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GRID: Texas’ grid manager increases its forecast for large-scale users from 111 GW to 152 GW — a 37% increase by 2030 that places even more pressure on an already wobbly power grid. (Dallas Morning News)
PIPELINES: Mountain Valley Pipeline officials say cost of the nearly completed project has grown to $7.85 billion, more than $220 million higher than its latest cost estimate in February. (Roanoke Times, Cardinal News)
SOLAR:
WIND: Dominion Energy readies its first batch of monopiles for placement as it begins construction of its offshore wind farm near Virginia. (Virginian-Pilot)
OIL & GAS:
TRANSITION:
NUCLEAR: Years of delay and tens of millions in cost overruns in Georgia Power’s expansion of nuclear Plant Vogtle will likely push utilities away from such large projects toward small modular reactors, experts say. (E&E News)
UTILITIES:
POLITICS: West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice vows to fight new U.S. EPA rules requiring coal-fired power plants to reduce or capture 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. (West Virginia Watch)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Tesla reportedly lays off its entire 500-person supercharger team throwing into uncertainty an EV charging industry that had started to rely on Tesla’s technology. (The Information, subscription; E&E News)
ALSO: The developers of an electric truck charging corridor across the Southwest struggle to site remote chargers where they can connect to the grid. (E&E News)
GRID:
PIPELINES: Mountain Valley Pipeline officials say the cost of the nearly completed project has grown to $7.85 billion, more than $220 million higher than its previous estimate in February. (Roanoke Times, Cardinal News)
OFFSHORE WIND:
CLIMATE: Students at three universities file legal complaints alleging their schools’ fossil fuel investments are illegal and violate their commitments to climate action and research. (Guardian)
CLEAN ENERGY: Three Energy Department-funded research projects investigate whether seaweed can be mined for minerals critical to clean energy projects. (Hakai)
OIL & GAS: The U.S. House overwhelmingly passes a bill that would direct the Energy Department to research abandoned oil and gas wells’ environmental risks. (The Hill)
EFFICIENCY: The U.S. Energy Department institutes stricter energy efficiency standards for residential water heaters. (New York Times)
STORAGE: A 2,000 MW battery storage system under construction in southern California is expected to be one of the world’s largest such facilities when completed next year. (Whittier Daily News)
CARBON CAPTURE: A carbon dioxide removal startup has injected more than 2,000 metric tons of a carbon-rich biomass slurry for sequestration in subterranean salt caverns below Kansas as it scales up its operations. (Canary Media)
More than 100 megawatts of planned solar projects throughout southeastern Massachusetts are facing lengthy delays as needed grid upgrades wait for state approval.
Arrays at Cape Cod schools, installations on an affordable housing complex on Martha’s Vineyard, and residential solar arrays for low-income homeowners are among the planned renewable energy developments that have been held up or reconfigured as regulators consider utility requests to upgrade substations and spread out the cost among customers. Until these improvements are approved and executed, no solar developments larger than 15 kilowatts for single-phase systems or 25 kilowatts for triple-phase systems can be connected to the grid in many of the covered areas.
“This stalling runs counter to the state’s climate goals,” said Kate Warner, energy planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the regional planning agency for Dukes County. “The Vineyard wants to do our part, but we can’t because we can’t add any more significant solar to the grid.”
These delays are one more twist in the ongoing growing pains the state — and many places across the country — is experiencing as the move away from fossil fuels changes the flow of power through the system. As Massachusetts aims to go carbon-neutral by 2050, the transition to home heat pumps and electric vehicles is ramping up the need for electricity. At the same time, growing numbers of solar arrays are sending more and more power to the grid. The surge in both supply and demand has utilities and regulators scrambling to expand and strengthen the grid as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Under previous rules in Massachusetts, a distributed generation project such as a new solar development would find itself on the hook for any expensive grid upgrades needed to connect the new power source to the system. Even though these improvements would benefit future projects, the development that triggered the need for the upgrades would have to bear the cost.
To remedy this imbalance, the state energy department created a process that lets utilities propose plans to spread the cost burden of some grid upgrades among ratepayers, then recoup some of this money from future distributed generation projects and use it to reimburse ratepayers. These capital investment project proposals must be approved by utilities regulators. Massachusetts is the first state to create such a process.
In April 2022, Eversource — which covers 140 towns around Boston and in the southeastern and western parts of the state — filed six such proposals relating to improvements in regions throughout southeastern Massachusetts. One of the proposals has been approved; the other five remain pending, raising questions about what happens next — and when.
“The thinking was that it was going to be pretty quickly reviewed and approved — and that has not been the case,” said Mariel Marchand, power supply planner for the Cape Light Compact, the regional energy administrator that serves the 15 towns of Cape Cod and the six on Martha’s Vineyard.
The Department of Public Utilities was unable to share any concrete timeline, noting that it intends to consider each application in detail. Because the process is new — in Massachusetts and beyond — there is no precedent for how long such deliberations should or usually do take.
The capital investment project proposal for Cape Cod, which also impacts Martha’s Vineyard, calls for upgrading the distribution lines connected to five substations and additional equipment on three substations.
The goal is to make the infrastructure ready for a significant amount of solar and wind power to come online in coming years as part of the state’s push toward decarbonization and electrification, said Eversource spokesperson William Hinkle.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the wait for these improvements means a 20-unit affordable housing development originally designed to maximize its solar production has had to go back to the drawing board. The project, intended to provide solar power and the associated savings to low-income residents, will now have to be configured as 10 smaller systems, each with its own interconnection. This arrangement, however, raises other regulatory questions about having more than one system on a single parcel of land, creating another delay.
“That project probably could’ve been built by now, but it’s now held up in this more complicated planning process,” said Ben Underwood, co-founder and co-CEO of Resonant Energy, the solar developer on the project.
On Cape Cod, the delays are slowing the deployment of a pilot program that provides low-income houses with solar panels, battery storage, and heat pumps. While many residential projects fall under the 15-kilowatt cap and can still be connected, the addition of batteries can increase the system size close to or over the limit, Marchand said.
“Before we recommend that this customer should have a battery, we have to make sure it can be installed,” she said. “It’s more work on our end, but we’re making it work.”
If the pending plans are rejected, the old system that would impose prohibitive costs on a small number of projects will remain in effect. If they are approved, it will still take significant time to complete the upgrades. At the moment, therefore, all anyone can do is wait.
“Right now we are dead in the water,” Warner says.
STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Minneapolis-St. Paul’s regional public transit agency will buy 20 electric buses to put in service by 2026 to help meet emission-reduction targets. (Star Tribune)
GRID: A federal judge upholds a decision to block a land swap needed to complete a major transmission line between Iowa and Wisconsin, creating more uncertainty for the project. (E&E News, subscription)
CLEAN ENERGY:
WIND: North Dakota regulators approve plans for a 200 MW wind project that includes an 18-mile transmission line. (North Dakota Monitor)
PIPELINES: At a North Dakota Republican Party convention, a resolution objecting to the use of eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines falls two votes short. (North Dakota Monitor)
AIR QUALITY: Wildfire smoke helped keep Fargo, North Dakota, on an annual ranking of the 25 worst U.S. cities for short-term particle pollution. (MPR News)
POLITICS: The top GOP candidates for Indiana governor say they would take steps to emphasize coal and reshape the state’s utility oversight board. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
GRID:
BIOGAS:
COMMENTARY:
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration unveils new federal permitting rules designed to prioritize projects with environmental benefits while adding reviews for ones that could worsen climate change. (New York Times)
FOSSIL FUELS:
NUCLEAR:
GRID: The U.S. Energy Department starts preparing for the rise of artificial intelligence and its projected energy demand, and begins exploring ways that AI could make power delivery and energy project permitting more efficient. (Axios)
EMISSIONS: Companies’ return-to-office plans are often out of line with their own climate pledges, as multiple peer-reviewed studies find working from home can significantly reduce a worker’s emissions impact. (Grist/Fast Company)
STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
UTILITIES: Several New England utilities plan to seek federal funds for a regional energy data platform to make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
OIL & GAS: A company agrees to pay New Mexico $24.5 million to resolve air pollution violations related to flaring methane and other associated gasses at its oil and gas facilities in the Permian Basin. (Associated Press)
ALSO:
NUCLEAR:
UTILITIES:
WIND: A California court rules that a lawsuit seeking to block a proposed wind facility in Shasta County will be heard by an out-of-area judge. (Record Searchlight)
SOLAR: Western Colorado residents continue to push back on a proposed utility-scale solar installation, saying it would “industrialize” the rural area. (Telluride Daily Planet)
GEOTHERMAL: California offers $30 million in tax credits to a geothermal power and lithium extraction project near the Salton Sea. (news release)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: An analysis finds California must upgrade its grid capacity by about 25% to accommodate projected power demands from growing numbers of electric vehicles. (Tech Xplore)
CLIMATE:
COAL: Powder River Basin coal production for the first quarter of 2024 fell 21% from the previous year. (Cowboy State Daily)
MINING: A uranium mining company plans to expand exploratory drilling at its proposed project in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. (news release)
COMMENTARY: Advocates urge Colorado lawmakers to pass legislation regulating facilities that convert plastics to fuel, saying their pollution disproportionately harms underserved communities. (Colorado Newsline)
A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that would make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies.
Clean energy advocates see this kind of service as key to supporting the rollout of Inflation Reduction Act rebates and, more broadly, to controlling costs and demand on a lower-carbon power grid.
Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities are working with several subsidiaries and state groups and agencies to propose the new data platform to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) grant program, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Their $29 million data hub concept, with half the funding requested from the Department of Energy, builds off a similar state-level platform that’s been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019. Proponents say federal funding is needed in part to encourage that state’s regulators to give final approval for the project.
Launched over the next four years, the regional data hub would provide standardized access to “very minute usage information” for millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, according to Unitil.
“With this data more readily available, customers could better understand their energy consumption, which would help them make decisions about energy conservation steps they may want to take at home or in the workplace,” Unitil said in a statement. “For instance, the information could be used to obtain a price quote from a rooftop solar provider, a competitive supplier to receive a price estimate, or a storage provider to determine the appropriate size of behind-the-meter battery storage.”
Multi-utility data platforms currently exist in Texas and New York, both states with unified electric grids, proponents said — but in New England and many other places, customers’ data access is inconsistent.
In a concept paper on their data hub proposal filed with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, the Northeast utilities say costs for efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources or DERs, can be inflated by the “idiosyncratic processes” and “bespoke electronic interfaces” needed to work with each customer’s data.
“Today, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs, while others install monitoring packages with their solar and storage applications that are functionally duplicative of the utility’s advanced meters, driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation,” the proposal says.
To estimate cost savings in a quote for rooftop solar, for example, a homeowner may have to provide a year’s worth of paper or electronic bills for their prospective installer to compile and analyze by hand — an “incredibly silly manual process,” said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that’s participating in the regional data hub proposal.
“And that’s just the single homeowner level — think about a multi-family housing project, where you have forty, fifty, a hundred units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It’s just a total nightmare.”
An automated system would access customers’ data on demand in a standardized format and could spit out expected project savings at essentially the push of a button, he said. Contractors he’s spoken with, he said, call this approach “transformational for the way that we interact with customers.”
The data hub could also support energy dashboards, especially for environmental justice areas, to help visualize progress toward climate targets with a goal of “reducing the energy burden for historically disadvantaged communities,” said Eversource spokesperson Sarah Paduano in a statement.
“By breaking down the walls of historically utility-housed and owned data, Unitil believes this would remove a significant barrier for a variety of stakeholders that would be able to leverage the data in a meaningful way and towards advancing an equitable clean energy transition,” Unitil’s statement said.
Estimated savings from individual energy projects aren’t just nice to have, said Michael Murray, president of Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit working on the hub project — they are often required. Certain Inflation Reduction Act rebates are only offered to projects that can prove at least a 20% energy savings.
“The legislation was really intended to be the first sort of fusion between making an efficiency project a smart grid asset,” Murray said. “It’s no longer just, ‘efficiency is in its own silo and all you care about is annual energy savings.’ The question is, how does it become interactive and part of a ‘virtual power plant’ kind of concept?”
Better data on individual projects could help customers access savings from new rate designs that incentivize less usage at times of peak demand, the proposal says, improving resilience and lowering costs on a more variable, renewables-powered grid.
“Energy data is increasingly going to become the currency of a modern grid,” said Evans-Brown. “It’s really difficult to manage our peaks if you have no idea where they’re coming from, like what’s causing them all the way down to the consumer level.”
Without standardized, streamlined access to energy data, Murray said, contractors trying to work with IRA rebates in states that choose to offer them will face a costly and time-consuming burden of iterating individualized manual processes thousands of times.
“(The IRA) is going to touch millions of American homes. Each one of these is multiple data requests and processing. And so we need to figure out a way to do it in a streamlined way,” he said. Otherwise, “all that federal money gets drained into stupid overhead as opposed to actually delivering value for people.”
Not every New England state or utility is participating in the grant proposal. Connecticut-based Avangrid, with subsidiaries like Central Maine Power or CMP, is one that declined to join.
CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program’s first round last year for technology to reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and plans to seek additional GRIP funding on its own this year.
“Our decision for round two was to focus on reliability and load capacity grid improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” said spokesperson Jon Breed in a statement. “We are aware of the concept of the Regional Joint Utility Energy Data Hub and will be monitoring the performance of the program if it receives funding.”
For Murray, the long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the six states’ regional grid manager. He said utilities — and their customers — that don’t get on board, if the project moves forward, could risk becoming siloed and left behind in older systems.
“The whole industry is moving towards an automated system, which New Hampshire is building,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately need to go.”
NUCLEAR: In New York, the decommissioning company that owns the former Indian Point nuclear plant sues the state for not letting it dump radioactive wastewater into the Hudson River. (Times Union)
WORKFORCE: Maine’s governor vetoes a bill tying union labor with clean energy projects on state land, noting that it was unclear to her the types of jobs that would be required to use union workers. (Portland Press Herald)
POLICY: Even though New York has set ambitious climate goals, the state’s most recent budget didn’t include any significant measures to move the needle on climate action. (City Limits)
TRANSIT:
WIND:
BUILDINGS: Rhode Island regulators consider conditions they might apply to a potential operations extension of a Portsmouth liquefied natural gas facility that was intended as a temporary back-up for Aquidneck Island’s energy supply — including a ban on new gas hook-ups on the island. (Providence Journal)
TIDAL: Federal regulators grant an eight-year license to the Marine Renewable Energy Collaborative to pilot the use of tidal turbines in the Cape Cod Canal in Bourne, Massachusetts. (news release)
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: New Hampshire’s Henniker School District purchases four electric school buses using funds from the U.S. EPA’s Clean School Bus Program. (Concord Monitor)
BIOFUELS: Berlin, Connecticut, residents are frustrated and disgusted with the pungent smell wafting from a food waste-to-biofuel facility, in addition to noise pollution complaints. (NBC Connecticut)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A $4 billion electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant taking shape in a rural Kansas town is fueling speculation about whether a nearby low-income housing community could be sold for redevelopment. (Wichita Eagle)
OHIO:
BIOFUELS: The nation’s first ethanol plant to use carbon capture and storage launches a new program aiming to provide premium prices to corn farmers who grow low-carbon crops. (North Dakota Monitor)
CLEAN ENERGY: Missouri clean energy advocates accuse Ameren of slow-walking its long-term clean energy plans and prolonging its reliance on coal. (First Alert 4)
GEOTHERMAL: Minnesota is among a growing number of states with cities rolling out underground geothermal networks to help meet all-electric building standards and emission-reduction targets. (Canary Media)
CLIMATE: The Quad-Cities area can expect to see more intense flooding and hotter temperatures under climate models that anticipate rising carbon emissions, according to a new climate study. (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
TRANSPORTATION: Illinois Democrats propose legislation that would create a transit agency to oversee public transportation in northeastern Illinois and provide an additional $1.5 billion for public transit. (Sun-Times)
OIL & GAS:
UTILITIES: The new president of AES Indiana says improving customer service and grid reliability are two top priorities in her new role. (Indianapolis Business Journal)
COMMENTARY:
SOLAR: While a federal database shows around 0.02% of U.S. cropland is used for large solar projects, an analysis of four Midwest counties reveals much higher penetrations, worrying some farmers and advocates. (Reuters)
WIND: Wind turbines only take up about 5% of the land where they’re built, meaning there’s room to co-locate farms and other facilities below them, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Washington Post)
OIL & GAS: Advocates suggest establishing a new tax on oil and gas production in the world’s wealthiest countries, with a report finding the charge could raise $720 billion for climate mitigation by 2030. (Guardian)
POLITICS:
GRID: The U.S. power grid performed better during cold snaps this January than it did during winter storms over the past few years thanks to grid operators’ improvements, a report finds. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GEOTHERMAL: A Texas company uses software and sensor-equipped drilling tools to install geothermal heating and cooling systems in spaces previously considered too small to house such projects. (Canary Media)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CLIMATE: The Southeast faces one of the most rapid sea level surges in the world, an analysis finds, combining with increasingly severe storms to create epic floods. (Washington Post)
EFFICIENCY: Advocates laud a new Virginia law that strengthens energy efficiency standards and mandates the development of a standardized test to measure the cost effectiveness of proposed efficiency programs. (Energy News Network)
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