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The data-center boom is pushing electricity costs to the breaking point for PJM Interconnection — the country’s biggest grid operator, serving more than 65 million people from the mid-Atlantic coast to Illinois — and that’s fueling a popular backlash.
Democratic gubernatorial candidates pledging to combat rising utility bills just won landslide victories in New Jersey and Virginia, two states bearing much of the brunt of data-center-driven cost increases. Congress members along with state governors and lawmakers are demanding that PJM take action.
PJM is poised to make a key decision this week on a fast-track process to get data centers online quickly while mitigating the impact of the facilities, which can use as much power as small cities. But a conflict has emerged over how far the grid operator can go. It boils down to this: Can PJM force data centers to stop using electricity at moments when demand for power peaks?
Data-center trade groups say no. But a growing number of politicians and environmental and consumer advocates say that requiring data centers to be the first to get disconnected from power during grid emergencies is the only surefire way to protect customers.
Last week, a bipartisan coalition of state legislators representing many of the 13 states served by PJM submitted its Protecting Ratepayers Proposal, which argues for data centers to be allowed to connect to PJM’s grid with the stipulation that they will be “‘interrupted’ during grid emergencies until they bring their own new supply.”
“We have a responsibility to ensure that technological growth doesn’t push vulnerable residents into financial hardship or enable a massive transfer of wealth from ratepayers to data centers,” said Maryland state Sen. Katie Fry Hester, a Democrat and organizer of the coalition, in a press release introducing the proposal.
“This proposal is about fairness and responsibility,” added Illinois state Sen. Rachel Ventura, also a Democrat. “We’re making sure data centers carry the cost of their own energy demands instead of passing it on to the public.”
That’s a salient concern, because the peak power needs of data centers are what’s driving electricity costs through the roof in PJM territory.
The grid operator must secure enough capacity from power plants and other resources to serve its peak loads. The prices of securing that capacity have skyrocketed in the past two years, from $2.2 billion in 2023 to $14.7 billion in 2024 and to $16.1 billion in PJM’s latest capacity auction this summer.
Growing demand forecasts of yet-to-be-built data centers are the primary culprit for these price spikes, and constitute the “core reliability issue facing PJM markets at present,” according to an August report from Monitoring Analytics, the company tasked with tracking PJM’s markets. “There is still time to address the issue but failure to do so will result in very high costs for other PJM customers,” the report warns.
Utility bills are rising across much of the U.S. due to a combination of factors, including volatile fossil-gas prices and the expense of repairing and expanding power grids. Data-center growth is not directly increasing costs in most regions yet, but in PJM, utility customers’ bills already reflect the capacity cost increases tied to serving future data centers.
Groups including consumer advocates in Maryland and the Natural Resources Defense Council agree that requiring new data centers to get cut off first during grid emergencies is a vital backstop to the suite of interventions PJM is considering for its fast-track process.
“We’re proposing to allow data centers to join PJM’s grid as fast as they want, but not guarantee them firm service, so they’ll be given interruptible service until they bring their own capacity,” Claire Lang-Ree, clean-energy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council and coauthor of the environmental group’s proposal, explained during an Oct. 22 webinar. “We think that’ll solve both the cost and reliability problem, because by removing all these large loads out of the capacity market until they bring their own supply, … capacity prices might go back down to historic levels.”
PJM’s Members Committee is expected to vote Wednesday on a final advisory recommendation to send to the grid operator’s board of managers. PJM has said it intends to file a proposal in December with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in hopes of gaining approval to institute changes in 2026.
Data-center companies and utilities are not happy about mandatory power cutoffs for new computing facilities, however — and their arguments have so far carried the day at PJM.
In August, PJM issued a “conceptual proposal” that included a “non-capacity-backed load” (NCBL) structure. The approach would force loads of 50 megawatts or larger to curtail power use to forestall grid emergencies as a precondition to interconnection.
That proposal was lambasted by the Data Center Coalition, a trade group that includes Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and dozens of other companies that own, operate, or lease data-center capacity. In comments to PJM, the coalition warned that by imposing NCBL status on data centers, the grid operator “risks exceeding its jurisdictional authority” over customer interconnection and interruptibility status, which are generally managed by utilities regulated at the state level.
“PJM has not provided a defensible rationale for creating this new class of service, and on its face the proposal is unduly discriminatory,” the coalition wrote.
PJM responded by pulling the NCBL concept from its next round of proposals, instead offering new data centers a voluntary method to commit to curtailing their peak power use through tweaks to a structure called “price-responsive demand,” or PRD.
As PJM explained in an October update, “With these changes, PRD becomes similar to voluntary NCBL,” since data centers that opt in would be exempt from paying for capacity but be obligated to “reduce demand during stressed system conditions.”
The big question is if data-center developers will choose to act at the scale required to “move the needle,” as analytics firm ClearView Energy Partners put it in a November research note. The authors wrote that, according to their observations in recent PJM meetings, “it’s far from clear whether new large load[s] would take service via this voluntary program.”
Consumer advocates aren’t happy with the data-center industry’s resistance to mandatory controls. Clara Summers, campaign manager for the Citizens Utility Board, an Illinois-based consumer-advocacy group, told Canary Media that the Data Center Coalition’s positions “are generally disappointing, given how some individual members of the DCC have shown a willingness to hammer out decent solutions that actually take responsibility for their own costs.”
Summers is referring to a handful of efforts by tech giants and data-center developers to use their own capacity resources to reduce their grid impacts. One such rare example is an agreement Google reached in August with PJM utility Indiana Michigan Power that commits the tech giant to bringing additional new capacity online and lowering power use during times of peak demand to alleviate the impacts of expanding a massive data center in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Most of the groups submitting proposals to PJM agree that its new rules should enable data centers to fast-track development by paying for generation and other capacity resources to serve their own needs. Stakeholders also agree that data centers that can use less power during times of peak demand should be rewarded for the relief that would provide to PJM’s system.
The Data Center Coalition has also won backing from the governors of Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, four states in PJM territory courting data centers for economic development. Those governors joined the coalition in submitting a proposal for the fast-track process that would task state regulators with expediting interconnection for data centers that can add enough new generation capacity to the grid to cover their energy demand at the time they are connected.
But groups arguing for mandatory restrictions say these alternatives may not take effect quickly enough to prevent data-center growth from outpacing the capacity of PJM’s grid.
PJM’s notoriously backlogged interconnection queue is impeding the addition of new power plants to the system. The grid operator’s efforts to fast-track new generation resources have yielded only a handful of projects expected to come online before 2030.
PJM is still in the early stages of developing options to add capacity to existing generators, such as pairing batteries with solar and wind farms. And proposals that let data-center developers tap into the flexibility of virtual power plants remain a work in progress.
Meanwhile, PJM’s grid is only just beginning to feel the pressures of data-center expansion. The latest forecasts of large-load growth across PJM territory show 32 gigawatts of additional demand by 2028 and about 60 gigawatts by 2030, or a 37% increase from PJM’s peak load today, according to the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, the state’s consumer advocate.
The sheer scale of proposed data-center construction beggars belief. To meet that projected demand, “by 2028, [developers] would have to be investing about $1 trillion within PJM in the next three to four years,” David Lapp, who leads the Maryland office, said during a press conference last month. “That’s an insane amount of money.”
Many groups are arguing to keep price caps on PJM’s capacity auction in place to mitigate the pass-through costs of rising data-center demand. They’re also pushing for PJM to order utilities to more stringently clear their load forecasts of speculative or redundant data-center applications, which experts agree are inflating expectations of how much load utilities and grid operators will have to serve.
But utilities, power-plant owners, data-center developers, and the tech giants spurring the AI boom have little reason to constrain these outsized growth plans, or to concede to restrictions on their peak power use, Lapp said. These are “some of the most powerful corporations in the world, all increasing their bottom line on the backs of existing customers,” he said.
As the 20th century ended, the National Academy of Engineering chose the top 20 engineering achievements of the past 100 years. At the top of the list was electrification, which beat out space travel, automobiles, computers, and the internet.
The 21st century may also be defined by electricity. The future unfolding before our eyes — from advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to the electrification of transportation — depends on vast and growing quantities of electricity. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global electricity consumption to grow by nearly 4% annually through 2027 and declared the world is entering a “new Age of Electricity.”
With the world increasingly dependent on electricity, grid resilience is essential. Unfortunately, threats to grid resilience are quickly growing in both volume and seriousness. Extreme weather events, for instance, are now more frequent and powerful. The U.S. experienced an average of 23 natural disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages each year between 2020 and 2024, compared with just nine per year over the prior three decades.
Other challenges to a resilient grid include the influx of distributed energy resources (DER), such as rooftop solar, energy storage, and electric vehicle (EV) charging, which can create two-way power flows, overload local feeders, and cause voltage fluctuations that strain grids. As the volume of DERs has spiked, so too has the threat from cybercriminals, who take advantage of the increased attack surface that so many grid-connected assets provide. The number of cyberattacks on U.S. utilities increased by 70% from 2024 to 2023.
The avalanche of threats to the grid was enough for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation President Jim Robb to warn of a “five-alarm-fire” for grid reliability. And when the grid is not resilient to growing threats, there are real-world consequences.
Between 2000 and 2023, for example, 80% of all major power outages were due to weather — primarily extreme weather including severe winds and thunderstorms, winter storms, and hurricanes. A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications found that one-, three-, and 14-day power interruptions reduce GDP in the area impacted by $1.8 billion, $3.7 billion, and $15.2 billion, respectively.
Utilities understand the importance of a resilient grid and have long been focused on improving their System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) scores. However, the existing tools and approaches to resilience planning and operations are inadequate to today’s challenges. Siloed outage management systems (OMS), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, and geographic information systems (GIS) combined with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) data, static studies, and limited DER visibility result in fragmented, slow, and ultimately inadequate approaches to resilience.
A modern approach to grid resilience
The key paradigm shift that utilities need to make is to go from imprecise and reactive resilience strategies to proactive planning driven by full grid visibility and sophisticated data analysis. Software platforms with access to OMS, SCADA, GIS, and other utility data sources make that shift possible by providing a foundation for a comprehensive analysis, which is impossible to do when information is siloed.
With comprehensive data, software can perform three types of analysis that are essential to grid resilience in today’s complex environment:
The best software platforms don’t just identify risks and vulnerabilities. They also translate results from analysis into recommendations for improved resilience through infrastructure investments, operational changes, demand response, strategic DER deployment, and other measures.
Transmission and distribution system operators worldwide face an increasingly common resilience challenge. “We are seeing massive increases in load from the electrification of vehicles and heating and cooling systems, as well as from data centers, coupled with increased variability from renewable energy. This is creating a greater need for analytical and optimization software solutions,” said John Dirkman, vice president of product management at Resource Innovations, whose Grid360 software platform provides contingency, sensitivity, forecasting, and critical-load analysis to help utilities understand and address resilience challenges.
Recently, a large utility in Europe worked with Resource Innovations to model various loading scenarios, including what would happen if 10% or more EVs began charging in specific neighborhoods. The analysis identified where the added EVs would strain transformers and feeders and then produced a system heat map showing where the grid would be most vulnerable.
The software also provided recommendations to address potential problems. It analyzed the utility’s urban distribution system, where much of the infrastructure is underground and grid upgrades would be expensive and disruptive. The analysis suggested alternative actions to provide increased flexibility: demand response to reduce peak load, battery storage or vehicle-to-grid capabilities to provide localized system backup, and strategic placement of switches and power electronic devices to shift load between feeders.
While utilities around the world face different specific threats to grid resilience, the value that software can deliver in analyzing the grid for risks and suggesting tangible action is similar. For instance, in wildfire-prone regions, software allows utilities to systematically assess vulnerability by overlaying grid networks onto topographical and fire-potential maps.
This highlights the transmission and distribution lines that face the highest wildfire risk — in places like California, that is often in difficult-to-access canyon areas. Contingency analysis provides valuable intelligence, such as alternative routes if a line goes down during a fire and how much load those backup options can serve. Analysis can also suggest where backup generation or storage is most needed.
One example of software that does scenario planning by integrating data from multiple utility systems to model the grid under stressed conditions is Resource Innovations’ Grid360 Grid Impact Assessment System (GIAS). The web-based platform allows utilities to simulate everything from wildfire impacts to DER integration challenges and cyberattacks. This provides system planners and operators with real-time visualization and forecasting tools to prevent predicted problems with voltage, loading, and power quality before they occur. Grid360 GIAS also integrates with Resource Innovations’ iEnergy platform for interconnection, demand-side management, and demand response, allowing utilities to coordinate both infrastructure investments and customer-side resources to strengthen resilience.
“Our software allows the utility to model the grid and find ways to provide power under any scenario,” Dirkman said. “That kind of planning can be done either on a very specific location basis or network-wide.”
“Our software allows the utility to model the grid and find ways to provide power under any scenario. That kind of planning can be done either on a very specific location basis or network-wide.”
John Dirkman, Vice President of Product Management at Resource Innovations
There is little chance that threats to grid resilience will diminish in the future, and the consequences of inadequate resilience can be measured in billions of dollars and growing risks to public safety. It is not a time to rely on reactive approaches. Software platforms that analyze unique vulnerabilities and recommend solutions give utilities the tools they need to act proactively and ensure the grid remains reliable as the world enters its new age of electricity.
Steel is one of the world’s most traded commodities, with roughly one-third of the global supply crossing borders. That makes decarbonizing the carbon-intensive sector a challenge when different companies or governments rely on disparate criteria to determine the amount of emissions to attribute to a ton of steel.
That’s now changing. On Friday, two major industry associations in China and Europe each signed onto landmark agreements with the Australian nonprofit ResponsibleSteel to set internationally coherent standards for what qualifies as green steel. Together, the three organizations represent around 60% of global steel production.
On the face of it, green steel seems easy to tell from the dirtier variety. If iron is made in a direct-reduction facility that uses a zero-carbon fuel such as green hydrogen, and that iron is transformed in an electric arc furnace powered by clean energy, then the resulting steel is unequivocally green. But factories that meet those specifications are virtually nonexistent, given the high cost and limited availability of green hydrogen.
Early next year, the European Union will start charging levies on imports based on how much planet-heating pollution was produced in their manufacturing — a policy called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM. But it will be a struggle to determine how high the tariff should be on steel that wasn’t made with green hydrogen but didn’t come from a coal-fired blast furnace.
“When you’re measuring emissions from steel, how do you measure natural gas and coal that’s used? Are you including upstream emissions? Are you counting coproducts you might not sell as steel but as cement?” Annie Heaton, the chief executive of ResponsibleSteel, said Friday on a call from outside the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil. “You need transparency, otherwise you can get a 20%, 30%, even 40% difference between different kinds of clean steel.”
The two agreements with ResponsibleSteel are separate, bilateral deals with each regional group, the China Iron and Steel Association and the Brussels-based Low Emission Steel Standard organization.
The watchdog group SteelWatch, which was not involved in the agreements, praised what it called “technical folk doing the wizardry for interoperability.”
“Decarbonization of steelmaking is hampered by lack of disclosure, inconsistent data, and a confusing array of standards,” SteelWatch’s executive director, Caroline Ashley, who is based in the United Kingdom, said over email. “It is a positive step forward that the decarbonization standards of these three organisations — one Chinese, one European, and one global — are aligning.”
China and Europe are the most obvious markets in which to start this process. China produces more than half the world’s supply of steel, and Europe’s CBAM promises to remake the continent as the first major destination for lower-carbon versions of the metal. Just this month, Germany’s national rail company, Deutsche Bahn, launched a pilot program to acquire green steel for its tracks. Over the summer, a major Chinese steelmaker promised to send a debut shipment of green steel to Italy in a move experts saw as setting the stage for exporting more of the metal.
The agreement “marks an important milestone for China’s steel industry in actively practicing green development principles,” China Baowu Steel Group’s chief carbon-neutrality representative, Wang Qiangmin, said in a press release.
Frederik Van de Velde, the chief executive of ArcelorMittal Belgium, called the partnership “a game-changer for our industry” in the release.
“By aligning our standards, we are … shaping a global consensus on what defines low-emission steel,” he said.
ResponsibleSteel this month released its “interoperability framework,” setting out the principles that will enable translating carbon metrics across its various agreements.
Heaton said India could prove trickier to rope into a standard-setting scheme because the government in New Delhi already established its own certification standards for green steel last December. The United States may be reversing most of its industry efforts on green steel, but the federal government already has in place a procurement system with what Heaton called a “threshold definition of what it means for a state procurement entity to buy clean steel, and it’s not a million miles from” the standards ResponsibleSteel is setting in China and Europe.
Despite its backtracking on green steel, Heaton said, the U.S. has some green shoots. In what’s arguably the most significant American project now, Hyundai Motor Group is plowing ahead with a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana, with the intention to initially rely on natural gas but swap in green hydrogen sometime in the next decade. Cleveland-Cliffs may have abandoned its plans to rebuild an Ohio coal-fired steel plant as a green-steel factory, but the firm’s new strategic partnership announced last month with the South Korean steel giant Posco could lay the groundwork for future decarbonization efforts, particularly as the Pohang-based company advances other green-steel projects abroad.
Still, worldwide, the sector’s efforts to decarbonize face serious challenges. “There’s a trickle of projects going forward, but it’s really not looking very promising,” Heaton said. “The finance needs to flow. The demand needs to be there. The agreements need to be signed that would actually signal to steelmakers that they can invest in a way that’s viable.”
Creating a common language for what such investments would look like, she said, is a key step toward establishing those conditions.
“The ultimate goal is comparability,” she said. “Whether you’re a buyer or a lender, you’ll know the performance of a project you’re funding or buying from. You’ll know how it stacks up on a global scale.”
In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.
To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO2, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO2.)
In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO2 the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.
To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO2 that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.
At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.
The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.
Electricity is getting more expensive — and Americans are getting worried.
Just look at last week’s election, when Democratic candidates who put a spotlight on energy affordability won key races in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia.
Fortunately, state and local lawmakers, including those just elected, have the authority to do something about this increasingly urgent problem. Here are three immediate steps they can take to save consumers money on their power bills.
State regulators can lower skyrocketing electric bills practically overnight by reducing utility profit rates. Investor-owned utilities earn a guaranteed profit on every dollar they spend. State public utilities commissions set these profit rates, and right now they’re way higher than they used to be.
Former utility executive Mark Ellis estimates the average American household overpays utilities by $300 per year, because the companies extract 3 to 7 cents more on every dollar of investment than they ought to.
Utilities consistently try to scare regulators off from lowering their excessive profits, claiming service quality will decrease or costs will actually rise — but there’s little evidence that doing so will negatively impact consumers.
We know that utilities can maintain high-quality service with lower profit rates because they’ve done it before. Recent research by RMI shows that utilities still received enough capital to build new infrastructure when profits were more reasonable in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Returning profit rates to those lower levels can also more than offset any increases in borrowing costs that might result from impacts to credit ratings.
Lawmakers can save consumers billions by adjusting incentives to pay utilities for performance rather than construction.
Under current rules, utilities profit significantly more from building new infrastructure than from investing in energy efficiency or cheaper upgrades to existing poles and wires. Most analyses of high electricity prices find that utility spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure is a main or major culprit.
The more utilities build, the more they profit, so they build a lot. Every grid problem looks like a nail to a utility that can use a gold-plated hammer to “solve” it — and consumers get bent out of shape as a result.
Customers in New York saved big when, in 2013, the state directed utility Con Edison to prioritize reducing energy demand via efficiency initiatives and solar panel installations. The investment successfully put off a $1 billion substation upgrade, saving New Yorkers $500 million in profits not paid to utility shareholders on top of $800 million in avoided hardware upgrades.
We could significantly reduce electricity use with energy-efficiency investments that routinely cost less than the fossil-fuel power generation favored by most utilities.
Instead, utility grid spending has exploded in recent years, outpacing inflation and electricity sales combined, according to the Energy Information Administration. And for each dollar of capital utilities invest in infrastructure, they’ll extract as much as 50 cents back in profits from customers over the life of the pole, transformer, or equipment.
A few states have comprehensive programs requiring utilities to prioritize cost-effectiveness rather than construction, but only Hawaii has discarded the conventional wisdom connecting utility profits to spending. State legislators can act now to align utility profit motives with performance, or at least efficient investment, and lower electricity bills in the process.
Local solar and batteries make electricity right where people use it, and more of each saves everyone money. Models suggest that dramatically scaling up energy resources like rooftop solar and batteries, and coordinating them with tools like smart thermostats, could cut future grid costs by half a trillion dollars.
But state and local laws, and utilities’ own policies around crucial processes like connecting to the grid, are mostly written to block and slow down small-scale clean energy.
It’s up to lawmakers to enact policies that remove those barriers by, for example, simplifying and automating permitting and zoning requirements, allowing non-utility ownership of solar projects, and fairly compensating solar owners through net metering. They’ll have to overcome vehement opposition from utilities, which see these kinds of policies as endangering their profits and allocate their lobbying dollars accordingly.
Electricity prices are rising at more than twice the rate of inflation. The Trump administration’s obstruction of clean energy and commitment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, are expected to make bills climb even further. Data-center development won’t help either. Most Americans feel this trend happening, and they are concerned.
It’s time to get a handle on the problem.
We’re all tired of paying more for electricity. We can pay less if state legislators and utility regulators seize the moment and act in the interest of consumers — rather than the shareholders of utility companies.
Representatives from all over the world are currently meeting on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belem, Brazil, to try and advance the global transition away from fossil fuels.
The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.
Today, that 1.5°C target is essentially impossible to meet, and the world is nowhere near on track to achieve the U.N.’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Even keeping warming below 2°C is a long shot. New estimates from the Rhodium Group suggest we’re on track for between 2°C and 3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with 2.8°C being the average outcome. Those figures would exacerbate extreme weather that has already worsened in recent years with far less warming.
It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.
The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.
Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.
Despite this progress, the line of actual, recorded emissions continues to tick up. This year’s COP comes amid global backpedaling on climate commitments and countless calls for a new, affordability-focused approach to the energy transition that proponents say is more pragmatic. The U.S. government, meanwhile, declined to even send a delegation to the event. (Trump administration officials had no problem carving out time to hawk natural gas to the European Union in Athens, Greece, last week.)
These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.
Back in May of 2021, Ford’s F-150 Lightning debuted with star-spangled flair. Then-President Joe Biden visited Ford’s sparkling new Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan, where the company displayed the truck in front of a giant American flag alongside its gas-powered siblings. And after declaring that “the future of the auto industry is electric,” Biden even took the Lightning for a zippy test drive.
The picture is decidedly less bright today. A factory fire has forced Ford to pause production of the groundbreaking truck — and The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is considering halting production of the Lightning altogether after years of sluggish sales.
It’s not just the Lightning that has stalled. Electric trucks as a category have sputtered, largely due to their cost. A standard gas-powered F-150 starts at just shy of $40,000, while a Lightning with the lowest trim package starts at $55,000. Charging at home can help EV drivers recoup that cost difference, but it’s hard to ignore the initial sticker shock — especially given that federal EV incentives are now dead under President Donald Trump’s July budget law.
Politics may also be to blame. While the gas-powered Ford F-150 is among the most popular vehicles in counties that voted for Trump in 2020, the president’s repeated railing against EVs, coupled with Biden’s early endorsement, has put electric cars at the center of America’s polarized politics.
Still, even the Cybertruck, which carries a very different political connotation, isn’t doing so hot. Tesla sold just under 40,000 Cybertrucks last year in the U.S., while Ford sold about 33,500 Lightnings.
Consumers simply seem a lot more interested in electric sedans and SUVs than electric trucks. Even with sales supercharged as consumers raced to tap expiring EV tax credits, Americans purchased just about 60,000 electric pickup trucks through the third quarter of this year, but bought more than 900,000 electric SUVs, sedans, and sports cars.
But there might be a path forward for the electric truck yet, says Art Wheaton, an expert on transportation industries at Cornell University: small and cheap.
“Changing policies, lower demand, and higher costs have made electric trucks a harder sell,” he said. “Canceling the Lightning and replacing with a much lower-cost, smaller electric truck makes long-term sense given the current policies towards electric vehicles.”
A tale of two gas bans
Massachusetts and New York may be neighbors, but they’re seemingly heading in different directions when it comes to transitioning their buildings off of fossil fuels.
Back in 2022, Massachusetts created a pilot program that let 10 municipalities prohibit fossil-fuel hookups in new buildings and major renovations. Advocates tell Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus that the program is already lowering energy bills and reducing emissions — and lawmakers are considering new legislation to bring another 10 cities and towns into the fold.
New York has also made big commitments to clean up its buildings, including enacting rules this summer that would require all-electric appliances in most new construction. But last week, 19 Democratic state lawmakers sent a letter to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul urging her to postpone implementation of the All-Electric Buildings Act. And on Wednesday, the state agreed, pausing the rules from taking effect at the end of this year.
COP30 kicks off with a focus on climate resilience
Leaders and advocates from around the world gathered in Brazil this week for the beginning of the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit. The Trump administration didn’t send a formal delegation, but that was OK with many diplomats — and with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the president a “wrecking ball” to climate action during one panel.
Digs at the U.S. were aplenty during the first days of the conference, as were discussions of the need to ramp up climate adaptation and resilience work as extreme weather events grow more frequent and more intense. Jamaica, for example, is facing as much as $7 billion in damages — a third of its gross domestic product — after last month’s Hurricane Melissa. But in the storm’s aftermath, Jamaica has also shown how resilience efforts pay off. The island has deployed more than 60 megawatts of rooftop solar power since 2015, and many solar-equipped homes became neighborhood hubs in the wake of Melissa’s destruction.
Fighting for climate funds: Clean-energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, sue the Trump administration over $7.5 billion in cuts to climate-related projects in Democratic-led states. (New York Times)
Stretching coal shutdowns: The Trump administration is poised to order two Colorado coal power plants to stay open past their planned retirements this year, even as the costs of keeping a Michigan coal facility open skyrocket. (Canary Media)
Pacific petrol: The Trump administration considers opening California coastal waters to offshore oil drilling for the first time in four decades, drawing pushback from advocates and Gov. Newsom. (Washington Post)
More supply, more demand: The International Energy Agency says the world is on track to build more renewable-energy projects in the next five years than it has over the last 40 — but rising demand means the world will keep relying on fossil fuels, particularly gas, for years to come. (The Guardian, Associated Press)
Pipeline “betrayal”: New York and New Jersey issue the state-level approvals needed for a previously rejected natural-gas pipeline to move forward, leaving environmental advocates feeling “betrayed” but still determined to fight the project. (Inside Climate News)
Government restart: President Trump signs a funding bill that will reopen the government, sending furloughed federal employees back to work. (E&E News)
RGGI retreat: Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro signs a budget bill that includes a provision to leave the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-invest program. (Inside Climate News)
New York just slammed the brakes on rules that would’ve prohibited fossil fuels in new homes and businesses.
The Empire State was on the precipice of fully enacting the All-Electric Buildings Act that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in 2023. The first-in-the-nation standard requires most new buildings to install efficient, electric appliances such as heat pumps instead of health-harming gas, propane, and fuel-oil systems. Regulators finalized the rules in July; they were set to take effect Dec. 31.
But on Wednesday, the state agreed to not enforce the zero-emissions standard until the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals makes its decision on a two-year-old lawsuit challenging the All-Electric Buildings Act. Climate-advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice expects that’ll delay the landmark building code until at least the fall of 2026, as oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
The legislation “was a promise that New York would stop locking families into expensive, polluting fossil-fuel systems and start building for the future,” said Democratic Assemblymember Gabriella Romero on a Thursday call with reporters. “Delaying this law is a total betrayal of that promise.”
Putting the all-electric building code on ice is an abrupt about-face for the administration. On Oct. 1, the state filed a brief saying that New Yorkers would “suffer irreparable harm if the Code amendments are delayed from taking effect,” because it would allow new buildings to depend on fossil-fuel equipment that would generate greenhouse gases and local air pollution for decades to come. That, in turn, would drive up the health, agriculture, and broader economy costs imposed by worsening climate catastrophes.
But just over one month later, Hochul signaled openness to pausing the law after a group of 19 Democratic state legislators raised concerns about its affordability and impact on the grid. Multiple studies have found that the grid has ample room for all-electric new buildings, and making them the default would benefit the planet and people’s pocketbooks.
Hochul’s office has positioned the delay as a pragmatic step that could expedite implementation of the rule in the long term. By voluntarily pausing the law, Hochul may be trying to avoid a potentially multiyear holdup should the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court and get on its “shadow docket.” That emergency process is typically less transparent than the court’s usual decision-making protocol.
“The Governor remains committed to the all-electric-buildings law and believes this action will help the State defend it, as well as reduce regulatory uncertainty for developers during this period of litigation,” Ken Lovett, energy and environment spokesperson for Hochul, told Canary Media. She’s “resolved to providing more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for New Yorkers.”
Earthjustice argues that there’s no reason to expect that the groups challenging the law would’ve been able to hamper its implementation if the state hadn’t made the concession itself.
The plaintiffs in the case — including the New York State Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Propane Gas Association — allege that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts the all-electric buildings law. That same reasoning was used to overturn Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban. In July, New York prevailed when a federal district judge in the state rejected the argument.
Similar lawsuits are playing out in courts around the country, including a challenge to New York City’s own all-electric-buildings standard, which has been in effect since 2024.
Hochul’s decision to slow-roll building electrification is part of her administration’s realpolitik embrace of fossil fuels. Last Friday, New York regulators signed off on a Trump-backed underwater gas pipeline, after having denied the requisite permits three times before. The same day, her administration announced a deal to allow a gas plant that mainly powers cryptocurrency mining to keep operating for at least five years. She also has yet to sign a bill that repeals gas-hookup subsidies. Legislators passed it in June.
Hochul justified recent moves by saying the state needs to “govern in reality.”
“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach,” she said last week in a statement.
Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha said she’s deeply concerned about the administration’s trajectory. Reducing the lethal and expensive harms born of the climate crisis “is not an optional goal,” she said. “Really, we’re talking about a disruption to our economy if we don’t act — in the same way the pandemic disrupted our economy.”
DALLAS — Past gnarly live oaks, behind a barbecue joint and a brewery in a suburb north of Dallas, a white-washed brick commercial building extruded its own wispy cloud into the Texas sunlight.
Inside, the startup Skyven Technologies was running a mechanical apparatus dubbed Arcturus, which turns waste heat into industrial-grade steam. It’s so new that I was the first outsider to see the contraption up close — signing my name in slot No. 1 in the log book. But, soon, Skyven will show it off to manufacturers who want to save money on energy bills while cutting their carbon emissions.
Industrial heat causes about 20% of global carbon emissions, per a McKinsey analysis. Very high-temperature processes, like melting ores for steelmaking, are tough to replicate without fossil fuels. But, in Skyven’s analysis, about half of those industrial heat emissions come from making steam, usually in boilers that burn gas or other fuels. Skyven, and a growing cadre of startups, are designing clean, electric, hyper-efficient heat pumps to take over that task.
They have their work cut out for them: Right now, the U.S. is home to about 39,000 industrial boilers, according to Richard Hart, a decarbonization expert at the think tank American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The steam they generate is used to sterilize injectable drugs, turn pulp into paper, pasteurize milk, cure lumber, and more.
Boilers are reliable and not particularly expensive — and in the U.S., natural gas is cheap — so it’s hard for cleaner alternatives to compete. ACEEE, which tracks announcements of new industrial clean-heat projects, namely heat pumps or thermal batteries, currently registers just 19 completed installations nationwide.
Skyven tackles the tricky economics by focusing on energy savings. The startup installs Arcturus at no cost to the customer, alongside existing gas boilers. The heat pump taps into the factory’s waste heat, which helps it reach high temperatures with far more efficiency than older technologies. Skyven and the customer split the savings from making cheaper electric steam, but if electricity prices spike, Skyven temporarily switches back to the gas boiler to avoid higher costs.
“What we want to do as a business is make industrial manufacturing in the U.S. and worldwide a lot more efficient, by being the leader in upcycling industrial heat and reusing it without having to create it anew,” Skyven founder and CEO Arun Gupta told me.
For now, the steam produced in Skyven’s site near Dallas floats harmlessly into the sky. But with contracts signed and real-world data to share, Skyven is mobilizing for a wave of factory deployments in the years to come.
Arcturus is not something you can pull out of a box fully formed, but a room-sized network of interlocking pipes, chambers, and appliances.
Gupta and Jim Saccone, Skyven’s senior vice president of global sales, handed me earplugs and led me into the clamorous, sun-washed room where the machinery whirred. In one corner sat a conventional gas boiler and a water heater, which acts as a stand-in for the waste source Arcturus will harness in factories.
Arcturus uses a heat exchanger to transfer energy from whatever the source is to a loop of water. While I observed it, relatively cool water from Arcturus hit the heat exchanger and rose from around 67˚C (153˚F) to 92˚C (198˚F). That heated water flows through shiny steel piping into a thick metal vacuum chamber, which lowers the boiling point and swiftly “flashes” the water into steam.
That low-pressure steam then travels through a series of four compressors, all noisily spinning at roughly 15,000 revolutions per minute. Each compressor ratchets up the temperature and pressure of the steam until it hits the target zone, which can be tailored to the needs of each factory.
“Because we make this steam with waste heat that was otherwise going to get dumped, and then just use compressors to compress that steam, that’s much less energy than using the energy to make the steam but not having any compressors,” Gupta said.
The demonstration unit generates 105˚C (221˚F) steam, which runs back through a pipe into the “customer” side of the room. In a real customer setting, Arcturus could sit up to half a mile from the factory where it delivers steam, if space is limited. For now, the vapor just vents through the roof.
The demo system produces up to 1 megawatt of thermal output. Skyven has already signed deals in the 10- to 15-megawatt-thermal range — these will have a similar footprint, Gupta said, but use bigger pipes and compressors. The technology can heat steam all the way to 215˚C (419˚F) if needed; that’s unusually high for industrial heat pumps, which typically reach around 170˚C (338˚F).
Since Skyven is producing real heat now, it has established an empirical baseline for its operating efficiency. The term of art here is “coefficient of performance,” which measures how much energy is produced per unit of energy consumed.
Gas boilers score 0.83, Saccone said, losing some energy along the way. Electric resistance boilers, a commercially mature electric heat technology, hit close to 1, a near-complete transfer of energy into heat. Startup AtmosZero recently installed an air-source industrial heat pump at New Belgium Brewing in Colorado that can reach 165˚C (329˚F); that device sports a COP of around 2.
Skyven’s average measured COP for its pilot is 6.5, but Gupta said he aims to raise it to 8 within the next three months. This isn’t a fixed value: It depends on factors like how hot the waste source is and how hot the steam needs to get. The demo site nonetheless establishes a real-world high water mark of how efficient Arcturus can be.
“The higher that [COP] value goes, the less important the spark gap is going to turn out to be,” said Hart, referring to the gap between power and gas prices. If, for example, a unit of electricity costs twice the equivalent in gas, but produces six or eight times the heat, then the heat pump is cheaper to run than a gas boiler.
Gupta didn’t set out to invent an industrial heat pump.
He had been working at Texas Instruments’ digital-light-projection business, designing the chips that run most every digital movie-theater projector. He wanted to do something good for the world and was concerned about climate change. “So, I was skimming ARPA-E research papers, as one does,” Gupta recalled, as we noshed on burgers up the road from Skyven headquarters.
The Department of Energy’s ARPA-E funds research on potentially transformative technologies. That archive was where he hit on the challenge of clean industrial heat; he figured, with his expertise manipulating light, he could make a better solar-powered heat source.
Gupta founded Skyven in 2013. At first he just tinkered in his Dallas garage, for a while confined to a wheelchair by a calamitous motorcycle accident. Eventually, he moved to the Dallas Makerspace and raised pre-seed financing for his concept. But the sheer amount of insulated plumbing needed to distribute the solar thermal heat wrecked his project economics.
“I made the mistake of a classic technical founder, in that I had a technology that I thought solved the market problem, but I didn’t really validate the market problem,” he explained. Still, he didn’t want to give up on his goal.
“At the time, no one knew anything about industrial heat,” Gupta said. The cleantech industry had spawned plenty of companies that could sell solar electricity to commercial customers, but hardly any solutions for heating needs at factories.
So Skyven reoriented around developing and financing energy-efficient upgrades for industrial heat using the best available technologies. The startup raised seed funding for this tech-agnostic model and landed a breakthrough deal with California Dairies, Inc., the largest dairy co-op in the Golden State.
The mission was to reduce gas combustion, saving money and carbon emissions, at major dairies in Turlock and Visalia. Skyven did this by deploying three types of equipment at each site: solar thermal to generate clean heat, smart steam traps to monitor steam loss in the existing system, and apparatuses to recover heat from boilers.
Skyven bundled $9 million in grants from the California Energy Commission with utility incentives from Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co., and landed project financing from Kyotherm, a French lender for clean-heat projects. With that combined funding, Skyven installed the equipment at no up-front cost to the dairies, and then as the facilities reduced their gas consumption, split the cost savings with them. The dairies could see a metered readout of the avoided gas combustion, and they paid Skyven an agreed-upon portion of it.
Installation wrapped up in 2023. The interventions, still operating under 10-year service contracts, are cutting 7,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually by avoiding over 110,000 million British thermal units of natural-gas combustion, more than originally anticipated. But Skyven concluded that the commercially available solar thermal panels weren’t a competitive source for heat, reporting to the California Energy Commission that a steam-generating heat pump would be “a more effective decarbonization solution with a wider appeal.”
Around that time, Gupta said, Skyven was scoping out a deal for an ethanol company in the Midwest. The team came across a bare-bones case study from a European ethanol plant that had built something called an “open cycle mechanical vapor recompression” device — machinery that takes waste heat, compresses and heats it, then recirculates it into the plant.
The problem was, outside of that European plant’s in-house engineering team, “there’s really no one in the world that knows how to implement this,” Gupta said. Skyven tried hiring a third-party engineering firm to draw up designs for the Midwestern customer, but that proved unsatisfactory. “We then said, ‘Okay, what if we built that experience and expertise and essentially invented this system in house?’”
Having learned from his early missteps, Gupta first vetted the idea with a slew of potential customers, who responded enthusiastically. Then Skyven stopped its tech-agnostic deals and staffed up on engineers, drawing on millions of dollars of revenue from the dairy projects. The company’s task, Gupta said, was to take existing steam compressors and adapt them into a heat pump that can be easily inserted into “an actual manufacturing facility with all the intricacies and challenges.”
Now that process has concluded, as evidenced by the steam billowing into the blue Texas sky. And Skyven did all that having raised just $11 million in outside investment and having generated real revenues, quite the outlier for Silicon Valley-backed cleantech.
A functional, highly efficient industrial heat pump is just table stakes. For Skyven to succeed, it must fight an uphill battle convincing big, old companies to bet on new technology. That’s why the startup designed its product and deal structure to minimize risk for the customer.
Arcturus can be assembled without interrupting factory operations, so customers don’t have to sacrifice production time to get the benefits of clean heat. Then Skyven schedules the steam and water connections to coincide with the plant’s regular maintenance shutdown. If that’s not possible, workers can perform a “hot tie-in” to connect Arcturus without stopping factory operations.
Skyven only runs the heat pump when it’s less expensive than using the legacy heat source. This entails real-time algorithmic calculations based on the price of electricity, the price of gas, and the COP. Company software toggles back to the original gas boiler in moments when power prices surge; if Arcturus is running, it’s got to be saving money compared to burning gas, with a target of at least a 30% reduction in cost.
This arrangement means that factories don’t have to pony up millions of dollars up front to decarbonize their heat.
“You can spend your dollars on stuff that’s core, like expanding production or improving quality or rolling out a new product line, and you can still hit your sustainability goals,” Gupta said.
Facilities teams that partner with Skyven can even tell their bosses that they’ll reduce their future operating budgets through the savings from electric heat, Saccone said.
Skyven is able to offer no-money-down steam with the ongoing financial support of Kyotherm, which financed the waste-heat collectors Skyven put into the two California dairies. Now, Kyotherm has signed an agreement whereby Skyven pitches Arcturus installations, and Kyotherm agrees to finance ones that clear its performance thresholds.
“You cannot give a blank check; you need to look at each different project,” said Remi Cuer, Kyotherm’s investment and business development director.
Kyotherm expects high single-digit internal rates of return; that’s more than solar or wind farms would pay, because emerging heat tech carries more risk. But assuming Skyven keeps bringing attractive projects, it can expect project financing for quite some time. Cuer declined to name a specific cap on the agreement but suggested his firm could fund a few hundred million dollars of Skyven installations.
Financiers usually run away from new technology until several of their peers have vetted it. But Kyotherm wasn’t afraid to back Skyven despite the newness of Arcturus. Cuer attributed that assurance to having seen how the team worked on the dairy installations. The Dallas-area pilot project is “really important for us,” he added, so his team can review the logs of COP, uptime, and other key metrics.
“It’s a market, heat pumps, where there are a lot of [original equipment manufacturers] and perhaps, currently, not enough project developers,” Cuer mused.
Until a few months ago, Skyven had a surefire tool for getting its first customer-oriented Arcturus installations done: It had won $145 million from the DOE, part of a $6 billion Biden-era effort to decarbonize heavy industry.
The Trump administration canceled Skyven’s fully contracted grants along with many others in a legally dubious effort to roll back binding federal commitments for clean energy.
“The loss of certainty on the $6 billion from the DOE’s Industrial Demonstrations Program is a challenge for the recipients. They are all considering next steps,” Hart said. But even where the money is gone, the knowledge and corporate buy-in required to win those grants lives on. The grantees “had to really think about how to do this technically, how to bring the right partners together, get the plants excited about the idea, and do all of that due diligence as part of their submissions,” Hart said.
Most other companies losing those grants boast far greater balance sheets, like Kraft Heinz and Diageo. Skyven, a much smaller company, is pursuing an internal appeal within DOE, and not currently seeking legal recourse, Gupta said.
“The cancellation of the funds has not killed the projects,” Gupta said. “They are actually all still moving forward, they’re just moving forward a lot slower.”
The plan had been to build a slew of them and learn from the results to drive costs down. Instead, Skyven slowrolled development to grind out system-cost reductions, so the projects would still make financial sense without government support. This effort went surprisingly well, Gupta reported, and pushed costs 40% lower in just a few months.
Skyven once again has had to zig and zag, improbably emerging stronger from the turbulence.
Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced an energy-affordability bill that opponents say would undo years of work on policies to fight climate change and promote energy efficiency, all without actually saving consumers much money.
“The bill is retreating from a couple of decades of climate progress in Massachusetts,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
The legislation, which a House committee approved 7 to 0 on Wednesday, would make the state’s 2030 emissions target nonbinding, slash funding for energy-efficiency programming, reinstate incentives for high-efficiency gas heating systems, and limit climate and clean-energy initiatives that impact customers’ utility bills. It would also prevent projects in cities and towns with natural-gas bans from claiming energy-efficiency incentives for all-electric construction.
The bill’s author — Democratic state Rep. Mark Cusack, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy — has said these steps are necessary to get ballooning energy bills under control. Critics of the proposal, however, say this approach would trade minimal short-term savings for environmental damage and much higher costs down the road.
“We want good energy-affordability legislation. This is not that,” said Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. “The claim that climate policies are the thing making prices rise is just not based in fact.”
Electricity prices in Massachusetts have been trending upwards for a decade and are among the highest in the country. In May, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, unveiled energy-affordability legislation aimed at saving consumers around $10 billion over the next 10 years. A hearing on the bill took place in June, but it has not advanced any further.
Cusack’s rival bill includes many of the same elements as the governor’s proposal but takes a far harsher approach to efficiency spending and climate goals. The bill still has a long way to go to become law. It would need to clear the Senate committee and be approved by both the House and the Senate, which would require support from many legislators who have previously voted for the priorities it undermines. Then Healey would need to sign it.
Still, in a state that has long been a leader in energy efficiency and climate action, the fact that the bill has gained any traction reflects the increasingly popular idea that decarbonization is at odds with affordability. This adversarial notion has gained currency in the past year as politicians and policymakers throughout the region — and the country — scramble for ways to address rising power prices. These claims, however, are simply incorrect, say climate advocates. They argue the cost of energy-delivery infrastructure and the rising price of natural gas are what’s really driving up utility bills.
Climate, energy, and consumer advocates are particularly concerned about the bill’s attempt to scale back and rework Mass Save, the state’s energy-efficiency program, which is funded by a small charge on consumers’ utility bills.
The legislation calls for cutting Mass Save’s current three-year budget from $4.5 billion to $4.17 billion, and capping spending for future triennial plans at $4 billion. These savings would, in theory, be achieved by tightening the program’s scope to focus on weatherization and lowering energy use. Mass Save would no longer be allowed to consider whether an incentive would promote decarbonization or electrification when assessing its benefits, which could put rebates for equipment such as heat pumps or home batteries at risk, advocates said.
“It essentially does eviscerate Mass Save,” Chretien said.
The charge that funds the energy-efficiency program currently makes up about 7% to 8% of the per-kilowatt-hour electricity rate from major utilities Eversource and National Grid. Reducing Mass Save’s budget by 11% would only lower that number slightly.
At the same time, Mass Save cuts costs for consumers. Those who take advantage of the incentives can save thousands of dollars on new appliances or home improvements that can then create ongoing savings by reducing energy demand. By lowering power demand, the programming also helps reduce the need to expand the grid, producing additional savings for everyone. Mass Save generated a total of $2.8 billion in benefits for participants and nonparticipants in 2024, the program administrators report.
The bill also calls for eliminating Mass Save incentives for all-electric projects built in cities and towns that are part of Massachusetts’ pilot program allowing some municipalities to ban fossil fuels in new construction.
Reducing incentives for efficient electric appliances leaves people paying more for energy-hungry systems, critics point out — even as both electricity and natural-gas prices are expected to keep rising.
“The best you could say is that it is going after short-term affordability at the expense of long-term affordability,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate-action nonprofit Acadia Center. “Unfortunately, because it misunderstands the actual drivers of cost, it will drive up costs for ratepayers.”
Advocates also question the logic behind the plan to make the state’s 2030 climate goals nonbinding. Cusack argues the move is necessary to prevent lawsuits against the state, should it not meet its targets, especially in the light of obstacles being thrown up by the Trump administration. Murray, however, finds this contention unconvincing: The likelihood of a successful lawsuit is too low to justify unravelling years of climate progress, he said.
Despite the bill’s success in the House committee, opponents could still defeat it by making their case to legislators, Boyd Rabin said. And there are a lot of opponents to speak up, she said, including not just climate activists but groups concerned with municipal operations, economic development, and equity.
“I am yet to have a conversation with anyone who supports it,” she said. “I would hope legislators would listen to what they’re hearing.”
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