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CLEAN ENERGY: Arizona regulators vote to repeal the state’s energy efficiency and renewable portfolio standards, saying the market should guide corporations. (12 News)
UTILITIES:
OIL & GAS: New Mexico Democratic lawmakers introduce legislation urging regulators to study the risks for people living near oil and gas facilities after well-setback language was stripped from another bill. (Carlsbad Current-Argus)
POLLUTION: California officials expect about half of California’s counties to be out of compliance with the new U.S. EPA standards for fine particulate matter, or soot. (Mercury News)
SOLAR:
ELECTRIFICATION: California, Colorado and Oregon sign an agreement with six other states to promote electric heat pump sales. (Verge)
TRANSPORTATION: Colorado lawmakers propose overhauling the state’s largest transit agency to better align it with broader housing and climate initiatives. (Daily Camera)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GRID:
NUCLEAR: Industry observers predict a slight uptick in domestic uranium mining could give a proposed advanced nuclear reactor in Wyoming a boost. (Wyoming Public Radio)
MINING: Federal wildlife officials consider extending endangered species protections to a snail found only in springs near the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. (news release)
CLIMATE: Conservationists challenge the federal government’s 2016 management plan for Glen Canyon Dam, saying it failed to consider climate change’s impacts on water levels and hydropower production. (Courthouse News)
Almost 50 environmental justice groups on Tuesday sent a letter to leaders of the federally-funded Midwestern hydrogen hub, imploring them not to try to loosen requirements for tax incentives for hydrogen produced with clean energy.
The U.S. Treasury in December published draft rules saying that to receive lucrative 45V tax credits for producing clean hydrogen, the energy used must not be diverted from the grid, but be “additional” energy created specifically to power the electrolysis process used to produce pure hydrogen from water.
Environmental advocates are largely pleased with Treasury’s draft rules, which also say clean energy must be generated around the same time and near where it is used for hydrogen production, to reap incentives. But organizations are worried that industry groups are lobbying to weaken the draft rules, which are open for public comment through Feb. 26.
The Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen (MachH2), a coalition of industry and research groups that won up to $1 billion in Department of Energy hydrogen hub funding, has proposed to produce much “pink hydrogen” powered by nuclear energy from Illinois. Critics say this, as well as “green hydrogen” produced with solar and wind, could divert zero-emissions power from other users and hence prolong the lives of fossil-fuel-fired generators that fill the gaps.
“If MachH2 imperils the achievement of our states’ climate goals, harms the health of our communities, and causes electricity price spikes that disproportionality impact low- and moderate-income households, it will face stiff opposition from our coalition and from communities that will bear the brunt of harmful, and avoidable, pollution,” says the letter from 47 organizations, including We the People of Detroit, Interfaith Power & Light, North Dakota Native Vote, StraightUp Solar, the Sierra Club, Eco-Justice Collaborative and Illinois People’s Action.
MachH2 declined to comment for this story.
The environmental and justice groups praised the draft 45V rules for including “three pillars” the groups see as crucial to making sure “clean hydrogen” is truly clean. Those pillars mean clean hydrogen production tax credits will only be awarded if new clean energy is used to power the projects, and the clean energy can actually be delivered to the site of the electrolysis around the time it is needed. The draft rules say that to be considered “additional,” the energy source must have been built within 36 months before the hydrogen production goes online.
Accounting known as hourly matching, which can be verified with Environmental Attribute Certificates, ensures that hydrogen production isn’t removing clean energy from the grid that could be used by consumers at times of high demand.
A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Energy and the Environment modeled the emissions impact that hydrogen production by electrolysis would have in the western U.S., and found that all three “pillars” would be necessary to ensure overall emissions don’t exceed fossil fuel generation.
The environmental justice organizations’ letter notes that the EPA has supported the Treasury department’s decision that induced emissions on the grid — caused by replacing electricity diverted for hydrogen production — should be counted as indirect emissions of hydrogen.
“Backsliding on Treasury’s proposed rule… would lead to significant emissions increases from hydrogen production, in violation of 45V’s statutory requirements,” said the organizations’ letter. “It would also directly harm communities that are home to some of our states’ dirtiest power plants, which would run more to replace the zero-carbon energy diverted to hydrogen production.”
Lauren Piette, a senior associate attorney in the clean energy program for Earthjustice, said, “The important thing now is to make sure Treasury holds the line against pressure to weaken the rules.”
Treasury asked for comment on possible exemptions to the additionality requirement, including the possibility that existing nuclear and hydroelectric plants could receive the tax credit, or that existing plants could get the tax credit if it helps them avoid retirement. Advocates have called these possible changes in the rules “loopholes.” An analysis by the Rhodium Group found these exemptions would generally increase greenhouse gas emissions, compared to modeling under the rules without exemptions.
“Treasury needs to reject the loopholes industry is demanding, which would create enormous subsidies for dirty hydrogen, lock in more fossil fuel production and use, and increase dangerous health and climate-harming pollution,” Piette said. “Especially damaging would be any loopholes to the incrementality requirement, which are based on industry’s speculative claims about retirement risk, curtailment, and modeling. Such loopholes would reward the hydrogen industry for siphoning critical zero-carbon energy from the grid, creating a massive power demand that would be filled by our dirtiest power plants – the ones that should be retiring, not ramping up.”
The letter charges that if the three pillars aren’t mandates for receiving tax incentives, the electricity diverted from the grid to hydrogen production will cause consumers’ energy bills to spike. They point to cryptocurrency mining as an example of how this phenomenon has played out.
“Cryptomining, which is subject to minimal constraints and requirements, has increased utility bills by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for households and businesses in upstate New York and led to costly grid strains in Texas,” the letter says.
BP’s Whiting oil refinery in Northwest Indiana is a focal point of the proposed Midwest hydrogen hub, as the company plans to ramp up hydrogen production at the site and provide it to regional users. BP asked the Treasury department to allow hydrogen made from existing generation to receive tax credits.
“We encourage the IRS and Treasury to adopt flexible criteria on ‘additionality’ especially at this nascent stage,” said BP America’s comment to the IRS. “Strict additionality rules requiring electrolytic hydrogen to be powered by new renewable energy is not practical, especially in the early years, and will severely limit development of hydrogen projects.”
BP and other members also argued against the requirement for hourly matching of renewable energy generation to use in hydrogen production, arguing instead for yearly matching. The draft rules currently allow for yearly matching until 2028, then hourly matching becomes mandatory.
“Stringent requirements such as hourly zero-emission matching have the potential to devastate the economics of clean hydrogen production,” said BP’s comment. “Moreover, such restrictive requirements are likely not practical or feasible in these early stages. If a green hydrogen production facility can only produce during hours when wind and solar are available, the low utilization rate will dramatically increase the price of the hydrogen produced.”
Bloom Energy Corporation, which manufactures electrolyzers, also said that adequate technology does not exist to timestamp energy generation and use in order to ensure that clean energy is generated when it is needed for hydrogen production.
“Since electrolyzers will comprise a very small percentage of the overall EAC-qualifying energy produced for many years to come, there is ample time for those state, regional and voluntary bodies to work through their stakeholder processes and make any changes as needed to adjust those systems so as to avoid unintended outcomes,” said Bloom Energy in its comment, referring to Environmental Attribute Certificates.
The Princeton study noted that hourly matching can add considerable costs to hydrogen production, but said the 45V tax credit would be lucrative enough to compensate for those costs while driving the market development of better hourly matching mechanisms.
Constellation Energy, owner of Illinois’s nuclear plants, also supported a mandate for hourly matching.
“Setting an expectation of hourly matched clean energy will provide a market signal for the clean energy investments needed to further drive decarbonization in the power sector,” said the nuclear company’s comment.
But Constellation is asking for exemptions to additionality, asking the government to decide that hydrogen made with behind-the-meter generation from existing plants qualifies for tax credits. The MachH2 hydrogen hub proposal calls for an electrolyzer on the site of Constellation’s LaSalle nuclear plant in Illinois, which could provide behind-the-meter electricity. But this electricity would still represent clean power that otherwise could have been sent to the grid, critics say.
Constellation also argued against adding carbon emissions related to the nuclear supply chain when calculating hydrogen’s lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions.
“Measuring carbon content for nuclear fuel is not typically done by the mining, enrichment, fabrication and transport vendors in the nuclear fuel supply chain, and it would be extremely cumbersome, costly, and labor intensive to impose these requirements on said vendors,” Constellation said.
The letter to MachH2 comes as grassroots groups and environmental organizations are increasingly organizing around still murky but well-funded plans for hydrogen to be used in everything from power generation to steelmaking to transportation, including as part of the seven federally-funded hubs.
On February 1, the national collaborative Just Solutions Collective released an Environmental Justice Platform on hydrogen, demanding strict limits on the type of hydrogen production and use that is incentivized as part of a clean energy shift.
The organization says hydrogen production from natural gas, and hydrogen produced with power from the grid, should be “ruled out” since “fossil fuel-based hydrogen fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” by many estimates. They also demanded strict safety protocols around new hydrogen development, strident protections for water resources, protections around chemicals added to hydrogen fuels, and transparency in all hydrogen-related projects.
Just Solutions leaders hope their platform influences policymakers and also helps community groups more effectively weigh in on plans for expanding hydrogen, including as the U.S. Department of Energy invests $7 billion in the seven hydrogen hubs nationwide.
“The framework is meant to be a resource for climate and environmental justice advocates so they can advance clean energy technology that meaningfully addresses the climate crisis and to stop false solutions from taking root in our communities,” Just Solutions senior fellow and strategist Sylvia Chi said in a January webinar.
Environmental justice organizations in other parts of the country have also opposed hydrogen hub plans. Last summer Indigenous, environmental justice, and youth groups urged the Biden administration not to fund a hydrogen hub based in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and that proposal was not among the seven selected.
“DOE is saying a lot of the right things, but there is widespread concern that environmental justice is going to be set off to the side and figured out later, after contracts are signed and projects are approved,” said Piette. “We have yet to hear a clear answer on whether communities will be able to say no to a Hub project. DOE needs to give its own guidance teeth and hold Hubs accountable to local communities, especially those already experiencing cumulative burdens of decades of fossil fuel pollution.”
The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) produced a report released in January commissioned by the Just Solutions Collective.
The report points to a pilot program in New York state where the Nine Mile nuclear plant is powering hydrogen production. While the nuclear power is zero emissions, it displaces energy from the grid that, when replaced by New York’s natural gas-heavy energy mix, increases overall greenhouse gas emissions.
IEER argues that the ideal place for zero-emissions-produced hydrogen is in areas like California and Texas where there’s often much more wind or solar power available than the grid can handle. These renewables are regularly curtailed, or kept off the grid, simply going to waste. A possible exemption to the additionality requirement for tax credits that Treasury has floated includes existing generation during times that renewables would be curtailed.
The IEER report estimates that curtailed renewables at current levels could produce 34,000 tons of hydrogen annually in California, and 150,000 tons in Texas. And the availability of renewables in those and other states is only expected to increase.
The environmental justice organizations’ letter similarly says that in the Midwest, MachH2 could successfully procure new renewables to power green hydrogen production.
“The MachH2 hub is one of the best situated in the country, able to take advantage of excellent wind and solar resources in the Midwest,” the letter says. “With the anticipated buildout of new renewable energy in this region, the projects funded by the hub will have no difficulty procuring cost-competitive, new, hourly-matched power from the proposed deliverability zone to claim the 45V tax credit.”
SOLAR: Duke Energy prepares to offer new rebates in North Carolina for rooftop solar arrays paired with batteries, which along with federal incentives could create a new wave of business for solar installers even after Duke reduced net-metering credits. (Energy News Network)
ALSO: An Arkansas city board agrees to move forward with development of a 4.9 MW solar farm that officials hope will provide 70% of the power for city operations. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
POLITICS:
CARBON CAPTURE: Southeastern Louisiana University deploys four buoys to monitor the ecosystem of a lake where a company wants to inject carbon dioxide captured from a blue hydrogen facility. (The Advocate)
OIL & GAS:
COAL: Private club property owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice will be auctioned off to satisfy more than $300 million in unpaid loans issued by a Virginia bank for the Justice family’s coal, agricultural and hospitality businesses. (Cardinal News)
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Community advocates rally to support a historically Black community in Alabama that’s seen repeated flooding problems since the state expanded a nearby highway. (Inside Climate News)
FINANCE: A multi-month pause in operations by a state-approved clean energy home improvement lender in Florida last year has caused problems for a couple who installed an air conditioning unit but haven’t been able to pay the contractor. (WKMG)
NUCLEAR: A truck carrying low-level nuclear waste catches fire on Interstate 40 near Nashville, leading to the revelation that up to 75% of low-level radioactive waste in the U.S. goes to Tennessee for processing. (WKRN)
GRID: Renewable energy developers say they are navigating a complex and congested electric grid in Minnesota to get their generation delivered to customers. (MPR News)
ALSO: The Biden administration will require some cryptocurrency mining facilities to report their energy use based on grid concerns with the energy-intensive industry. (Inside Climate News)
POLITICS: Illinois lawmakers who received campaign contributions from utilities deny a quid pro quo for supporting a new Illinois law that lifted the state’s moratorium on new nuclear plant construction. (Journal Star)
POWER PLANTS: Union members rally in support of a proposed northern Wisconsin gas plant that has divided local residents and elected officials. (Northern News Now)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
PIPELINES: Northern Iowa county officials share frustrations about not being reimbursed for pre-engineering and other site preparation activities related to a proposed carbon pipeline. (Globe Gazette)
AIR POLLUTION: The Biden administration’s proposed limits on soot would result in cleaner industrial facilities, power plants and vehicles in Illinois, experts say. (Chicago Tribune, subscription)
SOLAR: A developer plans 26 community solar projects averaging 3 MW in size that will feature pollinator habitats across Illinois. (PV Magazine)
UTILITIES: Detroit-based DTE Energy’s CEO predicts the utility will need to build a large Michigan gas plant with carbon capture technology as part of its long-term generation mix. (Crain’s Detroit Business, subscription)
COMMENTARY: A South Dakota landowner whose property includes a portion of the Dakota Access pipeline issues a warning about carbon pipelines that she says would similarly obstruct property rights. (South Dakota Searchlight)
EMISSIONS: The U.S. EPA tightens airborne soot regulations to reduce coal plant and diesel truck pollution, a move expected to save as many as 4,500 lives in 2032 and bring $46 billion in health benefits by that year. (E&E News)
BUILDINGS:
OIL & GAS:
CLIMATE:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
SOLAR: Duke Energy prepares to offer new rebates in North Carolina for rooftop solar arrays paired with batteries, which along with federal incentives could create a new wave of business for solar installers even after Duke reduced net-metering credits. (Energy News Network)
GEOTHERMAL: As geothermal pilot projects get underway in Massachusetts, the utilities behind them work to overcome high upfront costs, disruptive development and other challenges. (CommonWealth Beacon)
POLITICS:
Correction: An electrification advocate wrote that the International Code Council was violating its own rules to allow appeals that could strip electrification-ready measures from a recommended code update. An item in yesterday’s newsletter mischaracterized the author’s stance.
It’s called the “solar coaster:” The ups and downs the industry faces as solar-friendly policies ebb and flow. And in North Carolina, rooftop installers are in the middle of one wild ride.
On the heels of cutting bill credits for residential solar panels in October, Duke Energy is now poised to offer new rebates for rooftop arrays that are paired with batteries. Combined with federal incentives, the new “PowerPair” rebates could cut the cost of solar and battery systems in half and inject new interest in rooftop solar, which many installers say waned last fall.
“We definitely saw a dip,” said Doug Ager, the CEO and co-founder of Sugar Hollow Solar, describing his company’s business in the last quarter of 2023. But at least in the short-term, he said, “PowerPair will change all that.”
Approved to roll out in May, the pilot program will initially serve only an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 households. But proponents say it could pave the way for a new paradigm in which Duke invests in and manages distributed renewable energy and storage the same way it might a traditional power plant.
“It’s opening the door to active load management from Duke that is going to be increasingly important,” said David Neal, the senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who helped negotiate the program. Heralding the pilot as one of the first of its kind, he said, “it’s going to be a lot more cost effective than just building new generation to meet expected loads.”
Ultimately, advocates are also hopeful that the solar coaster can be smoothed out a little.
“The rooftop solar industry really has experienced quite a bit of ups and downs,” said Matt Abele, executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which also helped devise the rebates. There’s still the question of what long-term strategies would support installers, he said. “But I would say this is not an insignificant program in the interim.”
Greenlit by regulators last month, the rebates grew out of a years-long dispute between Duke Energy, advocates, and the solar industry about how rooftop solar owners should be compensated for the electricity they produce.
About 40,000 rooftops across the state boast solar arrays, the bulk of them on homes and in Duke territory. The figure accounts for a tiny fraction of North Carolina’s roughly 5 million housing units.
Despite these small numbers, Duke, like other investor-owned utilities around the country, has long sought to lower the state’s one-to-one net metering credit, which it says unfairly burdens both the company and customers that don’t have solar panels.
Solar installers and advocates contend that rooftop arrays provide more benefits than costs, including cleaner air, fewer electrons lost in transmission, and reduced need for electricity from centralized fossil fuel power plants. Their assertion is backed up by most independent studies of rooftop solar, a 2019 analysis found.
Still, a pair of state laws, both heavily influenced by Duke, mandate a change to the current net metering scheme by 2027. To avoid the bruising battles and excessive fees on solar customers seen in California and elsewhere, some of the state’s leading clean energy advocates and solar installers forged a complicated truce with the utility.
The crux of the agreement is a move toward “time of use” billing. New residential solar owners are charged and rewarded more for electrons they add to or subtract from the grid during peak demand hours of 6 to 9 p.m. in the summer and 6 to 9 a.m. in the winter. On a monthly basis, any net solar electrons added to the grid are credited at the “avoided cost” rate — akin to a wholesale rate and currently about 3.4 cents per kilowatt hour.
Diligent solar owners can squeeze benefits out of this complex billing scheme, some installers say. But to ease the transition, they also negotiated a simpler, lower-risk “bridge rate” with Duke, in which solar customers enrolling before 2027 get a monthly credit at the wholesale rate for any electrons they add to the grid.
Regulators on the utilities commission accepted these compromises last March and ultimately ordered new rates to begin October 1. But they rejected another component of the deal, which would have given customers with electric heat an extra rebate for enrolling in Duke’s smart thermostat program, in which the utility can make temperature adjustments from afar.
“Instead, the Commission directs Duke to develop a pilot program,” their order read, “to evaluate operational impacts to the electric system, if any, of behind the meter residential solar plus energy storage.”
PowerPair is the result. “This program was in many ways a result of our negotiations around net metering,” Dave Hollister, the president of Sundance Power Systems, said over email.
Devised after months of conversations between Duke, solar installers, clean energy advocates, and others, the new rebates would be based on the size of the solar array and battery and capped at $3,600 and $5,400 respectively. Combined with a 30% federal tax credit, the cash back could cut the cost of an average $40,500 system down to less than $20,000.
For customers, the deal is “actually really, really good in terms of the economics,” one installer said. And for Duke, the rebates could prove a low-cost strategy for smoothing out spikes in demand and strengthening the resilience of the grid.
“Cost effective and dispatchable customer-sited resources are key components of our clean energy transition,” Lon Huber, a senior vice president at Duke, said in an email. “We are committed to expanding the scope and adding ways for our customers to deploy grid beneficial technology.”
Customers will be divided into two equal cohorts. Those subscribed to the simpler bridge will allow the utility to remotely control their battery up to 18 times a year and will earn an extra $37 a month on average. Enrollees in the more complicated time-of-use rate plan, on the other hand, won’t get monthly incentives but would have control of their batteries.
“It will be interesting to see how many folks will allow Duke to control their battery and who wants to have that freedom and independence to manage their customer-generated electricity themselves,” Hollister said. “ We deal with so many folks who are looking for self-reliance and the idea of ‘smart grid’ is somewhat of a third rail for them.”
Already, batteries are popular options for rooftop solar customers. Installers say between a quarter and 40% of their clients were already choosing them for a variety of reasons, from a desire to save money to a quest for energy security in the face of outages.
Sugar Hollow Solar’s Ager said residential storage fits with the western North Carolina vibe. “Being in the mountains,” he said, “people just want batteries.”
With the PowerPair, the percentage of solar arrays paired with storage will undoubtedly rise, and many installers predicted it would double.
“I fully anticipate us selling tons of systems with batteries,” said Brandon Pendry, communications and outreach specialist with Southern Energy Management, one of the state’s oldest installers and a negotiator for both the bridge rate and the PowerPair scheme.
To avoid the problem installers and their clients faced with the last round of rooftop solar rebates — when demand far exceeded supply each year and available grants disappeared in minutes — the architects of the program gave it an overall cap of 60,000 kilowatts but no annual limits. That way, rooftop solar and battery owners can get the rebates on a rolling basis.
“In this case, there is only one capacity and it’s not time dependent,” said Pendry. “It’s just: when it runs out, it runs out.”
If customers choose the maximum allowable size of a 10 kilowatt solar array, a total of 6,000 households could benefit. But no one really knows when the capacity will be reached, with some predicting 18 months from May and others estimating as few as four.
Duke projects it will connect 11,400 residential rooftop systems this year. But a spokesperson said it was simply too early to tell when PowerPair rebates would dry up.
Once they do, the hope is that data gathered during the pilot will inform whatever comes next.
“It may possibly be a win-win for everyone,” Hollister said, “especially if it can be extended or transformed into a more permanent program.”
Since half of the PowerPair cohorts will be using the bridge rate, there’s some chance a permanent program would extend that rate’s life — a key priority for some in the industry.
No matter what, while most installers contacted for this article eagerly await the pilot, they’re also clear-eyed about their business plan for the future.
“We have been installing solar in [the state] for over a decade and have certainly seen lots of incentives come and go, said Jesse Solomon, vice president and director of sales for N.C Solar Now, in an email. “But we have always been able to design the investment to make sense for our clients.”
Solar installers also focus on the overall trends buoying their industry: Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, while the materials designed to harness and store forever-free sunlight are getting cheaper.
Every year Duke raises rates, said Pendry of Southern Energy Management, “solar becomes a better and better investment.”
Environmental agencies in nine states will work together to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions by making electric heat pumps the norm for most new home HVAC equipment sales by 2040.
The memorandum of understanding, spearheaded by the inter-agency nonprofit Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, or NESCAUM, was released today and signed by officials in California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island.
While it is not legally binding and does not commit particular funding, the agreement calls for heat pumps to make up 90% of residential heating, air conditioning and water heating sales in these states by 2040.
An interim goal of 65% by 2030 is based on last fall’s target from the U.S. Climate Alliance, a group of 25 governors, to quadruple their states’ heat pump installations to 20 million in the same timeframe.
The residential sector is one of the top two or three contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in most of the East Coast states signing on to the agreement, driven in part by cold climates and a heavy reliance on oil and gas for home heating. Residential emissions rank far lower in the Western states participating.
In a press release, NESCAUM emphasized the harmful smog, haze and ozone driven by nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions from fossil fuel combustion, calling buildings “a hidden source of air pollution.”
Senior policy advisor Emily Levin said states must move quickly to help residents replace these fossil-fired HVAC and water heating systems with heat pumps in time to limit the harms of global warming.
“You may only have one more crack at these buildings between now and 2050, because these are long-lived pieces of equipment — they can last 10 or 20 years,” she said. “So we really can’t miss our opportunity.”
Matt Casale, senior manager of market transformation with the Building Decarbonization Coalition, said the new agreement’s market-share approach adds specificity to how states will meet existing, number-based goals for heat pump installations.
“The idea is to send a clear signal to the market that heat pumps are the future of home heating and cooling, while reflecting the urgency with which we need to act to meet GHG emissions reduction targets,” he said.
Manufacturers have called for this kind of “long-term signal,” said Levin — “they need to plan, they need to make significant investments.” She said agreements like this show companies that “this is the direction we need to go in” and that state governments are committed to helping make the transition happen.
“Greater demand for heat pumps will also put pressure on installers,” Casale added. “We will need policies that both grow and further develop the workforce. The MOU is a great opportunity to bring them in more directly, learn from them, and talk about their needs.”
Under the new agreement, participating states will “collaborate to collect market data, track progress, and develop an action plan within a year to support the widespread electrification of residential buildings,” according to NESCAUM.
Afton Vigue, a spokesperson for the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, said taking advantage of consolidated industry data will help prevent another new reporting requirement for participating states and will help align with varying state metrics.
The states’ forthcoming action plan is expected to include emphasis on workforce development and supply chain constraints, which have tempered otherwise strong heat pump progress in states like Maine.
“It really does focus on that element of driving the market and collaborating with manufacturers,” Levin said. “Right now, states don’t really necessarily know … how their heat pump market is developing. Creating systems to bring visibility to that, provide insights into that … it’s a really important element.”
The agreement tees up annual reports on each state’s progress toward the 2030 and 2040 goals, and schedules a 2028 check-in about any necessary adjustments.
“A greater focus on consumer education, workforce development, and affordability will be critical to the success of the transition,” said Casale. “This means getting the most out of the Inflation Reduction Act and other incentive programs, but we also need to answer the questions of how this solution best serves multi-family buildings, renters and others for whom purchasing a new system isn’t entirely within their control.”
In the agreement, the states pledge to put at least 40% of energy efficiency and electrification investments toward disadvantaged communities — those facing high energy cost burdens or disproportionate pollution — in line with the federal Justice40 program, which underlies similar rules for the IRA.
Working through NESCAUM and other existing groups, the participating states will brainstorm tools for reaching these goals, potentially including funding for whole-home retrofits, building code enforcement and other uniform standards, data collection, research projects, use of federal resources and more.
“It’s going to look a little different in every state,” Levin said. “But they’re committing to collaborate and to advance a set of policies and programs that work for their state to accomplish those broader goals.”
This could include adapting or building on each other’s approaches. Levin highlighted Maine and California as having successful models for consumer outreach and heat pump market coordination, and said Maryland has shown strong impact and ambition around clean building performance standards.
Maine, which relies more on heating oil than any other state, is among the participants with existing heat pump goals in their climate plans. The state surpassed an initial target — 100,000 installations by 2025 — last year, and now aims to install 175,000 more heat pumps by 2027.
Officials in Maine have said that heating oil use appears to be slowly falling in concert with increasing use of electricity for home heat. Vigue said the new agreement lines up with existing state goals and will help Maine “bolster our ongoing collaboration with other states, share experiences, and see where gaps may exist.”
CARBON CAPTURE: A Bill Gates-backed startup plans to begin production at what it says will be the world’s largest carbon removal plant this week, where it will collect woody biomass from area paper mills and convert it into bricks to be stored underground. (E&E News)
ALSO: West Virginia lawmakers advance a bill to shift control of the permitting of carbon capture wells from the U.S. EPA to the state. (WV News)
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS:
EMISSIONS: A judge denies a motion by Virginia’s attorney general to throw out a lawsuit by an energy conservation group that seeks to block the state’s withdrawal from a regional carbon market. (Roanoke Times)
OVERSIGHT: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry appoints a new leader for the state agency that oversees coastal restoration and hurricane protection, while also considering whether to merge that agency with the energy and natural resources department to make it easier for oil and gas companies to operate. (Louisiana Illuminator, NOLA.com)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
PIPELINES: A federal judge blocks a company’s attempt to condemn and transfer property for a Texas pipeline before talking to landowners it’s so far been unable to reach. (Texas Public Radio)
GRID:
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: The U.S. EPA holds listening sessions to “ground-truth” its efforts in Richmond, Virginia, and other environmentally stressed communities as President Biden nears the end of his first term. (Inside Climate News)
EFFICIENCY: North Carolina officials confirm the state applied for federal efficiency and appliance rebates, which should be available to residents later this year. (Winston-Salem Journal)
COMMENTARY: News that Alabama Power is entering negotiations with the U.S. EPA to remove and recycle tons of coal ash could be good news for 300 square miles of “America’s Amazon” downstream from a coal-fired power plant, writes an opinion contributor. (New York Times)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A Chicago-area regional government agency offers communities a blueprint for upgrading electric vehicle charging infrastructure. (Energy News Network)
ALSO: A southeastern Michigan consortium receives a $60 million federal grant to advance research into electric vehicle batteries. (Michigan Public)
UTILITIES: A grid expert says Xcel Energy’s proposal to switch Minnesota customers from fixed to variable rates would be an outlier nationally because of the major gap between peak and off-hour rates. (Star Tribune)
PIPELINES: South Dakota lawmakers advance three bills that would give landowners more rights and compensation when dealing with pipeline developers, from surveying to eminent domain cases. (South Dakota Searchlight)
GRID:
CLEAN ENERGY: Clean energy groups criticize Xcel Energy’s long-term energy plan that calls for 2,200 MW of new natural gas peaking plants and keeps three waste-to-energy plants operating for a decade after their planned retirements. (Utility Dive)
HYDROELECTRIC: Michigan utility Consumers Energy plans to seek proposals this month for 13 hydroelectric dams it hopes to sell. (MLive)
OIL & GAS:
EFFICIENCY:
University Park is a small suburb south of Chicago, built around sprawling warehouses for companies like Clorox, Amazon and Solo Cup that attract a steady stream of diesel truck traffic. Its residents, 88% of whom are African American, are also exposed to pollution from a steel and wire processing facility relocated there from a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, as well as steel mills and an oil refinery in nearby Northwest Indiana.
So, village manager Elizabeth Scott figured, the town was a prime candidate for improving quality of life and the environment by adopting electric vehicles — even if only two local households had EVs when Scott first checked the secretary of state’s website.
An EV Readiness program developed by the Chicago-area Metropolitan Mayors Caucus helped University Park catapult to being a leader in electric vehicle adoption, with the program offering a “blueprint” for preparing charging infrastructure, accessing grants and doing community outreach. University Park earned the second-highest score of a dozen municipalities participating in the first cohort to finish the EV Readiness program last year, and they were the only municipality in the region’s “Southland” to complete the program.
University Park is in the process of acquiring an EV charging station for electric semi-trucks city leaders hope will increasingly serve its warehouses, and they hope to add electric vehicles to their municipal fleet while also supporting residents to get their own EVs.
University Park’s EV Readiness website offers resources for local electric car owners and aspiring owners, from a video demonstrating how electric vehicles work to an interactive map of charging stations.
Scott, who has an electric car herself, had long noticed the vast disparity in available charging stations in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods and suburbs on the South Side of Chicago, versus the wealthier and whiter neighborhoods and suburbs to the north.
“In Black and Brown communities there’s been a lot of disinvestment,” said Scott. “This [electric vehicle rollout] is big, it’s something new — for the world, and especially for this country.”
The truck charging station will be one of the first in the Midwest. “We’re kind of pioneers in this, this is uncharted territory,” Scott continued.
The EV Readiness program, funded by utility ComEd, offers guidance on a wide range of issues, including updating zoning and building codes to facilitate EV charger installation, training first responders in dealing with electric vehicle fires, and accessing federal and state incentives.
Municipalities receive scores for various achievements and can earn bronze, silver or gold certification through the program. Doing a fleet assessment to prepare to acquire municipal EVs helps earn silver certification, for example, and actually adding EVs to the fleet earns gold. Oak Park received a gold certification during the program’s first cohort, with the rest of the municipalities earning bronze.
The cohort of participating municipal leaders received guidance and instruction from the Mayors Caucus and met regularly.
“It was like a support group, to be able to partner with other communities, bounce ideas off one another,” Elizabeth Scott said. “I highly recommend every municipality to go through the program.”
Between October 2022 and November 2023, according to state registration data, the total number of EVs owned in the municipalities participating in the first cohort increased from 2,175 to 3,608. Hanover Park doubled its EV ownership, from 105 to 219, and Oak Park increased ownership from 581 to 904. Much-smaller University Park doubled its EV ownership — from eight to 16 vehicles.
The concept of EV Readiness was born in 2018 during public meetings around the Volkswagen vehicle emissions cheating settlement that provided funding to states for alternative fuels and electric vehicles. Metropolitan Mayors Caucus director of environmental initiatives Edith Makra noted that the majority of public comments made during that period were focused on acquiring electric vehicles.
The caucus launched the initiative with a series of listening sessions with stakeholders including the IBEW electrical workers union, fire safety officials, advocacy groups and municipal leaders. The caucus developed an EV Readiness checklist, certification program and curriculum. The first cohort of municipalities started the program in December 2022 and “graduated” in December 2023.
“When we first signed on to support this program, we weren’t fully sure what the response from municipalities would be,” said ComEd external affairs director Philip Roy. “We were kind of blown away by the interest. We have over 400 municipalities in our service territory, that are all very different — in size, makeup, resources, they all need different kinds of help. That’s where having a group like the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus that is so used to working with a broad, diverse set of municipalities is key to success.”
The EV Readiness program dovetails with an ongoing Metropolitan Mayors Caucus initiative known as the Greenest Region Compact that involves communities collaborating to develop and adopt sustainability standards.
EV Readiness also builds on the model of SolSmart, a nationwide technical assistance initiative that helps municipalities invest in and prepare for solar power, at no cost to them. Many of the municipalities in the first cohort of EV Readiness were also participants in SolSmart.
With both programs, part of the goal is to help communities be well-positioned to apply for federal grants and incentives.
“We wanted communities to be ready for the influx of funding that was on the way, we knew it was coming, we wanted to make sure they were thinking about it,” said Metropolitan Mayors Caucus sustainability specialist Cheryl Scott (no relation to Elizabeth Scott).
During the first cohort, the federal government announced the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program providing grants for EV charging under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The smallest grants available were $2 million, “more than most of our communities need,” as Makra said. And ironically the paperwork to apply for the environmental justice-focused Justice 40 mandates of the program was “a really heavy lift for most small communities,” as Makra said.
So, the Mayors Caucus worked with communities to prepare an aggregated NEVI grant application, seeking $15 million to install 114 chargers in 35 towns and two counties. Recipients have not yet been announced.
Illinois has been a leader in legislation promoting electric vehicles on the state level. The 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act created incentives for public transit electrification and EV ownership, with a goal of having one million EVs on Illinois roads by 2030. The law creates rebates of up to $4,000 for consumers who buy electric vehicles, and demands utilities pursue transportation electrification in an equitable way that does not burden customers who don’t own EVs.
Last year the Illinois legislature passed the Electric Vehicle Charging Act, which requires new single-family homes and multi-family buildings be EV capable, meaning conduit is laid to allow easy installation of chargers and wiring. State law also prohibits landlords and homeowners associations from unduly interfering with charger installation, and clarifies how renters should pay for electricity used in charging EVs.
ComEd funded the first two cohorts of EV Readiness with $225,000, and the utility is in the process of finalizing increased funding for additional cohorts, said Roy. The second cohort of the program – including 16 municipalities and two counties – is underway.
During a recent luncheon sponsored by the Executives’ Club of Chicago, ComEd CEO Gil Quiniones touted the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus’s work and the importance of EV rollout.
“We want to make sure our grid is ready, if someone wants to buy an electric vehicle today and put in a charging station,” Quiniones said. “We want electric vehicles to be an easier choice for our customers.”
He said alleviating “range anxiety” by installing more charging stations is key. Currently, there are about 2,000 level 2 chargers and 1,000 fast-chargers in ComEd’s service territory, he said.
As part of its Beneficial Electrification program, ComEd is spending $231 million on rebates and other incentives to encourage electrical vehicle adoption by municipalities and individuals.
“We recognize that municipalities are going to play a vital role in the transition to electrification,” said Roy. “Many of the policies that drive how and where infrastructure is installed are very hyperlocal policies that municipalities oversee: zoning, parking code, use of public space.”
The mayors caucus helps municipalities coordinate with utilities on EV readiness and helps them understand suggested electrical code standards and practices.
Cheryl Scott said most municipalities require permits for level 2 or fast-charging stations, but not for level 1 charging.
“If it’s the same outlet as plugging a toaster in, should the government get involved?” she asked. “Level 1 is where we saw uncertainty about how to do that. If it’s an older house, older wiring could cause problems. The owners manual (for chargers) says check with an electrician.”
“Do you permit for EV charging at a residential level or not?” added Makra. “We ask a community to think that through. Do you risk being overly burdensome, or not necessarily protecting your constituents in terms of safe installation?”
The EV Readiness program encourages communities to adopt policies going beyond the state EV charging law, and some including University Park did so by requiring new commercial construction be EV-capable.
Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago, adopted the “most transformative” charging infrastructure policy, in Cheryl Scott’s words. The town requires a level 2 charger be installed in any new residential building with a garage or parking space, and commercial buildings and multi-family residences must have a level 2 charger for every five parking spaces. Several towns including University Park also adopted policies that commercial construction must be EV-ready or EV-capable; the state law only applies to residential buildings.
Elizabeth Scott said she’s seen interest in EVs blossom in University Park since EV Readiness launched, for environmental and financial reasons.
She said she spent $350 a month on gasoline for her car before getting an EV, since her position requires constant driving. Now, she spends about $100 a month on charging.
“It’s convenient, it’s safer, I have no catalytic converter to steal, I don’t have oil changes,” Scott noted. “But it’s really an investment in the sustainability of our future and our communities. I’m really grateful we’re able to do this as a community of color that normally doesn’t have all the opportunities.”
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