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Geothermal heating and cooling is emerging as a go-to technology for St. Paul Public Schools as it seeks to renovate aging facilities in line with the district’s climate action plan.
Minnesota’s second-largest school district is also one of the city’s largest property owners, with 73 buildings containing more than 7.7 million square feet. Its climate action plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 45% by 2030.
New technology and federal incentives have helped convince district leaders that geothermal is among its best options for slashing emissions from school buildings. The energy efficient systems pump refrigerant through a closed loop circuit of pipes that moves heat between buildings and below ground reservoirs.
Last year, the district completed a ground-source geothermal system while renovating the 1960s-era Johnson High School. This year, it’s installing a different type of system at two other schools that tap aquifers rather than the ground as a heating and cooling source.
The aquifer-based systems that will be used at Bruce Vento Elementary School and the nearly 100-year-old Hidden River Middle School were developed by a Twin Cities-based company called Darcy Solutions that specializes in water-based geothermal systems.
The company’s technology requires far fewer wells than conventional, ground-based systems, making them more practical for dense, urban neighborhoods. Darcy places heat exchangers directly into the wells, where they can capture heat from the constant, 52-degree groundwater.
Darcy’s system changed the school district’s thinking, said Tom Parent, the district’s executive director of operations and administration. The elementary school project required just five wells, compared to more than 150 ground source wells at Johnson High, which disrupted outdoor sports activities for two summers.
“We see a lot of promise,” Parent said. “This is an incredible leap in technology.”
Geothermal and aquifer-based systems could be an essential strategy for reducing emissions, along with energy efficiency, LED lighting, electric buses and solar energy, Parent said. Because many St. Paul schools have small footprints, Darcy’s system could become a go-to HVAC solution.
Traditional ground-source geothermal would have been “impossible” at either school because of their small sites, according to the district’s indoor air quality coordinator Angela Vreeland. Darcy’s geothermal systems also take up less interior space than traditional, fossil fuel heating systems.
In Minnesota, several trends are driving geothermal’s growth. Nearly all projects receiving state aid must follow the rigorous standards for energy efficiency. Matt Stringfellow, a manager with Kraus Anderson who works on geothermal installations, said that “any state-funded project pretty much requires that (geothermal) to meet their guidelines at this point.”
Another catalyst has been the Inflation Reduction Act. The law allows a commercial building owner installing geothermal to claim as much as a 30% tax credit. It will enable nonprofits to receive the equivalent amount in cash from the federal government.
Parent said the school district used federal money to pay for its first geothermal project and plans to submit paperwork to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay option for this year’s projects, too. While not the only driving force in selecting geothermal, it played a role, he said.
Robert Ed, Darcy’s director of marketing strategy, said geothermal is one of the only solutions for electrifying large buildings in cold climates. “There are other energy efficient technologies, but in a northern climate, being able to use geothermal energy and not having to expend a lot of energy to provide thermal capacity is a big advantage,” he said.
The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium have been the primary users of geothermal aquifers, but Darcy aims to change that. Ed said the startup has expanded to Wisconsin and will now begin adding more states that have the right groundwater characteristics to work with its technology.
Parent said the Johnson project shows “just how viable (geothermal) can be under certain circumstances for our system. Now we’ve got two more projects underway with geoexchange systems; we’re learning how it can play a role in the continuous cycle of renewal in our buildings.”
Darcy advertises that its technology creates 70% fewer emissions and lower cooling costs than a traditional heating and cooling system. At Bruce Vento Elementary, named after a Minnesota congress member well-known for environmental advocacy, stakeholder engagement at the district level led to a desire to decrease energy intensity in buildings.
“Geothermal is the only way we are getting within spitting distance of what we want it to be able to do,” Parent said.
A Department of Energy analysis found retrofitting around 70% of buildings, combined with building envelope improvements, could bring a 13% reduction by 2050 in electricity demand.
Yet geothermal systems barely make a slice of the energy pie chart, producing less than 1% of the country’s energy capacity, according to the United States Department of Energy. The industry, however, is growing. Ground-source heat pump sales have grown by 3% annually, and the United States continues to be the international leader in geothermal energy.
The three schools will see significant savings over natural gas systems. Vreeland said the annual savings will be $143,000 at Hidden River Elementary and $200,000 at Bruce Vento. Both should pay for themselves in a decade. Johnson High’s savings will be $7 million over 30 years.
Darcy is also installing aquifer-based geothermal systems at two schools in Winona in southeastern Minnesota. It also recently installed a system at Rochester’s City Hall.
Parent said geothermal may not be the answer to every HVAC renovation, but it shouldn’t’ be overlooked.
“We don’t see a world in which geothermal energy is our only solution path forward because of the idiosyncrasies of our building, funding, and timing,” he said. “But it seems to be more and more the right answer.”
Four environmental groups filed an appeal Friday challenging an Ohio judge’s order declining to review state regulators’ decisions to allow oil and gas drilling under state park and wildlife areas.
The Notice of Appeal filed with Franklin County Court of Common Pleas takes issue with Judge Jaiza Page’s Feb. 23 order, which said the groups had no right to challenge rulings by the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission last November to allow drilling and fracking under Salt Fork State Park, Zepernick Wildlife Area and Valley Run Wildlife Area.
“Our appeal continues the fight for legal accountability and oversight of the commission’s decisions,” said Earthjustice attorney Megan Hunter, who is one of the lawyers representing groups in the appeal. Those groups include Save Ohio Parks, the Buckeye Environmental Network, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and the Ohio Environmental Council.
The move to drill and frack under state-owned lands was jump-started last year when Gov. Mike DeWine signed HB 507 into law. The statute would have required state agencies to lease lands unless the commission adopted rules and lease terms under a 2011 law. The leasing process under that law had languished after a widespread backlash a decade ago.
Once the commission adopted the rules and lease terms last spring, HB 507 no longer imposed any mandatory duty to allow drilling on state-owned lands. Instead, Ohio law requires the commission to consider nine factors. They include environmental impacts, effects on visitors or users of state-owned lands, economic benefits, public comments, and more.
In this case, the environmental groups claimed the commission didn’t consider all nine factors before reaching its decisions. They also objected to the commission’s failure to hold a hearing and accept public testimony for the proposed parcels at each park and wildlife area. Comments on the proposals detailed worries about possible contamination from accidents, anticipated interference with people’s ability to enjoy state parks and wildlife areas, and other objections.
Judge Page’s ruling rejected the environmental groups’ argument that the commission’s rulings could be appealed under a general statutory provision for “adjudication orders.” Instead, she noted there was no specific statutory language dealing with appeals from the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission. She also found the groups did not have standing to raise their claims.
Days after Judge Page’s ruling, the commission accepted a bid from Infinity Natural Resources, based in West Virginia, to drill under Salt Fork State Park. The commission also accepted Texas-based Encino Energy’s bids to drill under Zepernick Wildlife Area and Valley Run Wildlife area. Unless blocked, drilling is likely to start this spring.
Without judicial review of the commission’s actions, it’s unclear what checks, if any, exist over the commission’s decisions on drilling beneath park and wildlife areas.
“The Commission handed over Valley Run Wildlife Area, Zepernick Wildlife Area and Ohio’s largest state park — Salt Fork State Park — to drillers without considering the environmental and geologic impacts of oil and gas development,” Hunter said. “Thousands of state residents and users of these protected public lands demand accountability for this enormous failing.”
A separate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of HB 507 remains pending. Meanwhile, new filings this month ask the commission to allow drilling and fracking under Egypt Valley Wildlife Area and Keen Wildlife Area.
SOLAR: An Arizona utility brings a 260 MW solar project and the state’s largest battery energy storage installation online to power a Phoenix-area Google data center. (Energy Storage News)
ALSO:
UTILITIES:
CLIMATE:
ELECTRIFICATION: A southern Nevada county seeks a $500 million federal grant to support heat pump installations, efficiency upgrades and other climate-friendly improvements for low-income households. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
OIL & GAS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Automaker Stellantis agrees to comply with California’s strict auto emissions standards requiring that 68% of light-duty vehicle sales be zero-emission or plug-in hybrid by 2030. (Associated Press)
COAL: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon signs legislation directing state and federal funds toward cleaning up abandoned coal mines. (Wyoming Public Radio)
CARBON CAPTURE: A startup announces plans to build a direct air carbon capture facility in Wyoming using its relatively-low cost technology. (Heatmap)
GEOTHERMAL: Bipartisan U.S. lawmakers from Nevada, Idaho and Utah introduce federal legislation aimed at encouraging geothermal energy development by streamlining the permitting process. (news release)
LITHIUM: A company proposing a direct-lithium extraction project in southeastern Utah expects its pilot processing facility to come online this spring. (Moab Times-Independent)
CLIMATE: Colorado advocates worry proposed legislation aimed at luring more energy-intensive data centers to the state will put climate goals out of reach and drive up power costs. (CPR)
ALSO: An advocacy group launches an ad campaign in Arizona and Montana urging residents to support the federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s new climate risk disclosure rules. (news release)
SOLAR: A California school district unveils a 17.5 MW solar-plus-storage network consisting of 40 projects across 31 sites. (news release)
STORAGE: A firm signs on to purchase all of the capacity of a 200 MW stand–alone battery energy storage system under construction in southern California. (Solar Industry)
UTILITIES:
OIL & GAS:
TRANSPORTATION: Colorado lawmakers propose levying a daily fee on car rentals to help fund public transit projects. (Colorado Public Radio)
CARBON CAPTURE: Oregon researchers discover a way to pull carbon dioxide from the air with vanadium, potentially boosting the nascent direct air carbon capture industry. (Oregon Capital Chronicle)
PUBLIC LANDS: U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, looks to block a management plan for 3.7 million acres of federal land in the state, claiming it would hamper energy development. (WyoFile)
COMMENTARY: Energy investors and experts call on the uranium industry to ensure mines and mills financially benefit affected tribal communities, regardless of property ownership. (Wilson Center)
A pair of cousins who want to lease land for a contested solar project in central Ohio say a vocal minority is trying to interfere with their property rights.
“I have rights as an owner, farmer and investor that shouldn’t be limited by a small group of individuals who are opposed to any solar development,” said Richard Piar. He and Ethan Robertson jointly own two parcels of property in Knox County, which they want to lease to developer Open Road Renewables for the proposed 120 megawatt Frasier Solar project.
Much of the public debate surrounding the project has pitted local groups that oppose solar energy on agricultural land against the developer and clean energy advocates. But for the cousins, the project is a way to bring in new revenue and help keep the land in the fourth-generation farm family.
“Solar gives my family opportunities it otherwise would not have for a financial future,” Piar said.
Robertson is now seeking to intervene in the Ohio Power Siting Board case that will decide the project’s fate, and the cousins recently shared with Energy News Network how the project is important to them and their property rights.
“When someone who is not a farmer can tell us farmers what we can do with our land, it creates a slippery slope for property rights,” Piar said.
Concerns about conservation also factored into the cousins’ decision to lease the land, which the solar farm will have to restore at the end of the project. In Robertson’s view, those terms counter opponents’ arguments about blocking the project to protect farmland, especially when much of it – on the outskirts of Mount Vernon in Clinton and Miller townships, about an hour’s drive from Columbus – could otherwise become residential subdivisions.
“My children are nine, seven and five years old. This project is a key way to protect our land from the many ways this county may change over the next four decades,” Robertson said.
And much of the land in the Frasier Solar project will still be used for agricultural purposes while the solar project is in operation. On March 8, Open Road Renewables and New Slate Land Management announced they signed a letter of intent to use sheep grazing to manage vegetation for the project.
Brad Carothers, who runs New Slate, lives in Knox County and raises Katahdin sheep. When a letter came from Open Road Renewables about the Frasier Solar project, he reached out to the company.
“One of the main issues new and emerging farmers face is access to land,” Carothers said. “We’re a first-generation business. And so land is not something that I have from previous generations to utilize. And so this is how we can expand our business.”
Under Ohio law, a landowner generally gets to control who has access to real property and how it is used, including the right to lease it to others. Zoning can restrict some uses to certain areas, such as industrial or commercial activities.
For electric generation facilities, however, state law and rulings of the power siting board generally take precedence, except as provided in Senate Bill 52, said Jacob Bryce Elkin, one of Robertson’s lawyers who is with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
The 2021 law lets counties ban solar projects from parts of their territory, but only if they were not already in the grid operator’s queue when the law became effective.
“Frasier Solar clearly fits the bill to be grandfathered” under that exception, wrote Ohio Rep. Bill Seitz in a Feb. 23 letter urging the Ohio Power Siting Board to approve the project. Under the law, one county and one township representative will serve as ad hoc board members on the case.
Elkin also noted that while the Knox County Commissioners decided to ban wind farms in 2022, the same resolution said they would allow large solar facilities. So, because of SB 52, “if the OPSB grants the approval for the project, there’s nothing in local law that prohibits this project from being developed,” he said.
Yet when Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded group opposing the solar project, hosted a program last month, speakers there talked about zoning and hypothetical situations that don’t apply to the solar farm case.
“For anybody preaching property rights, I always just like to ask them flat out: Does that mean you want to just ban or abolish all zoning?” said Jared Yost, a Mount Vernon resident who incorporated the group. Surely, he suggested at the Feb. 24 event, landowners wouldn’t want a chemical plant going in next door or sewage flowing into their yards.
Kevon Martis, a frequent opponent of renewable energy projects, took a similar tack, suggesting no one would want a 24-hour truck stop or adult bookstore next door – uses already governed by local zoning rules.
“Everybody says, ‘I should be able to do what I want on my private property,’” Martis said. “And while they may mean that about them, they never mean that about their neighbors.”
A company official with Open Road Renewables was denied entry to the group’s Nov. 30 “town hall meeting” on the project. The group’s events have also denigrated the perspective of farmers and other landowners who will benefit from solar.
“In this project and a lot of projects like this, it’s easy for the supporters of the project to have their voices drowned out by a vocal minority of people opposing the project,” Elkin said.
Even aside from SB 52, zoning doesn’t let governments arbitrarily limit people’s use of their property, Elkin said. Instead, it needs to be rationally related to legitimate land use concerns.
“The onus is really on the opponents to put forward a case that’s grounded in fact, and they haven’t done that,” Elkin said.
Filings by Preserve Knox County and Knox Smart Development in the Ohio Power Siting Board case claim the Frasier Solar project could interfere with adjacent owners’ property rights. And Robert Bryce, a former fellow with the Manhattan Institute, which has been linked to fossil fuel interests, claimed it was “BS” to think solar projects wouldn’t hurt property values in an area.
Among other things, Bryce cited a 2023 study in the journal Energy Policy by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Connecticut. The study team’s analysis of 1.8 million real estate transactions found, on average, a 1.5% impact on sale prices for homes within half a mile of a solar project.
However, data for the study ranged from 2003 through 2020, which wouldn’t necessarily reflect the current real estate market. The study also didn’t compare the effects on property values near projects with or without measures to prevent potential negative impacts, although the authors did note that developers or policymakers have various tools to employ, such as landscape measures or compensation for neighbors.
The Ohio Power Siting Board revised its rules for solar farms after the Berkeley Lab study came out. The rule changes require setbacks from property lines, homes and roads. The rules also call for “aesthetically fitting” fencing and other requirements.
Open Road Renewables also stressed steps it takes to accommodate nearby landowners.
“We offer good neighbor agreements at all of our solar projects, and they generally include some sort of compensation,” said Craig Adair, the company’s vice president for development. Payments compensate for periodic disturbances during construction, while also letting neighbors benefit financially from the project, he explained.
Payments also encourage many neighbors to cooperate by sharing drainage tile information. That helps the company protect against problems with drainage or even improve local conditions, said Open Road president Cyrus Tashakori.
Robertson, Piar and other potential lessors are not alone when it comes to valuing property rights in Knox County.
Resident Steve Rex said he attended a Knox Smart Development meeting, which he felt was one-sided and presented inaccurate claims. Property owners shouldn’t have to worry about what other people think about how they use their land, he noted.
Franklin Brown, another Knox County resident, took exception to solar opponents trying to limit the rights of property owners for the Frasier Solar project. “The same conservative people say, ‘Well, we don’t want government up in our faces,’” Brown said. “But oh, here they do?”
The Ohio Power Siting Board is supposed to use statutory factors to decide whether a project moves ahead, rather than the number of supporters or opponents. However, the board has referred to local opposition in some past decisions blocking solar projects. The board will hold a public hearing on the Frasier Solar Project on April 4 at the Knox Memorial Theatre in Mount Vernon. The evidentiary hearing is currently scheduled for April 29.
POLICY: As Vermont lawmakers consider requiring most utilities to procure only renewable electricity by 2030, a new analysis finds the clean energy switch will cost ratepayers between $150 million and $450 million, or less than half of what a state agency previously estimated. (VT Digger)
EMISSIONS: The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, says the city has notched notable emissions reductions since 2018: 18% from the transportation and thermal sectors and 19% in buildings. (WCAX)
BUILDINGS:
WIND: A Pennsylvania legislative committee advances a bill to form a framework for the state to build up a Lake Erie wind industry. (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
GRID: New England’s power grid may still see resource adequacy problems even if it makes annual transmission investments of $1 billion through 2050 to keep up with clean power adoption, ISO New England reports. (Utility Dive)
UTILITIES:
BIOENERGY: A New York firm buys a Maine biowaste-to-power plant that was built less than a decade ago, planning to refit the facility to produce methane gas. (Mainebiz, Reuters)
SOLAR:
NUCLEAR:
CLIMATE:
TRANSIT: Washington, D.C., prepares to roll out the first application round for its e-bike voucher program, reserved for in-need communities like those enrolled in food assistance like SNAP. (Axios DC)
PIPELINES: The South Dakota Supreme Court hears arguments in a case over whether a proposed carbon pipeline is a public commodity and thus eligible to survey private land and use eminent domain. (South Dakota Searchlight)
ALSO: Iowa lawmakers advance a bill that would allow either party in a utility eminent domain case to ask a district court to decide whether the project is a public necessity. (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
GRID:
SOLAR:
CLIMATE: Rapid City, South Dakota, will seek $50 million in federal climate funding after state officials declined to apply for the money. (South Dakota Searchlight)
RENEWABLES: As Michigan regulators collect public input on a new law giving the state final say on where clean energy projects can be built, a developer notes that projects need to be completed with landowner cooperation in the first place. (WWMT)
OIL & GAS: BP’s large oil refinery in northwestern Indiana resumes normal operations more than six weeks after a power outage prompted a temporary shutdown of the complex. (Associated Press)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Rivian is leasing space for what’s expected to be the electric vehicle startup’s second service center in Michigan. (Crain’s)
STORAGE: Western Michigan is poised for additional growth in battery storage production based on the number of suppliers currently operating there, economic development groups say. (Second Wave Media)
COMMENTARY:
EMISSIONS: Flaring and venting of natural gas in the U.S. is causes about two premature deaths each day and costs the economy about $7.4 billion annually in lost work time and other health effects, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Inside Climate News)
ALSO: A coalition of 20 Democratic state attorneys general sign on to defend the U.S. EPA’s methane emissions rule as it faces a lawsuit from 24 GOP-led states. (The Hill)
MATERIALS: The U.S. aluminum industry is declining even as demand for the material grows, posing a challenge for domestic production of solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy components. (Canary Media)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
POLITICS:
STORAGE:
GRID:
BUILDINGS: Vermont saw mixed success encouraging residents to install heat pumps and other upgrades after devastating floods last summer, but advocates, utilities and state agencies are revisiting those residents to work on long-term, climate-minded rebuilds. (Energy News Network)
NUCLEAR: New York’s emissions have risen since the Indian Point nuclear plant closed in 2021, with fossil fuels, not clean energy resources, used to fill the power generation gap left behind. (The Guardian)
CARBON CAPTURE:
Overnight in early July last year, Vermont solar installer Bill Chidsey got a call that a grocery store he worked with in his village of Hardwick was flooded. He arrived to find feet of water in the Buffalo Mountain Market’s utility room, spilling over from the rising Lamoille River in a record-breaking rainstorm.
“The grocery store survived by an inch,” Chidsey said. “If it had rained fifteen more minutes, they’d have lost four compressors.”
He’s now helping the co-op build a net-zero energy system that will use solar power and recycled waste heat from the store’s refrigerators. But it’s going to be a long project — just one of countless examples Vermont has seen since last year of how sustainable rebuilds in the wake of a flood don’t happen quickly.
“I think we’re just getting started with this,” Chidsey said.
Advocates, utilities and state agencies have seen slow progress and mixed success since July 2023 in trying to replace flood-damaged home and business energy systems with more efficient, cost-effective, low-carbon technology. Now, they hope to redouble these efforts as part of a long-term recovery — both to keep people affected last year from falling through the cracks, and to be more resilient in the next storm.
“We consider that we’re now about to start ‘phase two,’ where we hope to go back and talk about energy systems,” said Sue Minter, who leads Capstone Community Action in central Vermont. “In the emergency — with winter and nowhere else to go, and oh, by the way, no contractors available, labor shortage, material shortage, crisis — we couldn’t do the transition work, but that doesn’t mean we won’t.”
More than a decade ago, Minter was the deputy secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Transportation when the 2011 Tropical Storm Irene — comparable in its severity to the 2023 floods — washed out hundreds of miles of roads and bridges across the state.
As the state’s Irene Recovery Officer, Minter spent the next two-plus years grappling with federal regulators and pushing through new policies and programs to rebuild “stronger, with resilience in mind,” she said. This included allowing easier upsizing of culverts and clearing development out of floodplains.
Many places with these post-Irene resilience upgrades and reforms saw less damage in the July 2023 floods as a result, Minter said. Vermont officials even came to a recent meeting of the Maine Climate Council, after a pair of weather disasters there, to talk about their approach to flood-resilient infrastructure.
“When you know you’re in an emergency, and you know everything has been destroyed, you also know it’s an opportunity to innovate … to rebuild differently,” Minter said.
Vermont, often called a potential haven for future climate migrants, is nonetheless seeing more frequent and intense rain and floods as one of its top impacts from human-caused climate change. The state also relies heavily on pricey, carbon-intensive heating oil.
After last year’s floods, Vermont leaders wanted to seize the moment to help affected residents make future-looking energy and efficiency upgrades on a widespread scale.
“They’re ripping out drywall, they’re having to update systems — this is the time to make sure that you do it properly,” said Efficiency Vermont supply chain engagement manager Steve Casey.
Efficiency Vermont, a statewide energy efficiency utility, created an emergency flood rebate program for affected homeowners and renters, reallocating $10 million in pandemic aid already set aside for low-income weatherization projects.
The new program offered up to $10,000 per household to repair or replace flood-damaged energy systems and other appliances, on top of existing funding for efficient electric heat pump water heaters and electrical panel upgrades. Similar rebates for damaged businesses were just raised to a $16,000 cap.
But uptake on this funding has been slow. As of January, only 155 households had received flood rebates of $5,100 apiece on average, according to state legislative testimony from Efficiency Vermont director Peter Walke.
It’s partly because the initial $10 million was “an overshoot to ensure we wouldn’t run out of funds,” allocated quickly “without knowing what the actual need would be,” said spokesperson Matthew Smith.
But people also ran into myriad barriers to using the money quickly.
Some lacked up-front cash to pay for upgrades that would be rebated later. In response, Efficiency Vermont has begun offering a 100% cost-coverage program for the lowest-income clients, where contractors are paid directly by the state. That program had paid out nearly $92,000 to 10 people as of January, per Walke’s testimony, with 58 more in the pipeline.
“The households that are still in significant need at this stage were vulnerable households to begin with,” Casey said. “We do have this repeating situation where flood events kind of just exacerbate some vulnerabilities for certain households.”
The timing of the 2023 floods was another complicating factor. The upcoming heating season loomed in the months after the disaster, and limited housing stock meant people couldn’t relocate from damaged homes, unlike after Tropical Storm Irene, said Sue Minter.
“In 2023, July, people had to get into their homes as quickly as possible,” she said. “You always have to have life and safety first.”
The repairs and retrofits needed most urgently were not simple. Many people’s water and space heating systems and electrical panels were in basements, “the first place to flood,” said Casey.
Parts of Vermont are trying to change this norm — Waterbury, for example, requires basements to be above flood elevation in new or substantially improved home construction, among other flood protections.
Chidsey, the solar installer in Hardwick, said he and his electrician have tried to shift to putting electrical panels on the outside of homes, with any indoor subpanels out of the basement. Ideally, he said, the cellar becomes “just a hole in the ground that holds up the house, because water comes in often now.”
But moving HVAC infrastructure out of a vulnerable basement, whether to meet a local requirement or voluntarily, isn’t easy, especially after major damage, Casey said. People may not have a ready space for that equipment on the first floor, or may need mold remediation before taking on serious flood-proofing.
It means that the advocates working to facilitate upgrades have had to take a long view.
Last fall, Efficiency Vermont, Capstone, the state’s utilities and a range of other partners stood up a new system of Vermont Energy Recovery Teams, who went into damaged homes to help people plan and prioritize repairs before winter, including coordinating holistically across contractors and funding sources.
Some homes were able to switch straight to heat pumps as a cheaper, cleaner method of water and space heating, officials said. But for many, a replacement oil or gas system was the simplest short-term option.
Efficiency Vermont does not normally offer incentives for installing fossil fuel systems, but made exceptions for high-efficiency Energy Star-rated models as part of its flood recovery rebate program.
“In every case, we looked for something that was more efficient than what they had before,” said Vermont Gas energy innovation director Richard Donnelly, who was part of many recovery team home visits.
In each of those visits, the teams would take note of residents’ long-term needs and goals for decarbonization, resilience, comfort and lower energy burdens, with an emphasis on heat pumps.
“We left off with sort of the promise that we’ll be back,” said Vermont Gas CEO Neale Lunderville — that “there’s money available for some of these technologies, that we can help you with the same process.”
The recovery teams are now under the umbrella of GreenSavingSmart, a pilot energy and financial coaching program for low-income residents run by the Vermont Community Action Partnership. They’ll soon begin revisiting last fall’s clients to facilitate a new round of resilient improvements.
“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a hopeful pathway to allow these households to have — once they’re fully made whole and recovered from all of this — a lower energy burden and cost burden than the situation they were in to begin with,” said Steve Spatz, an account manager on the supply chain team at Efficiency Vermont. “It really is an opportunity to … upgrade the conditions for the household.”
STORAGE: A battery company that powers cars made by Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW has become the latest front in the conflict between China and the U.S. after Duke Energy says it will stop using the batteries after concerns over their use on a Marine Corps base in North Carolina. (Guardian)
ALSO: A Texas-based clean-energy and battery developer is working on a tool for grid batteries to measure the cleanliness of emissions, which could appeal to projects with clients bound by strict carbon-accounting standards. (Canary Media)
GRID: Southeast utilities are juicing their near-term forecasts for power demand amid the construction of data centers, cryptocurrency operations, marijuana farms and electric vehicle factories. (Floodlight)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WIND:
SOLAR: A Florida utility announces a 2-acre solar facility on a pond, which it claims is the largest floating solar array in the U.S. (Solar Industry)
OIL & GAS: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm receives a frosty welcome at a Houston energy conference because of the Biden administration’s pause on approving permits for liquified natural gas export terminals. (Houston Chronicle)
EFFICIENCY:
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: A report by Virginia officials finds the numerous programs to assist low-income residents with energy bills fall short of need. (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
CLIMATE: Texas’ historic wildfires were triggered by malfunctioning electrical infrastructure and amplified by climate change, providing a possible glimpse of the future as state officials continue to resist regulations on the oil and gas industry. (Sierra)
EMISSIONS: A new report finds Louisiana, Texas and other states have significantly subsidized plastics manufacturers, only for those plants to repeatedly violate air pollution rules into vulnerable neighborhoods primarily occupied by people of color. (DeSmog)
OVERSIGHT: Florida lawmakers pass numerous bills to override existing city and county ordinances, including one to prevent local governments from mandating heat-exposure protections for outdoor workers. (WLRN, Inside Climate News)
MINING: Georgia moves closer to approving a titanium mine just outside the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, amping up an already raging fight over protecting America’s largest intact blackwater swamp. (Washington Post)
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