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Colorado just set a major new climate goal for the companies that supply homes and businesses with fossil gas.
By 2035, investor-owned gas utilities must cut carbon pollution by 41% from 2015 levels, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission decided in a 2–1 vote in mid-November. The target — which builds on goals already set for 2025 and 2030 — is far more consistent with the state’s aim to decarbonize by 2050 than the other proposals considered. Commissioners rejected the tepid 22% to 30% cut that utilities asked for and the 31% target that state agencies recommended.
Climate advocates hailed the decision as a victory for managing a transition away from burning fossil gas in Colorado buildings.
“It’s a really huge deal,” said Jim Dennison, staff attorney at the Sierra Club, one of more than 20 environmental groups that advocated for an ambitious target. “It’s one of the strongest commitments to tangible progress that’s been made anywhere in the country.”
In 2021, Colorado passed a first-in-the-nation law requiring gas utilities to find ways to deliver heat sans the emissions. That could entail swapping gas for alternative fuels, like methane from manure or hydrogen made with renewable power. But last year the utilities commission found that the most cost-effective approaches are weatherizing buildings and outfitting them with all-electric, ultraefficient appliances such as heat pumps. These double-duty devices keep homes toasty in winter and cool in summer.
The clean-heat law pushes utilities to cut emissions by 4% from 2015 levels by 2025 and then 22% by 2030.
But Colorado leaves exact targets for future years up to the Public Utilities Commission. Last month’s decision on the 2035 standard marks the first time that regulators have taken up that task.
The commission’s move sets a precedent for other states working to ditch fossil fuels from buildings even as the federal government eliminates home-electrification incentives after Dec. 31. Following Colorado’s lead, Massachusetts and Maryland are developing their own clean-heat standards.
Gas is still a fixture in the Centennial State. About seven out of 10 Colorado households burn the fossil fuel as their primary source for heating, which accounts for about 31% of the state’s gas use.
If gas utilities hit the new 2035 mandate, they’ll avoid an estimated 45.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. They’d also prevent the release of hundreds more tons of nitrogen oxides and ultrafine particulates that cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems, from asthma to heart attacks. State officials predicted this would mean 58 averted premature deaths between now and 2035, nearly $1 billion in economic benefits, and $5.1 billion in avoided costs of climate change.
“I think in the next five to 10 years, people will be thinking about burning fossil fuels in their home the way they now think about lead paint,” said former state Rep. Tracey Bernett, a Democrat who was the prime sponsor of the clean-heat law.
Back in August, during proceedings to decide the 2035 target, gas utilities encouraged regulators to aim low. Citing concerns about market uptake of heat pumps and potential costs to customers, they asked for a goal as modest as 22% by 2035 — a target that wouldn’t require any progress at all in the five years after 2030.
Climate advocates argued that such a weak goal would cause the state to fall short on its climate commitments. Nonprofits the Sierra Club, the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, and the Western Resource Advocates submitted a technical analysis that determined the emissions reductions the gas utilities would need to hit to align with the state’s 2050 net-zero goal: 55% by 2035, 74% by 2040, 93% by 2045, and, finally, 100% by 2050.
History suggests these reductions are feasible, advocates asserted.
“We’re recommending targets that put us on a technology-adoption curve — a trajectory that’s been seen over and over again,” said Ramón DC Alatorre, senior program manager at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. “There’s a tremendous amount [of] mature technology available today in order to be able to meet these targets.”
Heat pumps, for example, have a track record of holding their own even in Denver’s deepest freezes. Some companies are devising ways to bring installation costs way down. And the state is making the tech more affordable via a federally funded rebate program for low-income households and tax credits worth hundreds of dollars for both customers and contractors.
Expecting the market to move more slowly than advocates predicted, the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment recommended a 41% cut. But then in September, after reviewing stakeholders’ comments, the agencies dropped it to 31% — a “more realistic, yet still ambitious goal,” they wrote.
The agencies’ 41% proposal was “far better supported” by their own analysis, Commissioner Megan Gilman said at the Nov. 12 commission meeting: Agencies found that this target comports with the clean-heat law. The 31% figure, by contrast, seemed untethered to the legislation’s mandates, she noted.
The commission’s decision doesn’t factor in concerns about the cost of decarbonization — nor is it meant to, Gilman said. The regulators will address cost-effectiveness when they evaluate utilities’ specific plans for complying with the statute, which are required every four years. Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, will file its next plan in 2027.
Even as Colorado doubles down to leave gas in the past, Xcel isn’t planning to relinquish the fossil fuel anytime soon.
Xcel provides gas to 1.5 million customers across the state. From 2025 to 2029, the utility is seeking to invest more than $500 million per year on the gas system — costs passed on to customers via their energy bills. That’s a bigger investment than Xcel’s $440 million plan for 2024 to 2028 to reduce reliance on gas by implementing clean-heat measures.
Overbuilding gas infrastructure now could have decades-long ramifications for energy bills. “If utilities are not scaling these [electrification] programs, the customers left on the gas systems are ultimately going to face higher costs,” said Courtney Fieldman, utility program director of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.
Colorado is nudging gas utilities to instead become clean-heat utilities; for example, lawmakers have directed the companies to pilot zero-emissions geothermal heating projects and thermal energy networks.
Meanwhile, the commission’s November decision sends a clear signal that utilities need to adjust their gas-demand forecast, the Sierra Club’s Dennison said. While advocates hoped that regulators would create more policy certainty by setting targets beyond 2035, commissioners demurred. They have until 2032 to get those standards finalized.
“The targets that conservation advocates have proposed are achievable,” said Ed Carley, an expert on building decarbonization policy at Western Resource Advocates. Adopting them “is really our opportunity to be a leader in achieving our greenhouse gas emissions goals — and demonstrating that market transformation is possible.”
WESTERN MACEDONIA, Greece — For more than a decade, Lefteris Ioannidis had been saying what no one wanted to hear: Coal is dying, and it’s time to prepare for what comes next.
He could see the writing on the wall while serving as mayor of Kozani, the largest city in Western Macedonia, even as other local politicians wanted to build new power plants and dig more coal from the region’s sprawling mines. The president of the coal workers’ union said Ioannidis was dead wrong.
But coal production had been sagging since the early 2000s. The power plants were getting too costly to run, thanks to new pollution rules. And extracting and burning the fossil fuel — which in Western Macedonia is mined in vast open pits that over the decades have destroyed homes, entire villages, and lives — was clearly incompatible with the European Union’s vision for a green future.
Still, even Ioannidis didn’t believe Greece would abandon coal so soon.
Just over a decade ago, more than half the country’s electricity was produced by burning through mountains of lignite, the lowest-grade form of coal. Now, if all goes according to plan, Greece aims to shutter its last two coal-fired power plants next year and stop producing coal from most of its mines, including one that is among the largest in Europe. In coal’s place, the country is building clean energy — mostly solar — at a feverish pace.
Western Macedonia, a landlocked and sparsely populated region far north of Athens and the iconic whitewashed buildings of the Cyclades islands, is at the center of this rapid transition.
The region sits atop the biggest lignite deposits in Greece. Over the course of six decades, the once state-owned PPC Group pulled hundreds of millions of metric tons of coal from the area’s soil, producing thousands of jobs and eventually most of Greece’s electricity — along with devastating environmental and health consequences.
Today, things are changing. Blue-black lakes of solar panels shimmer across the valley floor, busily converting the bountiful Greek sun into clean energy, while others wait to be plugged into the grid. The installations stretch to the edges of quiet mines and surround idled power plants. Lonely plumes of steam escape from the cooling towers of the few coal units that remain online, wavering in the wind like white flags of surrender.
Soon, PPC will complete the construction of 2.1 gigawatts of solar in Western Macedonia, erected mostly on top of remediated coal lands. It will be the largest cluster of solar panels in Europe. Most of it was built within the last 12 months.
The success of the region’s energy transition is undeniable. But so too is the failure to build an economy for the post-coal era. Even though Greece announced back in 2019 that it would eliminate coal, uncertainty reigns over Western Macedonia’s future, and the region remains wracked by poverty and unemployment.
“We had an economy dominated just from coal, and everybody knew that the coal would have to end,” said Ioannidis. “But nobody did anything to prevent the disaster. It’s like the Titanic — everybody dancing on board, but the disaster is coming.”
Most of PPC Group's massive solar cluster in Western Macedonia was built recently, as is visible when comparing satellite imagery from October 2024 to April 2025.
The situation underscores an urgent question as 17 other European nations work to eliminate coal over the coming years: How can a country do what’s right for the planet without wronging the people who depend on fossil fuels for jobs?
The European Union is searching for answers: In 2021 it created a €17.5 billion fund “to ensure no one is left behind on the road to a greener economy.”
The following year, Greece became the first country to have a just-transition plan approved by this fund. But to date, only a sliver of the nearly €1 billion allocated specifically to Western Macedonia has trickled into the impacted communities. There’s not yet a large-scale flagship project in operation — something to demonstrate what a world without coal might look like.
Ioannidis says the lack of progress is unacceptable, the result of a top-down, Athens-led approach that has left little room for the locals to shape their own destiny.
“The main path is to create a bottom-up strategy,” he said. “But I’m not optimistic. I’m not waiting for anything from the government. For them, Western Macedonia is only a very small part of Greece. … Anything outside Athens, it’s not a priority.”
This sense of fatalism hangs over the region like smog. Frustrated by the lack of progress, many residents are leaving in search of better prospects.
It’s a devastating feedback loop: Every working-age resident who pursues a job in Athens or Thessaloniki, every young person who goes off to university and never returns, is one less person to help wrest Western Macedonia from the quicksand of its dirty past. The task of inventing the future becomes harder with each departure — and the sense that it is possible to do so becomes that much more remote.
On a warm Sunday evening in September, every bench in Plateia Nikis, Kozani’s main plaza, was full.
Conversation rose from the tavernas that line the west side of the plaza. Groups of teenagers roamed the pedestrian-only street that feeds into the plaza from the south, pushing one another around and giggling their way into one of several nearby arcades. A child kicked a soccer ball in the plaza’s center and suddenly 10 more appeared; a game began. Another cut across the match, running not after the ball but to hug her grandmother, whom she had spotted from across the way. An elderly couple sat next to me on a bench, and the man offered me a cigarette. I declined politely in Greek, and together we watched silently as the fading sun painted the Kozani clock tower gold.
Just blocks away, the atmosphere was far less vibrant. As I walked away from Plateia Nikis, the bustling shops and cafés gave way to empty storefronts, their smudged windows covered in white paper signs with big red letters that read “ΕΝΟΙΚΙΑΖΕΤΑΙ” — “for rent.”
Outside a bar on one of these side streets, I met up with Sokratis Moutidis, the longtime editor-in-chief of Chronos Kozanis, Western Macedonia’s oldest newspaper. He and two other residents who sat with us explained that these quiet streets were once home to nice shops.
The contrast illustrates how Western Macedonia is struggling to adapt to the end of coal, its core industry for over half a century.
Then entirely state-owned and known as the Public Power Corporation, PPC opened its first major lignite power plant in 1959, perched on the edge of a coalfield located about 15 miles north of Kozani. Its smokestack jutted from the valley floor, a symbol of Greece’s rapid modernization; it was the tallest structure in the nation upon completion.
In the decades that followed, PPC built a total of 15 coal-fired units across the region, which provided over 70% of Greece’s electricity at its high-water mark. (The newest one, Ptolemaida 5, was brought online in 2023 — four years after the country decided to eliminate coal — at a cost of nearly €2 billion. PPC will convert it to gas by 2028.) Western Macedonia’s mines swelled in step with its coal fleet, and by the early 2000s Greece was the world’s fourth-largest producer of lignite.
Coal created not just jobs for miners and engineers but also a bustling secondary economy of mechanics, truck drivers, and lunch-spot proprietors. As much as 20% of the working population was employed directly or indirectly by the sector, according to a 2020 World Bank study. Lignite generated a whopping 42% of Western Macedonia’s gross domestic product.
But as soon as world leaders signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, awakening at last to the reality of climate change, the clock started ticking, Ioannidis said. It became inevitable that someday time would run out for coal — in Western Macedonia and beyond.
The only question was when.
As mayor of Kozani from 2014 to 2019, Ioannidis was not content to wait around for an answer. In 2016, he organized the city’s first public discussion about life after lignite. He also convinced the World Bank to visit the region in order to create a road map for how it could move beyond coal.
But by the time the World Bank recommendations came out in 2020, the post-lignite era was already hurtling toward Western Macedonia. The year before, just months into his first term, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had stood before the United Nations Climate Action Summit and pronounced that Greece would “close all lignite power plants, the latest by 2028,” an inspired target for a country in which the industry was so deeply entrenched. That timeline has since been accelerated to 2026.
“We lost many decades to understand the problem, to realize the problem,” said Ioannidis. “Now we don’t have time.”
Though Mitsotakis’ announcement was couched in soaring rhetoric about the imperative to deal with climate change, it was ultimately long-simmering regulatory and economic forces that brought lignite to its knees.
In 2005, the EU launched the Emissions Trading System, a cap-and-trade program that puts a price on carbon dioxide emissions. The scheme hit lignite especially hard because it emits more than other forms of coal do. Five years later, the EU clamped down on air pollution from industrial sources. Meanwhile, the cost of natural gas, wind, and solar power began to plummet. These trends converged, and as the region’s carbon price slowly crept up, the profitability of PPC’s lignite plants went down.
Still, the phaseout came as a surprise.
“In Greek, when we want to say we are in shock, we say ‘Our legs were cut,’” said Ioannis Fasidis, a 44-year-old coal miner and power plant worker who is now president of Spartakos, a major union of PPC workers, via Moutidis, who translated. “It was a shock.”
That shock is still reverberating throughout Western Macedonia.
No region in Greece, itself a shrinking nation, is losing people faster. Between 2011 and 2021, the year of the most recent census, Western Macedonia lost 10.3% of its population. It has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe: In 2023, more than one-third of young people there were out of work, compared with nearly 22% nationwide and 11% across the EU.
The future of Western Macedonia, it feels, is slipping away — even as the region drives the increasingly ambitious Greek energy transition forward.
In April, Mitsotakis and PPC Chairman and CEO Georgios Stassis stood outside the decommissioned Kardia power plant and unveiled a €5.75 billion “green” vision for Western Macedonia.
Some of that plan is already underway — namely PPC’s colossal solar installations and the company’s work restoring already inactive mine lands. But it also included more aspirational proposals, like turning two lignite mines into pumped hydroelectric facilities and converting Ptolemaida 5 to a hydrogen-ready gas-burning facility. In total, PPC says the plan could create up to 20,000 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs.
“If we wanted to be very fast in phasing out coal and developing renewable energy — and mostly solar — we had to leverage all of the weapons in our armory. There, we owned the land, we had space. We owned the grid connections,” explained Elena Giannakopolou, the chief strategy officer of PPC. “That’s why Western Macedonia was such a special place for us. It was our vehicle to the new day.”
I could see that new day dawning when I visited PPC’s expansive Western Macedonia facilities in September.
Immediately outside the silent turbine hall of the former Kardia power plant, whose four units were shut down between 2019 and 2021, electric boilers now sit to help heat Kozani’s buildings during the city’s chilly winters — a job previously done by the lignite plants. Across the street, construction was newly underway on a gas-fired thermal plant that will also help with heating. Five minutes up the road, PPC’s first-ever grid battery facility was being built. The red-and-white cooling tower of Ptolemaida 5 stood in the distance.
A short drive away was the Kardia mine, which once fed piles of lignite to the units of the power plant that shares its name. From within the mine, some PPC engineers explained how the great crater will gradually fill with rain and groundwater and be repurposed as a pumped-hydro station, an old-school form of energy storage that harnesses gravity to squirrel away electricity. Already, a deep blue pond sat on the mine floor as if to suggest the future.
Past the Kardia complex, fields of solar panels stretched so far that when I looked out from among them, I could see only the region’s most striking features in the distance: the occasional coal excavator rising like a skyscraper; the towers of the half-dead, half-alive Agios Dimitrios coal-fired plant; and the mountain peaks that ensconce the Ptolemaida basin, the physical delimiters of a region whose fate was determined by geological machinations long ago.
PPC’s rapid transformation from a lignite giant to a “powertech” firm that develops clean energy and gas is a microcosm of Greece’s energy transition more broadly.
Earlier this year, the country increased its renewable energy targets under its EU-mandated National Energy and Climate Plan. Previously, Greece aimed to get 66% of its electricity from renewables by 2030 — a figure it flirted with this spring. Now it’s targeting 76%, and the virtual elimination of fossil fuels from its grid by 2035. (PPC, meanwhile, says it will see its emissions plummet by a staggering 85% between 2019 and 2028.) Mitsotakis, whose country was once singled out as a laggard on clean energy, is now taking to the Financial Times’ op-ed pages to lecture other nations on “golden rules” for the green transition.
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For all the progress on renewables, however, fossil fuels are not yet in the country’s past.
Natural gas, that pesky “bridge fuel,” is on the rise in Greece. Once a comparatively small part of the Greek grid, it provided nearly 40% of the country’s power across 2024. The nation has opened major import infrastructure for liquefied natural gas, positioning itself as a hub for Europe, and is proudly courting Chevron and Exxon Mobil to explore for the fossil fuel off the coast of Crete.
Some influential groups are also pushing to keep burning coal.
One prominent example is the coal workers’ union led by Fasidis. We met at a shady café on a hot afternoon in Kozani, and Moutidis, the local journalist, translated. A serious but not unfriendly man, Fasidis brought his two preteen daughters along, who chimed in occasionally when Moutidis was stuck searching for a word.
Fasidis is in active negotiations with PPC about the future of his roughly 1,800 mine and power plant workers. Though he welcomes the company’s new investment plan, he was clear on what the union really wants.
“Our main goal is for lignite, coal, to be alive,” he said. “This is the main demand of the union.”
He clarified that it is “not an economical point of view” but rather one based on energy security concerns. Greece imports all the natural gas it consumes; lignite remains its core domestic fossil fuel. This fact offered Fasidis and his workers a brief reprieve three years ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and spurred the worst European energy crisis since the 1970s oil shock that pushed Greece to embrace lignite to begin with.
“But it’s not realistic today to talk about lignite,” said Ioannidis, who later pulled up a chair and joined the conversation with Fasidis — a man he had clashed with as the mayor soothsaying the end of coal.
“Lignite is a dead man,” Ioannidis concluded.
That reality was hard to forget even when I stopped by the Agios Dimitrios power plant during my tour of PPC’s energy complex.
In the hulking facility’s coal yard, I was surrounded by screeching conveyor belts carrying lignite, and my eyes watered and nostrils stung from the caustic swirls of coal dust. But I could also see some telling graffiti spray-painted on one of the power plant’s cooling towers. A decade ago, activists had climbed the steel structure and left behind a message: “GO SOLAR” — a message that now, with all the challenges it brings, the region is heeding.
But for all the clean energy being built in Western Macedonia, the boom is creating little wealth for the people who live there.
Konstantinos Siampanopoulos, a 34-year-old resident of Kozani, is a case in point.
Siampanopoulos is a restless entrepreneur. Details of venture after venture dribbled out as we spoke over meze at a Kozani taverna. There’s the fur clothing brand he founded, the accounting firm he runs, and, most recently, a facility where locals can play the squash-like racquet sport padel.
Siampanopoulos is also a longtime investor in renewable energy, one of the few locals who managed to get in early on the region’s solar boom. In 2010, he and his father developed their first solar installations. In partnership with other investors, their portfolio grew to 16 megawatts, including some small hydropower projects. But as the country has become awash in solar, he told me, what was once a prescient and profitable bet has soured.
Holding up a phone displaying the real-time market dashboard from Greece’s grid operator, he showed me the problem for small investors. “Tomorrow, the price is zero. It’s zero for many hours,” he said. “We signed the contract that if the price is zero for more than two hours, we are not paid.”
Put simply: Greece often has more solar power than it can use. Plans to build energy storage will help alleviate this problem, but that’s small comfort for investors like Siampanopoulos right now. Under the current conditions, he and his coinvestors were hardly able to keep up with the loan payments on their installations, let alone earn an attractive profit. They sold 10.8 MW of their portfolio in August.
These price dynamics, among other challenges, have made it difficult for locals to profit from the energy transition.
Overall, at least 95% of the operational or licensed renewable projects in Western Macedonia are owned by large investors, per April 2024 data from Greece’s transmission and distribution grid operators shared by Siampanopoulos; he obtained and analyzed the data in his capacity as a member of the Kozani Chamber of Commerce and president of the local photovoltaic investors’ group. That means only a fraction of the wealth is going directly to residents.
“I characterize this as an air bridge, by which income is transferred from Western Macedonia to somewhere else,” said Lefteris Topaloglou, a professor who runs the Energy Transition and Developmental Transformation Laboratory at the University of Western Macedonia.
In one sense, this is nothing new. Although majority owned by Greece until 2021, PPC was still a single large entity — headquartered elsewhere, in Athens — that controlled the energy infrastructure in Western Macedonia.
But the coal-fired power plants made up for this centralized ownership with jobs. Solar provides neither significant revenue nor employment to residents. PPC declined to disclose the exact number of permanent jobs that its solar installations have created in Western Macedonia to date.
In some ways, this is a good thing. Solar results in so few jobs once installed because it requires no fuel and little maintenance. That’s one reason it is the cheapest form of energy, and that affordability is itself why solar is growing at blazing speed worldwide — giving humanity a chance to kick our self-destructive habit of burning fossil fuels like lignite.
Coal, by contrast, creates jobs because it is extractive. Humans must pilot excavators that disfigure the Earth to produce coal, which then must be transported by humans to power plants, where yet more humans oversee operations. Its economic benefits are a direct function of its pollution, of its destruction; its jobs are paid for with the health of workers and nearby residents and that of the planet.
But the point remains for the people of Western Macedonia: Solar isn’t bringing them jobs.
“This is the employment paradox of the green energy boom,” said Topaloglou.
On a brisk and sunny morning in early October, the marble sidewalks of Athens slick from the previous day’s uncharacteristic downpour, I met Alexandra Mavrogonatou in her office near the Hellenic Parliament.
She offered me an espresso, a comfortable seat, and a history lesson. In June 2022, she explained, Greece became the first country to receive European Commission approval for its €1.63 billion just-transition plan. Most of the money comes from the EU’s broader Just Transition Fund, which supports 96 regions across the bloc.
Mavrogonatou is the head of the directorate of strategic planning and coordination of funds for Greece’s Just Transition Special Authority. That means she oversees the implementation of the country’s just-transition program, from which Western Macedonia was allocated about €994 million. The rest is split between the country’s other main lignite area, Megalopolis, and then among the islands and other mainland regions.
To date, her agency has made some progress: It has approved projects amounting to 50% of the funds and inked contracts with awardees for almost 35% of the funds, she said. But through September, she told me, less than 5% of the money had actually been given to the beneficiaries.
“This percentage may seem low, but we need to take into consideration that we are a newly established program,” Mavrogonatou said. “We’ve had no projects coming from a previous programming period, so we started from scratch — from zero.”
Most of the funding approved by Mavrogonatou’s office so far is for projects in Western Macedonia, she said.
Entrepreneurship has been a main focus, and the office to date has greenlit more than 500 such investments for the region, she said. It funded the creation of a coworking space and a startup incubator in Kozani. The 22-person accounting firm Siampanopoulos manages received approval for funding, and he’s working on securing money for his padel hub, too. The agency has also funded regional support offices in Kozani and the city of Florina — “one-stop shops” for entrepreneurs, she said — as well as a skills development and employment center in Kozani.
But during my five days in Western Macedonia, locals dismissed these sorts of programs as not enough. They are not unwelcome, necessarily, but viewed as insufficient. Ioannidis called them “very, very soft actions.”
“We are full of soft actions and programs,” he told me, weeks before my conversation with Mavrogonatou, while on a break from his job managing a 40-person health clinic in town. As we spoke at his favorite café, the former mayor fielded a steady stream of greetings. Some passersby pulled up a chair, Ioannidis poured them a glass of beer, and they sat and chatted before continuing on their way.
“That’s enough with soft actions, trips, discussions, studies,” he said. “We need jobs. We need something concrete.”
Ioannidis’ frustration is shared by many in the region: Even though it’s been six years since Mitsotakis’ fateful announcement, there’s been no large-scale job creation, and there’s not a clear and broadly understood vision for how to change that.
Above all, the residents I spoke to feel that they’ve had no chance to participate in planning for what comes next.
When I brought up these criticisms to Mavrogonatou in Athens, she said she “totally” disagrees with the notion that locals have had no voice. She pointed to working groups in Western Macedonia, which are staffed by representatives from the local university and municipalities and which are under the supervision of the region’s governor. The idea, she said, is to provide a way for one unified stream of feedback to flow to Athens.
Be that as it may, the perception that the transition is being mismanaged is real — and that perception is eroding trust in the entire process. Ongoing field research from Fenia Pliatsika, a doctoral student in Topaloglou’s lab, found a high level of concern that the transition is suffering because of a lack of trust and “tokenistic participation,” echoing similar peer-reviewed findings published by Topaloglou and Ioannidis in 2022.
Perceived inconsistencies in the government’s stance on clean energy threaten to wash away what little confidence remains.
Again and again, throughout my time in Western Macedonia, residents called out two projects as confusing and unfair.
First, there’s the waste-to-energy facility. Under an EU regulation, Greece needs to rapidly decrease the amount of trash it puts into landfills. Its proposed solution is to construct six incinerators around the country that will burn garbage for energy. That includes a facility PPC intends to build at the site of Ptolemaida 5, to which waste would be trucked in from as far as the island of Corfu. Opposition runs deep. Fasidis singled it out as the only proposed new investment the union is against. As I returned from touring PPC’s energy complex, a protest against the plant was winding down, the shouts of opposition still ringing through Kozani’s narrow streets.
Then, there is the lignite mine in the village of Achlada, near Florina. The facility, which is not owned by PPC, ships its coal across the border to North Macedonia, home to one of the most polluting power plants in Europe. The mine has a contract in place until 2028.
Locals make the point that the government is all but eliminating the industry that has anchored their economy for decades in the name of a green energy transition while embarking on two projects that undermine that very effort. In their view, the government is still allowing dirty activities — but only the ones it finds convenient.
Back in Athens, Mavrogonatou urged patience. She stressed that her agency has had only a few years to achieve something difficult — the wholesale transformation of a regional economy — and that results will take time. The projects approved so far will create 2,500 permanent jobs in Western Macedonia, she said. Her team has until 2030 to spend the money.
“We’re trying to do the best we can for the area,” she said. “We’re not perfect. No one is perfect in this world, but I am pretty sure that very soon, especially during 2026, the area will start seeing the first results of our effort.”
The microchip factory her office approved for funding in 2024 is one example. Greek telecoms firm Intracom plans to break ground soon on a €45 million facility and complete construction by 2027. It will create at least 150 skilled jobs.
She also pointed to her agency’s plan to build an “innovation zone” at the University of Western Macedonia’s main campus. It’s a sweeping idea that includes everything from a green hydrogen hub to a supercomputer, as well as mechanisms for university researchers to commercialize their work via startups. Funding for the project has been approved, but construction has not yet begun.
The projects are all part of the nebulous plan to turn the energy-rich region into something of a tech hub for Greece.
Perhaps the most promising venture on this front is one that Mavrogonatou’s office has nothing to do with: a huge data center proposed by PPC as part of its April investment plan.
The €2.3 billion, 300-megawatt facility would replace the lignite field outside the Agios Dimitrios plant. PPC says it can have the data center online by 2027, a potentially appealing timeline for tech firms that are struggling to swiftly secure energy to power their artificial intelligence strategies.
“Time to market is one of the most critical, if not the most critical, points in this decision,” said Giannakopolou of PPC. “Building the building is not difficult. What’s difficult is to have grid connections, to have electricity to power the data center.”
If the demand is there, PPC says it can scale the facility to 1,000 megawatts — a move that would make it among the largest data centers in Europe and also spur the company to outfit Ptolemaida 5 with a 500 MW combined-cycle gas turbine. The facility would, in theory, help propel the area’s startup ecosystem by attracting young, tech-savvy professionals. PPC declined to disclose exactly how many jobs the data center or its related gas-turbine upgrades would generate.
But these visions of a high-tech economy are tentative at best. PPC has to convince a major tech company to set up a data center in Western Macedonia — and that’s just the first step. PPC said that negotiations are active but declined to provide further detail.
Marquee projects promised to the region have fallen apart before. A €1.4 billion lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility was supposed to bring more than 2,000 permanent jobs; it was abandoned late last year. An €8 billion green-hydrogen complex that pledged an audacious 18,000 direct jobs fizzled out after failing to secure European Commission funding.
Amid these false starts, the pleas for patience from Athens have worn thin. As the journalist Moutidis put it in a message after I spoke with Mavrogonatou, “Since 2019, they’ve been saying, ‘Next year things will be better — just be patient.’”
The hope, of course, is that the cynicism is wrong. That the big ideas do work out — that, very specifically, the data center gets built. The residents I spoke to want the region to see a large-scale project that isn’t coal, not only for the much-needed jobs it will bring but also for the symbolic weight — for the suggestion that it’s possible for Western Macedonia to reinvent itself.
“The first buildings, the beginning of the construction — it will be a good signal,” said Ioannidis. “We need a good signal here. We need a flagship investment. This is the main problem: The people here don’t see a good signal and lose their belief in this process.”
“This is not political,” he clarified, before pausing, searching for the word in English. “It’s psychological.”
Climate change impacts of relevance for the humanitarian sector and beyond include (a) the timing of temperature exceedance, (b) the peak warming and (c) the duration of overshoot.
As global temperatures appear likely to surpass the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C target by 2050—and remain above it for decades—researchers warn that governments and aid organizations aren’t prepared for what this “climate overshoot” will mean for people and societies.
A perspective published today in PNAS Nexus suggests that while scientists have made progress describing overshoot’s physical impacts, its humanitarian and social consequences need greater focus. The authors call for urgent action to build the evidence, data and policy links needed to plan for decades of heightened, uneven climate risk before that window closes.
“Climate overshoot is no longer a distant possibility,” said lead author Andrew Kruczkiewicz, senior researcher at the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
“Understanding how overshoot will affect people’s lives and livelihoods—before, during and after disasters—must be part of climate planning, policy and finance. To do otherwise is increasingly irresponsible, with the cost of doing nothing potentially creating tensions with the humanitarian principle of ‘do no harm.’”
The authors outline five interconnected factors linking Earth’s physical changes to social and humanitarian consequences.
Peak warming and duration. Even a short period of overshoot could lock in sea-level rise and other irreversible effects, while higher or longer warming peaks would magnify losses and strain the financial reserves that underpin recovery. Because systems like groundwater and ice sheets respond slowly to heat, some impacts could persist for centuries, even after temperatures stabilize.
Geography will shape who faces the greatest risks. The world won’t feel overshoot evenly: Regions warming faster than the global average are home to some of the world’s most socially and economically vulnerable populations. Limited capacity to prepare or recover means these communities may experience compounding crises, shifting where humanitarian needs are most acute and deepening inequities.
The timing of overshoot’s arrival. The rate of warming will determine whether systems can adapt in time. Rapid warming can outpace infrastructure and ecosystem adjustments, while slower change could allow for limited adaptation.
Adaptation limits and vulnerabilities. Overshoot could push some communities beyond the limits of feasible adaptation, creating cascading risks across food, water, health and energy systems. Implementing short-term fixes can lead to maladaptation, or solutions that solve one problem while creating others.
The path back down may bring new risks. Returning temperatures below 1.5 °C will require large-scale carbon dioxide removal, which could compete with agriculture, fisheries and livelihoods if these technologies repurpose land or ocean resources. Recovery paths with cycles of warming and cooling would also complicate disaster financing and planning. Policy discussions often fail to represent these variable recovery pathways, even though they would create different operational demands on the humanitarian sector.
To avoid widespread system strain, the authors stress the need for stronger links among climate science, social data and humanitarian operations. They recommend expanding research on the social and economic dimensions of overshoot, improving data from vulnerable areas and strengthening scenario planning that anticipates irreversible change and immediate threats.
“In a period of overshoot, the course our social and climate systems take will depend on how we respond to new and unpredictable shocks,” said coauthor Joshua Fisher, a Columbia University research scientist and director of the Columbia Climate School’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity.
“Because those shocks are difficult to predict, institutions will need stronger coordination and collaboration to stay flexible and respond effectively.”
Governments can reduce the risks associated with overshoot by accelerating emissions cuts to limit its magnitude and by investing in adaptation and early-warning systems that help communities cope with prolonged heat, food security pressures and other impacts. Without such foresight, countries could underestimate humanitarian needs or put resources toward responses that no longer fit future conditions.
Overshoot will also challenge how societies think about time and preparedness. Infrastructure designed for one hazard may prove inadequate for another, and the regions most at risk now may not be the same in the future. For example, a city that’s fortified its coast against storm surge could later face other types of flooding if rainfall patterns shift, demonstrating why adaptation approaches must evolve as conditions change.
Even if global efforts succeed in bringing temperatures below 1.5 °C, recovering from overshoot won’t be straightforward. How temperatures drop will matter as much as how high they rise—gradual cooling could ease adaptation pressures, but erratic cycles of warming and cooling could increase instability. Addressing this variability requires flexible approaches to risk reduction, disaster response, and infrastructure investment and closer coordination between climate and humanitarian planning.
The authors emphasize that meeting the Paris Agreement target is essential, yet warn we must also prepare for the possibility of temporarily exceeding it. Planning for the distinct phases of overshoot is not about accepting failure, but about anticipating change and protecting those most at risk.
The article’s coauthors are Zinta Zommers, Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania; Joyce Kimutai, Kenya Meteorological Service and Imperial College London; and Matthias Garschagen, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Around the world, smelters use massive amounts of electricity — often generated by fossil fuels — to turn raw materials into aluminum. As more carbon-free energy comes onto the grid, these power-hungry facilities will get progressively cleaner. But smelters will never be entirely emissions-free until producers can solve a much trickier technical problem.
That’s because modern aluminum plants rely on a 19th-century process that uses big blocks of carbon, which account for almost one-sixth of the greenhouse gases associated with producing new aluminum globally. Replacing the blocks is crucial to decarbonizing this key industrial process.
Now the industry may be one step closer to reaching that goal.
Earlier this month, the Canadian firm Elysis said it hit a major milestone when it deployed an industrial-size, carbon-free anode inside an existing smelter in Alma, Quebec. Elysis is a joint venture of the U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa and global mining company Rio Tinto, both of which produce aluminum in the Canadian province.
“This is really a first for the aluminum industry, and a worldwide first as well,” François Perras, president and CEO of Elysis, told Canary Media.
Elysis installed its “inert,” or chemically inactive, anode technology in a 450-kiloampere (kA) cell, the same amount of electric current used in many large, modern smelters. The full-scale prototype is a significant step up from the company’s 100 kA pilot unit, which has produced low-carbon aluminum used in certain Apple laptops and iPhones, Michelob Ultra beer cans, and the wheels for Audi’s electric sports car.
Elysis launched in 2018 and has raised over 650 million Canadian dollars ($460 million) in investment for the effort, including from the governments of Canada and Quebec. The 450 kA cell will undergo several more years of testing as the company works to measure and validate how the larger unit performs inside a commercial smelter.
Rio Tinto, meanwhile, has already licensed the inert-anode technology from Elysis. The manufacturer plans to build a demonstration plant with 10 of the 100 kA cells at its existing Arvida smelter in Quebec, possibly by 2027, through a joint venture with the provincial government.
“We’re trying to replace a process that has been used for close to 140 years,” Perras said of the initiatives.
Elysis belongs to a small but persistent group spread across China, Iceland, Norway, and Russia that aims to disrupt the smelting method known as the Hall–Héroult process.
Smelting involves dissolving powdery alumina in a molten salt, which is heated to over 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Large carbon anodes are lowered into the highly corrosive bath, and electrical currents run through the entire structure. Aluminum then deposits at the bottom as oxygen combines with carbon in the blocks, creating CO2 as a by-product. It also releases perfluorochemicals (PFCs) — long-lasting greenhouse gases — as well as harmful sulfur dioxide pollution.
The anodes themselves are made using petroleum coke, a rocklike by-product of oil refining.
The Hall–Héroult process was revolutionary, but it is extremely energy-intensive. Most of the emissions associated with producing aluminum are tied to electricity production. In the United States, more than 70% of CO2 pollution from six operating smelters came from the power supply in 2021, according to the Environmental Integrity Project. (The U.S. now has four smelters left, three of which rely on fossil-fuel power.)
Another 20% of U.S. smelters’ carbon emissions were directly from the electrochemical process, the EIP study found. Smelting was also responsible for virtually all the PFCs reported by metal producers to the Environmental Protection Agency that year.
The solution to reducing electricity-related emissions is relatively straightforward: Deploy vast amounts of wind, solar, battery storage, and other clean energy sources. But completely eliminating emissions from the smelting process requires redesigning how the anodes and cells work — and researchers are only just beginning to develop commercial-size alternatives.
Smelting represents “the hardest-to-abate emissions from primary aluminum production,” said Caroline Kim, a technical analyst on climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s really important that we’re able to replace carbon anodes,” she added, noting that PFCs last for tens of thousands of years longer in the atmosphere than CO2 does.
Elysis and other inert-anode developers have been tight-lipped about the composition and performance of their technologies, often citing trade secrets. But Elysis’ industrial-scale prototype, as well as Rio Tinto’s future demonstration plant in Quebec, could provide key answers about whether inert anodes can become the game-changing solution that many aluminum and climate experts are betting on.
“Now that it seems like [Elysis’] technology can work, the question is more about, can it be done at full-scale, sustained operating conditions at or below current costs?” Kim said.
Perras didn’t say what kinds of materials Elysis uses in its anodes. “This is our secret sauce,” he explained. But generally, the idea is to use inert metallic alloys or ceramics that don’t contain carbon, and thus won’t release CO2 and PFCs when zapped with electricity.
Elysis has also swapped the horizontal design of typical smelting pots for a “vertical approach” that Perras said looks more like a battery. These and other technical changes are expected to increase the lifespan of anodes by several years, so aluminum producers won’t have to replace them as often as they do carbon blocks, ideally reducing costs.
Aluminum experts have pointed out that the new technology could, in theory, consume more total electricity than conventional anodes, which would raise smelters’ energy needs even higher. But Perras said that Elysis is focused on making its technology competitive on both costs and energy consumption. “What we are targeting, and what we’ve seen so far, is that the technology we have is in a similar bracket of operation ranges from the incumbent Hall–Héroult technology,” he said.
Eventually, aluminum companies will be able to install Elysis’ technology in existing smelters — whenever they decide to expand production or replace old smelting pots — or in new facilities, Perras said.
In the United States, Emirates Global Aluminium is planning a $4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, while Century Aluminum is evaluating sites for a plant in the Ohio and Mississippi River Basins. Given that Elysis is aiming to mature its full-scale technology by the end of this decade, it seems unlikely that the new U.S. facilities will use inert anodes initially.
The news of Elysis’ milestone comes as the Trump administration guts federal funding for industrial decarbonization projects domestically.
Ian Wells, the federal industrial lead on climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the United States should be making similar investments in large-scale innovation projects to remain competitive with other countries.
Still, “we want to see emissions reductions around the world,” Wells said. If Elysis’ technology works as promised, he added, “it could be a real win for climate, and something that could help aluminum production really compete in an increasingly carbon-conscious global economy.”
Steel is one of the world’s most traded commodities, with roughly one-third of the global supply crossing borders. That makes decarbonizing the carbon-intensive sector a challenge when different companies or governments rely on disparate criteria to determine the amount of emissions to attribute to a ton of steel.
That’s now changing. On Friday, two major industry associations in China and Europe each signed onto landmark agreements with the Australian nonprofit ResponsibleSteel to set internationally coherent standards for what qualifies as green steel. Together, the three organizations represent around 60% of global steel production.
On the face of it, green steel seems easy to tell from the dirtier variety. If iron is made in a direct-reduction facility that uses a zero-carbon fuel such as green hydrogen, and that iron is transformed in an electric arc furnace powered by clean energy, then the resulting steel is unequivocally green. But factories that meet those specifications are virtually nonexistent, given the high cost and limited availability of green hydrogen.
Early next year, the European Union will start charging levies on imports based on how much planet-heating pollution was produced in their manufacturing — a policy called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM. But it will be a struggle to determine how high the tariff should be on steel that wasn’t made with green hydrogen but didn’t come from a coal-fired blast furnace.
“When you’re measuring emissions from steel, how do you measure natural gas and coal that’s used? Are you including upstream emissions? Are you counting coproducts you might not sell as steel but as cement?” Annie Heaton, the chief executive of ResponsibleSteel, said Friday on a call from outside the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil. “You need transparency, otherwise you can get a 20%, 30%, even 40% difference between different kinds of clean steel.”
The two agreements with ResponsibleSteel are separate, bilateral deals with each regional group, the China Iron and Steel Association and the Brussels-based Low Emission Steel Standard organization.
The watchdog group SteelWatch, which was not involved in the agreements, praised what it called “technical folk doing the wizardry for interoperability.”
“Decarbonization of steelmaking is hampered by lack of disclosure, inconsistent data, and a confusing array of standards,” SteelWatch’s executive director, Caroline Ashley, who is based in the United Kingdom, said over email. “It is a positive step forward that the decarbonization standards of these three organisations — one Chinese, one European, and one global — are aligning.”
China and Europe are the most obvious markets in which to start this process. China produces more than half the world’s supply of steel, and Europe’s CBAM promises to remake the continent as the first major destination for lower-carbon versions of the metal. Just this month, Germany’s national rail company, Deutsche Bahn, launched a pilot program to acquire green steel for its tracks. Over the summer, a major Chinese steelmaker promised to send a debut shipment of green steel to Italy in a move experts saw as setting the stage for exporting more of the metal.
The agreement “marks an important milestone for China’s steel industry in actively practicing green development principles,” China Baowu Steel Group’s chief carbon-neutrality representative, Wang Qiangmin, said in a press release.
Frederik Van de Velde, the chief executive of ArcelorMittal Belgium, called the partnership “a game-changer for our industry” in the release.
“By aligning our standards, we are … shaping a global consensus on what defines low-emission steel,” he said.
ResponsibleSteel this month released its “interoperability framework,” setting out the principles that will enable translating carbon metrics across its various agreements.
Heaton said India could prove trickier to rope into a standard-setting scheme because the government in New Delhi already established its own certification standards for green steel last December. The United States may be reversing most of its industry efforts on green steel, but the federal government already has in place a procurement system with what Heaton called a “threshold definition of what it means for a state procurement entity to buy clean steel, and it’s not a million miles from” the standards ResponsibleSteel is setting in China and Europe.
Despite its backtracking on green steel, Heaton said, the U.S. has some green shoots. In what’s arguably the most significant American project now, Hyundai Motor Group is plowing ahead with a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana, with the intention to initially rely on natural gas but swap in green hydrogen sometime in the next decade. Cleveland-Cliffs may have abandoned its plans to rebuild an Ohio coal-fired steel plant as a green-steel factory, but the firm’s new strategic partnership announced last month with the South Korean steel giant Posco could lay the groundwork for future decarbonization efforts, particularly as the Pohang-based company advances other green-steel projects abroad.
Still, worldwide, the sector’s efforts to decarbonize face serious challenges. “There’s a trickle of projects going forward, but it’s really not looking very promising,” Heaton said. “The finance needs to flow. The demand needs to be there. The agreements need to be signed that would actually signal to steelmakers that they can invest in a way that’s viable.”
Creating a common language for what such investments would look like, she said, is a key step toward establishing those conditions.
“The ultimate goal is comparability,” she said. “Whether you’re a buyer or a lender, you’ll know the performance of a project you’re funding or buying from. You’ll know how it stacks up on a global scale.”
The Trump administration has ordered the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open for the next 90 days, citing an energy “emergency” that state utility regulators and regional grid operators say does not exist.
It’s the latest move in the administration’s expanding agenda to force aging and costly coal plants to keep running, despite warnings from energy experts and lawmakers that doing so will burden Americans with billions of dollars in unnecessary energy costs and environmental harms.
Tuesday’s emergency order from the Department of Energy was anticipated by Consumers Energy, the utility that owns and operates the 63-year-old facility. It’s the third such emergency order for the plant; the DOE issued its first directive in May, one week before the plant was scheduled to be retired, and then re-upped the decision in August.
State attorneys general are challenging the DOE’s authority to keep J.H. Campbell running. Environmental groups have also filed lawsuits to try to block the DOE’s emergency must-run orders for the J.H. Campbell plant, as well as similar directives for another fossil-fueled power plant in Pennsylvania. Opponents say the move is a blatant attempt to prop up a dying industry at the expense of everyday utility customers.
“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount. Coal is more expensive than modern resources like wind, solar, and batteries,” Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders, said in a Wednesday statement.
Consumers Energy reported in an October earnings call that the cost of keeping the plant running past its planned closure had added up to $80 million, which is more than $615,000 per day, from May to the end of September.
An analysis from the consultancy Grid Strategies found that a broad application of the DOE’s emergency authority to the more than 60 gigawatts of aging coal, gas, and oil-fueled power plants likely to face closure by 2028 could add nearly $6 billion in costs to U.S. consumers by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term.
In the emergency order issued late Tuesday night, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “I hereby determine that an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electricity, and other causes.” The DOE has authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to order utilities regulated by states to keep plants running under emergency circumstances.
But that claim of an emergency is belied by analysis from Consumers Energy and Michigan utility regulators, who determined in 2022 that the plant’s closure would not threaten grid reliability and that replacing it with fossil gas, solar, and battery resources could save customers $600 million through 2040.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages the transmission grid supplying power to about 45 million people in 15 states, including Michigan, has also determined that the J.H. Campbell plant is not necessary to maintain grid reliability.
“Michigan’s Public Service Commission, grid experts, and the utility all agree it’s time for Campbell to go,” Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said in a Wednesday statement.
Those reliability analyses focused on the summer months, when MISO’s grid is under the greatest stress from demand for electricity to support air-conditioning during heat waves. MISO does not face a near-term reliability challenge in winter months at present, according to a winter readiness assessment issued in October.
Aging coal plants are less reliable and more prone to unplanned outages than more modern power plants, according to a recent analysis of data from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. Environmental Protection Agency data shows that the J.H. Campbell plant stopped generating for multiple stretches this summer and fall, indicating it may not be a reliable resource during emergencies, Lenoff noted in a November interview.
“Mandating aging, unreliable and costly coal plants to stay open past their retirement is a guaranteed way to needlessly hike up Americans’ electricity bills and make air pollution worse,” Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a Wednesday statement.
The DOE may soon issue Section 202(c) orders requiring two coal plants set for closure this year in Colorado to stay running, according to reports.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration in February reported about 8.1 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire this year, including the 1.8-gigawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
Lenoff warned that the Trump administration appears “ready to issue additional orders to prevent the long-planned retirement of some of the dirtiest and oldest coal-burning power plants in the U.S. That amounts to a corporate bailout of coal at our expense.”
The startup Sortera Technologies has raised fresh funding to expand its tech-driven recycling operations — with an eye toward meeting rising U.S. demand for low-carbon aluminum.
Sortera uses advanced sensors and artificial intelligence to sort different types of aluminum found in old car parts and appliances. On Thursday, the company said it raised $45 million to fuel its next phase of growth, including from global investment firm T. Rowe Price Associates, venture capital fund VXI Capital, and Yamaha Motor Ventures, an arm of the Japanese manufacturer.
Sortera’s flagship facility in Markle, Indiana, currently processes about 100 million pounds of shredded metal per year to recover specific alloys — blends of aluminum that contain other elements to make them stronger and more durable. With the new investment, the startup plans to build a second plant next year, in Lebanon, Tennessee, to double its capacity to pick through gleaming scrap heaps.
The expansion comes as the United States is racing to shore up supplies of aluminum.
Part of that is driven by the Trump administration’s increased tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel, which have put pressure on U.S. manufacturers to produce more metal. Automakers are also using more lightweight aluminum instead of steel, including in battery-powered cars and hulking Ford F-150 pickup trucks. Data-center developers need more of the metal for their buildings and the technology inside, while some buyers are looking specifically for lower-carbon aluminum to meet decarbonization goals.
The U.S. is now playing catch-up. America’s production of new, primary aluminum has declined significantly in recent decades, and while plans are underway to build two new smelters, neither is expected to be fully on line this decade. Both projects will also need to secure huge amounts of cheap — and ideally clean — electricity at a time when that’s hard to come by.
Recycling aluminum, on the other hand, requires only about 5% of the energy that’s needed to produce the metal in power-hungry smelters. As a result, it’s generally a faster, cheaper, and lower-carbon way of making aluminum products.
“The domestic market is hungry for sustainable, high-quality recycled aluminum,” said Michael Siemer, Sortera’s CEO.
The country’s use of scrap will climb even higher once two new rolling facilities — which shape aluminum into plates, sheets, and coils — ramp up production. Steel Dynamics rolled its first hot coils at a $1.9 billion plant in Mississippi this summer. Novelis, which is partnering with Sortera to use the startup’s rescued aluminum, is slated to bring its $2.5 billion facility on line in Alabama later next year.
“For them to be green, they each are going to need an additional billion pounds of scrap aluminum,” Siemer estimated.
Despite the growing domestic appetite for aluminum, much of what the country recycles still gets exported overseas, particularly when it’s lumped together with other metals like copper, brass, and titanium. Magnets can easily pull out pieces of steel from scrap piles, but aluminum alloys are tricky to sort. That leaves behind roughly 18 billion pounds of mixed-metal material per year, about 10 billion of which include aluminum alloys, according to Sortera.
“We generally scoop it up, put it into ships, and send it to Southeast Asia,” where the metals are sorted by hand, Siemer said of the industry’s approach. “Or it’s made into low-value products in America, where you can melt the aluminum down” with the other metals, he added, likening the process to melting a box of colorful crayons into a functional, but less desirable, brown soup.
Sortera’s founders, Nalin Kumar and Manual Garcia, launched the company in 2020 to introduce more precision and automation to this sorting process. After spinning out of an Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy program that focused on recycling metals for lightweight vehicles and aircraft, the startup raised money from firms including Chrysalix Venture Capital and the Bill Gates–affiliated Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Sortera said the funding announced this week brings its total investment to about $120 million.
Other early-stage companies are working on new ways to pluck recyclable materials out of the gobsmacking amounts of garbage we generate every day. Greyparrot, for example, has developed AI camera systems that recycling firms can install to track aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic packaging as they move down conveyor belts. The startup Amp uses software-driven robotic systems inside its own plants to automatically sort materials.
But Sortera handles only scrap metal, and it hunts for only specific types of high-quality aluminum alloys — ones that manufacturers like Novelis are typically willing to pay more for. The company’s Indiana facility can also process scrap at high enough volumes to justify handling it domestically, Siemer said.
“They’re getting into a really interesting niche,” said Parker Bovée, who leads waste and recycling research for the consulting firm Cleantech Group. “If you can get pure sorted alloys, then you know exactly what you’re dealing with,” which makes the metal more valuable to the companies turning it back into car frames, engine blocks, or complex metal parts.
Bovée said that from an investment standpoint, he considers Sortera’s approach to be higher risk than a software-only solution, since it involves spending more capital to build facilities and machinery. Waste management in general “is a difficult industry to break into and make substantial inroads,” he said. But Sortera’s ability to capture sought-after alloys “makes them very impressive.”
Siemer added that Sortera will eventually use its technology to sort the other metals found in shredded scrap piles. But for now, he said, “We’re building a business on the aluminum.”
The Trump administration appears poised to force more coal plants to stay open past their planned closing dates — an unprecedented intervention in the power sector that is already making energy even more expensive for Americans.
The first signal of the strategy came in late May. A week before the J.H. Campbell coal plant’s scheduled shutdown, the Department of Energy directed the 63-year-old facility in Michigan to keep operating for 90 days. The agency has since re-upped that order, and the power plant’s owner, Consumers Energy, expects another extension later this month. Through the end of September, the move had already cost Consumers’ customers a total of $80 million, or roughly $615,000 per day.
But the J.H. Campbell plant is unlikely to remain the lone example. Despite the costs, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive who denies the severity of the climate change crisis, is reportedly intending to interfere in more long-planned coal plant closures — this time in Colorado.
Late last month, the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association revealed that DOE officials have indicated they will issue a Section 202(c) order to keep Unit 1 of the electric cooperative’s Craig Station coal plant online past its scheduled closure later this year. Tri-State provides power to member utilities that collectively serve over 1 million customers in rural Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
“Based on conversations with the U.S. Department of Energy, we believe that it is likely that we will receive an emergency order before the end of the year,” Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz told Canary Media. That puts the cooperative in a bind, given that “we do have legal requirements to close that unit, but we also are closing it for economic reasons,” he said.
Tri-State declined to disclose the costs it would incur due to an emergency order. But the cooperative’s broader plans to expand clean energy and close coal plants are expected to save its members $422 million over 20 years.
Another Colorado coal plant slated for closure this year is also likely to stay online, whether via DOE fiat or more typical state processes.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing a district in western Colorado, wrote a letter to the DOE last month asking it to stall the planned retirement of Comanche Unit 2, a more than 300-megawatt power plant owned by Xcel Energy. The utility estimated in 2018 that shutting down two Comanche units and building out renewables would save customers about $213 million over time. This week, Xcel Energy and state agencies petitioned Colorado regulators to delay the retirement of Comanche Unit 2 until the end of 2026 due to repeated failures at the newer Unit 3.
In both Michigan and Colorado, regulators and utilities had previously determined that shutting down the coal plants in question would not compromise grid reliability.
Still, the Trump administration said the J.H. Campbell plant needed to stay online due to summertime grid emergencies. No such emergencies came to pass this summer. In fact, the regional grid operator “had 10 times the amount of unused resources available to it than the amount of energy Campbell was providing,” said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders.
The Trump administration has also issued Section 202(c) orders forcing the Eddystone oil- and gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania to stay open.
These eleventh-hour orders come with both direct and indirect costs.
Power plants on the verge of closure reassign workers and defer maintenance. They stop purchasing fuel; the J.H. Campbell facility likely had to make an expensive rush order after receiving last-minute notice that it would have to operate. These direct costs associated with reversing closure plans can range from the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, as is the case in Colorado, utility customers are often already paying for energy infrastructure that will replace coal units, said Matthew Gerhart, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club’s Denver office. If the DOE orders Craig Unit 1 and Comanche Unit 2 to keep running, those customers will end up “paying twice, since they’re already paying for the replacement resources.”
Coal provided about 15% of electricity in the U.S. in 2024, a far cry from the 51% it provided in 2001. Swapping renewables and fossil gas in for the dirty power source has been a major driver of decarbonization for the nation’s grid.
About 8.1 gigawatts’ worth of coal-fired capacity, or 4.7% of the U.S. coal fleet, was scheduled to retire this year as of February, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That list includes the 1,800-megawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
These facilities are some of the most expensive plants to run within the coal fleet, which is itself the costliest source of electricity on the U.S. grid today, said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.
The think tank reported in June that coal-plant owners spent $6.2 billion more in 2024 than they would have spent for the same amount of electricity generated by coal in 2021. The 28% increase was driven by the rising costs of maintaining a power-plant fleet with an average age of 44 years.
The plants set to retire this year “are on the higher end of the cost increases we saw” compared to the U.S. coal fleet as a whole, Solomon added.
What’s more, “all these plants are likely to be less reliable and efficient, because the owners are reducing the amount of maintenance they’re doing,” she said. That means, ironically, they’re more likely to be offline when needed for the emergencies that are the DOE’s rationale for keeping them open.
Lenoff highlighted U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data that shows the J.H. Campbell units “kept going on and off” from July 1 through Sept. 30. “They’d operate for 24 hours, days on end — and then shut off.”
That’s problematic for two reasons, he said. First, under Section 202(c), the DOE is “only allowed to order the units to run during designated hours of emergency. But these units have been running 24 hours a day.” Second, weeks-long shutdowns indicate that the plants are unlikely to be available when the grid really needs them.
“Meanwhile, Campbell was racking up costs and polluting its neighbors and polluting Lake Michigan,” he said.
The Trump administration could foist enormous costs onto consumers if it ultimately pursues a policy of blocking most fossil-fuel retirements.
Americans are already struggling with utility bills that have been rising at more than twice the rate of overall inflation this year. Democratic candidates focused on energy affordability won races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and won two of five seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
In an August analysis, consultancy Grid Strategies estimated that if the DOE forced about 35 gigawatts’ worth of large fossil-fueled power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 to keep running, annual costs for utility customers could reach $4.8 billion by the end of Donald Trump’s term.
Add in the risk of forced operations of another 31.4 gigawatts of fossil-fueled power plants that are not slated for retirement but are around retirement age, and the yearly costs rise to $5.9 billion.
Michael Goggin, Grid Strategies executive vice president and author of the report, said that the latest data from Consumers Energy on the costs of J.H. Campbell indicate that “our August estimate stands, and if anything appears conservative.”
The DOE isn’t responsible for every coal plant that remains running past its sell-by date, Goggin noted. Grid operator PJM Interconnection has ordered the Brandon Shores coal plant and H.A. Wagner oil-fired plant in Maryland to run years past their planned closure, under a longstanding process to determine when retirements could threaten critical grid reliability. Xcel’s Monday petition asking state regulators to postpone the closure of Comanche Unit 2 is another example of how coal plants can be kept open through traditional processes.
That “reliability must-run” process has its critics. But it also has well-established rules that regional grid operators, state utility regulators, and other stakeholders follow.
The DOE’s use of Section 202(c) emergency authority under the Trump administration, by contrast, has broken with these decades-old rules. Critics fear the administration’s true goal is not to ensure grid reliability, but to unilaterally carry out a political agenda to bolster the fossil-fuel industry and undermine clean energy.
It’s not an outlandish argument. The Trump administration has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to propping up coal-fired power plants. It has also ordered the DOE to create a process by which the agency could usurp state and regional grid planning decisions to unilaterally declare any power plant in the country as critical. In July, the DOE issued a heavily criticized report claiming that coal-plant closures represent a major threat to grid reliability.
Meanwhile, the costs being pushed onto utility customers by the DOE’s existing must-run orders are starting to cause political tensions.
Last month, Kentucky’s attorney general and an electrical cooperative in the state filed a joint protest before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging PJM’s plan to spread the costs of keeping plants forced to remain open under DOE order across all utilities within the grid operator’s 13-state footprint.
Regulators are working out similar cost-sharing arrangements across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator region for the extra expenses borne by Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running. The logic is that the DOE’s orders claim that the plant is necessary for region-wide grid reliability, and that consumers across the region must therefore bear part of the burden.
These extra costs are coming at a time of rising utility rates in PJM, in MISO, and across the country, which intensifies the likelihood that individual states and utilities will balk at being asked to carry costs for power plants that nobody but DOE has said need to keep running.
“It’s a strange environment,” Goggin said. “There’s large load growth, and resource-adequacy concerns, and there are always going to be people arguing about not paying for something. But in this case it’s complicated by the fact that everyone wants to retire a plant that everyone has already signed off on.”
Legal challenges from state attorneys general and nonprofit groups are underway, but moving slowly. Lawsuits against the DOE’s Section 202(c) order for the J.H. Campbell plant are now awaiting review at the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure this case is heard” quickly, Earthjustice’s Lenoff said. But that process will likely stretch into the middle of next year, he said.
Meanwhile, Goggin said, with the DOE only forcing J.H. Campbell and Eddystone to stay open so far, “this has been flying under the radar a little bit.” But if the DOE moves ahead on Section 202(c) orders for the rest of the coal power plants set for closure this year, “we’re getting people ready to understand that this thing may be coming to your utility very soon.”
Representatives from all over the world are currently meeting on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belem, Brazil, to try and advance the global transition away from fossil fuels.
The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.
Today, that 1.5°C target is essentially impossible to meet, and the world is nowhere near on track to achieve the U.N.’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Even keeping warming below 2°C is a long shot. New estimates from the Rhodium Group suggest we’re on track for between 2°C and 3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with 2.8°C being the average outcome. Those figures would exacerbate extreme weather that has already worsened in recent years with far less warming.
It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.
The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.
Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.
Despite this progress, the line of actual, recorded emissions continues to tick up. This year’s COP comes amid global backpedaling on climate commitments and countless calls for a new, affordability-focused approach to the energy transition that proponents say is more pragmatic. The U.S. government, meanwhile, declined to even send a delegation to the event. (Trump administration officials had no problem carving out time to hawk natural gas to the European Union in Athens, Greece, last week.)
These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.
New York just slammed the brakes on rules that would’ve prohibited fossil fuels in new homes and businesses.
The Empire State was on the precipice of fully enacting the All-Electric Buildings Act that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in 2023. The first-in-the-nation standard requires most new buildings to install efficient, electric appliances such as heat pumps instead of health-harming gas, propane, and fuel-oil systems. Regulators finalized the rules in July; they were set to take effect Dec. 31.
But on Wednesday, the state agreed to not enforce the zero-emissions standard until the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals makes its decision on a two-year-old lawsuit challenging the All-Electric Buildings Act. Climate-advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice expects that’ll delay the landmark building code until at least the fall of 2026, as oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
The legislation “was a promise that New York would stop locking families into expensive, polluting fossil-fuel systems and start building for the future,” said Democratic Assemblymember Gabriella Romero on a Thursday call with reporters. “Delaying this law is a total betrayal of that promise.”
Putting the all-electric building code on ice is an abrupt about-face for the administration. On Oct. 1, the state filed a brief saying that New Yorkers would “suffer irreparable harm if the Code amendments are delayed from taking effect,” because it would allow new buildings to depend on fossil-fuel equipment that would generate greenhouse gases and local air pollution for decades to come. That, in turn, would drive up the health, agriculture, and broader economy costs imposed by worsening climate catastrophes.
But just over one month later, Hochul signaled openness to pausing the law after a group of 19 Democratic state legislators raised concerns about its affordability and impact on the grid. Multiple studies have found that the grid has ample room for all-electric new buildings, and making them the default would benefit the planet and people’s pocketbooks.
Hochul’s office has positioned the delay as a pragmatic step that could expedite implementation of the rule in the long term. By voluntarily pausing the law, Hochul may be trying to avoid a potentially multiyear holdup should the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court and get on its “shadow docket.” That emergency process is typically less transparent than the court’s usual decision-making protocol.
“The Governor remains committed to the all-electric-buildings law and believes this action will help the State defend it, as well as reduce regulatory uncertainty for developers during this period of litigation,” Ken Lovett, energy and environment spokesperson for Hochul, told Canary Media. She’s “resolved to providing more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for New Yorkers.”
Earthjustice argues that there’s no reason to expect that the groups challenging the law would’ve been able to hamper its implementation if the state hadn’t made the concession itself.
The plaintiffs in the case — including the New York State Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Propane Gas Association — allege that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts the all-electric buildings law. That same reasoning was used to overturn Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban. In July, New York prevailed when a federal district judge in the state rejected the argument.
Similar lawsuits are playing out in courts around the country, including a challenge to New York City’s own all-electric-buildings standard, which has been in effect since 2024.
Hochul’s decision to slow-roll building electrification is part of her administration’s realpolitik embrace of fossil fuels. Last Friday, New York regulators signed off on a Trump-backed underwater gas pipeline, after having denied the requisite permits three times before. The same day, her administration announced a deal to allow a gas plant that mainly powers cryptocurrency mining to keep operating for at least five years. She also has yet to sign a bill that repeals gas-hookup subsidies. Legislators passed it in June.
Hochul justified recent moves by saying the state needs to “govern in reality.”
“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach,” she said last week in a statement.
Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha said she’s deeply concerned about the administration’s trajectory. Reducing the lethal and expensive harms born of the climate crisis “is not an optional goal,” she said. “Really, we’re talking about a disruption to our economy if we don’t act — in the same way the pandemic disrupted our economy.”
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