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UTILITIES: Colorado’s largest electric cooperative officially splits with Tri-State Generation and Transmission following years of wrangling over the wholesale power supplier’s rates, fossil fuel reliance and limits on local generation. (Greeley Tribune)
ALSO: Arizona regulators reject a utility’s request to exempt its proposed natural gas plant expansion in the western part of the state from environmental reviews. (12 News)
TRANSMISSION: Developers complete construction on the 125-mile Ten West Link transmission line designed to move solar power between California and Arizona. (Inside Climate News)
GRID: PacifiCorp becomes the first entity to formally commit to the California grid operator’s extended day-ahead power market. (RTO Insider, subscription)
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY:
COAL: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon plans to sue the Biden administration over rules aimed at reducing power plant pollution, saying it will hasten the demise of the state’s coal industry. (WyoFile)
OIL & GAS:
HYDROPOWER: Alaska utilities send their proposed plan for the Eklutna hydropower dam to Gov. Mike Dunleavy after months of debate over the facility’s management. (KTUU)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE: Portland, Oregon’s clean energy fund considers investing $50 million in seven school districts to fund solar installations, efficiency upgrades and other emissions reduction and climate change mitigation efforts. (OPB)
POLICY: New York’s comptroller releases an audit finding that the state energy siting office is too slow at approving big wind and solar developments and that permit applications often had missing or insufficient paperwork. (LoHud, Spectrum News 1)
ALSO:
OFFSHORE WIND:
GRID: Pennsylvania environmentalists cheer the end of plans to develop a major plastics chemical recycling plant in a cornfield, following their concerns it would be an energy-hungry and highly polluting facility. (Inside Climate News)
SOLAR:
UTILITIES: Pennsylvania utility commissioners unanimously vote to investigate a rate hike request from FirstEnergy equal to 34%. (Butler Eagle)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
COMMENTARY: A pediatric physical therapist and climate advocate writes that electrifying NJ Transit without regressive fare hikes is necessary to improve public health and air quality. (Star-Ledger)
GRID: The Biden administration finalizes a transmission permitting streamlining rule and plans to spend $331 million to add more than 2,000 MW of grid capacity in the West. (Heatmap, news release)
ALSO: California’s grid operator proposes investing $6.1 billion in 26 infrastructure projects aimed at expediting renewable energy project interconnections before 2035. (Reuters)
STORAGE:
SOLAR: A New Mexico company breaks ground on a $50 million solar tracking equipment manufacturing facility near Albuquerque. (Solar Power World)
COAL:
POLLUTION: The American Lung Association finds four New Mexico counties have excessively high levels of ozone pollution, including three in oil and gas producing regions. (NM Political Report)
OIL & GAS:
NUCLEAR:
HYDROPOWER:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES: Oregon regulators reject consumer advocates’ bid to dismiss Portland General Electric’s requested rate increase, saying the proposal must go through the lengthy review process. (Oregonian)
COMMENTARY: A California columnist celebrates the closure of 21 Western coal plants over the past two decades, but warns that shuttering the 32 remaining facilities may be even more difficult. (Los Angeles Times)
OFFSHORE WIND: Federal ocean energy regulators soon plan to publish updated regulations that could lead to 12 new offshore wind lease sales by 2028, including in the Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight and the central Atlantic. (Offshore Wind Biz)
ALSO:
HYDROGEN: Siemens Energy and a hydrogen production and storage startup join together to identify where and what type of hydrogen production is best suited for Delaware. (Delaware Business Times)
GRID:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The head of transportation and parking at Princeton University discusses how the school’s shuttle bus fleet went all-electric this past fall, describing the costs and benefits of making the switch from diesel. (WHYY)
BUILDINGS: A New Hampshire town works to train and certify at least 16 more people to do energy audits, installations and weatherizations as it aims to decarbonize 200 of its and a neighboring town’s buildings. (NHPR)
RENEWABLE POWER: A Maine startup business accelerator contracts with two executives-in-residence to push innovation at clean energy companies. (Mainebiz)
COMMENTARY: Several Delaware Tech faculty and students say the university shouldn’t drop a renewable energy degree program because it provides a “unique and affordable opportunity to enter the clean energy workforce.” (Delaware Online)
AIR POLLUTION: Several Missouri counties receive poor or failing grades in a new air pollution scorecard that tracks ozone and particulate pollution, including from burning fossil fuels. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
ALSO:
SOLAR:
PIPELINES: Michigan environmental activists say building a tunnel for Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac poses serious risks during construction while the tunnel’s ongoing operation violates tribal treaty rights. (9&10 News)
BIOFUELS: As commodity prices decline and operating costs rise, Ohio farmers hope new markets for ethanol will provide financial stability. (Columbus Dispatch)
WIND:
NUCLEAR: A retired physicist tells a northern Minnesota climate advocacy group that nuclear power will play a key role in the state’s energy future that includes a carbon-free power mandate by 2040. (The Timberjay)
CLEAN ENERGY: The U.S. Department of Labor releases an interactive map showing tens of thousands of jobs created by clean energy projects across the country. (Daily Reporter)
COMMENTARY:
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
In a case that could impact other lawsuits on voting rights, Black voters who sued over Georgia’s elections for key utility regulators are appealing their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Those elections for the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC, have been on hold for years and while last week a federal appeals court lifted an injunction blocking the elections from taking place, there is little chance the elections will happen this year.
Public Service Commissioners have enormous sway over greenhouse gas emissions because they approve how electric utilities get their power. They also set the rates consumers pay for electricity.
In Georgia, the commissioners have to live in specific districts. But unlike members of Congress who are only elected by residents of their district, the Georgia commissioners are elected by a statewide, at-large vote. A group of Black voters in Atlanta argued in a lawsuit that this violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it dilutes their votes, preventing them from sending the candidate of their choice to the commission.
In one example the plaintiffs cited, the former commissioner for District 3, which covers Metro Atlanta, “was elected to three terms on the PSC without ever winning a single county in District 3.”
That commissioner — along with four of the five current commissioners — is a white Republican. Georgia’s population is one-third Black, with a much higher proportion in District 3. Georgia voters elected Democrat Joe Biden and two Democratic U.S. Senators in 2020, and Atlanta voters tend to choose Democrats for seats ranging from mayor and city council to U.S. Congress.
A federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs in 2022 and suspended PSC elections until the state legislature could devise a new system. However, in November 2023, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision.
The appeals court ruling took issue with the proposed fix of single-member district elections, arguing a federal court can’t overrule the state’s choice to hold at-large elections because it would violate the “principles of federalism.”
“It’s kind of an upside-down view,” said Bryan Sells, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs. “What the 11th Circuit’s ruling says is that Georgia is allowed to discriminate against Black voters.”
The plaintiffs are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court decision, though there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will take up the case.
In their petition for Supreme Court consideration, the plaintiffs argue that if it’s upheld, the appeals court decision “would upend decades of settled law and have a cascading effect far beyond the reach of this case.”
“[The appeals court panel] simply decided that whatever rationales Georgia might tender for the at-large scheme…automatically trump any amount of racial vote dilution, no matter how severe,” the petition argues. “If a State’s interest can prevail in this case, there is no case in which it won’t.”
The Georgia secretary of state’s office declined to comment on the appeal.
In the meantime, PSC elections have been on hold since 2022, when the federal judge who found for the plaintiffs imposed an injunction blocking the secretary of state from holding or certifying those elections. The 11th Circuit issued an order last week lifting the injunction, though its effect was not immediately clear.
Sells and a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office both said they were reviewing the order. In a text message, Sells also expressed surprise at what he called “the court’s unilateral action that no one asked for.”
Under the injunction, elections for two PSC seats that were scheduled for November 2022 were canceled. Despite not facing voters, those commissioners continue to serve and vote on PSC decisions, including rate increases and the three new fossil fuel-powered turbines the commission just approved.
PSC elections are also not on the 2024 ballot. A third commissioner’s term will expire at the end of the year.
A bill that passed the Georgia General Assembly before the Supreme Court appeal was filed or the injunction was lifted lays out a schedule for elections to resume, still following the current model of statewide voting. Governor Brian Kemp signed it into law last week.
The law schedules those elections to begin in 2025.
Environmental advocates say new rules announced Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should close a loophole that has helped power plant operators skirt responsibility for toxic coal ash pollution at scores of sites nationwide.
Two rules — part of a suite of new regulations on fossil fuel power plants that also include the first-ever carbon emissions limits — may offer the broadest tools yet for forcing cleanup of hundreds of ponds, landfills, and impoundments known to be holding coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal.
Coal ash has been piling up for more than a century wherever coal has been burned as an energy source. Some has wound up in landfills. Some has been repurposed as construction fill. Some still sits in unlined ponds or piles next to power plants. It was mostly unregulated until recent years as its danger to public health became better known.
The initial attempts to regulate coal ash were incomplete. The U.S. EPA’s 2015 coal ash rules covered only active repositories — exempting about half of all known dump sites including landfills, ponds closed before 2015, and sites where ash was scattered or dumped. Advocates have fought to expand the rules ever since.
The new, finalized Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) rule essentially prohibits any pollution of groundwater or water bodies by coal plant sites, regardless of the exact source.
Meanwhile the new Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELGs) address wastewater released from power plants, including water used to clean bottom ash out of boilers. The effluent rules, proposed last spring, represent the first-ever regulations on coal plant wastewater, which includes contaminated water that has seeped through coal ash, and water drained from coal ash impoundments in preparation for closing.
Companies have been able to avoid cleaning up even regulated coal ash ponds that were leaking, by blaming groundwater contamination on nearby unregulated coal ash sources, environmental attorneys have long argued.
“So there’s a huge loophole that we will hopefully be closing,” said Environmental Integrity Project senior attorney Abel Russ during one of two online press conferences held by environmental attorneys and advocates before the rules’ release. “What EPA proposed would require basically sitewide corrective action and cleanup, whatever the source is, and owners will no longer be able to point to an unregulated unit and avoid a cleanup. This will also lead to clean up plans that are actually going to do what they’re supposed to do, which is restore groundwater quality.”
“We’ll finally eliminate the shell game of ‘Oh contamination came from that pile, not this pile,’” added Frank Holleman, coordinator of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s regional coal ash initiative. “The utilities will finally step up to the plate and be law-abiding citizens, and clean up this historic mess that the utilities are well capable of cleaning up and which should have been cleaned up years and years ago.”
The new rule will also for the first time regulate “historic” coal ash that has been scattered and dumped around coal plant sites and even in surrounding communities, often without records even being kept.
“It may be underlying buildings, it may be underlying playgrounds, it’s basically everywhere,” said Sierra Club staff attorney Megan Wachspress. “The first step under the rule is for coal plant operators to actually figure out and delineate where this stuff is. When we talk about implementation, that’s making sure all of this dumped ash actually becomes accounted for.”
Earthjustice senior attorney Lisa Evans praised the new rules, but noted that change depends on meaningful enforcement. Indeed, the 2015 federal rules were barely enforced until 2022, when the Biden administration’s EPA began issuing denials of cleanup extension requests and violation notices to coal ash site operators.
Attorneys said the coal ash and ELG rules work in tandem, with the coal ash rules covering groundwater near coal ash impoundments, and the ELG rules addressing surface water near power plants — both coal and new gas plants.
“The two rules are necessary and complementary to each other and point in the same direction, which is that they are contaminating groundwater, they’re contaminating the surface waters that run alongside them,” said Earthjustice attorney Thom Cmar. “Both standards work in complementary ways to set a high bar that points toward cleanup and environmental protection to make sure these dangerous sites are fully cleaned up.”
Holleman said that for decades, the powerful coal industry has avoided taking seemingly obvious precautionary measures.
“If you have solid waste with toxic substances in it, you can’t dump it in an unlined pit below the water table sitting next to a river, you’ve got to put it in a modern landfill,” said Holleman. “That’s true even with kitchen garbage in America. And secondly, if you discharge water containing toxic substances like arsenic, mercury, you’ve got to treat it before you discharge it in the river. That is the sum total, in many ways, of these two rules. That is not cutting edge. That’s just the basic, environmentally responsible — and I’d say humanely moral — thing to do.”
While advocates said they are pleased with the attention the Biden administration and specifically EPA Administrator Michael Regan have paid to coal ash, they worry gains could be precarious.
“If the next administration [has] no interest in enforcement, the public interest community will carry a very heavy burden,” said Evans, citing various measures taken by the Trump administration to weaken the federal coal ash rules and other coal-related protections. If Trump is elected in 2024, she said, “I have no doubt that the administration will either try the same thing again or not enforce the rule, which would be disastrous.”
While the coal ash rule would force the cleanup of coal plant sites even after the plants close, the wastewater rules could force companies to implement expensive pollution controls, or decide to close rather than making the investment.
“It makes a lot of sense for coal plant operators to really take a hard look at the economics of retiring rather than expending additional funds, oftentimes captive ratepayer funds, retrofitting these units,” said Sierra Club senior attorney Joshua Smith.
Activist Dulce Ortiz said the new coal ash rules could help reverse the “painful history” of industrial pollution in her home of Waukegan in northern Illinois, the site of five of Illinois’s 11 Superfund sites. Ortiz and others have been demanding the cleanup of coal ash at a shuttered NRG coal plant on the Lake Michigan shore, with little response.
“Waukegan has dreamed for years and still does dream of revitalizing our lakefront. We have aspirational lakefront plans that have seen little to no success in coming to fruition in part because of the amount of contamination that remains at many of these sites… When we allow companies to pollute our communities and not force them to clean up, we deter future investment in these sites and our communities at large.”
Ortiz, founder of Clean Power Lake County and a Waukegan Township trustee, continued that, “My vision for my family and my community is that I can take my children swimming in Lake Michigan without worrying about toxic pollution, groundwater pollution…A lakefront with open space that respects our environment, where corporate profit does not override the health needs of our families… I want to see a clean energy future for Waukegan and all communities that have borne the brunt of coal ash pollution for decades.”
OVERSIGHT: As Georgia’s regulatory board goes years without elections, a group of Black voters appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to shift from at-large elections to having each commissioner elected by voters in the district where they live. (Grist/WABE)
GRID:
SOLAR:
PIPELINES:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Tesla announces it will lay off 10% of its workforce, including 2,688 employees at its headquarters and flagship factory in Texas. (Houston Chronicle)
NUCLEAR: A nuclear energy company building an advanced fuel facility in Tennessee receives a $148.5 million tax credit from the federal government. (Knoxville News Sentinel)
EMISSIONS: A new report shows the Houston area has the second worst air quality in the country, according to data from the U.S. EPA. (Houston Chronicle)
COMMENTARY:
GRID: Power outages stemming from severe weather across the U.S. have surged 74% in the past decade compared to the decade before, showing another tangible effect of global warming, a climate group’s analysis finds. (Guardian)
ALSO:
OFFSHORE WIND:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
AIR QUALITY: Nearly 40% of U.S. residents were exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution last year, an increase from the year before thanks to wildfires and extreme heat. (Guardian)
HYDROGEN: A U.S. Energy Department advisory committee says the clean hydrogen industry isn’t growing fast enough and needs further federal help to meaningfully help the U.S. reach net-zero emissions by 2050. (E&E News)
PUBLIC LANDS: A wave of new federal rules and plans aim to leverage public lands for clean energy development while protecting vulnerable ecosystems. (Canary Media)
SOLAR:
OVERSIGHT: As Georgia’s regulatory board goes years without elections, a group of Black voters appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to shift from at-large elections to having each commissioner elected by voters in the district where they live. (Grist/WABE)
PIPELINES: Environmental groups sue to challenge federal regulators’ approval of an extension for the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s spur into North Carolina, arguing the project has changed so much the pipeline should be required to start the permitting process over. (Cardinal News)
WIND: The Northern Chumash Tribe and wind energy companies agree to a phased establishment of a national marine sanctuary along central California’s coast that would clear the way for offshore wind development while providing protections the tribe seeks. (KCLU)
ALSO: The Biden administration plans to lease up to a dozen new federal offshore wind tracts over the next five years, including ones in California and Hawaii. (Associated Press)
SOLAR:
BATTERIES: Battery storage system output was the largest power source on California’s grid for the first time this week, surpassing natural gas, hydroelectric and wind generation for about two hours. (Renew Economy)
UTILITIES:
POLLUTION: The American Lung Association finds the Los Angeles area continues to be the nation’s smoggiest region, even though air quality has improved significantly over the last three decades. (Los Angeles Times)
HYDROGEN: The nation’s first commercial hydrogen fueling station for big-rig trucks opens at a port in Oakland, California. (Los Angeles Times)
OIL & GAS:
PUBLIC LAND: Western advocates and Republican lawmakers prepare for a legal battle over the Biden administration’s new federal public lands rule aimed at putting conservation on a par with extractive uses. (Utah News Dispatch, Source NM)
CLIMATE: The National Science Foundation awards an Alaska university $20 million to study how climate change could affect the state’s fishing and aquaculture industries. (KTOO)
BIOFUELS: Construction begins on a 13.4 MW power plant in California that will be fueled by wastewater-derived biogas. (Microgrid Knowledge)
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