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UTILITIES: California advocates criticize lawmakers for failing to pass bills aimed at containing rising utility rates while continuing to fund grid upgrades and wildfire-hazard mitigation efforts. (Canary Media)
ALSO: Six candidates for Arizona’s utility regulatory commission are split down party lines on policy stances, with Democrats favoring clean energy and Republicans looking to keep fossil fuels in the mix. (Arizona Daily Star)
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS: Observers say a northern California city leveraging a ballot initiative to extract a $550 million payout from Chevron over damages from its oil refinery could provide a model for other communities. (Politico)
ELECTRIFICATION: California legislation awaiting the governor’s signature would allow natural gas utilities to pilot up to 30 neighborhood-scale building electrification and decarbonization projects. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Colorado allocates $1.3 million to fund an additional round of electric bicycle purchase rebates, saying residents have redeemed more than 6,700 of the incentives so far. (news release)
CARBON CAPTURE: The U.S. Energy Department awards a Wyoming research center $5 million to launch the first phase of a pilot project aimed at capturing carbon from a 450 MW coal plant. (Power)
CLEAN ENERGY: The U.S. Energy Department awards New Mexico $2 million to install heat pumps, solar panels and other efficiency upgrades on 85 homes in disadvantaged communities. (news release)
GRID:
NUCLEAR: Idaho National Laboratory brings online a hot cell facility for researching and testing materials used in nuclear reactors. (East Idaho News)
CLIMATE:
MINING: A company begins construction at a contested battery metals mine in southern Arizona after state regulators approve its air quality permit. (Arizona Republic)
GRID: Regional transmission experts say the buildup of energy-intensive data centers poses an “emerging risk” to grid reliability in the West. (OPB)
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY: The U.S. Energy Department awards Arizona $1.7 million to fund commercial sector energy efficiency projects aimed at benefiting low-income and disadvantaged communities. (Solar Quarter)
STORAGE: A California startup raises $2 million to further develop a thermal energy storage system for industrial applications that uses bricks to convert electricity into heat. (Canary Media)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
ELECTRIFICATION: An Alaska city begins offering residents up to $500 to replace oil-based heating systems with electric heat pumps. (KTOO)
COAL: Data show 10 coal-fired generating units provide about one-third of Colorado’s power, but the facilities all are slated to close by 2031. (Colorado Sun)
OIL & GAS:
UTILITIES: Utah lawmakers raise concerns about the state’s largest utility’s proposed 36% rate hike. (Deseret News)
CLIMATE: A study finds an increase in heat-related deaths between 2018 and 2023, with the vast majority of fatalities occurring in California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas. (Los Angeles Times)
COMMENTARY: California energy analysts find undergrounding power lines is necessary to mitigate wildfire hazard in some areas, but urge utilities to use more cost-effective methods when possible. (Energy Institute at Haas)
GRID: A flood of new solar and battery capacity have kept Texas’ independent state power grid afloat as it sets a new record for peak demand, experts say, though some state lawmakers also credit a new conservation alert system. (Canary Media, KIII)
STORAGE:
SOLAR: A new report highlights Florida as a “solar powerhouse” in the Southeast, with more than 9,000 MW of capacity that’s expected to double by 2027. (WLRN)
OIL & GAS:
COAL: Federal attorneys argue that West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s coal companies shouldn’t have agreed to a settlement for unpaid mine safety fines if they can’t afford to pay. (WV Metro News)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
EFFICIENCY: Tennessee seeks more than $167 million in federal money for home energy rebates, but residents will likely have to wait until spring to begin applying. (Tennessee Lookout)
CLIMATE:
POLITICS: A young Democratic Florida Congress member uses his speech during the Democratic National Convention to spotlight the state’s exposure to climate change. (Florida Politics)
SOLAR: Alabama Power is paying less for power generated by third-party companies and charging them a fee to connect to the grid, prompting criticism that the utility is “trying to protect their monopoly” from solar energy providers. (AL.com)
CLEAN ENERGY:
COAL:
WIND: North Carolina’s second onshore wind farm begins operations as the sector struggles under a 2018 moratorium on wind permits. (Daily Tar Heel)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GRID:
PIPELINES: The Mountain Valley Pipeline identifies a manufacturer’s defect in an elbow joint as the cause of a May rupture that occurred during water pressure testing. (Roanoke Times)
GEOTHERMAL: Two of the most promising companies in the emerging geothermal energy industry are based in Houston, largely because the technology builds on hydraulic fracturing techniques. (Texas Monthly)
BIOMASS: Environmentalists blast Georgia Power’s plan to add 80 megawatts of generation from biomass facilities, which regulators are considering ahead of a mid-September vote. (Georgia Recorder)
STORAGE:
FINANCE: A progressive business group sues Texas over a 2021 law that blocks state investments in companies that have reduced or cut ties with the oil and gas sector and that state officials say are antagonistic to fossil fuels. (Texas Tribune)
STORAGE: Analysts say a significant buildup of battery energy storage capacity over the last two years has helped California’s grid weather this summer’s heat wave-driven power demand spikes. (East Bay Times)
ALSO: Rural Washington state residents push back on a proposed 16-acre battery energy storage system, saying it would take land out of farming. (Capital Press)
SOLAR:
GRID:
MICROGRIDS: A developer plans to install a wind and solar powered microgrid in downtown Honolulu. (news release)
OIL & GAS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES:
MINING: An industry-commissioned report finds Alaska’s mining sector supported 11,800 jobs and $1.1 billion in total wages last year. (Alaska Beacon)
COMMENTARY: A retired attorney calls on the Northwest’s congressional delegations to help prepare for rising power demand by reforming a 1980s law that handicaps the Bonneville Power Administration. (Oregon Capital Chronicle)
GRID: Experts weigh in on how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s newly adopted transmission rules might take shape under a Harris or Trump presidency, and how permitting legislation or a Supreme Court ruling could affect them. (E&E News)
POLITICS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WIND: Federal ocean energy regulators give the country’s first floating offshore wind research lease to Maine for a project of up to 12 turbines near Portland; the state first sought the lease in 2021. (Associated Press)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CARBON CAPTURE: Oil companies are pinning their decarbonization hopes on carbon capture projects to reduce their emissions, but rising construction costs and the lagging pace of related infrastructure development are cutting into the value of federal tax credits for the technology. (Houston Chronicle)
OIL & GAS: Aggressive sales tactics and “compulsion” laws means many Ohio landowners with fracking wells on their properties were forced to accept them, according to a new study. (The Hill)
SOLAR: A solar company’s partnership with a Minnesota agriculture nonprofit helps emerging farmers from around the world grow crops alongside community solar projects. (Sahan Journal)
GRID: New England public advocates say they’re concerned with the structure and cost of Eversource’s proposed $384 million transmission line upgrade project, which they say is overkill given that much of the line is still in good shape. (NHPR)
FOSSIL FUELS: A Bitcoin miner in upstate New York sues the state after being denied an air permit renewal for the gas plant powering its operations. (Gothamist)
SOLAR:
BATTERIES: A Hydro-Québec subsidiary says its first utility-scale battery energy and storage system in the U.S., a 3 MW facility in Troy, Vermont, is now operational. (news release)
BUILDINGS: New York’s governor is “facing pressure on all sides” amid final rulemaking that aims to set emissions standards for refrigerants in commercial refrigerators, residential heat pumps and chillers over the next decade. (E&E News, subscription)
BIOENERGY: In Pennsylvania, a renewable natural gas plant at a Bethlehem landfill officially opens, with enough capacity to heat 14,000 homes. (Lehigh Valley News)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
AFFORDABILITY: Connecticut’s U.S. House delegation wants the state’s utility commission to help alleviate financial pressure on residential ratepayers facing high utility bills. (Hartford Courant)
POLITICS: A New Hampshire newspaper details how the state’s four gubernatorial candidates have described their future climate and energy policies. (New Hampshire Bulletin)
COMMENTARY:
The pair of 1950s-era coal plants bailed out under Ohio’s House Bill 6 law are likely to remain unprofitable even after a surge in grid operator payments to generators, experts say.
The PJM Interconnection grid market makes capacity payments to line up power to meet expected demand in the years ahead. Aging, uneconomical coal plants are being retired at a time when data centers and manufacturers are starting to use more electricity, causing future power generation prices to rise.
But even record-high prices in PJM Interconnection’s recent capacity auction won’t cover the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies paid by ratepayers to cover Ohio utilities’ costs for the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation’s Kyger Creek and Clifty Creek power plants.
“Even with a super high price, OVEC is still going to be in the red,” said Neil Waggoner, Midwest manager for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
The ratepayer subsidies are a result of HB 6, the 2019 state law at the heart of the largest corruption scheme in Ohio’s history. Republican legislative leaders have blocked all efforts to repeal the coal subsidies from coming to a floor vote.
This year alone, ratepayers are on track to pay nearly $200 million to prop up the two plants, one of which is in Indiana. By 2030, total ratepayer costs from the bailout could exceed $1 billion, according to RunnerStone, a consultant for the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association.
Starting next summer, the payments for generators to be ready to supply electricity when PJM Interconnection needs it will jump to about nine times the current rate for most of the grid operator’s service region.
“Put simply, the market pays participants for the promise to produce electricity when called upon by PJM,” said Daniel Lockwood, a spokesperson for the regional grid operator. An auction sets the levels for each year’s capacity payments, and the payments go to generators that bid the clearing price or less.
A spokesperson for the power plants did not directly answer the Energy News Network’s question about whether both cleared the latest PJM auction, although he described the auction results as “positive.”
“The auction results were a positive development for the OVEC plants and are more broadly a signal to the market that additional generation resources are needed in the PJM region,” said Scott Blake, a spokesperson for American Electric Power and Ohio Valley Electric Corp. While the HB 6 rider charges depend on multiple factors, the impact of the 2025/2026 capacity pricing “is expected to be positive for customers,” he said.
AEP is OVEC’s largest shareholder, along with other utility companies in Ohio and other states.
HB 6’s OVEC subsidies currently require Ohio’s residential utility customers to pay between $1.30 and $1.50 per month, depending on whether their utility is owned by AEP, AES Ohio, Duke Energy or FirstEnergy, according to PUCO data from spokesperson Brittany Waugaman. Businesses pay for the rider, too. The HB 6 rider’s net total costs last year were more than $148 million.
While capacity payments will reduce the OVEC plants’ total costs to Ohio ratepayers, the revenue won’t, in itself, make the plants profitable.
Expert testimony from a Michigan case last year found the OVEC plants would need capacity payments averaging about $418/MW-day for several years to become economical. Last month’s record-high price that will take effect next summer was about $270/MW-day.
Economic analyst Devi Glick of Synapse Energy Economics testified in the case on behalf of the Sierra Club.
“To massively oversimplify the economics of the OVEC plants, there are two categories of costs and two categories of revenues,” Glick told Energy News Network. “Costs are on one side of the equation and revenues on the other.”
Based on then-current projections for costs and energy market revenue, Glick calculated what the plants’ capacity revenues would have to be for the equation to balance out.
Several caveats would apply, Waggoner acknowledged, including any differences from last year to this year that could affect projected energy revenues. Nonetheless, he noted, a significant gap would remain.
Glick’s estimate of about $418 as a break-even capacity price for the OVEC plants is realistic and may even be conservative now, said John Seryak, managing partner for RunnerStone.
“PJM is no longer paying for a coal plant’s full power capacity anymore under new rules it created just prior to this capacity auction,” Seryak explained. “That could mean that OVEC needs even higher-priced capacity and energy to be profitable.”
“Future energy market prices, OVEC’s future coal costs, and OVEC’s environmental compliance costs will also be important factors determining the extent of its losses or profitability,” Seryak continued. “All that said, we do not anticipate OVEC operating at a profit without further price increases.”
Blake emphasized the OVEC plants’ role as a “reliable generation resource for our customers and for our region,” adding that the HB 6 rider “ensures that customers in Ohio receive electricity from OVEC for what it costs to produce it and the funds are used to pay down debt with no proceeds going to shareholders.”
That’s not exactly correct, said attorney Kimberly Bojko at Carpenter Lipps, who represents the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association in cases at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. “Customers pay the cost to operate and run OVEC and the power produced from OVEC is then sold into the wholesale electric market,” she said. Any revenue offsets the costs of HB 6’s coal subsidy.
The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association also has disputed the use of the HB 6 rider to pay down the OVEC plants’ debt in cases before the PUCO.
“By using ratepayer funds to pay down its debt, AEP Ohio is essentially shifting its bad debt to the Ohio ratepayers,” Seryak said. “It’s akin to if a person forced their neighbor to pay for their mortgage payment.”
“Customers pay for more than just OVEC’s debt, though,” Seryak added. “Customers also pay for losses in the energy market OVEC incurs. When this occurs, it means the electric grid does not need OVEC for reliability. Instead, OVEC is burning coal pointlessly at a loss and charging it to Ohio’s ratepayers.”
A major expansion of battery storage may be the most economical and environmentally beneficial way for Illinois to maintain grid reliability as it phases out fossil fuel generation, a new study finds.
The analysis was commissioned by the nonprofit Clean Grid Alliance and solar organizations as state lawmakers consider proposed incentives for private developers to build battery storage.
“The outlook is not great for bringing on major amounts of new capacity to replace the retiring capacity,” said Mark Pruitt, former head of the Illinois Power Agency and author of the study, which suggests batteries will be a more realistic path forward than a massive buildout of new generation and transmission infrastructure.
The proposed legislation — SB 3959 and HB 5856 — would require the Illinois Power Agency to procure energy storage capacity for deployment by utilities ComEd and Ameren. Payments would be based on the difference between energy market prices and the costs of charging batteries off-peak, to ensure the storage would be profitable. The need for incentives would theoretically ratchet down over time.
“As market prices for power go up, your incentive goes down,” Pruit said. “The idea is to provide an incentive that bridges the gap between the cost of battery technology and the value in the market. Over time, those will equalize and level out.”
The bills, introduced in May at the end of the legislature’s spring session, would amend existing energy law to add energy storage incentives to state policy, along with existing incentives for nuclear and renewables.
The study noted that Illinois will need at least 8,500 new megawatts of capacity and possibly as much as 15,000 new megawatts between 2030 and 2049, with increased demand driven in part by the growth of data centers. Twenty-five data centers being proposed in Illinois would use as much energy as the state’s five nuclear plants generate, according to nuclear plant owner Exelon’s CEO Calvin Butler Jr., quoted by Bloomberg.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) found in its summer and winter 2024 assessments that within MISO and PJM regional grids, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana are all at “elevated” risk of insufficient capacity.
“NERC, PJM, MISO and the Illinois Commerce Commission have all identified the potential for capacity shortfalls,” said Pruitt. “You do have some options for alleviating that. You can build transmission and bring in capacity from outside the state. You can maintain your current domestic generating capacity [without retiring fossil fuel plants]. You could expand your domestic generating capacity. And an independent variable is your growth rate. All these have to work together, there’s no silver bullet. We know there are major challenges on each of those fronts.”
The latest PJM capacity auction results showed capacity prices increasing from $28.92/MW-Day for the 2024/25 period to $269.92/MW-Day — a nearly 10-fold increase — for the following year. That “translates into an annual cost increase of about $350 for a typical single-family household served by ComEd,” Pruitt said. “The increase in costs indicates that more capacity supply is required to meet capacity demand in the future.”
There are many new generation projects in the queue for interconnection by MISO and PJM, but many of them drop out before ever being deployed because of unviable economics, long delays, regulatory challenges and other issues. A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noted that while interconnection requests for renewables have skyrocketed since the Inflation Reduction Act, only 15% of interconnected capacity was actually completed in PJM and MISO between 2000 and 2018, and experts say similar completion rates persist.
“This finding indicates that deploying sufficient new capacity resources to offset [fossil fuel] retirements is not likely to occur in the near term,” said Pruitt. “Just because something is planned doesn’t mean it gets built.”
Meanwhile the state is running out of funds for the purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs) that are crucial to driving wind and solar development. The 2024 long-term renewable resources procurement plan by the IPA shows the state’s fund for renewables reaching a deficit in 2028, so that spending on RECs from renewables will have to be scaled back by as much as 60%.
Long-distance transmission lines could bring wind energy or other electricity from out of state. But planned transmission lines have faced hurdles. The Grain Belt Express transmission line, in the works for a decade, was in August denied needed approval from an Illinois appellate court. The transmission line, proposed by Invenergy, would have brought wind power from Kansas to load centers to the east.
“That sets it back years,” Pruitt said. “Transmission is a very long-term solution. I’m sure people are working diligently on it, but it’s five to 10 years before you get something approved and built.”
Pruitt’s study found that if 8,500 MW of energy storage were deployed between 2030 and 2049, Illinois customers could see up to $3 billion in savings compared to if they had to foot the bill for increased capacity without new storage. The savings would come because of lower market prices in capacity auctions, as well as investment in new transmission and generation that would be avoided.
Pruitt found that $11 billion to $28 billion in macro-level economic benefits could also result, with blackouts avoided, reduced fossil fuel emissions and jobs and economic stimulus created.
Pruitt’s analysis indicates that the incentives proposed in the legislation would cost $6.4 billion to customers. But the storage would result in $9.4 billion in savings compared to the status quo, hence a $3 billion overall savings between 2030 and 2049.
“Solar is great, but solar is an intermittent resource; battery storage when paired with solar allows it to be far more reliable,” said Andrew Linhares, Central Region senior manager for the Solar Energy Industry Association. “Battery storage is not as cheap as solar, but its reliability is its hallmark. Combining the resources gives you a cheap and reliable resource.”
“Solar and storage is this powerful tool that can help reduce costs for consumers and create new jobs and economic activity,” he continued. “I don’t believe that same picture is there for building out new natural gas resources. Anything that helps storage, helps solar and vice versa. CEJA sees these two technologies as being joined at the hip for the future, they are being seen more and more as a single resource.”
GRID: The San Carlos Apache Tribe calls on the federal government to replace an aging transmission line after unusually high winds damaged it and left the northern half of the southeastern Arizona reservation without power. (Associated Press)
ALSO:
SOLAR: The federal Bureau of Land Management seeks public input on the proposed 600 MW Samantha solar-plus-storage project in eastern Nevada. (news release)
HYDROGEN:
UTILITIES: A southern Idaho utility breaks ground on a 17.5 MW natural gas peaker plant and energy research center. (Local News 8)
STORAGE: Industry observers worry a proposed 150 MW battery energy storage system in Idaho could run into opposition after a county in the state rejected a utility-scale solar project. (Power Engineering)
CARBON CAPTURE: A study finds previous estimates vastly overinflate the amount of carbon dioxide that can be stored in crops and soil, throwing an Oregon initiative relying on agricultural carbon sequestration into question. (OPB)
OIL & GAS:
TRANSPORTATION: A historic tourist railroad in southwestern Colorado converts its coal-burning steam locomotives to run on oil in an effort to reduce wildfire hazard. (KSUT)
GEOTHERMAL: Colorado regulators adopt rules for deep geothermal development after expanding their focus from oil and gas to other energy and carbon capture projects. (Colorado Politics)
COAL: Wyoming leads 17 other states in a lawsuit seeking to block new U.S. EPA coal ash impoundment rules scheduled to take effect in November. (Cowboy State Daily)
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