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Standing alone on a rocky coastline wearing a seaman-style knit hat, Samuel L. Jackson reaches into a snack bag and gazes intensely through binoculars. Wind turbines spin ominously on a watery horizon.
“Motherfucking wind farms. Loud, ugly, harmful to nature,” the “Pulp Fiction” actor says. Then, shaking his head knowingly and shifting his tone, he adds, “Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up from the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”
The 60-second ad, released in July, immediately went viral. It also ran on television channels in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and other European countries. It’s part of a marketing campaign launched by Vattenfall, a century-old Swedish energy giant whose clean energy portfolio includes a famous 11-turbine project built within view of President Donald Trump’s Scotland golf course.
The ad reached 600 million viewers across 33 countries within four days of its release, according to a Vattenfall spokesperson. Trump isn’t named in the video, but Jackson’s script is a comedic wink-and-nod to the president’s frequent anti-wind rants.
“So, what’s it going to be? ‘Motherfucking wind farms’?” Jackson says in a mock angry voice at the end of the video. He then repeats the question, grinning widely and raising his eyebrows cheekily: “Or ‘motherfucking wind farms’?”
Research shows that comedy plays a powerful role in making climate change information salient for public audiences. That’s especially useful now, as the Trump administration works to derail the clean energy transition, but such efforts also come at a fraught moment for comedy in America.
It’s a tough time for political satire. In July, CBS cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after Colbert used the phrase “big fat bribe” to describe a $16 million settlement the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump. CBS said the show was killed for financial reasons, but the timing led to speculations that the decision may have been politically motivated.
Then in mid-September, ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” after comments he made related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk provoked a veiled threat from Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. The network’s parent company, Disney, reversed course on Monday following public backlash, and Kimmel was back on air Tuesday.
“There’s this tragedy of killing freedom of speech. … The reason this is happening is because [Trump officials] don’t have the superpower of comedy,” said Staci Roberts-Steele, a producer for the wildly successful film “Don’t Look Up.” The 2021 Netflix movie used satire to point out the absurdity of delaying climate action.
America now has a president pumping the brakes on the clean energy transition, most recently by attempting to scuttle numerous U.S. offshore wind farms already in development.
Trump has called wind turbines “ugly,” “terrible for tourism,” and responsible for “driving the whales crazy.” His dislike of “windmills” dates back to his unsuccessful court battle in the U.K. to stop a Vattenfall offshore wind farm from being installed within view of his Aberdeen, Scotland, golf course. All 11 turbines were eventually built in 2018.
Some Americans who saw the foul-mouthed Jackson ad on social media relished a major Hollywood movie star poking fun at Trump’s favorite anti-climate talking points. Roberts-Steele said she is glad that big European companies like Vattenfall are turning to humor to call out climate disinformation — and that the content is finding American audiences. She hopes it emboldens U.S. comedians and institutions to follow suit.
“The Europeans have been doing it much longer than us. … That’s totally true,” she lamented, adding that U.S. public relations firms and film studios have been less bold about taking big swings at climate skepticism.
“Don’t Look Up” was a rarity for Hollywood. But its chart-topping success mirrors Jackson’s ad in several ways.
Both employed comedy to tackle the topic of climate change. Casting major Hollywood actors drew loads of viewers. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill all starred in what became Netflix’s fourth most successful movie of all time.
Hollywood hasn’t generated a major climate comedy since.
Roberts-Steele is now leading Yellow Dot Studios, a new nonprofit aimed at keeping the climate jokes coming. The studio hosts live comedy events, develops podcasts, and produces short-form videos that, among other things, mock the fossil-fuel industry.
But mainstreaming this kind of comedy isn’t easy, even with Hollywood director Adam McKay as the group’s founder and board member.
“It hasn’t yet trickled up,” said Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the fusion of climate change and comedy. After years researching the topic, he’s now trying to catalyze it.
Boykoff and his students — in collaboration with CU Boulder theater professor Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke — are part of an ongoing collaboration with some of the nation’s top writers’ rooms.
They’ve been working with writers on “The Daily Show,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and Comedy Central to make climate change news funny and memorable. On Saturday, Boykoff and his students produced a climate-themed comedy show with professional comedians in New York City, timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC.
“Comedy has this power to point out the contradictions in which we live,” said Boykoff. “It’s through comedy that people feel like they’re not being talked down to or lectured.”
With late-night shows facing intimidation under Trump, Boykoff said the involvement of independent academics — like himself — is more important than ever. He added that Europe’s role should not be discounted either.
The Samuel L. Jackson ad was the brainchild of the communications team at Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned energy company that has been around for more than 100 years. It manages a wide range of projects, from hydroelectric dams to offshore wind farms. The company’s long-term goal with its outreach is to spread the idea of freedom from fossil fuels, said Monica Persdotter, vice president and head of brand.
Unlike past campaigns, she said, this one “took off.”
“We’ve always been very bold in the way that we present ourselves to the world, with the messages that we have, which always circles back to fossil-free energy and fossil freedom,” said Persdotter.
The ad hit Vattenfall’s core market — the U.K. and European Union — where the offshore wind sector has grown steadily for decades. For example, offshore wind farms generated 17% of the U.K.’s electricity last year.
Vattenfall operates more than 1,400 wind turbines across 14 wind farms, with a total installed capacity of approximately 6.6 gigawatts in five European countries, according to Persdotter. Several other Vattenfall wind projects are also in the works.
Meanwhile, the U.S. only has one large-scale offshore wind farm in operation. Four others are currently being built in America’s waters. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused construction on a fifth one, Revolution Wind, in August, but this week, the project’s developer, Ørsted, a Danish state-owned company, won a court-ordered injunction lifting the freeze.
Given the contrast between Europe and the U.S., Jackson, a widely recognizable American actor, was a powerful choice for Vattenfall’s ad.
According to Persdotter, her team got a tip that Jackson had studied marine biology in college and, at one point, considered a career in the field. The actor, she said, liked the script, making just a few stylistic tweaks to better align with his voice.
The ad was filmed along the California coast to accommodate Jackson’s schedule. The Golden State has no wind turbines installed in its waters yet — though the Los Angeles Times reports that the state, despite losing some federal funding, has not backed down from its plans to deploy the technology. The ad’s wind turbines were superimposed post-production using video footage of a real Vattenfall wind farm in Denmark.
As for the snack bag Jackson dips into — that’s a nod to the fact that wind farms can provide benefits beyond generating carbon-free electricity, for example, serving as sites for seaweed farming. The seaweed snack Jackson is munching — which he calls “serious gourmet shit” — isn’t commercially available yet, but Persdotter said it was harvested from experimental seaweed farming “lines” strung between wind turbines at Vesterhav Syd, a Vattenfall project in Denmark’s waters. (Vattenfall sent Canary Media a bag of the prototype snack, and a reporter verified that it tasted like conventional seaweed snacks.)
Trump, who famously cannot take a joke, has continued to call for the silencing of comedians critical of his policies, and he’s also been ramping up his attacks on offshore wind.
Last week, during a press conference in England with the U.K. prime minister, the president went on an unprompted rant about the clean energy resource, saying, “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster. It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Trump may not like jokes. But if the popularity of Vattenfall’s video is any indication, Europeans are clearly having a laugh at him. Roberts-Steele said Americans will keep laughing, too, as long as comedians are free to make the jokes.
LAS VEGAS — There were plenty of reasons to think that this year’s RE+, the U.S. solar industry’s biggest annual gathering, would be a gloomy and downtrodden affair.
The Trump administration had declared an energy emergency, then set about reducing energy supply by going after renewables projects. The massive spending law yanked nearly seven years of tax credits for wind and solar. The White House arbitrarily halted construction on two major offshore wind farms that had all their permits in order, raising the fear that it might block other fully approved projects. Tariffs have changed the price of parts that go into clean energy equipment on a sometimes weekly basis. The cleantech bankruptcies have been relentless: Powin, Sunnova, Mosaic, Northvolt, Li-Cycle, Nikola, to name a few.
“I can’t think of a time when we have been subject to quite as much of a brutal swing as we’ve been in now,” said Abby Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which puts on the conference.
But when I got to the exhibit hall at the Venetian Expo, it stretched farther than I’d ever seen at a clean energy show, and I heard rumors of additional halls above and below. The exhibitors even sprawled across a sunwashed bridge to Caesar’s Forum, where vendors of flow batteries and other alternative technologies hawked their wares, quite fittingly, from the periphery of the event.
Final attendance for the show hit 37,000, just shy of the record 40,000 from the previous two years, and other metrics broke records. The mood on the floor, in the halls, and at the myriad Vegas afterparties reflected an industry that had taken some punches, had lost some nice things, but was nonetheless charging forward, resolute and battle-tested.
“If you’d asked me in May how I was feeling about RE+, I would have a very different answer,” Hopper noted at a roundtable with journalists a few days into the show. “But we have more exhibitors than we’ve ever had in our history, and we have more registration revenue than we’ve ever had in our history. … [People] are really, really hungry for information and for a vision for what’s coming next.”
Judging by this year’s dire headlines, the show’s ebullient atmosphere does not seem entirely rational. Of course, even teetering startups try to project confidence among peers, customers, and especially journalists. And the overstimulated Vegas backdrop inspires a particular strain of optimism, the kind that encourages you to light cash on fire and feel lucky for the opportunity.
But after three days of roaming the frenetic halls, I came to see this year’s positive outlook as warranted. The general consensus among conference goers seemed to be that though political headwinds are blowing hard, economic tailwinds are blowing harder. Here are three reasons why I think they are right.
With the federal tax credits cut short, fewer solar projects will get built, and costs will rise for the ones that still go forward, passing on higher energy bills to American consumers.
But, with a little distance from the sting of this summer’s legislative setbacks, many solar and energy storage professionals believe losses in the policy arena are counterbalanced by increasingly rosy outlooks in the marketplace.
“I think people tend to over-orient on the policy story, and under-orient on the economic and financial story,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of the clean energy financing platform Crux, as we sipped espressos outside the hubbub of the cavernous expo halls.
Johnson’s company launched as a marketplace for tax credit transferability, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, but has expanded into other forms of financing, like debt and tax equity. That perch gives him visibility into clean energy project economics and the flows of capital into the sector. He ticked off a series of key factors defining the current energy market: Electricity prices are way up; solar and battery keeps getting cheaper while improving performance; gas prices are rising as the Trump administration promotes exports; gas turbine prices are rising due to intense competition from buyers.
In short, it’s a bad time to be someone who uses electricity in America, despite President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to cut energy prices. That means, though, that it’s a great time to be someone who sells power.
Even better for power producers, the biggest new customers — data centers — have the price sensitivity of a ravenous grizzly bear. They’re trying, with the enthusiastic support of the White House, to win a global arms race to unlock artificial superintelligence, whatever that means. Facing such civilizational stakes, the hyperscalers aren’t going to quibble over nickels and dimes.
Even with elevated electricity prices, hyperscalers still have to pay a lot more for the “graphics processing units” that train and run their AI models, Johnson noted. And once they’ve paid for those GPUs, they want to use them as much as possible, which means gobbling up as much electricity as they can get.
“The value of being faster on delivering the model … is worth so much more … than the additional cost of energy, which means that the marginal demand in a lot of these markets is the data centers, who are not price sensitive,” Johnson said.
Solar is clearly the cheapest source of new electricity production. But what matters most now is speed to market, and here solar and batteries easily trounce all other commercially viable sources of power. Taking mass-produced panels and parts and assembling them in a field is fundamentally easier than constructing a traditional large power plant. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than some of the hyperscalers’ other ideas, like building nonexistent nuclear fusion plants, or nonexistent small modular reactors, or restarting a long-shuttered nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island plant.
These dynamics led some of my fellow conference goers to muse about a counterfactual choice: Would you rather have strong federal policy tailwinds and an unfavorable market, or booming market fundamentals but unfavorable policy? Nine months ago, the industry enjoyed both. Trump ended those good times, but the robust market serves to mollify the pain of his policy attacks.
SEIA has strived to welcome energy storage into the fold, and diversification from solar alone looks especially prescient these days. Rooftop solar is struggling in a big way, with the federal onslaught and friendly fire from states like California, and large-scale developers are racing to cram in a bumper crop of projects before tax credits disappear next July. (Projects that start construction after that must be operating by the end of 2027 to qualify for the federal incentives.) But storage companies evaded the policy setbacks of their solar-powered brethren, and are building toward yet another record year of construction.
“Right now, we are seeing all of the factors are very supportive to storage,” said Johnson. “Demand is going up, there’s more of a focus on having dispatchable power. It got tax credits for the first time in the IRA … and then it retained the tax credits in [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act].”
The budget law preserves the battery-installation tax credits through 2033, with the stipulation that projects prove they don’t excessively rely on parts or corporate support from China. That sparked initial concerns from some analysts that these Foreign Entity of Concern rules (FEOC) could be enforced in a way that strangles development arbitrarily.
A few months later, many storage developers are encouraged by how clearly the text of the law lays out the boxes to check. Even so, compliance creates extra work for the American companies trying to expand the capacity of the grid, and the law does not explicitly encourage domestic manufacturing, since the rules are anti-China rather than pro-America.
Trump’s tariffs also pose a unique threat to storage, because so many of the battery cells used in these projects come from China. The U.S. has only just begun building supply chains for lithium ferrous phosphate, the battery chemistry now favored for grid storage. LG opened an LFP factory in Michigan this summer; AESC did so in an old Nissan Leaf battery plant in Tennessee, and Tesla is working on one in Nevada slated to start up early next year.
Now, said Brian Hayes, CEO of storage developer Key Capture Energy, it’s common for suppliers to offer three battery-sourcing options: China, Southeast Asia, and domestic. Buyers can toggle based on current tariff rates, U.S. manufacturing premiums, and the FEOC obligations of a particular project. Once the new FEOC rules kick in, though, the industry will need to move away from Chinese-made battery cells.
“I’m feeling a lot more positive today than I was six months ago,” said Hayes, whose company has built 40 megawatts in New York and 580 megawatts in Texas. “We ended up in a good place.”
That’s not to say storage developers can afford to get complacent.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” Hayes mused. “We always have to be paying attention to what else could come.”
The Biden administration combined trade policy with methodical domestic incentives to reshore the manufacturing of clean energy equipment and other tech, like semiconductors. Trump supports the resurgence of domestic manufacturing in theory, but his primary tactic for that goal has been frequently shifting and legally dubious tariffs. These policies raise the price for materials that American manufacturers need to make their products and for the equipment required to build new factories, and they undermine the long-term certainty that reassures investors.
Still, the reshoring of clean energy supply chains has continued, and signs touting FEOC compliance have become a new form of currency on the expo hall floors.
Nextracker, the homegrown solar-tracking manufacturer and publicly traded cleantech success story, used the occasion of the conference to publicize its acquisition of Origami Solar for $53 million. That marked a refreshing shift in an era when cleantech acquisitions have tended to feature bankruptcy auctions or the kind of firesale where participants abashedly refuse to share the purchase price.
Origami developed a steel frame technology to replace the usual aluminum frames that wrap around solar panels. This enhances structural integrity as solar modules grow ever larger and more powerful. Indiana manufacturer Bila Solar, for instance, recently tapped Origami to frame its new 550-watt solar module.
But beyond preventing bending or buckling, the acquisition is a domestic-production play. The U.S. aluminium industry has cratered since the 1980s, so aluminum frames are now largely an import business, subject to all the vagaries of trade in 2025. The U.S. still makes things with steel though; Nextracker has been working with partners to open steel plants around the country to produce the torque tubes that carry the panels through their daily rotation. Origami manufactures in the U.S. too; now Nextracker can offer a more complete domestic solar package, making it easier for developers to clinch the 10% tax credit adder for Made-in-America content.
Over in Texas, module manufacturer T1 Energy signed a deal a few weeks back with glass producer Corning for a lot more than oven-safe casserole dishes. Corning subsidiary Hemlock Semiconductor will make hyper-pure polysilicon and carve it into solar wafers in Michigan, to supply T1’s forthcoming solar cell factory starting in the second half of 2026.
I tracked down Alex Zhu, CEO of ES Foundry, which in January opened one of the only currently operating solar cell factories in the country. Production from the 1-gigawatt line in Greenwood, South Carolina, is already sold out until 2027, Zhu said. He has greenlit a 2-gigawatt expansion, slated to be fully running by June 2026, to meet demand from domestic panel producers. A digital display by the company’s booth advertised “No FEOC Ownership. No FEOC Board. No FEOC Funding.”
Zhu stressed that it wasn’t easy opening a cell factory when the U.S. lacks a supply chain for some of the industrial inputs that are abundant and cheap in China. One of the key gases used in the process cost him 120 times the rate it sells for in that country’s solar industry centers. But Zhu nonetheless raised investment, launched the company, and built the factory all in the last two years.
Sales of these U.S.-made cells very much depend on the domestic content adder to compete with cheaper imports: “That’s the only drive to make the economic sense to buy a more expensive domestic module and domestic cell,” Zhu noted.
That’s a clear risk factor, because that perk will disappear along with the solar tax credits. But tax rules say that if developers start construction before next July 4, they can take up to four years to finish projects. That means projects could get built with both the credit and the domestic content adder through the end of the decade.
It’s hard to know what context manufacturers will be operating in at that point. But Zhu noted that “after five years, we definitely need to move to the next generation.” Much like semiconductor fabs, solar cell factories must regularly refresh themselves to keep up with technological advancements.
Longer-term certainty would be nice for the generational effort to reshore the solar supply chain, but maybe five busy years of manufacturing is enough to look forward to right now.
Maryland’s first offshore wind farm could have broken ground next year. But now the 114-turbine renewable energy project is all but doomed following the Trump administration’s most recent move in a long line of attacks on the industry.
In a motion filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Interior Department asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was authorized in the final weeks of the Biden administration. The wind farm was expected to power over 718,000 homes in a Democrat-led state facing rocketing energy demands.
Officials claim that the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made an “error” when assessing the turbines’ potential impact on other activities — like search-and-rescue operations and fishing — within the 80,000-acre swath of ocean where the wind farm would be located.
The project is over a decade in the making, with developer US Wind purchasing the lease in 2014. But after President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July and greatly shortened the duration of the wind energy tax credit, Maryland’s first offshore wind farm already seemed impossible to pull off — at least economically.
Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst with BloombergNEF, told Canary Media in July that with the tax credits sunsetting at a much earlier date, the Maryland project would likely no longer be able to offset 30% of its costs. The original rule for receiving the incentives required construction to start by 2033 or potentially even later, but the new law stipulates that wind farms must be “placed in service” by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify.
Onshore construction is not supposed to start until next year at the earliest, and at-sea installation not until 2028, so the new deadline for receiving tax credits was crushing. Also, US Wind doesn’t have its financing in place yet to underwrite construction, according to Sholler. Securing financing without those credits guaranteed is a hard sell.
Analysts saw the tightening of the tax credit’s timeframe down to this one-year sprint as the final nail in the coffin for offshore wind farms that were fully approved but not currently underway.
Two projects — MarWin, the first phase of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, and New England Wind off the Massachusetts coastline — exist in that gray zone. If the judge yanks its approval, MarWin will almost certainly be mothballed for the rest of Trump’s tenure.
Four offshore wind farms are currently being built in America’s waters. A fifth project, Revolution Wind, is 80% complete, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused its construction in August, citing “national security” concerns. Project developer Ørsted is challenging the federal freeze in court. That saga is part of an escalating war on wind power led by the White House that has thrown the industry into chaos in recent weeks.
US Wind is a joint venture of the Italian corporate giant Toto Holding and Apollo Global Management, an investment firm. A spokesperson for the company said it will fight to maintain its approvals.
“After many years of analysis, several federal agencies issued final permits to the project,” spokesperson Nancy Sopko said in a public statement released Friday. “We intend to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
California’s Legislature has approved a slate of policies aimed at curbing high and rising electricity costs, involving everything from short-term relief for high summertime utility bills to public financing of transmission grids — a big accomplishment in the waning days of the session.
The affordability measures emerged as part of a sprawling energy and climate package negotiated by legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office last week and passed by lawmakers Saturday. Newsom, a Democrat, now has until Oct. 12 to sign the bills into law.
“It’s just a massive end of session,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, a Democrat whose bill, SB 254, was included in the package. “We had all these planes in the air. Are they all going to crash, or are they going to land?”
Becker hopes the provisions in SB 254 will contain rapidly rising costs for the state’s three biggest utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — which are in turn driving up rates for their customers. Those residents now pay roughly twice the U.S. average for their power, and nearly one in five are behind on paying their energy bills.
“Energy affordability was understood to be one of the top issues the Legislature needed to act on, due to massive rate increases and widespread customer outrage,” said Matthew Freedman, staff attorney at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group that supported SB 254.
Among other things, that legislation aims to rein in how much utilities spend hardening their grids to reduce the risk of sparking wildfires, a major factor in cost increases. To that end, the bill would prohibit utilities from earning profits on some of the investments they make in wildfire-related upgrades.
It would also create a new “transmission accelerator” that enables utilities to use public financing to expand the state’s high-voltage grid rather than recoup those expenditures by charging customers. Those savings will take longer to kick in but could add up to billions of dollars a year, said Sam Uden, managing director of Net-Zero California, an advocacy group that cowrote a report last year examining how much utilities could save by relying on public financing.
“There’s a strategic role for public-sector investment to drive the clean energy transition,” he said. “We see this transmission financing as an embodiment of that viewpoint.”
SB 254 ended up as a 136-page document with a multitude of energy and climate provisions, Becker told Canary Media last week. But he highlighted one set of key cost-containment measures that the utilities had particularly resisted.
Utilities typically earn a profit by receiving a return on the investments they make in grid upkeep. Now, though, California’s big three utilities will have to finance a portion of what they spend hardening their grids via bonds — a process known as securitization.
Utilities “were kicking and screaming on that,” Becker said.
The amount to be financed through bonds was initially set to be $15 billion for all three utilities. But Freedman suggested that the utilities might have used their political clout last week to negotiate the final securitization requirement down to $6 billion, which is “a pretty big reduction,” he said.
Regardless, securitizing a portion of the growing grid-hardening costs will reduce pressure on utilities to increase rates in the future, said Merrian Borgeson, California policy director for climate and energy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which supported the legislation. “I don’t know what the rates are going to be next year, but they’ll be lower,” she said.
Enabling public financing of transmission projects could deliver even more savings over time, Borgeson said. The “transmission accelerator” created by SB 254 for that purpose would be based out of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz). That entity would be authorized to pool state funds drawn from California’s cap-and-trade program and from a climate bond passed last year to lower the cost of capital for transmission projects.
The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, estimates that California must invest between $46 billion and $63 billion into transmission over the next 20 years to meet its goal of achieving a carbon-free grid by 2045. Using public money to offset a portion of utilities’ capital spending on those projects could cut the costs of the currently planned long-range transmission buildout by more than half, saving customers as much as $3 billion a year, according to an October report from Net-Zero California and the Clean Air Task Force.
Just how much money could be saved will depend on how the accelerator structures its public-private financing, Freedman said. “SB 254 leaves open a range of possible outcomes on this front,” he added. “It depends on the ambitiousness of the implementation by this and future governors.”
The final days of this year’s session also saw lawmakers reauthorize the state’s decade-old cap-and-trade program, an initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was set to expire in 2030. AB 1207 and SB 840 would extend the program through 2045 and make a number of changes with significant implications for polluting industries, though regulators and lawmakers still need to work out the exact structures for executing the new rules, Borgeson said.
The bills also take an initial stab at reallocating funds raised by the cap-and-trade system to the myriad state programs and industry sectors jockeying for the money.
For example, one key affordability measure in AB 1207 institutes important changes to the “climate credit” now paid to utility customers out of funds collected from the cap-and-trade program.
Today, those credits are delivered to customers in twice-a-year lump-sum rebates. Under the new structure created by AB 1207, those rebates can be redirected to specifically help lower utility bills during summer months, when air conditioning drives up power consumption.
“Just think about the Central Valley,” Becker said during a virtual town-hall event in June, referring to a region of California that’s both hotter and poorer than the rest of the state. During summer heat waves, “it’s 100 degrees all day — and sometimes all night — in those areas. It’s literally a matter of life and death to keep the air conditioning on.”
AB 1207 will also redirect climate credits issued to gas utilities to support lowering summer electrical bills exclusively, through a process to be worked out by California utility regulators, Borgeson said. (Today, both gas utilities and electric utilities issue climate credits to their customers.)
That provision was strongly opposed by Sempra, the holding company of San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co., the state’s biggest gas-only utility. In an opposition letter, Sempra said the shift would create a “statewide subsidy requiring gas customers to fund bill relief for electric customers, worsening the high cost of living in California for millions of families.”
But climate advocates say the legislation aligns with California’s goal of shifting customers from using gas to using electricity. “This is a good idea, because it doesn’t need any more money,” Juliet Christian-Smith, Western states program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Canary Media in July. Instead, “it’s redirecting money already in a pot to reduce electricity rates and enable the clean energy transition in a more affordable way.”
We’re in the midst of a global solar revolution. Don’t believe it? Just look at the latest numbers.
In the first six months of this year, the world built 64% more new solar energy capacity than it did in the first half of 2024, according to think tank Ember. The 380 gigawatts’ worth of solar installed through June of this year is roughly equal to the amount of solar installed in all of 2021 and 2022 combined.
The story of this global solar boom is, really, the story of solar growth in China.
The country, which is the world’s largest producer of solar equipment and most other clean-energy technologies, on its own deployed 256 GW of new solar over the first half of this year — more than two-thirds of the global total. That’s double the amount it installed during the same period last year.
China’s rapid buildout of solar is welcome news. The country emits more planet-warming greenhouse gases than any other, in large part because it burns prodigious amounts of coal to produce electricity for its 1.4 billion citizens. But solar and other renewables are now putting enough of a dent in the country’s coal use that some analysts expect China’s overall emissions to decline this year.
Outside of China, the rest of the world installed just 15% more solar capacity in the first half of this year than it did in the first half of last year.
The two next-biggest solar installers over this time period were India, at 24 GW, and the U.S., at 21 GW. The U.S. is still managing to push solar to new heights despite the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy.
Overall, solar provided just 7% of electricity generated around the globe last year. That percentage needs to increase — fast — so the world can ditch fossil fuels and bend the emissions curve downward. Luckily, solar has so far proven up to the challenge of growing at an astonishing rate.
Solar generated more power than it ever has before on Texas’ grid earlier this month.
That’s impressive, but even more so when you consider that it was the 17th record the power source set in the state this year, according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The record setting started bright and early on Jan. 24, when solar generated 22.1 gigawatts of power. That figure has since steadily risen, and on Sept. 9, solar produced a huge 29.9 GW. Also that day, solar provided more than 40% of the state’s power from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., per data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator.
That early September day capped a groundbreaking summer for solar in Texas. From June 1 through Aug. 31, solar met 15.2% of all demand in the ERCOT system. Coal provided for 12.5% of demand during that time.
And solar wasn’t the only top performer this year. Battery storage has already set four discharge records in Texas this month, often charging up on solar power that floods the grid in the mornings and putting it back into the system when the sun sets, per the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Texas’ extreme summer temperatures have frequently driven ERCOT to ask people to conserve power, warning that increased air-conditioning use could overwhelm the grid’s energy supplies. But this year, ERCOT didn’t ask customers to conserve power at all, and credited its summertime stability to Texas’ nation-leading deployment of solar and batteries.
This all reveals solar’s growing ability to replace fossil fuels and meet power demand in Texas, especially when the clean energy source is paired with batteries. And it couldn’t be more necessary: The U.S. Energy Information Administration anticipates demand in ERCOT will surge as much as 23% from 2024 to 2026.
Meanwhile, natural gas is failing to meet the moment. Texas developers have proposed building more than 100 new gas power plants in the next few years to meet rising demand from data centers and other heavy industry. The state created a $7.2 billion loan program to incentivize gas plant construction, but more than two years after that fund was launched, just two facilities have been approved for only $321 million in loans. Developers pulled another seven projects from consideration, citing high costs and supply chain challenges.
Solar and batteries, meanwhile, remain among the cheapest and quickest ways to add power generation to the grid — though the Trump administration isn’t making it any easier for communities to yield the benefits of these technologies as it rolls back federal clean energy tax credits and solar-boosting programs.
Even polluters are wary of EPA’s rollback of greenhouse gas reporting
The U.S. EPA proposed late last week to kill its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which has required top polluters to disclose their planet-warming emissions for around 15 years. The rule change would end the collection of data from 46 sources, including power plants, and pause data collection from several petroleum and natural gas industry sources until 2034.
The EPA, as well as states and cities, have used Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data to create emissions-reduction targets and regulations. Still, one oil and gas lobbyist told E&E News that the industry actually pushed for modifications to the program rather than a full repeal, which could complicate trade with the European Union.
A carbon-capture industry coalition is also opposing the program’s end, saying the reporting rules are “inextricably” tied to federal carbon-capture incentives and the repeal would hurt the industry’s growth.
Trump admin targets two more offshore wind projects
A new wave of federal attacks on offshore wind started last Friday as the U.S. Department of the Interior asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports. Republicans in Congress had already saddled the project with potentially insurmountable financial challenges by mandating an early end to federal tax credits, and this potential permit dismissal leaves it in even more trouble.
Just yesterday, Interior asked another court to revoke the same approval for SouthCoast Wind, a 141-turbine project off the coast of Massachusetts. The planned project had similarly been facing financial difficulties.
Meanwhile, the fight to continue building the Revolution Wind project carries on. The Democratic attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island, which would receive power from the nearly complete offshore array halted by the Trump administration, are now seeking a court order to let construction resume.
Surprise, surprise: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reaffirms that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet, despite the Trump administration’s moves to downplay and even disavow that finding. (E&E News)
DOE’s new energy philosophy: An Energy Department official touts a “best of the above” approach to power generation in a congressional hearing, as an alternative to the “all of the above” energy philosophy. (E&E News)
States’ new climate fight: Four states team up to battle the Trump administration’s attacks on the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases are a hazard to public health and underpins many federal climate regulations. (CT Mirror)
Rivian presses on: Rivian broke ground on its $5 billion factory in Georgia this week after long delays, and even though federal EV tax credits are set to expire at the end of this month. (Associated Press)
Affordability in focus: California legislators pass a slate of legislation to lower energy bills, including measures to curb utility profits from grid upkeep and to accelerate transmission development via public financing. (Canary Media)
Electrifying your seafood tower: In the coastal waters of rural Maine, some early adopters of electric boats are proving they’re a quieter, cleaner alternative to petroleum-powered vessels that dominate oyster farming and other aquaculture industries. (Canary Media)
Art Deco decarbonization: A former terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport that’s now an administrative building got an all-electric renovation, and could be a blueprint for other historic buildings looking to decarbonize. (Canary Media)
Cooking up contradiction: Top appliance companies have quietly removed comparisons of gas and induction stoves’ air quality impacts from their websites as the industry fights a Colorado law mandating warning labels on gas stoves. (Grist)
That used-car smell: Used EV sales have risen 40% over the last year as buyers find they’re often cheaper than comparable gas-powered cars. (New York Times)
A novel solar power project just went online in California’s Central Valley, with panels that span across canals in the vast agricultural region.
The 1.6-megawatt installation, called Project Nexus, was fully completed late last month. The $20 million state-funded pilot has turned stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District’s canals into hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.
Project Nexus is only the second canal-based solar array to operate in the United States — and one of just a handful in the world. America’s first solar-canal project started producing power in October 2024 for the Pima and Maricopa tribes, known together as the Gila River Indian Community, on their reservation near Phoenix, Arizona. Two more canal-top arrays are already in the works there.
In California, the solar-canal system was built in two phases, with a 20-foot-wide stretch completed in March and a roughly 110-foot-wide portion finished at the end of August. Researchers will study the project’s performance over time, while a new initiative led by California universities and the company Solar Aquagrid will push to fast-track the deployment of solar canals across the state.
Proponents of this emerging approach say it can provide overlapping benefits.
Early research suggests that, along with producing power in land-constrained areas, putting solar arrays above water can help keep panels cool, in turn improving their efficiency and electricity output. Shade from the panels can also prevent water loss through evaporation in drought-prone regions and can limit algae growth in waterways.
Plus, solar canals could offer a faster path to clean energy development than utility-scale solar farms, especially in rural parts of the U.S. where big renewables projects increasingly face community opposition. Placing solar panels atop existing infrastructure doesn’t require altering the landscape, and the relatively small installations can be plugged into nearby distribution lines, avoiding the cumbersome process of connecting to the higher-voltage wires required for bigger undertakings.
“Why disturb land that has sacred value when we could just put the solar panels over a canal and generate more efficient power?” said David DeJong, director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, which is developing a water-delivery system for the Gila River Indian Community.
The purpose of these early arrays is primarily to power on-site canal equipment like pumps and gates. But such projects could eventually help clean up the larger grid, too. A coalition of U.S. environmental groups previously estimated that putting panels over 8,000 miles of federally owned canals and aqueducts could generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power nearly 20 million homes — and reduce water evaporation by possibly tens of billions of gallons.
Still, the technology isn’t an obvious choice for many canal operators.
Elevating solar panels over canals is more expensive and technically complex than installing conventional ground-mounted solar arrays on trackers, and it can involve using more concrete and steel. Wider canals may also require support structures for panels within the waterway, which can disrupt the flow of water.
Earlier this year, a senior engineer at Arizona’s Salt River Project recommended that the power and water utility not pursue a solar-canal pilot “based on cost estimates and project concerns,” after comparing the unique design to both rooftop and utility-scale solar alternatives.
Solar-canal developers are hoping they can still gain a toehold in irrigation districts that are grappling with high electricity costs and have limited options for generating cheap power, said Ben Lepley, the founder of engineering firm Tectonicus, which designed the Gila River Indian Community’s 1.3-MW system south of Phoenix.
The initial costs are “definitely higher … but it can actually be really fast as a project,” Lepley said. “By the next year, you can have really cheap electricity, and that gives [irrigation districts] stability over the 30-year life of the project.”
For its part, the Gila River Indian Community is building solar-canal projects as part of its broader mission to “generate enough renewable energy to completely offset the electrical use by the irrigation district,” said DeJong. He noted the district pays about $3 million a year for the 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity it needs to pump, move, and store water.
The community built its first solar-canal project over the Casa Blanca Canal with a nearly $5.7 million grant provided by the Inflation Reduction Act — part of a $25 million provision that supplied funding for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to design, study, and deploy projects that put panels over waterways. Irrigation districts in California, Oregon, and Utah received the remaining funds to develop their own installations.
The Trump administration is unlikely to support future programs, given its focus on gutting clean energy incentives, but a handful of projects are already moving forward without such grants.
DeJong said that construction is 90% complete on the tribal community’s second solar-canal project, a nearly 0.9-MW array built in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is slated to go online later this year. The community is self-funding a similar-sized project over the Santan Canal and is developing a floating solar array on one of its reservoirs, with both systems set to be up and running by early 2026. All told, the installations will provide 4 MW in local clean energy generation, he said.
“We have become really familiar with the economics of building these [canal] projects,” said Lepley, whose firm also worked on the Gila River Indian Community’s second and third solar-canal systems. “We have a pretty good playbook of how to continue these projects going forward, even without any grant funding from the federal government.”
To all the challenges the solar industry is facing today, add one more: cultivating a domestic market for lamb meat. It may seem an unlikely mission for clean-energy developers, but in many states, including Illinois, grazing sheep between rows of photovoltaic panels is considered the most efficient form of agrivoltaics — the combination of solar and farming on the same land.
Solar advocates, researchers, and developers have given much attention to agrivoltaics. The practice includes growing crops like blueberries, tomatoes, or peppers in the shade of solar panels and letting cows or sheep graze around the arrays.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of agrivoltaics is that land is not being taken out of agricultural production in favor of clean energy, a concern that has stoked intense opposition to solar. The Trump administration codified this sentiment when the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Aug. 19 that the agency “will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland.”
Illinois’ sprawling fields of corn and soybeans don’t coexist well with solar panels, but sheep do, making grazing a promising type of agrivoltaics for the state, proponents say.
In a typical solar grazing arrangement, sheep farmers (called grazers) are paid by solar developers to bring the animals to sites hosting large arrays — often farms — where they munch away on the vegetation. Meanwhile, the landowner benefits from lease payments. Grazing is a lower-emissions alternative to mechanical mowing, and sheep can reach corners that mowers can’t.
But to make a living herding sheep, the grazers need to be able to sell the lambs they raise as meat. In the U.S., lamb is sold primarily in halal markets and appears on menus only during Easter holidays. Three-quarters of that meat is imported from Australia and New Zealand.
“What there needs to be, honestly, is more demand for lamb in the country,” said Stacie Peterson, executive director of the American Solar Grazing Association, which offers solar grazing certifications and contract templates. “We’re hoping to help develop more breeding stock, more farmers, more grazers doing this.”
Brooke Watson would like to see demand for lamb soar in the Midwest, in tandem with demand for solar grazing. Brooke’s husband, Chauncey Watson IV, has been raising sheep since he was in 4-H, a program that teaches kids about agriculture. Chauncey’s family has farmed in Illinois since 1856. The couple has raised lambs and sheep for wool, but in 2023 they bought a new flock of “hair sheep,” which don’t need shearing, to give solar grazing a try. “Hooves on the ground” happened last summer, Brooke said. Now they have 500 ewes grazing on over 320 acres at nine community solar sites in six Illinois counties.
Brooke laments that Americans “lost their taste for lamb” after World War II — because veterans had grown tired of wartime canned lamb rations, according to some accounts. (Other historical factors also likely influenced the decline in mutton’s popularity.)
“It has picked up in the last few decades, but more so with immigrant communities, where lamb is that really valuable cultural and religious product,” she said, adding that “traditional beef and chicken consumers” should give lamb a chance. “There’s really a huge, huge potential for both of these industries to grow and evolve together side by side.”
Brooke said solar grazing can also provide a way for younger farmers to stay in the business.
“The landowner most typically is hitting retirement age, and they don’t want to work the land anymore. So solar is a way for them to still maintain ownership of that parcel, and they’re compensated to host the solar on the site” while collaborating with farmers like her and her husband, who are typically “younger, maybe first generation or newer farmers, and they’re excited about the sheep grazing.”
According to a census by the American Solar Grazing Association and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, sheep solar grazing is concentrated in the West and the South. In 2024, almost 62,000 sheep were grazing over 87,000 acres at 109 solar sites in the South, with more than half of the animals in Texas. In the Midwest, including Illinois, just over 13,000 sheep grazed almost 7,000 acres of solar at 148 sites.
Texas and California have long histories of shepherding, and in many areas sheep are central to the ranching culture. That means grazing sheep under solar panels is continuing these areas’ traditional agriculture.
But in Illinois, there is little history of raising sheep. So converting acres of the state’s primary corn and soybean fields may still raise eyebrows.
“In Europe, solar grazing has taken off, but they are much more into sheep,” said Ken Anderson, director of the Advanced Energy Institute at Southern Illinois University. “When you see sheep move into Illinois, it’s unfamiliar to people; they’re not used to seeing sheep. It’s better with cattle, but cattle are harder — they like to scratch. It can do damage to the panels.”
Solar grazing goats, meanwhile, has been “a disaster,” Anderson said, because they chew wires and other parts of solar arrays. He is working on a proposed agrivoltaics research site that would grow peaches, apples, and other specialty crops amid solar panels on a former military munitions site in Illinois. Anderson prefers growing crops under panels to grazing, but crops need more specialized solar configurations.
Solar panels suited for sheep are “strictly industrial arrays,” he said. “All you’re going to be able to do is graze sheep there in the future, so you need to think about the long haul.”
Sheep may be the state’s best option for large arrays because, Anderson thinks, there’s limited potential for solar panels to occupy the same land as the state’s traditional sprawling corn and soybean fields.
“In my opinion, the economics will never work,” for pairing corn and soy with solar, Anderson said. “When you grow broad-acreage crops like corn and soy, you use very large equipment, so you have to put the panels far apart,” resulting in less energy output.
While solar grazing in Illinois might often replace corn or soybean production, Watson sees it as a positive trade-off.
“So much of that corn is used for ethanol production, and so much of that soy is, quite frankly, exported to other countries,” she said. “So we really look at solar grazing as an opportunity to have more U.S.-sourced energy production and food production as well.”
The Watsons work with a solar developer called Pivot Energy. Since 2021, agrivoltaics has been the company’s main focus, according to director of operations and maintenance Angie Burke. In Illinois, Pivot Energy has 365 sheep grazing at 11 sites, and those numbers are projected to more than double by next year.
“Agrivoltaics is this great way to support those family farmers locally and provide that cost-competitive, locally sourced, and high-protein-value food for those communities that are excited to eat more lamb,” Burke said.
While solar grazing may not be more profitable than mechanical mowing for landowners, it leaves the soil in better condition than if it were left idle under the panels.
“Let’s be delicate — [the sheep] are contributing to the soil” with their excrement, said Anderson.
In climates like Illinois’, sheep must be housed and fed inside during winter — a considerable expense. But Brooke Watson noted that, unlike solar grazers in Western states, she and her husband don’t need to provide much water for sheep in summer, as the lush vegetation and frequent rain suffice. In any state, solar grazing means ensuring that there are safe fences or wires around sites and that predators are kept out.
“In the early days, there were some horror stories where people dropped sheep off and came back at the end of the summer and there weren’t any sheep anymore,” said Ethan Winter, national smart solar director of American Farmland Trust, an organization committed to farmland preservation and sustainable farming practices. “You’re starting to see more professionalization, more formalized best practices for grazers.”
The organization United Agrivoltaics connects would-be grazers with solar developers and provides resources for insurance and contracts, Winter added.
American Farmland Trust’s Midwest solar specialist Alan Bailey noted that existing crop residue or debris must be cleared and specific cover crops planted to prepare for solar grazing, but this can happen while an array is being built. “One of our principles is having some sort of living cover on those sites throughout the entire construction process,” he said.
Because solar grazing’s benefits to the land and environment are well established, Winter said, boosting the lamb market is “the next big step” for expansion.
“There’s both the need and opportunity to think about markets for the lamb,” Winter said, noting that the animals could be sold to wholesale processors or marketed locally. “There may be a real advantage in having the Illinois Solar Lamb label.”
At 15, Kyle Barber started working at the Captain coal mine in southern Illinois — “following in the footsteps of my forefathers,” he says.
It was 1996, and the mine was closing, so his job involved swinging sledgehammers and scrambling down dangerously steep hillsides to retrieve huge rolls of discarded chain-link fence. He knew this was not the industry he wanted to spend his life working in.
Barber had long been fascinated by clean energy; he even won a grade school contest designing a solar canopy to go over highways. After graduating from college, he connected with the southern Illinois solar company AES to learn the trade, and in 2010 founded his own solar company, EFS. In 2017, he began teaching in a solar workforce training program in Peoria, Illinois, that was created by the state’s Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA), which went into effect that same year.
Now, Barber is spreading the gospel of solar from the Scott Bibb Center at Lewis and Clark Community College in the southwestern Illinois city of Alton, on the banks of the Mississippi River. It’s one of 14 clean energy jobs hubs created by the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), successor to FEJA. And it shows how even in the wake of dire federal cuts to clean energy programs, a well-funded and thoughtfully implemented state program can foster a robust transition to renewables on the local level.
Barber has been on the faculty at Lewis and Clark since February 2020, originally teaching classes on solar through a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. After the pandemic, Barber saw interest in the solar training program surge. CEJA allowed the school to bolster its offerings with wraparound social services and basic education, helping a wider range of students overcome barriers and prepare for careers in the industry.
With one of his former students, Richie Darling, Barber cofounded a nonprofit, Solar Workforce Development, to teach courses on solar installation, marketing, technology, and other aspects of the business at CEJA workforce hubs and elsewhere around the state, including Richland Community College in Decatur, where leaders are pinning their hopes on electric vehicle manufacturing.
Darling was this summer named manager of the Alton CEJA hub based at Lewis and Clark. Barber teaches classes there and also owns the residential and commercial solar company BKJ, having sold his interest in EFS.
Another of Barber’s proteges, Austin Frank, founded a solar company called ARF that installed a 100-kilowatt array on the Bibb Center roof. Thanks to federal and state incentives and labor donated by Frank’s company, the system cost the school nothing and saves the institution about $5,000 a month in energy bills, covering 40% of the building’s energy, he said. Frank has hired multiple graduates from Lewis and Clark.
“It all starts with Kyle,” said Darling. “It’s like vertical integration. We’re training people in solar, getting contractors set up, and then we have solar on the roof.”
For six decades, residents of Alton breathed pollution from the nearby Wood River coal plant. The plant closed in 2016, taking around 90 jobs with it, and the facility was spectacularly imploded in 2021. Clean energy advocates have proposed a solar farm be built on the site.
Alton was founded more than 200 years ago at the confluence of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri rivers. The city was once a booming industrial and commercial center, but its fortunes have declined as has its population, which now hovers near 25,000, though a smattering of trendy breweries, restaurants, and antique stores attract visitors from the St. Louis area and beyond.
The college qualified to be a workforce training hub under CEJA because the Alton area is home to a closed coal plant and because the state has deemed that the community was historically excluded from economic opportunities. CEJA prioritizes job creation and clean energy deployment in such spots, to make sure the clean energy transition benefits those who were harmed by or left out of the fossil fuel economy.
Advocates applauded the law’s impact at a celebration of the Alton hub at Lewis and Clark last month. “Now because of CEJA,” said Francisco Lopez Zavala, climate policy program associate of the Illinois Environmental Council, hubs like the community college “are helping to build Illinois’s clean energy future, which in turn makes our air easier to breathe, our communities healthier, and our grid more resilient.”
Under CEJA, students are paid to take the clean energy and related basic skills courses. At Lewis and Clark, students can choose from four tracks: solar, energy efficiency, HVAC/ heat pumps, and a Climate Works pre-apprenticeship program affiliated with labor unions. Since launching last fall, the school’s program has graduated 57 students in 10 cohorts — five focused on solar, one on energy efficiency, one on HVAC, and three in pre-apprenticeship. Ninety-five percent of enrolled students have graduated, and eight companies, including ARF, have already hired graduates.
CEJA also sets aside money to reduce barriers for students, who can apply for funding for everything from car repairs and bus passes to electric bills and child care. This opportunity lasts for a full year after graduation. Each hub has a navigator organization that administers the aid; in Alton’s case, that’s Senior Services Plus, a social service agency that helps people of all ages.
“We’re bringing people from barely being able to get to class, because of barriers, to getting them hired,” Darling said.
During the August event, current students enthused about the program and the opportunities it creates. In one of the HVAC classes, Michael Mahon Jr. said he wants to set a good example for his daughter, and John Bone said he wants to solve the problems of greenhouse gases and ozone.
Chase Ellinger said that he is excited about the chance for a real career after bouncing between minimum-wage jobs in warehouses, bars, and landscaping. “I want to make a better world and contribute to something for real,” he added.
Other students were learning how to build energy-efficient tiny houses in a workshop on the college grounds.
Up on the roof of the Bibb Center, Frank’s employees were installing the latest addition to the solar array. Frank started his career in construction, working with his father. After a number of customers asked them about solar, “we were like, ‘Holy cow, this is the next big thing. We’ve got to get educated,’” Frank said. He enrolled in Lewis and Clark’s solar training program before it was funded by CEJA.
Following his graduation, he founded ARF Solar in 2021 and became an approved vendor for the Illinois Shines and Illinois Solar for All programs created by FEJA and expanded by CEJA. Illinois Shines provides incentives for residential, commercial, and community solar, and Illinois Solar for All offers even more robust support for deploying solar in lower-income or environmental justice areas and hiring employees who meet equity-focused criteria.
ARF has installed systems on fire stations and other municipal buildings around southern Illinois, as well as schools and churches. Frank is also hoping to branch into community solar, which allows individuals to subscribe for access to energy from a shared array.
“The state had my back,” Frank said. “It created a program for small contractors like myself to come in and have a safe space where we’re able to grow.”
People with criminal records are among those prioritized for CEJA’s equity-minded incentives, and at Lewis and Clark, multiple students and graduates said the solar training could provide a crucial job opportunity especially given barriers they’ve faced due to their pasts.
“I come from a background of poverty, addiction, and mental illness. I didn’t have anyone to teach me how to do life things,” program graduate Taryn Sensmeyer told visitors. “By the time I found recovery, I had created a lot more barriers to entry,” including “my colorful criminal history.”
She heard about the program from a friend who described it as “this weird thing you are totally going to love,” and she said the friend was right.
“I thought I’d just be showing up to learn how to install solar panels, but I got comprehensive knowledge of the whole industry and a deep passion for the environment.”
She’s now participating in an apprenticeship that will prepare her to become a journeyman electrician.
“For the first time, I can put food on the table without any outside help,” Sensmeyer said. “It’s had a ripple effect on everyone I come in contact with.”
Zachary Resmann, a current student in Barber’s class, grew up on an Illinois dairy farm and worked in solar sales. But he felt he was being taken advantage of by out-of-state solar companies flocking to the Illinois market to cash in on incentives, especially for community solar. He joined the CEJA program in hopes of becoming a contractor himself, and his background qualifies him to tap into the law’s equity funds and services. He plans to become an approved vendor under Illinois Shines and Illinois Solar for All, and develop residential arrays for the many friends and acquaintances who have asked him about solar.
“Solar power is power by the people for the people,” said Resmann, who founded the company Resolute Energy Solutions, which helps customers interested in solar, energy efficiency, and other services get quotes and connect with suppliers. “With four kids and a felony, it was hard to get hired. This has changed my life and given me hope.”
In October, a clean energy job fair will be held at the college. Resmann noted Barber’s determination to get his graduates good “W2” jobs — rather than independent contractor gigs that entail 1099 tax forms.
Barber grew up near the massive Baldwin coal plant, which is scheduled to close in 2027 — an extension from a previous 2025 closing date. A lot of renewables will be needed to replace the 1,185-megawatt plant. A 68-MW solar array and 2-MW energy storage system have already been built on its site, under the state’s coal-to-solar program.
With such demand plus state incentives and training programs, Barber is confident the solar industry has strong prospects in Illinois, despite federal rollbacks.
“Under CEJA, there is truly no limit to the number of jobs, companies, projects we can create,” he told visitors to Lewis and Clark in August. “There is no magic; it’s just hard work and determination to create a cleaner and brighter future here in Illinois.”
This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune.
When Texas legislators conceived of the Texas Energy Fund in the spring of 2023, its goal of jump-starting the construction of more natural gas power plants to support the state’s strained power grid seemed reasonable.
In the two years since that vote, however, experts say the energy market has turned against the development of gas-fired power plants. Experts and energy companies say the fund’s $7.2 billion worth of low-interest loans and bonus grants may not be appealing enough to overcome those economic headwinds.
“It is a challenging market for natural gas developers right now, and it has been for a good amount of time,” said Walt Baum, CEO of Powering Texans, a trade association representing Calpine, Constellation, NRG, and Vistra, the state’s four largest operators of dispatchable power.
Only two new proposals have been approved so far through the TEF’s In-ERCOT Generation Loan Program, one of four programs included in the fund intended to coax energy companies into building new gas power plants. The two loans, both to be paid back over 20 years at a 3% interest rate, would tap just $321 million of the $7.2 billion total.
Together, the plants would have a capacity to generate 578 megawatts of electricity, a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 62,500 megawatts of additional electricity that regulators forecast the state will need to generate by 2030.
Another 15 loan applications are currently in the pipeline, totalling 8,392 megawatts, according to the Public Utility Commission, which administers the TEF.
But of the 25 total loan applications that have advanced to the fund’s due diligence review stage, seven have been pulled from consideration by the companies that filed them, citing supply chain issues or forecasts that the projects would not be as profitable as expected. An eighth application was denied funding last fall due to accusations of fraud.
The most recent company to withdraw an application, Hunt Energy Network, cited the cost-effectiveness of constructing a natural gas power plant under the loan program as the reason for its withdrawal, according to a July 25 letter to the PUC.
The fund was created in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, the February 2021 storm that plunged most of the state into blackouts during freezing weather for days, leaving hundreds of people dead.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders were quick to blame trouble with wind and solar power generation for the power outages. While renewables did struggle to generate electricity in the frigid temperatures, so did natural gas power generation after power plant equipment and some pipelines that supply gas to the plants froze.
After that disaster, lawmakers argued that the state needed more on-demand power — specifically natural gas power plants — that doesn’t require wind and sun to generate electricity. They started the Texas Energy Fund with an initial $5 billion, and earlier this year added another $5 billion — but $2.8 billion was set aside for separate programs to support backup power generation for critical infrastructure and modernization incentives for natural gas plants.
But since 2023, the economic factors working against the development of natural gas plants have only worsened.
Energy demand is rising globally due to the construction of new data centers for artificial intelligence, and many regions are turning to natural gas power because of its relative affordability, lower emissions compared to coal, and its ability to operate at all times of the day, unlike wind and solar.
That demand is straining the supply chain for turbines, specialized equipment used in power plants that cost tens of millions of dollars. Wait times on orders for the machinery have doubled just over the past year, and tariffs are now increasing their price further.
A turbine order placed today likely would not arrive before 2029, and only if a company were willing to pay a premium to get it quickly, said Doug Lewin, author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter.
At the same time, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid operator, is predicting energy demand in the state will double by 2030. The increase is driven by oil and gas operators in the Permian Basin transitioning operations to run on electricity rather than gas or diesel, as well as Texas’ own AI and data center boom.
The state is on course to meet those electricity demands, but largely through advancements in solar technology and battery storage, which are significantly cheaper than natural gas power plants to install. In Texas’ deregulated energy market, which gives preference to the least-expensive power, this takes away the forecast market share available to companies hoping to profit from a new natural gas power plant, meaning the plants cost more to install and are likely to make less money over time, said Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst with the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
“Markets speak loud and clear if you listen to what they’re saying,” Wamsted said. “The market in Texas is saying loud and clear that gas is not going to be built any time soon.”
Legislators this spring have responded by extending the deadline for spending the $5 billion they approved in 2023. Under the original legislation creating the fund, the PUC had until the end of this year to distribute the money earmarked for power plant construction loans. Senate Bill 2268 by state Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, gave the PUC authority to extend that deadline if “market factors necessitate.”
“What we didn’t know two years ago is that various market influences would affect the TEF application process, such that supply chain disruptions … would impact the timeline for several otherwise well-qualified projects,” Schwertner said in an April committee hearing about the bill.
The PUC said in a statement that demand for the natural gas plant loan program has been high, citing the 15 applications that have reached the due diligence review stage. The agency said it is focusing on reaching loan agreements for those 15 applicants before deciding if an extension on the disbursement deadline is necessary.
State Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, said he believes those who have applied for loans were planning to build a natural gas plant without the state energy fund and are now asking taxpayers to help cover the cost.
“If taxpayers are subsidizing a lower interest rate than what they could get in the market, of course [energy companies] will take a free ride,” Anchía said.
Anchía voted against SB 2268, calling the loan program a “big government” approach to influencing the energy market. He did vote for the additional $5 billion in money for the fund, citing the fund’s two other programs supporting backup power generation for critical infrastructure and modernization incentives for natural gas units.
Members of the Legislature’s Texas Energy Fund Advisory Committee have not met since October but plan to in the coming months as part of a regular review of the effectiveness of the fund’s policies, said Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston, and a member of the committee.
Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro and cochair of the advisory committee, said he believes the fund’s effectiveness is worth studying because the Legislature’s original intention was to bring these gas plants online quickly.
“We know that over a period of time we will get to where we need to be,” Spiller said. “My concern is over the next five or six years, bridging that gap. I think sooner rather than later, we need to look at that and maybe review what we have in place and tweak it some.”
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