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Dangerous amounts of heat and air pollution swirl in most commercial kitchens — even when the stoves are off. Switching to electric appliances helps protect workers.
In restaurant kitchens around the U.S., cooks are toiling away to create mouthwatering meals, from bibimbap to spaghetti puttanesca.
But their own stomachs may be roiling.
That’s what Christopher Galarza, a longtime chef and co-founder of sustainable kitchen certification company EcoChef, experienced firsthand back when he worked in gas-fired commercial kitchens. Much of the heat goes into not the food, but the air and workers’ bodies.
“I can’t tell you how many times … we throw up and get back to work,” Galarza said. Cooking with gas creates such a combination of dry and wet heat that “no matter where you turn, you’re being assaulted by that.”
When he finally cooked in an all-electric kitchen, it was a revelation, Galarza said. “For the first time in my career I was able to do what I loved — and not feel like I’m dying.”
A new peer-reviewed study backs the experiences of Galarza and other cooks with data. Published Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters, the analysis is, the authors believe, the first in the U.S. to quantify just how different conditions are between commercial kitchens using fossil fuels — gas and propane — and those harnessing only electricity.
The top-line finding: Fossil-fueled equipment generates dangerous amounts of air pollution and heat in kitchens, despite their commercial-grade ventilation. All-electric equipment doesn’t.
For the estimated 15.7 million U.S. food service workers, the results provide much-needed insight on “what it is we’re exposing ourselves to,” said Galarza, a study co-author who recruited most of the commercial kitchens for the research. More than three-quarters of restaurants in the U.S. burn gas, according to a 2022 survey by the National Restaurant Association Research Group.
Twenty-seven kitchens from California, New York, and Pennsylvania participated in the study; three were all-electric, while the rest used fossil fuel. They served American, Chinese, French, Italian, baked goods, pizza, and other dishes, and their settings ranged from mom-and-pop to Michelin-starred restaurants, along with higher education and senior facilities.
Researchers from PSE Healthy Energy, Stanford University, and New York University set up instruments to measure kitchen temperatures and pollutant concentrations. Plastic tubes ran from gas analyzers to a handful of spots around the facility, sniffing the air during and after workdays for up to a week.
What they caught was disturbing, if not surprising.
The majority of gas- and propane-fired kitchens reached maximum temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. That exceeds the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s stalled proposal of an 80°F indoor high-heat threshold, which would trigger 15-minute breaks every two hours. Galarza said he has experienced broiling temperatures greater than 130℉.
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a toxic byproduct of combustion that inflames the lungs and increases the risk of asthma, was also in the air. Seventy percent of fossil-fueled kitchens had NO2 concentrations that surpassed what’s considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization. By contrast, electric kitchens had the lowest NO2 levels, never exceeding even a tenth of the WHO limit.
Gas stoves kept pumping out pollution even when turned off: About a third of fossil-fueled kitchens produced NO2 levels outside of business hours that exceeded health standards. The culprit was pilot lights.
“You have all these little fires going [in] the appliances overnight in the kitchen with the ventilation off,” said Drew Michanowicz, principal scientist at PSE Healthy Energy and a study co-author. In mixed-use buildings with restaurants on the ground floor, emissions could be migrating into nearby apartments.
“That pollution has to go somewhere,” Michanowicz said.
Carbon monoxide — a poison that can cause nausea, headaches, and disorientation — and benzene, a carcinogen known to raise the risk of leukemia, were also occasionally found at unsafe levels in some fossil-fueled kitchens. Electric kitchens again had the lowest levels of these compounds, and they stayed under safety guidelines.
“This study from PSE Healthy Energy makes clear that transitioning to fully electric kitchens can help protect the health of the people who work in them every day,” said Panama Bartholomy, executive director at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. “We need policies, incentives, and other support that make electrification accessible to the industry.”
California currently leads the U.S. in policies encouraging commercial kitchens to electrify, according to the coalition. The state’s building energy standard requires new commercial kitchens be electric-ready, built with the wiring, outlets, and electrical capacity to allow kitchen owners to avoid having to make costly retrofits later. The Golden State has also created protections for indoor workers under heat stress, as have Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, indirectly incentivizing all-electric kitchens. Utilities in California — and a few elsewhere — also offer rebates for more efficient commercial kitchen equipment, including electric options.
Galarza is seeing more chefs realize the other benefits of fossil-free appliances: the power, speed, and consistency of induction cooking; the reduced cleaning time and air-conditioning costs; and the improved mental health of workers, he said.
The new study’s results could catalyze the clean-cooking transition, Galarza noted. “The people who are bankrolling these kitchens — like the CFOs of these large hotel chains and these big conglomerate restaurants — those people need to understand what it is they’re putting their people in front of.”
State law AB 130 has stalled local building efficiency rules for up to nearly a year, hampering progress on climate goals.
More than a dozen California cities and counties have been trying for months to get climate-forward building standards enacted. But they’ve been caught in regulatory purgatory thanks to legislation meant to address the state’s affordable housing crisis.
Last year, in an effort to ease development, California hit the brakes on updates to state and local building codes meant to make buildings safer and more efficient. But the law that established the six-year moratorium, Assembly Bill 130, left some exceptions for local governments — including a narrow legal pathway to adopt emissions-cutting rules to support their preexisting climate goals.
Since the pause went into effect Oct. 1, 2025, 21 cities and counties have passed such building ordinances. These “reach codes” go beyond the state’s energy-efficiency standards in encouraging building owners to ditch fossil fuels. For example, 14 localities have adopted rules to incentivize households to replace broken one-way air conditioners with two-way heat pumps, which provide both heating and cooling. The approach nudges homes toward electrified heating, since when the furnace dies, the installed heat pump is ready to take its place.
Reach codes have the potential to be among “the most impactful ordinances” that local agencies can adopt to tackle climate change, said Anthony Eulo, senior manager of public sector services for Silicon Valley Clean Energy, a public energy agency.
Localities must get the green light from the California Building Standards Commission, followed by a thumbs-up from the state energy commission, before they can implement those codes. But as of Friday, the Building Standards Commission has yet to approve 17 proposed reach codes from 15 jurisdictions, including Alameda, Glendale, Marin County, Palo Alto, and San Luis Obispo. Some have been waiting nearly a year.
In the past, the commission’s vetting process took days, not months, Eulo said.
The Building Standards Commission, which must ensure ordinances meet AB 130’s complex exemption requirements, said it has approved seven reach codes over the last year. But the 17 pending ordinances “contain more complex amendments and are still under review,” the agency said. “We hope to begin issuing response letters soon.” In the last year, the commission has processed 440 ordinances out of about 500 received.
At the commission’s last meeting on Aug. 25, city and county representatives and building decarbonization advocates expressed their frustration at the unusual delay, which is holding them back from reducing noxious pollution from gas appliances.
“Alameda cannot achieve its urgent climate goals and protect the health and safety of our residents without these foundational policies,” Danielle Mieler, the city’s sustainability and resilience manager, said at the meeting.
The delay hampers California’s own goals. Decarbonizing buildings, which account for a quarter of its planet-heating emissions, is key to hitting the state’s climate targets, among them reducing emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by the end of the decade.
Local officials and advocates contend that the ordinances should qualify for an AB 130 exemption, as they align with jurisdictions’ previously adopted greenhouse-gas reduction strategies as part of state-mandated general plans, per the law. Exempted updates are allowed to encourage all-electric appliances so long as they allow for “mixed-fuel” construction — meaning they don’t outright ban the use of fossil fuels.
This stipulation ensures new ordinances don’t run afoul of a controversial federal court decision: In 2023, three Ninth Circuit judges ruled that Berkeley, California’s 2019 ban on gas hookups in new buildings conflicted with a federal appliance energy-efficiency law. (That argument, backed by real estate developers and the appliance industry, is flailing in courts elsewhere across the country.)
“These reach codes have been very heavily vetted by their own city attorneys before moving forward at the local level,” Serena Pelka, senior policy advocate at the San Diego–based nonprofit Climate Action Campaign, told Canary Media. “So we are very confident that all of the reach codes presented to the commission should be able to move forward.”
Alameda code amendments “meet the standard for exception to AB 130,” Mieler told the commission. Her city and others have also worked to address any outstanding concerns. “We responded to additional questions posed by the commission about our ordinance in February, but have still yet to receive a decision.”
The questions, reviewed by Canary Media, asked jurisdictions to clarify exactly how their ordinances meet AB 130’s exemption requirements. Mieler has not received any follow-up questions from the commission, she told Canary Media.
The delay is having a chilling effect on decarbonization efforts in other cities and counties across California, according to Colleen Corrigan, sustainability and resilience policy manager at San Francisco Bay Area Urban Planning Research Association, a nonprofit that works with dozens of local governments on housing, transportation, and climate policy issues. Several jurisdictions “are considering code adoption locally but have paused their processes due to uncertainty brought on by these delays,” she said at the meeting.
AB 130 was never meant to block local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Corrigan noted. “We’ve spoken with leadership in the Legislature and the governor’s office, both of whom assume that the language in AB 130 cleared a path for building decarbonization and climate resilience updates,” she said. “But this has not been the case.”
A correction was made on Oct. 8, 2026: This story has been updated to identify Climate Action Campaign as the San Diego–based organization, not the national coalition with the same name.
The Minnesota mining firm will forgo traditional coal-based steelmaking at the facility — a step toward cleaning up production to compete on a global market.
The company behind America’s first new iron ore mine in 50 years has unveiled plans for a massive, $15 billion steel plant in southeast Iowa, bringing the firm closer to realizing its ambitious vision for low-carbon steelmaking.
Mesabi Metallics, which is owned by India’s Essar Group, announced the project on Monday at the White House alongside President Donald Trump, senior cabinet members, and a handful of top Republican officials from Iowa.
Trump touted the steel plant at a moment when Republicans face difficult midterm prospects. The president cited the promise of high-paying jobs for Iowa, a state that could help the GOP maintain control of the U.S. Senate in November. He also credited his administration’s 50% tariffs on imported steel for driving investment in a facility that, if built as planned, would be among the world’s largest.
Mesabi didn’t specify why it chose Iowa for the proposed facility, which is slated to receive iron-ore pellets from the company’s vast new operation in Minnesota’s Iron Range and ultimately churn out around 10 million tons of steel a year. Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said on Monday that “tough negotiations took place” between the state and Mesabi, but didn’t elaborate further.
Mesabi’s Iowa mill “will be one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly facilities in the world,” the company said in a press release. The mill will use natural gas to turn pellets into direct reduced iron, or DRI, that will then be fed into an electric arc furnace, or EAF, likely powered by Iowa’s wind-dominated grid.
The facility could be made far cleaner if the company replaced that gas with green hydrogen — made from renewable energy and water — during the ironmaking process, though Mesabi didn’t mention plans to use the fuel, which is currently expensive and in short supply.
Along with the $15 billion earmarked for the steel mill, Mesabi is investing nearly $3 billion to complete its iron ore mine in northern Minnesota. The company has long envisioned creating a network that begins on the Iron Range and ends with shiny steel coils for producing U.S. cars, ships, appliances, and energy infrastructure.
“With the new steel complex in Iowa, we will complete the fully integrated American supply chain, from mine to mill,” Rewant Ruia, chair of Mesabi, said from the Oval Office.
He added that the new facility “will use the latest technology, and will compete head-to-head with any steel plant in the world on size, quality, and on cost.”
In a stark departure from more than a century of vertically integrated steelmaking in the United States, Mesabi’s new complex will not use coal-fired furnaces.
The older steel mills operated by America’s legacy steelmakers, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, still rely on blast furnaces to melt and purify iron ore. The lavalike mixture is then fed into basic oxygen furnaces that remove most of the remaining impurities to produce crude steel. The process is a significant source of global greenhouse gas emissions and toxic air pollution.
Mesabi’s plan represents “an important, and predictable, investment in the future of iron and steelmaking in the U.S.,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at the decarbonization-advocacy group Industrious Labs. It’s a sign for other “outdated, polluting” steel mills to clean up their act, she added.
“The writing is on the wall for the few coal-based furnaces left in the U.S.: Modernize, or lose out,” Lewis said by email. “This is a wake-up call for industry decision makers, elected leaders, and communities across the Midwest — if they want to keep the steel industry that helped build our buildings, bridges, cars and the modern middle class, they need to invest in cleaner, modern iron and steel technology today.”
But Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs remains committed to the older technology in at least one of its mills. Last month, it said it would use a $500 million federal loan to extend the life of the blast furnace at its Middletown complex by 15 to 20 years. It was a sharp turnaround for Cliffs, which only two years earlier said it would use the loan to replace the Middletown blast furnace with a direct reduction plant like the one Mesabi is planning in Iowa — and the one Cliffs already owns and operates in Toledo, Ohio.
The Toledo facility remains the only DRI complex in the Great Lakes region, which has for decades leaked steelmaking capacity to Gulf Coast markets with easier access to cheaper imported ores. In Louisiana, the Korean industrial giant Hyundai recently broke ground on a nearly $6 billion steel mill that will also use the DRI-to-EAF pathway.
The White House said Mesabi’s Iowa mill will begin production in 2030, and Trump said its steel would be cost-competitive in a global market increasingly dominated by lower-cost Asian producers.
But important questions remain. Most traditional, integrated steel mills are on or near the Great Lakes and can receive ore by water, a more efficient pathway than rail. Though Mesabi’s Iowa mill will be located on or near the Mississippi River, the locks on the ship canal between the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds are generally too small for hulking ore carriers to traverse.
The mill may instead take delivery by rail direct from northern Minnesota, like U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works near St. Louis. At the White House, Ruia referenced “American ore carried on American railroads” when outlining his mine-to-mill vision.
Earlier this month, Mesabi CEO Joe Broking suggested the company may yet add DRI capacity closer to its Iron Range mine. Broking, who was also in attendance at the White House, teased the idea of Minnesota DRI at a little-noticed county board meeting on Sept. 15, according to a report by KAXE/KBXE. He told Itasca County commissioners that Mesabi was prepared to spend $5 billion on an expansion that would more than double the mine’s annual production capacity and build a DRI plant nearby.
Elizabeth Boatman, the Minnesota-based industrial decarbonization lead for consultancy 5 Lakes Energy, told Canary Media in February that the prospect of lower shipping costs strengthens the case for a DRI-based steel mill in northern Minnesota, possibly at the long-cleared site of an integrated mill U.S. Steel ran last century in Duluth.
“One of the push points to moving [purified] iron production here is that around one-third of the pellet is not iron. Why would you want to pay for fuel and time to ship non-iron when you could just ship the iron itself?” Boatman said.
Broking said the expansion hinged on state environmental permitting reforms and on the outcome of a dispute between Mesabi and Cliffs over mineral leases for 2,600 acres near Mesabi’s mine. Mesabi once controlled those leases, but the state of Minnesota revoked them earlier this decade after Mesabi ran into financial trouble. It later handed them over to Cliffs.
As for the Iowa plant, the message from Mesabi leaders and Trump administration officials on Monday was unambiguous: It’s happening, even if details remain sparse.
“I think this deal’s done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters. “They’ve already worked it all out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal.”
A shift away from coal has slashed pollution from the U.S. power sector in recent decades, but some states still have dirtier power generation than others.
Have you ever gazed up at power lines and wondered how clean the electrons passing along them are? The answer is very different depending on where you are.
Just look at the spectrum of blues in the map above. It charts the carbon intensity of power generated in each state in 2024, according to federal data compiled by U.S. Energy Data, a new project from the think tank Institute for Progress. Carbon intensity is the amount of planet-warming carbon pollution emitted per megawatt-hour of electricity generated.
The states with the highest carbon intensity burn a lot of fossil fuels, especially the really dirty kinds like coal and petroleum. In the three states with the dirtiest electricity generation — West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming — most power is created by burning coal, which makes sense considering they are among the top coal-producing states.
States with the lowest carbon intensity, of course, are home to a larger share of clean energy, ranging from wind and solar farms to hydroelectric facilities to nuclear plants. Vermont has the cleanest in-state generation, with essentially 100% of the power it creates coming from renewables — largely hydropower — since 2015.
It’s important to note that the above map represents the power generated in a state — not necessarily the power consumed there. Wyoming, for example, generates about 12 times more power than it consumes. Electricity flows all over the place via sweeping interregional transmission lines — so even a state with a high share of clean power generation could have a dirtier grid than meets the eye.
The good news is that America’s grid as a whole has been getting cleaner over the last two decades. Greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power sector fell about 40% between 2005 and 2024 as old coal plants shuttered and were replaced with cheaper natural gas–fired facilities and renewable energy. Generation in all states except Idaho and Vermont got less carbon-intensive over that period of time.
Lots of states want to continue the progress, and many are going so far as to aim for completely clean grids by midcentury. It won’t be easy, as data centers’ energy demand drives a gas power boom and the Trump administration attacks renewables while propping up the coal industry. With the White House stripping the federal climate policies put in place by previous administrations, the onus is increasingly shifting onto states to keep up the pace of the clean energy transition.
The agency just gutted a Biden-era policy that would have slashed planet-warming pollution — but that doesn’t mean clean energy will slow down.
The Biden and Obama administrations built a raft of climate regulations that was supposed to carry America beyond coal power. The Trump administration has officially sunk it.
This week, the EPA gutted the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, a set of rules enacted under the Biden administration that would’ve required fossil fuel power plants to either significantly reduce or capture their emissions in the coming years, or shut down. The rollback completes the agency’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of the past two administrations.
That sounds pretty bad for climate action. And, well, it is. But it’s worth noting that power-sector emissions have fallen substantially even without the enforcement of federal regulations.
A quick history lesson: In 2015, then-President Barack Obama introduced his Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce the electricity sector’s greenhouse gas emissions 32% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Lawsuits and a Supreme Court decision kept the rules from actually going into effect, and then in 2017, the first Trump administration repealed them.
Nevertheless, the U.S. hit the plan’s decarbonization target a full decade early. The reason? The country has retired dirty old coal plants and replaced them with natural gas and renewables.
That’s happening in large part because it just makes economic sense to shift off coal power — even if President Donald Trump claims otherwise. Federal orders to keep aging coal plants open have racked up millions of dollars in additional costs to utility customers over the past year, while renewables remain America’s lowest-cost power option.
This is not to say the U.S. can rely on market logic alone to eliminate fossil fuels.
Yes, with or without power-plant emissions regulations, clean energy is going to continue to displace fossil fuels — especially coal — because the economics just make sense. The question, then, is not whether a transition will happen sans regulations but how fast it will move. That is no small consideration: Climate change is made worse and more dangerous with every additional ton of CO2 that’s emitted into the atmosphere.
The transition would almost certainly happen faster with emissions regulations in place. For now, however, that’s off the table in America.
Unpacking Newsom’s clean-energy legacy
As California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s time in office comes to a close, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John is weighing whether the Democrat’s action on climate change should be celebrated or critiqued. Sure, under Newsom’s watch, California has built tons of new clean energy, added millions of EVs to the roads, and committed to ending sales of gas-powered cars by 2035. But analysts and experts say Newsom has fallen short on some of his environmental justice promises, and hasn’t gone far enough to take on utility and corporate powers in the name of lowering residential energy costs.
Newsom still has time to shore up his clean-energy legacy and tackle sky-high prices with a handful of bills sitting on his desk. As Jeff spells out in the first edition of his new weekly newsletter, California Wire, the state Legislature has passed measures that could cut into utility profits and boost virtual power plants. All they need now is Newsom’s signature.
Democrats chart a path on climate policy
House Democrats have a bold and broad new climate plan. Just don’t call it a climate plan.
This week, a group of Congress members rolled out the Thriving Economy Project — a title that, much like the Inflation Reduction Act, hides just how far the blueprint would go to tackle climate change. Restoring federal tax credits for residential clean energy and efficiency, tackling data center power demand, and unlocking lost-cost financing for renewables projects are all among its priorities.
These wide-ranging proposals have a long road ahead before they become legislation, project leader Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) tells Heatmap. First, the authors want to figure out which of their ideas could actually gather bipartisan support — something that’s easier said than done as long as President Trump remains in office.
Congress tackles data centers: The U.S. House approves a bill to require state regulators to consider making data centers pay for the power and transmission upgrades made to serve them. (Associated Press)
Rethinking a renewables ban: Bannock County, Idaho, is rethinking its ban on clean energy development as leaders and residents suggest solar and wind, along with nuclear, power could bring much-needed economic benefits to farmers struggling amid years of drought. (Canary Media)
Gutting wildlife protections: The Trump administration moves to strip another core protection from the Endangered Species Act — a decision that could have massive implications for energy development. (New York Times)
RGGI revamp: As the Northeast’s cap-and-trade program approaches 20 years in action, industry leaders and other observers question if it’s still doing its job. (Canary Media)
Shaking the deep freeze: Power generators in the U.S. experienced fewer outages during extreme cold snaps this past winter than they did back in 2021 and 2022, finds an analysis from FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (Utility Dive)
After Republicans voted to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act, a few cleantech professionals set out to exact electoral revenge. So far, it seems to be working.
Last summer, when the Republican-controlled Congress took a wrecking ball to the Inflation Reduction Act, Tom Matzzie was pissed. Though some Republican members of Congress had written letters trying to save wind and solar tax credits, when it came time to vote, they nearly all fell in line behind President Donald Trump. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed with widespread Republican support, canceling a decade-long tax incentive meant to accelerate America’s transition to cheaper, cleaner energy.
Politicians have long lived in fear of certain powerful lobbies — the National Rifle Association, Big Oil, Big Pharma — knowing that if they voted against those interest groups it could cost them their seats. But as the votes came down for the OBBBA, nobody in Congress, Matzzie couldn’t help noticing, seemed scared of antagonizing the clean energy industry.
Matzzie, who founded electricity retailer CleanChoice Energy and previously led campaigns for progressive groups and the Democratic National Committee, resolved to try to strengthen clean energy’s political clout by taking down the industry’s most prominent foes seeking elected office.
This strategy attracted the interest of Chris Larsen, a major clean energy investor who made a fortune in cryptocurrency, and Michael Brune, former head of the Sierra Club. Together, Matzzie, Larsen, and Brune formed the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition — a forgettable name that sounds like those of the other shadowy groups blanketing the airwaves during election season, but that happens to share an acronym with the now-defunct investment tax credit for solar installations. As primary season got underway, the super PAC cobbled together commitments for $20 million from Larsen, Matzzie, and other donors to spend on races this election cycle. Their targets: the far-right House Freedom Caucus members who pushed hardest to undo the IRA.
“Are we strong or weak? Are we someone that people can hurt without consequences?” Matzzie said of the clean energy industry.
Freedom Caucus Vice Chair Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina got a fresh taste of those consequences last week, when he lost the Republican primary race to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. ITC had hit Norman with $1 million in attack ads accusing him of insufficient loyalty to Trump. The president happened to corroborate the message by enthusiastically endorsing Norman’s opponent, Graham’s sister, Darline, who went on to beat Norman by 5 points.
https://vimeo.com/1218123668?fl=pl&fe=vl
An Invest in Tomorrow Coalition ad against Ralph Norman
In his concession speech, Norman lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the outside spending against him.
“All of our money came from South Carolina and from my personal account,” Norman said. “My opponents, the money came from outside PACs. It’s a fact; I’m not being critical. The PACs that were against, to me, freedom — as Democrats, they got what they wanted.”
ITC got what it wanted in all five Republican races it intervened in this primary season. The results suggest that even a small amount of strategic spending and targeted messaging can have an outsize impact on the foes of clean energy. If Matzzie and his team keep dealing vengeance to their enemies, they could deliver some of the political firepower needed to create more durable pro-renewable policies.
ITC kicked off election season by funding attack ads against Rep. Chip Roy in his May primary runoff for Texas attorney general. The ads did not mention Roy’s antipathy to clean energy subsidies. Instead, they blasted Roy for not being loyal enough to Trump. ITC rigorously tests different messages to find what’s most effective, Matzzie explained: “We’re going to use whatever works.” Roy lost by 10.4%.
Matzzie, jumping into Republican primary races for the first time, found that each dollar spent on them goes a surprisingly long way. Conservative audiences get their news from a relatively small number of ideologically aligned media spaces, which means ITC can buy ads on Fox News, Truth Social, Rumble, and a few others and have a good shot at reaching a lot of motivated Republican voters, at which point it can cater to those voters’ deeply held beliefs rather than challenging them.
After tackling Roy, ITC put out ads supporting the reelection bid of Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a pro-renewable Republican running in a primary against an anti-renewable challenger. “Stand with Trump, support MAGA, vote Miller-Meeks,” one of the TV spots declared, alongside photos of the candidate posing with Trump. She won her primary on June 2.
Then, ITC launched its first offensive against Ralph Norman. At that point, he was running in the June 9 primary for South Carolina governor and needed to place in the top two to advance to a runoff. The PAC funded a wave of attack ads against him, and he finished in a distant third.
ITC’s clearest flex thus far has been to take on Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, who faced a primary challenge from former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Each campaign had spent nearly $600,000; ITC dropped $2 million on a two-pronged strategy to attack Ogles and elevate Hatcher.
The PAC sought to label Ogles as “Lyin’ Andy” by calling attention to instances in which he missed votes in Congress and triggered an FBI investigation over campaign finance irregularities.
At the same time, since incumbent Ogles had much better name recognition, ITC paid for ads to raise Hatcher’s profile and ran tracking polls to test their efficacy. Over three weeks, the portion of Republican primary voters who had never heard of Hatcher fell from around half to one-quarter, Matzzie said.
Despite an endorsement from Trump and an infusion of more than $700,000 from the Freedom Caucus Fund, Ogles lost the August 6 primary by more than 6 points.
The upset proved sufficiently embarrassing that Trump disavowed Ogles in a subsequent Truth Social post, calling him “a person who I remained loyal to even though he had virtually no chance of winning.”
Of course, there’s no way to prove that ITC’s money played a decisive role in these races. The group operates in a noisy political landscape with many variables at play. Ogles, for instance, was reportedly in hot water with voters over Islamophobic and homophobic remarks, per Politico, and needed to reach new voters due to redistricting. Graham had Trump stumping for her in the state, and his PAC funded a barrage of get-out-the-vote texts for her.
Still, each race turned out the way ITC wanted.
As Matzzie sees it, scientifically proving a causal link is beside the point; what matters is that politicians fear the possibility of this happening to them. That narrative gains strength with each candidate who’s knocked out.
It would be hard to find better testimony to the effectiveness of that strategy than the words of the defeated candidates themselves. Norman railed against ITC during his final minutes in the public spotlight as a candidate. Ogles, before he lost, called out the group during a radio interview: “They literally are trying to make an example out of me to try to strike fear in other Republicans. Which is why, if they prevail, this will have a chilling effect to the conservatives in Congress.”
Even if politicians think they can survive an assault from a scrappy team of clean energy enthusiasts, the PAC’s interventions increase the cost of running a campaign, pushing candidates to raise more money to counter the spending. “If you make enemies, your next election will be more expensive for you,” Matzzie said.
ITC hopes to keep raising money to spend up to $30 million in this cycle, he said. The PAC is now targeting its first Democratic primary, attacking Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee for scapegoating clean energy as the cause of the state’s affordability problems. McKee was trailing his challenger in an Emerson College poll released last week.
The general election season will draw a much broader electorate than the races ITC has participated in so far. Matzzie declined to comment in detail on what the PAC’s general election strategy will be.
ITC’s efforts may have delivered a visceral satisfaction to clean energy pros chafing from last year’s defeats, but these actions aren’t likely to yield a more renewable-friendly Congress. Two of the candidates it attacked — Norman and Roy — were running for offices outside of Congress. Hatcher was never a champion of wind and solar. Some Republicans may think twice before loudly attacking the clean energy industry in the future, but that doesn’t mean they’re more likely to sign legislation that’s good for the industry.
Meanwhile, the major clean energy trade groups are not exactly embracing the PAC’s approach.
“We’re in the business of making more friends, not more enemies,” Tim Pawlenty, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an email. (Matzzie, for his part, allowed that the trade group has “to stay friends with everybody so they can walk into every office.”)
Another clean energy leader, cleantech executive and investor Steve McBee, sees ITC’s work on “enforcing accountability” as a valuable effort in a broader campaign to expand clean energy’s political power, even as he himself focuses on coalition building.
In May, McBee launched Amped, an effort to mobilize clean energy professionals and executives to engage more in public discourse, in order to build sustainable bipartisan support for their industry.
Though solar, wind, and batteries have taken over the power sector, representing an estimated 93% of all new power plant capacity getting built this year, the industry doesn’t yet wield the political power to match that success.
“We don’t show up with any swagger,” McBee said. “We continue to call ourselves ‘alternative.’ … We find ourselves a bit outside the cultural zeitgeist, and that’s not a good place to be.”
McBee believes that the IRA was a “beautifully designed piece of legislation,” but that not enough work was done to tell voters and their representatives about the jobs and economic opportunities flowing to their districts. He wants to spur energy professionals to flood the political arena with the degree of money and effort that the fossil fuel industry has invested over the decades — but without the “lying and distortion.”
“The good news is, as an industry, we have all the facts on our side,” McBee said. “We just have to prosecute the case.”
Since starting Amped, McBee said he has received hundreds of inbound messages from people who want to help the industry put up more of a fight, noting the “organic unstructured energy that can be harnessed.”
That’s a bigger project than the upcoming midterms: to turn the IRA defeat into a political awakening for the clean energy sector.
The Trump admin is propping up the aging coal fleet despite the financial and environmental costs — and also making far-fetched plans to build new coal plants.
The Trump administration seems to be doing all it can to give the coal industry everything it wants. Those efforts may not succeed, but they could keep the dying industry on life support, and soak U.S. citizens with the financial and environmental costs of doing so — unless legal challenges compel it to change course.
The National Coal Council, an advisory group that includes executives from coal mining companies and major U.S. utilities, met with Trump administration officials last week and delivered 19 recommendations. One of its key requests is for the government to issue grants and loans to build the first new U.S. coal plants in over a decade. But the industry also seeks intervention to keep existing coal plants running, including federal government power purchase agreements and the suspension of environmental protections.
Trump administration officials were on the same page. “There’s no road for a great, prosperous America without saving the coal plants we have and doing everything we can to remove barriers that can open up the possibility to expand our coal fleet,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Already, Wright’s agency has committed to invest $850 million in existing or new coal facilities and has used emergency authority to force coal plants on the verge of shutting down to keep running indefinitely. The Trump administration has also issued executive orders that free plants from regulations for air pollution and coal ash, lift restrictions on coal mining, and open coal leases on 13 million acres of federal lands.
As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told attendees, “Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.”
Overall, the aim is to halt the coal industry’s ongoing decline in the face of cheaper and cleaner alternatives to provide electricity, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. EDF is one of several environmental groups and a handful of state attorneys general challenging the administration’s environmental rollbacks in court.
Coal has fallen from supplying nearly half the country’s electricity in 2011 to just 15% in 2024, but it rose slightly last year amid increased power demand and rising natural gas prices.
The Trump administration is “openly admitting that it’s their goal to increase profits and increase operations of fossil fuel in any way these companies want, without the interests of ratepayers or Americans at large in mind,” Kelly said.
The administration has plenty of tools at its disposal to achieve those goals — particularly when it comes to keeping old coal plants online past their planned closure. But certain other goals, like building new coal plants, will prove much harder to achieve.
New coal plants are the most far-fetched item on the coal industry’s wish list, but that’s not stopping the Trump administration from bankrolling such projects.
In June, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to spend about $425 million under the 1950 Defense Production Act to retrofit and support 13 existing coal-fired power plants it deems vital to national security. It also directed about $100 million for the engineering and design of two new coal plants: a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Alaska and a 1.6-gigawatt plant in West Virginia.
But that federal contribution is a drop in the bucket for coal plants of that size. According to reporting from CNN, based on an analysis prepared for the Wyoming Energy Authority, it would cost $10 billion to build the West Virginia plant and $8 billion for the Alaska facility, assuming both use carbon-capture technology as currently planned. Those totals are roughly twice the cost of building equivalent natural gas power plants with carbon capture.
The electricity from those plants would, in turn, likely be far more expensive than competing alternatives such as gas, solar, wind, or batteries, said John Miller, a managing director and energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen.
Utilities and independent power generation companies are “very happy to take federal money to extend the life” of aging coal plants, he said. But beyond the projects in Alaska and West Virginia, “nobody’s proposing to build new coal-fired power plants,” he said.
The newest major coal plant in America is the Sandy Creek facility, located in Texas and completed in 2013 — and it’s been offline since 2025 due to “catastrophic failure,” he said. The Texas grid operator reported last year that Sandy Creek is expected to be back online in 2027. Similarly, the Comanche 3 plant in Colorado, which opened more than a decade ago, has been offline since August 2025, and remains idle after missing a projected July restart date.
“It doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that coal plants will open,” Kelly said. “But money has been allocated to that, and we could see the loss of taxpayer money before we come to that conclusion.”
More money could be wasted in attempting to restart coal plants that were purposefully shut down, he added. DOE last month offered $78 million to AES, the owner of the Warrior Run coal plant in Maryland, which shuttered the facility in 2024 but has recently explored reopening it to meet growing demand for power.
“That’s a plant that was shut down because it was not just uneconomic but extraordinarily uneconomic to run,” Kelly said, citing comments from the independent market monitor for PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator for 13 states including Maryland, which protested AES’s restart plan.
Subsidizing its reopening “could not only cost a lot of money and increase pollution, but also interfere with the opportunity to have a better, more economic way to improve reliability and address system needs,” he said.
Building or reopening long-shuttered coal plants may be a stretch, Kelly said, but the administration has demonstrated that it is able to keep old, costly, and unreliable coal plants open past their planned closure dates.
Through July, the Trump administration has “preserved more than 13 GW of coal capacity that would have closed by now absent intervention,” according to a new report from the National Coal Council.
That tally includes just under 10 gigawatts of coal plants whose closure dates were voluntarily extended by their owners, as well as roughly 3.2 gigawatts of coal plants forced to keep running past retirement via Department of Energy emergency orders issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act.
These interventions for coal plants in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Washington state have slowed the pace of coal-plant closures. Only 2.6 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity shuttered in 2025, the lowest amount in the past 15 years, according to an April report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The DOE could force more coal plants to stay online this year. In a February briefing paper, EIA tallied 6.4 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire in 2026, or about 4% of the U.S. coal fleet. But “renewed or new emergency orders could affect retirements planned for this year as well,” it noted.
Indeed, environmental advocates have little expectation that the DOE will stop issuing stay-open orders.
“The Trump administration is going to continue to renew them until a court stops it,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, citing the legal challenges brought by his group and others.
The first stay-open order to see its day in court will be that concerning the J.H. Campbell power plant in Michigan. Environmental groups and the state itself are seeking to undo the DOE’s orders, arguing that the agency has failed to prove that a true grid emergency exists — and pointing out that the utility Consumers Energy, Michigan regulators, and the regional grid operator have all determined that closing the plant would not threaten reliability.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments on the case in May, and could issue a ruling as early as next month, Kelly said. “If we get a good decision from the D.C. Circuit, laying out what the standard is for these — and it clearly hasn’t been met in the case of Campbell — that can start to be used to start short-circuiting DOE using these 202(c) orders to keep plants online,” he said.
Meanwhile, the cost of keeping these coal plants open is mounting. The Sierra Club estimates that U.S. utility customers have paid a collective $415 million and counting in excess costs caused by forcing six coal plants and one oil- and gas-fired power plant open under DOE emergency orders. It could balloon further: Consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that, if unchecked, DOE’s use of 202(c) emergency orders could increase energy costs by nearly $6 billion by 2028.
“It’s very clear this is not doing anything to lower energy costs,” said Patrick Drupp, the Sierra Club’s climate policy director.
In fact, many of the power plants under the DOE’s must-run orders “are not functional and costing lots of money to get functional and back online,” said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at think tank Energy Innovation who co-wrote a 2023 report finding that clean energy and batteries are a cheaper alternative to operating 99% of the U.S. coal fleet. “That means they are not contributing to reliability.”
As the California firm boots up a giant thermal battery system in South Dakota, fresh funds will help it build a second U.S. factory and more large-scale projects.
The startup Antora Energy just raised $550 million to build and deploy more of its heat-storing batteries for powering data centers and cleaning up factories.
On Thursday, San Jose, California–based Antora said it closed a Series C funding round co-led by climatetech investor G2 Venture Partners and the VC firm Eclipse, which backs manufacturing-focused startups. That brings Antora’s total corporate and project financing to around $1 billion, the company says, adding that the latest infusion will enable it to expand domestic production of its thermal batteries and accelerate the buildout of large-scale projects.
Eight-year-old Antora has likened its technology to an enormous toaster. Electricity runs through a large resistance heater to warm big blocks of solid carbon to extremely high temperatures for days on end. The blocks release controlled blasts of high-intensity light that can be used to either produce power on demand or generate steam for industrial processes.
Just two months ago, Antora began booting up its first commercial-size system: a 5-gigawatt-hour thermal battery at Poet’s biofuels plant near Big Stone City, South Dakota. The project will turn cheap wind energy into steam the plant needs to convert corn into ethanol, displacing some of the facility’s reliance on coal-fueled boilers.
Antora says this system will be one of the largest battery storage projects in the world when it’s fully operating later this year. Meanwhile, its San Jose manufacturing campus ranks among the country’s largest battery factories.
But the firm is hardly alone. Dozens of thermal energy startups in the U.S. and worldwide are developing systems with a variety of heat-trapping materials, including ceramic bricks, crushed rocks, and “stonelike” industrial waste.
The sector is expanding as countries are scrambling to meet power demand from data centers and industrial facilities — and struggling to limit the growing strain on grid infrastructure and household utility bills. In the U.S., high electricity costs have also hindered manufacturers from adopting cleaner, electrified heating technologies.
Energy storage systems in general can address those challenges by charging up when power is cheap and abundant, then dispatching that stored energy when it’s needed, such as by sending electricity to the grid during hours of peak demand. Thermal batteries can also deliver heat directly to factories to keep them from drawing lots of costly peak power.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” Andrew Ponec, co-founder and CEO of Antora, said in a news release. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck — delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”
The company launched its first pilot project in 2023: a 5-megawatt-hour system installed at a facility owned by the utility Wellhead Electric near Fresno, California. Months later, Antora raised $150 million from corporate and venture investors to scale up thermal-battery production at the San Jose factory, which it has expanded into a three-building manufacturing campus.
Antora built over 200 battery modules for the South Dakota storage system. But the project is notable for more than its technology. Antora is also pioneering an electricity tariff, designed with the local utility Otter Tail Power, that rewards Antora for charging up during periods of surplus local renewable energy production. The idea is to improve the bottom line for thermal energy systems while also ensuring they benefit everyone on the grid. Antora said it’s working with utilities across the country to develop similar rate structures for future projects.
With the $550 million fundraise, Antora said it plans to build a second U.S. manufacturing hub and to start fulfilling its “growing pipeline of signed agreements” with some of the nation’s biggest data center operators and industrial companies, including biofuels and chemical producers and food and beverage manufacturers. The company declined to share more specific details.
“We’re in the process of developing many more projects, very similar to the Big Stone project [with Poet], and those projects span a variety of sectors and are sort of a similar size,” Justin Briggs, Antora’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Canary Media in a May interview.
“We’re also developing projects in the power sector that would provide the ability for data centers to come online much faster than they otherwise would,” he said, noting that those systems could be anywhere from five to 10 times the scale of its 5-GWh system at the South Dakota ethanol plant.
“Our energy system is at an inflection point, and very few companies can meet soaring power demand,” Jake Tauscher, partner at G2 Venture Partners, said in the news release. “Antora is meeting that demand today. They’re deploying at scale, on budget, and on the rapid timelines customers need.”
State lawmakers must decide whether to unlock $194M to fix aging school HVAC and plumbing systems or return it to utilities for a few dollars off monthly bills.
Should California spend nearly $200 million helping public schools install healthier and more efficient heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and plumbing systems? Or should it send the money back to the state’s biggest utilities so their customers can pay roughly a dollar less on their monthly bills over the course of a single year?
That’s the choice that California lawmakers must make in the coming months.
The funds at stake are part of the California Schools Healthy Air, Plumbing, and Efficiency program, or CalSHAPE, which funds schools’ HVAC and plumbing repairs and upgrades. The state required its three big utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — to fill the initiative’s coffers with about $1 billion in fees collected from customers between 2020 and 2023.
Although much of that total has already been doled out, $194 million in CalSHAPE funds has been frozen since 2024 as state leaders debate ways to curb skyrocketing energy bills. Because current law sunsets CalSHAPE at the start of 2027, the leftover money will revert to utilities by year’s end without legislative action.
Clean energy and community advocates are pressing lawmakers to prevent that from happening.
They want leaders to leverage a sprawling budget-negotiating document, known as a budget trailer bill, to extend the looming deadline and to direct the California Energy Commission, which administers CalSHAPE, to disburse the money to schools — many of which have already identified projects they want to pursue. That includes replacing old AC equipment to keep students comfortable as climate change fuels extreme heat, improving air-filtration systems, and swapping fossil-fueled heaters for all-electric heat pumps that can both warm and cool buildings.
“The $200 million or so that’s sitting unused would help about 120,000 students in California electrify their schools, which would reduce their air pollution and give them access to air conditioning,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That work, she added, is “not optional — it’s to protect kids from extreme weather events, from climate change, from fires, from heat waves.”
Nine members of the state Assembly have signed a letter asking lawmakers who chair key budget committees to extend the CalSHAPE funds. Unless legislation is introduced to alter the current state of affairs, the final decision on whether the $194 million will remain available for schools or be returned to the utilities on Dec. 1 will be made in budget negotiations between lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. While a final budget package must be settled by July 1, budget trailer bills that modify state law to implement a broader budget agreement have until Aug. 31, the end of this year’s legislative session, to be completed.
CalSHAPE was created by a law passed in 2020 that aimed to make schools — especially those in underserved areas and “fenceline” communities near polluting facilities — more energy efficient, healthy, and resilient. It has since given out nearly $800 million to more than 1,000 projects, according to a 2025 report from the California Energy Commission.
But the agency abruptly closed further grant applications in mid-2024.
It said it closed the program to ensure that schools had enough time to fully spend their awards before the program’s sunset. But according to a March analysis from a state Senate budget subcommittee, the funding was frozen “in part because legislation and other departmental reports focusing on energy affordability proposed to revert CalSHAPE funds to ratepayers.”
That statement refers to Assembly Bill 3121, introduced in mid-2024 by Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D), who chairs the chamber’s Utilities and Energy Committee, in consultation with the Newsom administration. The bill proposed clawing back CalSHAPE funding, along with grants for solar on low-income multifamily buildings and batteries for medically vulnerable households, in an effort to curb the state’s fast-rising electricity rates.
Critics of that plan pointed out that pushing that money back to utilities was likely to yield only $30 to $50 in one-time rebates for customers — an amount they said was too little to validate axing the programs. Those arguments won the day, with AB 3121 failing to advance.
Yet the CalSHAPE funding has remained frozen, and Newsom has continued trying to return the funds to utilities. That’s left schools stuck in limbo. Of the nearly 5,000 schools that received grants to conduct initial assessments — nearly half of which are in underserved communities — only 172 have secured follow-on funding to complete recommended HVAC work, according to the pro-CalSHAPE coalition.
“We’ve been working for two years to try to get this funding revived,” said Keith Butler, deputy superintendent of Torrance Unified School District, in Southern California. His district used $1.6 million in first-phase CalSHAPE funding to deploy carbon dioxide–detecting thermostats and to hire an engineering firm to identify about 300 buildings, serving about 6,000 students, that need to replace decades-old air-conditioning units, he said.
“We were ready to push the button on round 2,” he said — a $6 million investment in replacing those AC units with modern equipment — “and then the plug got pulled.”
The California Energy Commission told Canary Media in an email that it is working with schools to process the nearly $800 million in previously allocated funds, but that “unallocated funding is anticipated to be returned to ratepayers.” The agency declined to comment on pending legislative discussions. Petrie-Norris’ office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Returning the unspent $194 million wouldn’t make much of a dent in utility rates. According to the March Senate budget subcommittee analysis, redirecting the funds back to customers “would result in savings of $2 per month for one year for San Diego Gas & Electric ratepayers, $1.25 per month for one year for SoCal Edison ratepayers, and $0.20 per month for one year for Pacific Gas & Electric ratepayers.”
Utilities aren’t obligated to use any unspent money to reduce rates under the law that authorized CalSHAPE, Stokes added. “My fear is that utilities will just do their creative accounting and shuffle things around and take that as profit,” she said.
California isn’t the only state looking to curb energy-efficiency spending to offer short-term utility bill relief. Democratic lawmakers in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, for example, have recently proposed cutting back on energy-efficiency programs to reduce fees on utility customers’ bills. Experts warn that such rollbacks are shortsighted, since lowering energy use through efficiency helps customers save money on their bills and drives down utility costs in the long run.
Efficiency upgrades can also help states meet their climate goals. The California Energy Commission forecasts that the projects funded by CalSHAPE so far will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3,300 metric tons, equivalent to taking 770 gasoline-fueled cars off the road for a year.
For example, the Santa Paula Unified School District, in Ventura County, is using $3.9 million in CalSHAPE funds to replace fossil gas–fueled condensers and furnaces at an elementary school with all-electric heat pumps and air-conditioning systems, said Douglas Henning, the district’s facilities and construction manager. “Everything we’re replacing, gas is going away,” he said.
These retrofits have significant health and wellness impacts too, Stokes noted. Students often struggle to concentrate in classrooms that are too hot or cold, and older HVAC systems may not properly filter air pollutants, such as vehicle exhaust or wildfire smoke. Richard Bruns, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University, found that the long-term benefits of school HVAC upgrades — which come in the form of improved health and educational outcomes — outweigh the costs by a factor of 30.
HVAC retrofits can also reduce the burden that schools put on the power grid. Some California school districts are piloting advanced AC control systems to shift when they draw electricity to avoid increasing peak loads on grids during heat waves.
Reducing that strain could lower costs for everyone by reducing the amount of money that utilities have to spend to upgrade their power grids. “Ratepayers will benefit from lower peak demand and lower environmental drag from using less electricity,” the Torrance district’s Butler said.
In an interesting twist, the ongoing dispute over CalSHAPE funding intersects with another controversial energy issue before the California legislature: what to do with the state’s biggest virtual power plant program.
Lawmakers are now haggling over whether to extend funding for that Demand Side Grid Support program or whether to close it down and redirect the funds to utility-managed VPP programs, which have been far less effective at delivering grid relief at an equivalent cost. The Newsom administration has proposed shifting roughly $70 million in interest generated by the CalSHAPE funds to the utility-run programs.
Stokes is among the advocates pushing to redirect that $70 million to the Demand Side Grid Support program, even as she works to retain the $194 million for school retrofits.
In both cases, Stokes said, the choices are to spend money as lawmakers originally intended or to give it back to the state’s politically powerful utilities. “The idea that we would rob from schoolkids to hand another blank check to utilities is to me unacceptable,” she said.
The DOE says the Schahfer plant is key for reliability, but repairs mean it’ll be offline for much of 2026. The grid is set to be just fine without it this summer.
The Trump administration has spent the last year demanding that old, inefficient coal plants stay online long past their retirement dates. But one of those plants in Indiana hasn’t operated in months and won’t be able to until costly repairs are completed — undermining federal officials’ claims that their mandates will make energy more affordable and are needed to avoid imminent blackouts.
The Trump administration first ordered Indiana’s R.M. Schahfer coal plant to continue running in December, just a week before its scheduled closure date and after regulators had already determined that the polluting plant was not needed to keep the region’s lights on. That 90-day emergency must-run order was reupped on March 23.
Yet the coal plant has been offline for repairs since the end of February and is not expected to start running again until this fall, facility owner Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO) told regional grid operators at their May 19 hearing on summer electricity reliability. The utility added that even without that energy, it is well positioned to meet power demand this summer, in large part thanks to new wind, solar, and batteries.
In other words, “the coal-fired units couldn’t produce electricity for an emergency even if one existed, which it doesn’t,” Sameer Doshi, a senior attorney for the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, said in a statement. Earthjustice is asking a federal appeals court to overturn the administration’s must-run orders for Schahfer and another Indiana plant.
In total, President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy has ordered seven fossil-fueled plants in the U.S. to run past their retirement dates — sometimes against the wishes of the plant owners themselves — in an unprecedented flex of authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The agency had previously used that power only temporarily on request from utilities and grid operators facing immediate energy threats.
Even before the DOE ordered Schahfer to stay online, one of the plant’s two coal-fired units had been out of service since July 2025 because of mechanical failures.
The plant’s other coal-fired unit operated in January, helping to meet demand during Winter Storm Fern. But it has been offline since Feb. 28 for “planned maintenance,” NIPSCO said. Both units are scheduled for a “tentative” return to service by October, company officials said at the May forum held by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which operates the grid covering parts of 15 states.
“The conditions of both those units were deteriorated,” said NIPSCO environmental compliance director Rockey Pollard, citing issues with equipment including boiler feed pumps and tubes, as well as last summer’s turbine failure.
The company told MISO that “significant boiler and turbine work” is ongoing on both coal units, which were built in the mid-1980s.
Households and businesses will bear the financial brunt of propping up coal plants, which are more expensive to operate than newer gas plants and renewable energy paired with batteries. In March, federal regulators approved NIPSCO’s request to spread the costs of the coal plant repairs among customers across the north and central part of the region. The company has estimated that keeping the coal plant running past its 2025 scheduled retirement date will cost more than $1 billion through the end of 2027.
Local residents are also furious that, along with keeping Schahfer running, NIPSCO is planning to develop a massive data center, and a gas plant to power it, adjacent to the coal plant.
While experts are skeptical of the Trump administration’s “energy emergency,” the U.S. does need to quickly build generation as data centers, factories, and electrification spike demand. But many say wind and solar — the cheapest, fastest types of electricity to build — are the solution, rather than running antiquated coal plants.
NIPSCO, for one, explained at the hearing that it expects to have a surplus of power in the coming months, and that it had added three wind farms, eight solar farms, and two battery sites to its portfolio since 2021. Across MISO’s territory, solar and storage plants — along with some new gas plants — mean that the grid is prepared to meet demand over the summer, the organization reported this month.
“The DOE is using 202(c) emergency orders to force ratepayers to pay for plant rebuilds at this dilapidated coal plant even as Indiana regulators have already approved replacement power plants, which are now operating or under construction,” Earthjustice’s Doshi said.
The Trump administration is expected to issue yet another 90-day must-run order at Schahfer when the current one expires on June 21. But as NIPSCO has made clear, the coal plant won’t be able to run at all for the entirety of that three-month mandate.
Consumers “will be forced to absorb additional costs for facilities that are not delivering any benefit to the public,” Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Indiana consumer watchdog group Citizens Action Coalition, said in a statement. “Ratepayers need relief, not further punishment.”
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