional supply, and can help cut energy costs.
Though they come in all configurations and sizes, microgrids have historically generated power with fossil fuels. But as the transition to sustainable energy accelerates, more organizations are looking at ways to combine renewable energy and battery storage to create cleaner microgrids.
Several years ago, semi-retired engineer David Dayton saw in this evolving model an opportunity to improve the health and safety of environmental justice communities — areas that bear a disproportionate environmental burden and are often home to many low-income residents and people of color.
Solar panels could cut energy costs, while batteries could provide power to critical facilities, such as municipal buildings, community centers, and senior housing, in case of power outages. Batteries could also be used to sell power back to the main grid to help pay for the system.
To get this vision off the ground, Dayton reached out to organizations he was familiar with, including the Green Justice Coalition and private companies Peregrine Energy Group and Synapse Energy Economics. The participants identified Chelsea and Chinatown as good candidates for a community microgrid. Both communities have high populations of immigrants and people of color, and both have median household incomes well below the average for the area. And they are vulnerable to climate change impacts including flooding and dangerous temperatures as the result of the urban heat island effect.
In 2018, the group Dayton assembled acquired grants from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for feasibility studies in the two communities.
The model developed during this process proposes to create the nation’s first community-owned “virtual microgrid.” The designs use cloud-based software to connect solar installations and batteries in locations that aren’t necessarily adjacent to each other, a departure from the conventional model in which the components of the microgrid are physically connected. This approach allows more flexibility in deciding what facilities can participate, particularly helpful when a community would like to include vital facilities that are geographically spread out.
“It’s a microgrid without borders,” Dayton said. “We can add any building to the network at any time — they don’t have to be contiguous.”
Today, the first two projects are making progress. In Chelsea, a design has been created that includes 500 kilowatt-hour batteries at both the police station and city hall, as well as a 400 kilowatt solar array at the department of public works facility. Plans are already in the works to start gathering more community input by the end of the year about expanding the system to other essential locations such as senior housing, churches, or health care centers.
“We want this system to proliferate as fast as we possibly can,” Train said.
In Chinatown, project developers have had to scale back their initial ambitions of connecting several multifamily housing buildings. They are now focused on serving Masspike Towers, a privately owned development of 190 affordable units, before expanding. The plan, still being finalized, is to build a solar installation and share the savings across all residents in a model similar to community solar. Battery storage will help keep common areas powered and extensive energy efficiency measures will reduce overall consumption.
“Our goal is to bring the benefits of clean energy and decarbonization incentives to a low-income urban community that has historically missed out on a lot of those benefits,” said Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, one of the community partners in the project
As work has progressed in Chelsea and Chinatown, other communities have started to wonder about the possibilities. And the two ongoing projects are offering valuable lessons about how to make community microgrids work.
Financing has emerged as a potential major sticking point. In Chelsea, where the city will own the system, the city council voted to provide $4 million in funding to the project. That money – along with federal support, the savings created by solar generation, and the revenue from selling stored powerback onto the grid – is enough to get the project up and running. Building on municipal sites that each have only one tenant also helps simplify the design and logistics.
In Chinatown, however, the city is providing some funding, but not enough to cover the entire project, making it more challenging to structure the financing in a way that is affordable yet satisfies potential investors.
“It is a little bit tougher. We were able to get the city on board in Chelsea,” said Sari Kayyali, microgrid manager for the two projects. “We’ve been working with them to find a workable scope that can pay back investors in a timely manner.”
The work thus far has also highlighted the importance of the community-led ethos that distinguishes the approach from other microgrids, which are generally privately owned and operated. From the beginning, Dayton and other planners felt it was essential to the underlying mission of environmental justice that community members have a lot of say in determining the goals, design, and operations of these community microgrids. In both Chelsea and Chinatown, the planners divided the $75,000 each community received, dedicating half to engineering and technical planning, and giving the other half to community organizations to conduct outreach and education.
In Chelsea, these efforts were key to securing the microrid’s future: The strong support of the community helped sway a few skeptical city councilors to vote for funding for the project, said Elena González, technical director of Climable, a nonprofit that has conducted community engagement and outreach for Chelsea, Chinatown, and Cambridge.
But the importance of community involvement is far more than just strategic, supporters said.
“These microgrid projects empower communities and give them a role in the way that energy development happens,” González said. “This is something that has a huge impact in people’s lives and it is important that the community leads.”
This commentary was submitted by Sneha Ayyagari, a Clean Energy Leadership Institute Fellow and a Program Manager for Clean Energy Initiative at the Greenlining Institute. See our commentary guidelines for more information.
Winter is coming, and having resilient homes is crucial in climate disasters. For instance, Texans were woefully unprepared for Storm Uri which resulted in 246 deaths. While my family shivered under blankets, temperatures in our house stayed safe since we had insulation and a heat pump that kicked into gear when we had short periods of power. It was devastating hearing of families living in poorly insulated homes exposed to hypothermia. Weatherizing buildings and switching to efficient systems like heat pumps can be lifesaving in extreme weather and generally be more comfortable and can save residents money.
However, for more than a third of residents living in rental housing, accessing incentive programs that allow them to make these upgrades in their homes is very difficult. These barriers are especially high for residents in multifamily affordable housing and mobile homes where many people who are most susceptible to heat-related illnesses live.
States and local governments should implement federal funding with renters in mind. The Department of Energy’s Home Energy Rebates (HER) program provides $8.8B in rebate funding for energy efficiency and electrification projects and an additional $200M for states to develop complementary contractor training programs. States can provide their most vulnerable residents health, economic, and environmental benefits by prioritizing low-income renters in their applications for Home Energy Rebate funding.
To ensure the benefits of this program reach tenants, states should:
Renters should not have to fear that their landlords would use building upgrades as a reason to raise rents or displace them (as has happened in construction projects including apartment renovations in Los Angeles). At a minimum, HER guidance states that the owner must agree to rent the dwelling to a low-income tenant and cannot increase rent as a result of energy improvements for two years. Tenants must also have written notice of their rights in a specific and verifiable mechanism. States should go further to specify clear enforcement and penalties. They should ensure that tenants have access to legal services and support in reporting violations without fear of retaliation. Administrators should prohibit rent increases due to HER or at least extend the window of preventing rent increases to at least 10 years following the precedent of other programs.
In addition to building decarbonization programs, states should adopt policies such as rental efficiency standards, rental registries, eviction protections, and rent-stabilization measures to preserve affordability and increase the quality of rental housing. State and local renter protections such as California’s Transformative Communities Draft Program Guidelines and Berkeley’s Existing Buildings Electrification Strategy include a list of tenant protections and anti-displacement resources.
States have many resources from tenant advocates, environmental justice leaders, and policy groups to build from. This letter led by Just Solutions Collective in collaboration with 60 environmental justice, housing, workforce, and environmental organizations has detailed recommendations on reducing barriers for tenants. Strategic Actions for a Just Economy shared recommendations on developing a tenant protection plan to prevent rent burden, limit evictions, minimize disruptions to tenants, and design enforcement and penalty systems. The Greenlining’s Equitable Building Decarbonization Framework shares how to design a community-led approach to implementation. Just Solutions Collective provides recommendations on ensuring access to low income renters, and Green and Healthy Homes Initiative and Building Decarbonization Coalition shares lessons learned from past federal building retrofit programs. Other resources include American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s webinars and Energy Innovation’s report on ways to design effective outreach strategies.
Regional and local community based organizations should be compensated to be part of the program administration team and help with outreach, implementation, and evaluation of the Home Energy program. The HER application also requires that states create Community Benefits Plans that describe anticipated economic and direct benefits especially for disadvantaged communities. As states develop their community benefits plans, they should ensure that benefits to low income tenants are prioritized within the scope of the goals.
Stacking and braiding federal funding with other state, local, and utility housing, energy, and building retrofits programs can maximize benefits to renters while streamlining the effort of property owners applying for multiple programs. Philadelphia’s Built to Last and Washington’s Weatherization and Health are good examples of holistic programs.
Families shouldn’t have to choose between affording rent and having a safe and healthy place to live, especially in the face of climate disasters. States have a historic opportunity to drastically improve the lives of tenants. By collaborating with tenants, state energy offices can create strong applications in 2024 that ensure healthy, affordable, and climate-resilient housing for all.
Steel doesn’t have a great set of climate credentials.
The iron and steel manufacturing industries have a huge emissions impact, accounting for 7% of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Producing iron and turning it into steel also takes tons of heat and power, making the industry a hard candidate to convert from fossil fuels to electric power.
But one major steel producer has found success in cleaning up its process. Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs cut emissions last year by almost a third from 2017 levels at a few dozen of its U.S. facilities, winning it federal recognition, Kathiann M. Kowalski reports.
Much of that progress stems from Cleveland-Cliffs’ opening of a “direct reduction” plant in Toledo. Its steel is made with pelletized iron ore, which already has many impurities removed, reducing the power needed to turn the pellets into hot briquetted iron. From there, the hot briquettes can head into an electric furnace, where they can be turned into steel with a lower emissions impact.
Energy efficiency upgrades also made a difference, and the incorporation of hydrogen power could take the company’s emissions cuts even further.
After all, while climate advocates and steel company representatives know there’s more work to be done, Cleveland-Cliffs’ success proves that cleaning up steel is definitely doable.
Read more from the Energy News Network.
🌎 Climate predictions: The White House has released its National Climate Assessment, which predicts how climate change will likely impact each region of the U.S. — and how many states are leading on action to stop it. (Grist)
🗳️ Vote of climate confidence: Analysts say the 2023 election shows that a strategy by some Republicans to attack climate policy was “dead, flat wrong,” as Democrats made gains even in states where clean energy was a prominent issue. (E&E News)
🏭 A carbon capture milestone: The nation’s first direct air carbon capture facility is beginning operations in Tracy, California, where it’ll use limestone to capture carbon from the air and store it. (E&E News)
💸 Throwing away “free money:” Five large states have collected more than half of a federal climate grant program’s funding, while several smaller states still haven’t accessed “free money” for climate-related projects they’ve been offered. (E&E News)
☢️ Nuclear disaster? After a proposed small modular nuclear power plant was canceled over cost concerns, industry observers are questioning whether next-generation nuclear reactors will ever take off. (Deseret News, E&E News)
🔎 Search party: Startups pilot software that can help utilities and grid operators identify rare openings to connect new renewables to the grid. (Canary Media)
🚦 Driving emissions cuts: An environmental group found that California ranks first in the nation for transportation projects that address inequality while tackling climate change. (Bloomberg)
🔥 Does gas still make sense? Clean energy advocates say Wisconsin regulators should withdraw their prior approval for a 625 MW natural gas power plant, citing the availability of new grid storage and federal clean energy incentives. (Energy News Network)
🧱 Brick by carbon brick: A Bill Gates-backed startup company says it can effectively capture and store carbon by making bricks out of wood chips and plant pieces, which it can then bury deep underground. (Washington Post)
A group of utilities that once went big on building transmission is now going small to open bottlenecks and move more wind power from western Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Grid North Partners, which includes 10 investor- and consumer-owned utilities, will spend roughly $130 million for 19 transmission upgrades to improve access to wind energy and reduce grid congestion.
Many of its members, including Xcel Energy, Minnesota Power and Great River Energy, are also involved in much larger transmission projects through the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which manages the grid in the central portion of the country.
The utility partnership came together in 2004 to begin planning additional transmission lines to tap wind generation in the state’s western regions and the Dakotas. The CapX2020 initiative, as it came to be called, developed the largest transmission project in the Upper Midwest in more than 40 years.
Between 2010 and 2017, CapX2020 spent $2 billion on five projects that created more than 800 miles of new transmission lines. The initiative interconnected 3,600 megawatts of wind energy, enough to power 1.5 million homes annually.
The planning for CapX2020 took place before MISO began extensively planning regional transmission lines. MISO eventually incorporated CapX2020 into a portfolio of projects that decade, a precursor to a current batch of projects announced this year known as “Tranche 1,” two of which involve Great River Energy.
Beth Soholt, executive director of the Clean Grid Alliance, said the Grid North projects serve a different purpose. Rather than add a huge volume of new capacity, the projects will create “a bridge until we get the new large transmission lines in place” and create enough capacity to allow utilities to continue adding solar and wind.
Utilities involved seek to “use the existing grid we have better,” she said. “You’ve got a spectrum of smaller things you could do quickly, that are not going to solve your whole problem, but they’re going to help and they’re going to be quick.”
Unlike bigger projects, which will take years, Grid North Partners said the upgrades will be completed over the next three years and be finished by the end of 2026. The partnership of the state’s major utilities and cooperatives includes Xcel, Great River Energy, Minnesota Power, Otter Tail Power, Dairyland Power Cooperative, Missouri River Energy Services, Rochester Public Utilities, Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency, Central Municipal Power Agency and WPPI Energy.
Matthew Ellis, Great River Energy’s manager of transmission strategy and development, said big transmission projects take eight to 10 years to build. The generation and transmission cooperative is involved in six Grid North Partners projects in collaboration with other members.
“The goal of this effort was to identify what can be done incrementally to mitigate congestion within the next two to three years,” he said.
Congestion blocks the transmission of clean energy generation and has caused the growing problem of wind curtailment in western Minnesota. The projects will allow “cost generation, like wind and solar, to have better access to the transmission grid,” he said. “The transmission grid is all interconnected. What these projects directly do is allow better access for clean energy resources.”
Grid North Partners conducted the research to determine the location of transmission bottlenecks. Ellis said the experience is a bit like looking at traffic maps and where congestion occurs at different times and places. Electricity from wind and solar generators slows at sites in different parts of the state, he said.
Fixing one part of the grid to reduce congestion sometimes means just adding to another location. “One of the advantages of Grid North Partners is that, by having different utilities partnering up, we can mitigate those downstream impacts,” Ellis said. “We can get a lot more bang for our buck and much more synergy.”
Ellis said the transmission upgrades mainly focus on replacing old equipment, not on adding lines or new transmission towers. Instead, newer technology allowing them to operate more efficiently will be installed. Grid North Partners said in a news release the project will pay for itself.
Upfront costs will be paid for by the utilities that will benefit from them. In some projects, several utilities will split costs; in others, the line and work will be owned by one of the partners, Ellis said. The transmission lines affected by the projects span in length from half a mile to 67 miles.
Xcel Energy said in a statement that congestion in western Minnesota caused by wind projects has pushed the existing grid beyond what it can support and forced the utility to use peaking plants to supplement the energy supply at peak demand times. Congestion “limits our efforts to keep costs low for customers,” Xcel said.
Xcel will partner or be the sole sponsor on 10 Grid North projects, more than any other utility. Two of the largest Xcel projects add second circuits to the existing CapX2020 transmission lines between eastern South Dakota and Lyon County, Minnesota, and between Scott and Dakota counties. After regulatory approval, the western line will be completed by 2024, with the Scott-Dakota project slated for 2025. Xcel has partners on both projects.
“We estimate hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits to customers following the completion of the project due to reduced congestion costs and increased ability to access renewable energy in the region,” Xcel said.
Otter Tail Power’s seven Grid North projects involve upgrading substations, adding circuits and replacing electricity poles, said communications director Stephanie Hoff. No new facilities will be added by the utility.
Hoff said Otter Tail has partnered with other regional utilities on two projects in the long-range MISO plan. Although the Grid North Partners initiative does not directly impact Otter Tail’s generation assets, including renewables, the investment will help the grid function more effectively, she said.
“New and upgraded transmission helps move electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s used,” Hoff said. “When the transmission system can’t move electricity from the most economic energy generators, market prices rise and energy generators may need to be curtailed, resulting in higher electricity costs for customers.”
Grid North Partners’ budget is tiny compared to projects announced by MISO and Xcel. MISO will spend $10.3 billion on its first tranche of transmission projects, with more than $2 billion dedicated to corridors entirely or partially in Minnesota. Xcel Minnesota Energy Connection, linking wind farms in the southwest to a plant in Becker, will cost $1 billion.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.
Illinois is the home of the world’s first nuclear reactor, and has since made a business of splitting atoms. Today, nuclear power is the source of more than 50% of the state’s energy, and legislators just decided Illinois needs more of it.
With bipartisan support, Illinois lawmakers last week eliminated the state’s nearly 36-year-long ban on construction of new nuclear reactors, opening the door for the development of emission-free nuclear power that proponents say will accelerate the state’s transition to clean energy.
The plan, however, will exclude the large scale nuclear reactors that make up the entirety of Illinois’ nuclear fleet in favor of smaller, untested nuclear reactors – which could take years to build.
The new legislation will limit the kind of nuclear reactors that can be built within the state to small modular reactors (SMRs) with an electrical output of only up to 300 megawatts. For comparison, the Byron Power Station, a large-scale light water reactor in northern Illinois, can generate up to 2,347 megawatts – enough to power more than 1.7 million homes.
The idea is the smaller reactors will be produced at factory scale, which will lower costs over time and bring them online faster than previous generations of reactors. Currently, there are no SMRs in operation or even production anywhere in the U.S.
As coal burning plants go offline in southern Illinois to meet a 2045 statewide climate goal to offramp the state from fossil fuels, State Sen. Sue Rezin, the lead co-sponsor of the bill, said SMRs could be a boon. And even a lifeline to the region, which has faced energy issues with affordability and reliability.
“You have a very highly skilled workforce that used to work at the coal plants that can now build out the new nuclear plants and work at the new nuclear plants,” Rezin said. “It’s a win-win.”
She adds that the state’s major agricultural and technology forward industries could capitalize on the emission free energy to decarbonize.
Abe Scarr, the director of the Illinois Public Interest Group, a non-profit watchdog group, opposed the legislation.
“I wouldn’t be confident that based on this, anybody’s going to be building SMRs in Illinois,” Scarr said. “It’s still a speculative technology. The largest company in the United States that was moving towards building one just announced that it was scrapping the project because it had gotten way too expensive.”
The NuScale Power Corporation announced last week that its venture, a first of its kind SMR project in the country, fell apart after 10-years of work and more than a $1 billion pledge from the Biden administration due to issues with financing.
Even so, the U.S. Department of Energy is counting on more nuclear power. In a report released this year, officials estimate that to successfully hit net-zero emissions by 2050, the country will need to add an additional 200 gigawatts of reliable generating capacity. To hit that target, the agency is looking at nuclear power such as SMRs.
But the American public soured on nuclear after the 1979 partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania, and nuclear development nationwide all but halted. Only a handful of reactors have come online since.
States started banning new construction of nuclear reactors until the federal government could identify a permanent solution for the nuclear waste piling up across the country. In total, 16 states enacted some level of nuclear ban. Illinois put its own in place in 1987. A masterplan for the country’s nuclear waste never materialized.
Illinois is done waiting. Gov. JB Pritzker has vowed to sign the new bill, and soon Illinois will join Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana and West Virginia in rolling back nuclear bans.
Mark Nelson, founder of the Chicago-based energy consultancy group Radiant Energy, said the state is making a mistake by banking on SMRs.
“It’s going to be a really rough and exceptionally difficult energy transition if we don’t do it based on nuclear energy, which we have proven to work in upstate Illinois,” Nelson said.
He said the exclusion of large-scale reactors is a mistake because “the only proven nuclear plants in the world are cut out of this bill. And the only ones we’re allowed to build are the ones that are expensive and going bankrupt.”
The law would take effect in 2026, and according to Rezin, could take anywhere from six years to a decade to obtain the permits necessary to build a new reactor in the state.
This article originally appeared on Planet Detroit.
After Mayor Mike Duggan announced nine finalists in his campaign to recruit Detroit neighborhoods to host solar panel arrays at a Wednesday press conference, community members and activists are divided over whether the plan will help or unfairly burden their communities.
“I thought it was time the city of Detroit stepped up and took action on climate change,” Duggan said. “Too much of the climate change discussion in this country, as far as I’m concerned, is empty performance.”
Under the program, owner-occupied households in selected communities would be eligible to receive $10,000 to $25,000 in energy-efficient upgrades, such as new windows, roofs, energy-efficient appliances, or battery back-up for power outages.
Detroit would own the land for the solar arrays and contract with private solar developers to build and operate them. Details for how the city would be credited for the power are not yet determined, Duggan said.
Of the nine, he said six will be selected to assemble 250 acres of vacant and underutilized land to offset the electricity used to power city operations. Duggan said the project will cost the city about $8 million a year, or roughly what Detroit now pays DTE Energy to power the city’s 127 public buildings, plus $1-2 million per year more to provide community benefits. He said he plans to bring a funding proposal to city council by spring.
The finalist neighborhoods include Gratiot/Findlay, Greenfield Park/I-75 McNichols, Grixdale, Houston Whittier/Hayes, I-96/Plymouth (O’Shea), Mount Olivet, State Fair, Trinity Pickford and Van Dyke/Lynch.
Duggan emphasized that the city would place solar arrays only in areas “where we are wanted,” noting that the city would buy out residents in owner-occupied homes with a minimum offer of $90,000 and would pay moving costs and 18 months’ rent for tenants. He previously said the city sought “stretches where they don’t have more than one or two occupied homes.”
But several proposals contain a number of residences, especially rentals.
For example, the footprint of the 21-acre Mt Olivet project contains 16 renter-occupied and seven owner-occupied homes. Duggan said the fenced-in solar panel arrays would contribute to neighborhood stability and prevent illegal dumping in vacant and abandoned areas of the city.
But Duggan spokesperson John Roach said the city could also use eminent domain to assemble land for the arrays, and the mayor said the city may condemn vacant properties owned by speculators. The finalist neighborhoods have until Jan. 31 to provide documentation that residents in owner-occupied homes are willing to move.
Measha Parker has lived in Gratiot-Findlay for 18 years. She’s president of her block and said she hoped the fenced-in panels on 24 acres would help fight illegal dumping and drive out illegal drugs in the area.
She’d also like to see the former Wilkins Elementary School building, which has sat vacant for years, demolished as part of the plan. But she is concerned about vandalism and hopes the solar arrays will have surveillance cameras.
“It’ll bring safety over there,” she said. “Once they put the solar panels up…. It’ll help with the blight and help the whole area survive.”
But several residents and sustainability advocates Planet Detroit talked to question the emphasis on large solar arrays that won’t provide energy directly to residents. Others voiced concern that the projects could attract even more blight.
Birch Kemp, a lifelong Detroiter and president of the nonprofit tree-planting organization Arboretum Detroit, said he supports installing solar panels on top of buildings but worries that fenced-in solar fields will only add to blight problems and hurt property values.
Kemp said city officials approached him and others living in and around the Poletown East area about a possible array around Perrien Park, a former Detroit Public Schools site, but neighborhood organizations unanimously rejected it.
“It’s not going to increase anybody’s property value. It’s not going to make it look more beautiful. And it’s not going to increase your access to green space,” he said. “It’s going to be like a little prison for solar panels.”
A recent study found solar installations in California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Massachusetts reduced property values by 1.5% within half a mile, and outcomes varied by state.
Kemp added that the solar fields would tie up land the city could use for open space and green infrastructure to sequester stormwater and prevent basement flooding. He also worries that trees would need to be cut down to reduce shade on the panels.
Experts consider tree cover important for reducing heat and managing stormwater. And while solar power is considered critical for dealing with the climate crisis, solar fields can create a localized increase in temperature.
This may pose a special problem in Detroit, where the heat island effect, or the capacity of impervious surfaces to absorb and re-emit heat, already increases temperatures by 8 degrees or more.
Jon Kent, a Riverbend resident and co-founder of Sanctuary Farms, also supports solar, but said communities hosting the arrays should benefit more than what he sees in the current proposal.
“They’re doing this within neighborhoods that are really poor and really disengaged,” he said, adding that these areas would be getting a one-time pay-out while the city would continue to benefit.
Kent said he’d like to see the city take more time with the process, doing additional community outreach and building in a more extensive community benefits process that could include allowing communities to renegotiate the terms for hosting arrays in the future.
The expedited time frame may be driven by pressure to secure federal support through the Inflation Reduction Act before this program ends in 2033. A city of Detroit spokesperson confirmed that the city is seeking federal credits to offset municipal operations’ energy use under the IRA. However, they added that the short timeline is because “the mayor feels the climate crisis is an urgent matter.”
Roach defended the current plan, saying the city worked with 15 renewable energy groups to develop the proposal and that eight groups, including Walker-Miller Energy Services, EcoWorks and the GreenDoor Initiative, have been working with neighborhoods to help them develop community benefit requests.
“This is a remarkable partnership between renewable energy advocates and neighborhood groups to design better neighborhoods that will help fight climate change,” he said.
Roach also pushed back on the idea that solar could hurt property values. “Those who best know the property values in a neighborhood are those who actually live there, which is why they will be the ones choosing the sites,” he said.
Jackson Koeppel, a Highland Park-based energy democracy practitioner and former executive director of the nonprofit Soulardarity, questioned the strategy of jumping immediately to large-scale solar arrays before embracing more targeted strategies.
“This approach to just build out as much solar on vacant land as possible to meet that need isn’t the right order of operations,” he said. Koeppel argues that on-site and rooftop solar and battery storage is the most cost-effective approach for city operations because it would generate “behind the meter” power that would allow the city to avoid the full cost of energy it would otherwise have to purchase.
Instead, the mayor’s proposal would have a third-party solar developer generate the power and likely sell it to DTE, which could then credit the city on its bills. The city’s request for information from solar developers did include inquiries about behind-the-meter projects at municipal facilities.
North Rosedale resident Amanda Paige said the city could incorporate solar energy into the urban landscape in other ways, like installing rooftop solar panels in neighborhoods or putting panels on top of structures like parking garages and bus shelters.
She worries especially about those living in some of Detroit’s most disinvested neighborhoods who may be underwater on their mortgages and struggling to build generational wealth.
“They’re not attractive,” Paige said of solar panels. “It’s not going to do anything for your long-term property values if you’re across the street from a big solar farm.”
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