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STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Minneapolis-St. Paul’s regional public transit agency will buy 20 electric buses to put in service by 2026 to help meet emission-reduction targets. (Star Tribune)
GRID: A federal judge upholds a decision to block a land swap needed to complete a major transmission line between Iowa and Wisconsin, creating more uncertainty for the project. (E&E News, subscription)
CLEAN ENERGY:
WIND: North Dakota regulators approve plans for a 200 MW wind project that includes an 18-mile transmission line. (North Dakota Monitor)
PIPELINES: At a North Dakota Republican Party convention, a resolution objecting to the use of eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines falls two votes short. (North Dakota Monitor)
AIR QUALITY: Wildfire smoke helped keep Fargo, North Dakota, on an annual ranking of the 25 worst U.S. cities for short-term particle pollution. (MPR News)
POLITICS: The top GOP candidates for Indiana governor say they would take steps to emphasize coal and reshape the state’s utility oversight board. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
GRID:
BIOGAS:
COMMENTARY:
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration unveils new federal permitting rules designed to prioritize projects with environmental benefits while adding reviews for ones that could worsen climate change. (New York Times)
FOSSIL FUELS:
NUCLEAR:
GRID: The U.S. Energy Department starts preparing for the rise of artificial intelligence and its projected energy demand, and begins exploring ways that AI could make power delivery and energy project permitting more efficient. (Axios)
EMISSIONS: Companies’ return-to-office plans are often out of line with their own climate pledges, as multiple peer-reviewed studies find working from home can significantly reduce a worker’s emissions impact. (Grist/Fast Company)
STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
UTILITIES: Several New England utilities plan to seek federal funds for a regional energy data platform to make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
OIL & GAS: A company agrees to pay New Mexico $24.5 million to resolve air pollution violations related to flaring methane and other associated gasses at its oil and gas facilities in the Permian Basin. (Associated Press)
ALSO:
NUCLEAR:
UTILITIES:
WIND: A California court rules that a lawsuit seeking to block a proposed wind facility in Shasta County will be heard by an out-of-area judge. (Record Searchlight)
SOLAR: Western Colorado residents continue to push back on a proposed utility-scale solar installation, saying it would “industrialize” the rural area. (Telluride Daily Planet)
GEOTHERMAL: California offers $30 million in tax credits to a geothermal power and lithium extraction project near the Salton Sea. (news release)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: An analysis finds California must upgrade its grid capacity by about 25% to accommodate projected power demands from growing numbers of electric vehicles. (Tech Xplore)
CLIMATE:
COAL: Powder River Basin coal production for the first quarter of 2024 fell 21% from the previous year. (Cowboy State Daily)
MINING: A uranium mining company plans to expand exploratory drilling at its proposed project in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. (news release)
COMMENTARY: Advocates urge Colorado lawmakers to pass legislation regulating facilities that convert plastics to fuel, saying their pollution disproportionately harms underserved communities. (Colorado Newsline)
A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that would make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies.
Clean energy advocates see this kind of service as key to supporting the rollout of Inflation Reduction Act rebates and, more broadly, to controlling costs and demand on a lower-carbon power grid.
Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities are working with several subsidiaries and state groups and agencies to propose the new data platform to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) grant program, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Their $29 million data hub concept, with half the funding requested from the Department of Energy, builds off a similar state-level platform that’s been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019. Proponents say federal funding is needed in part to encourage that state’s regulators to give final approval for the project.
Launched over the next four years, the regional data hub would provide standardized access to “very minute usage information” for millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, according to Unitil.
“With this data more readily available, customers could better understand their energy consumption, which would help them make decisions about energy conservation steps they may want to take at home or in the workplace,” Unitil said in a statement. “For instance, the information could be used to obtain a price quote from a rooftop solar provider, a competitive supplier to receive a price estimate, or a storage provider to determine the appropriate size of behind-the-meter battery storage.”
Multi-utility data platforms currently exist in Texas and New York, both states with unified electric grids, proponents said — but in New England and many other places, customers’ data access is inconsistent.
In a concept paper on their data hub proposal filed with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, the Northeast utilities say costs for efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources or DERs, can be inflated by the “idiosyncratic processes” and “bespoke electronic interfaces” needed to work with each customer’s data.
“Today, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs, while others install monitoring packages with their solar and storage applications that are functionally duplicative of the utility’s advanced meters, driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation,” the proposal says.
To estimate cost savings in a quote for rooftop solar, for example, a homeowner may have to provide a year’s worth of paper or electronic bills for their prospective installer to compile and analyze by hand — an “incredibly silly manual process,” said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that’s participating in the regional data hub proposal.
“And that’s just the single homeowner level — think about a multi-family housing project, where you have forty, fifty, a hundred units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It’s just a total nightmare.”
An automated system would access customers’ data on demand in a standardized format and could spit out expected project savings at essentially the push of a button, he said. Contractors he’s spoken with, he said, call this approach “transformational for the way that we interact with customers.”
The data hub could also support energy dashboards, especially for environmental justice areas, to help visualize progress toward climate targets with a goal of “reducing the energy burden for historically disadvantaged communities,” said Eversource spokesperson Sarah Paduano in a statement.
“By breaking down the walls of historically utility-housed and owned data, Unitil believes this would remove a significant barrier for a variety of stakeholders that would be able to leverage the data in a meaningful way and towards advancing an equitable clean energy transition,” Unitil’s statement said.
Estimated savings from individual energy projects aren’t just nice to have, said Michael Murray, president of Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit working on the hub project — they are often required. Certain Inflation Reduction Act rebates are only offered to projects that can prove at least a 20% energy savings.
“The legislation was really intended to be the first sort of fusion between making an efficiency project a smart grid asset,” Murray said. “It’s no longer just, ‘efficiency is in its own silo and all you care about is annual energy savings.’ The question is, how does it become interactive and part of a ‘virtual power plant’ kind of concept?”
Better data on individual projects could help customers access savings from new rate designs that incentivize less usage at times of peak demand, the proposal says, improving resilience and lowering costs on a more variable, renewables-powered grid.
“Energy data is increasingly going to become the currency of a modern grid,” said Evans-Brown. “It’s really difficult to manage our peaks if you have no idea where they’re coming from, like what’s causing them all the way down to the consumer level.”
Without standardized, streamlined access to energy data, Murray said, contractors trying to work with IRA rebates in states that choose to offer them will face a costly and time-consuming burden of iterating individualized manual processes thousands of times.
“(The IRA) is going to touch millions of American homes. Each one of these is multiple data requests and processing. And so we need to figure out a way to do it in a streamlined way,” he said. Otherwise, “all that federal money gets drained into stupid overhead as opposed to actually delivering value for people.”
Not every New England state or utility is participating in the grant proposal. Connecticut-based Avangrid, with subsidiaries like Central Maine Power or CMP, is one that declined to join.
CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program’s first round last year for technology to reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and plans to seek additional GRIP funding on its own this year.
“Our decision for round two was to focus on reliability and load capacity grid improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” said spokesperson Jon Breed in a statement. “We are aware of the concept of the Regional Joint Utility Energy Data Hub and will be monitoring the performance of the program if it receives funding.”
For Murray, the long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the six states’ regional grid manager. He said utilities — and their customers — that don’t get on board, if the project moves forward, could risk becoming siloed and left behind in older systems.
“The whole industry is moving towards an automated system, which New Hampshire is building,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately need to go.”
NUCLEAR: In New York, the decommissioning company that owns the former Indian Point nuclear plant sues the state for not letting it dump radioactive wastewater into the Hudson River. (Times Union)
WORKFORCE: Maine’s governor vetoes a bill tying union labor with clean energy projects on state land, noting that it was unclear to her the types of jobs that would be required to use union workers. (Portland Press Herald)
POLICY: Even though New York has set ambitious climate goals, the state’s most recent budget didn’t include any significant measures to move the needle on climate action. (City Limits)
TRANSIT:
WIND:
BUILDINGS: Rhode Island regulators consider conditions they might apply to a potential operations extension of a Portsmouth liquefied natural gas facility that was intended as a temporary back-up for Aquidneck Island’s energy supply — including a ban on new gas hook-ups on the island. (Providence Journal)
TIDAL: Federal regulators grant an eight-year license to the Marine Renewable Energy Collaborative to pilot the use of tidal turbines in the Cape Cod Canal in Bourne, Massachusetts. (news release)
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: New Hampshire’s Henniker School District purchases four electric school buses using funds from the U.S. EPA’s Clean School Bus Program. (Concord Monitor)
BIOFUELS: Berlin, Connecticut, residents are frustrated and disgusted with the pungent smell wafting from a food waste-to-biofuel facility, in addition to noise pollution complaints. (NBC Connecticut)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A $4 billion electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant taking shape in a rural Kansas town is fueling speculation about whether a nearby low-income housing community could be sold for redevelopment. (Wichita Eagle)
OHIO:
BIOFUELS: The nation’s first ethanol plant to use carbon capture and storage launches a new program aiming to provide premium prices to corn farmers who grow low-carbon crops. (North Dakota Monitor)
CLEAN ENERGY: Missouri clean energy advocates accuse Ameren of slow-walking its long-term clean energy plans and prolonging its reliance on coal. (First Alert 4)
GEOTHERMAL: Minnesota is among a growing number of states with cities rolling out underground geothermal networks to help meet all-electric building standards and emission-reduction targets. (Canary Media)
CLIMATE: The Quad-Cities area can expect to see more intense flooding and hotter temperatures under climate models that anticipate rising carbon emissions, according to a new climate study. (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
TRANSPORTATION: Illinois Democrats propose legislation that would create a transit agency to oversee public transportation in northeastern Illinois and provide an additional $1.5 billion for public transit. (Sun-Times)
OIL & GAS:
UTILITIES: The new president of AES Indiana says improving customer service and grid reliability are two top priorities in her new role. (Indianapolis Business Journal)
COMMENTARY:
SOLAR: While a federal database shows around 0.02% of U.S. cropland is used for large solar projects, an analysis of four Midwest counties reveals much higher penetrations, worrying some farmers and advocates. (Reuters)
WIND: Wind turbines only take up about 5% of the land where they’re built, meaning there’s room to co-locate farms and other facilities below them, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Washington Post)
OIL & GAS: Advocates suggest establishing a new tax on oil and gas production in the world’s wealthiest countries, with a report finding the charge could raise $720 billion for climate mitigation by 2030. (Guardian)
POLITICS:
GRID: The U.S. power grid performed better during cold snaps this January than it did during winter storms over the past few years thanks to grid operators’ improvements, a report finds. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GEOTHERMAL: A Texas company uses software and sensor-equipped drilling tools to install geothermal heating and cooling systems in spaces previously considered too small to house such projects. (Canary Media)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CLIMATE: The Southeast faces one of the most rapid sea level surges in the world, an analysis finds, combining with increasingly severe storms to create epic floods. (Washington Post)
EFFICIENCY: Advocates laud a new Virginia law that strengthens energy efficiency standards and mandates the development of a standardized test to measure the cost effectiveness of proposed efficiency programs. (Energy News Network)
UTILITIES: Colorado’s largest electric cooperative officially splits with Tri-State Generation and Transmission following years of wrangling over the wholesale power supplier’s rates, fossil fuel reliance and limits on local generation. (Greeley Tribune)
ALSO: Arizona regulators reject a utility’s request to exempt its proposed natural gas plant expansion in the western part of the state from environmental reviews. (12 News)
TRANSMISSION: Developers complete construction on the 125-mile Ten West Link transmission line designed to move solar power between California and Arizona. (Inside Climate News)
GRID: PacifiCorp becomes the first entity to formally commit to the California grid operator’s extended day-ahead power market. (RTO Insider, subscription)
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY:
COAL: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon plans to sue the Biden administration over rules aimed at reducing power plant pollution, saying it will hasten the demise of the state’s coal industry. (WyoFile)
OIL & GAS:
HYDROPOWER: Alaska utilities send their proposed plan for the Eklutna hydropower dam to Gov. Mike Dunleavy after months of debate over the facility’s management. (KTUU)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE: Portland, Oregon’s clean energy fund considers investing $50 million in seven school districts to fund solar installations, efficiency upgrades and other emissions reduction and climate change mitigation efforts. (OPB)
POLICY: New York’s comptroller releases an audit finding that the state energy siting office is too slow at approving big wind and solar developments and that permit applications often had missing or insufficient paperwork. (LoHud, Spectrum News 1)
ALSO:
OFFSHORE WIND:
GRID: Pennsylvania environmentalists cheer the end of plans to develop a major plastics chemical recycling plant in a cornfield, following their concerns it would be an energy-hungry and highly polluting facility. (Inside Climate News)
SOLAR:
UTILITIES: Pennsylvania utility commissioners unanimously vote to investigate a rate hike request from FirstEnergy equal to 34%. (Butler Eagle)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
COMMENTARY: A pediatric physical therapist and climate advocate writes that electrifying NJ Transit without regressive fare hikes is necessary to improve public health and air quality. (Star-Ledger)
GRID: The Biden administration finalizes a transmission permitting streamlining rule and plans to spend $331 million to add more than 2,000 MW of grid capacity in the West. (Heatmap, news release)
ALSO: California’s grid operator proposes investing $6.1 billion in 26 infrastructure projects aimed at expediting renewable energy project interconnections before 2035. (Reuters)
STORAGE:
SOLAR: A New Mexico company breaks ground on a $50 million solar tracking equipment manufacturing facility near Albuquerque. (Solar Power World)
COAL:
POLLUTION: The American Lung Association finds four New Mexico counties have excessively high levels of ozone pollution, including three in oil and gas producing regions. (NM Political Report)
OIL & GAS:
NUCLEAR:
HYDROPOWER:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES: Oregon regulators reject consumer advocates’ bid to dismiss Portland General Electric’s requested rate increase, saying the proposal must go through the lengthy review process. (Oregonian)
COMMENTARY: A California columnist celebrates the closure of 21 Western coal plants over the past two decades, but warns that shuttering the 32 remaining facilities may be even more difficult. (Los Angeles Times)
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