Back
The following commentary was written by Charles Hua, policy analyst at Rewiring America; Ana Sophia Mifsud, a manager within the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) carbon-free building team; and Robin Lisowski, managing director of policy at Slipstream. See our commentary guidelines for more information.
The Inflation Reduction Act is an unprecedented investment in clean energy and provides a transformative opportunity for Michigan to move toward a healthier, more affordable, and safer future.
By signing this groundbreaking bill into law last year, President Biden directed nearly $400 billion in federal funding for climate initiatives through a mix of tax incentives, grants, and loan guarantees. Depending on household income, Michigan residents can take advantage of tax credits — and soon up to $14,000 in rebates — for making homes less dependent on fossil fuels and more efficient, including technologies like heat pumps and insulation.
But still, states like Michigan have a huge role to play by leveraging these millions in federal funding to invest in clean energy and ensure households are powered by resilient, healthy, and affordable sources of energy.
Michigan has already taken steps toward securing the benefits of clean energy. In 2020, Governor Whitmer committed the state to economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050. A year later, the state developed the MI Healthy Climate Plan (MHCP) that charts a path to reach a goal halving emissions by 2030. Just last week, Governor Whitmer was one of the 25 members in the bipartisan coalitions of the U.S. Climate Alliance who committed to collectively reach 20 million residential electric heat pump installations by 2030 — potentially quadrupling the number of residential heat pumps currently in operation. The state legislature is currently considering implementing a clean energy standard, which could single-handedly put Michigan over three-quarters of the way to its 2030 climate goals.
Unfortunately, bad faith actors determined to keep homes reliant on inefficient and dirty energy sources would have you believe that Michigan lawmakers are wheeling and dealing behind closed doors to ram through sustainable initiatives without any public debates. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy has been soliciting feedback from the public on implementation priorities for the MHCP, and Governor Whitmer has already signed several bipartisan pieces of climate legislation into law.
The benefits these clean energy initiatives will bring to Michigan households can’t be understated.
This June, Michigan paid the 11th highest rate for energy in the country: 19 cents per kilowatt per hour — well above the national average. This is even more harmful to low-income communities. While the average Michigan household spends 3% of its annual income on energy, low-income households spend upwards of 15%. Furthermore, in the Midwest the cost of fossil fuel expenditures for heating has steadily increased since 2019. We can expect for fuel costs to continue to increase in Michigan. A recent analysis of Michigan’s gas utility, Consumer Energy, which provides gas service to nearly 2 million Michigan households, predicts that gas bills will increase 49% in 2030 compared to 2021. This is partly because the utility plans to spend $11 billion in infrastructure investments in their gas distribution system between now and 2030.
By installing a heat pump, which can both heat and cool a home using electricity, the Department of Energy estimates that many American households can save significantly on operating costs. Households will have one appliance that does the job of both a fossil fuel heating system and a traditional AC unit — and does both jobs better. Heat pumps are more effective at maintaining a comfortable and consistent temperature, even during peak summer or winter days, and are 3 to 5 times more efficient than most fossil fuel heating systems. Households that heat with delivered fuels, like propane, are expected to benefit most.
Induction stoves are also safer than gas options. Induction stoves are also safer than gas options. 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US are linked with emissions from gas stoves, and cooking for just one hour can aggravate the condition. In fact, 75% of emissions from a gas stove — including the carcinogen benzene — leak even when the stove itself is off.
Of course, Michigan will have to build out the infrastructure to support carbon neutrality by 2050. But doing so will mean jobs. Since the IRA was signed a year ago, nearly 200,000 clean energy jobs have been created in the Great Lake State to support electric vehicle manufacturing alone. In fact, the state is predicted to see a GDP growth increase of 2.5% above the current baseline growth rates by 2050 as a result of the clean energy jobs and IRA investments.
Clean energy is the future Michigan residents want. More than half of Michiganders supported the IRA when it first came out, and a whopping 71% wanted the state to secure more federal dollars. A poll released in April showed 73% of Michiganders want their government to do more to keep energy bills affordable — and these federal incentives offer a distinct opportunity to do just that.
Federal funding offers the state a huge opportunity to bring in long-term jobs and help households switch to safer, more affordable, and more efficient appliances. It’s the future that all Michiganders deserve.
With two-plus decades of retail experience, Rachel Brown well knew her internal fraud detector should be on high alert when weighing any offer touted as “free.”
That’s why the retired quilt store owner paused — and did her homework — when a tempting overture for no-cost rooftop solar crossed the transom of her Augusta County home a year ago.
Brown’s research involved querying her utility-savvy nephew, Everett Brubaker, who assured her that Dominion Energy’s solar plan targeting elderly and low-income Virginians is indeed a legitimate deal.
“Everett would not be recommending anything that wouldn’t be good for me,” she emphasized. “It came from a very trusted source. That really mattered to me.”
Brubaker’s nod motivated his aunt to sign up for solar.
And, true to its promise, the only money she has spent — all voluntarily — was on ingredients for the chocolate caramel oatmeal cookies she baked for the SunDay Solar crew that arrived Sept. 12 to attach a 12-panel array atop her house. The 5-kilowatt system was scheduled to go online this month.
“Just the idea that this will help me move off fossil fuels is exciting,” Brown said about a system configured to cut her power bill by at least one-third.
“I know Dominion is a huge corporation and my little electric bill is nothing to them. But I’ll be saving and that’s big for someone on a fixed income.”
Brubaker, based in the nearby Shenandoah Valley city of Harrisonburg, is an outreach specialist on the Energy Solutions team at Community Housing Partners. His employer is the largest of roughly a dozen nonprofits statewide qualified to perform weatherization services.
Linking homeowners who live paycheck-to-paycheck to a suite of age- and income-qualifying programs is the bread and butter of that network. Those connections are all about enhancing affordability, adding value and ensuring residents are safe and healthy in their homes.
However, that holistic approach falls flat, Brubaker said, if he doesn’t devote time to building relationships with people who have every right to be wary of anything promoted as free.
“For my Aunt Rachel, that little 5-kilowatt system is a gamechanger,” he said. “But seniors are inundated with scams about solar so it’s nearly impossible to sift through what’s legitimate and what isn’t.
“It’s important that there be comfort and trust.”
While Brown credits Dominion’s “charitable” action, the investor-owned utility isn’t as altruistic as she might think.
The three-year program — which carries the cumbersome name, Income and Age Qualifying Solar — grew out of 2019 legislation (HB 2789) introduced by Del. Israel O’Quinn of Bristol.
O’Quinn, a Southwest Virginia Republican, called on both Dominion and Appalachian Power to craft pilot programs geared at offering energy efficiency and solar incentives to low-income and elderly customers. After it became law, utility regulators at the State Corporation Commission rolled out program rules in 2021.
Dominion and its contractors began installing the small-scale arrays last October. Thus far, they’ve served 116 households, and more are in the pipeline.
The no-hidden-fees program includes a 25-year warranty for panel maintenance and repairs.
While activating small arrays — they range from 3 kW to a maximum of 5 kW — might not be a juggernaut, Dominion’s maxim is that every kilowatt matters as the utility transitions to renewable power.
“While not the largest, they provide meaningful benefits to customers, especially in areas that may not otherwise be near a solar installation,” said Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton.
The initial legislation, which covered both utilities, called for a total investment of $25 million in the solar portion.
In Dominion territory, costs for the rooftop installations are shared among all customers via a demand-side management rider, Slayton said. Briefly, those initiatives modify consumer demand for energy by deploying financial incentives and behavioral changes.
One prerequisite is that each solar installation be paired with an energy efficiency makeover, via a related Dominion endeavor, so homes are as airtight as possible beforehand.
It never pays to outfit a leaky home with photovoltaic panels, Brubaker said, adding with a laugh that homeowners must partake of their energy efficiency “vegetables” before indulging in a solar dessert.
Brown checked that box in the spring when workers from the Local Energy Alliance Program — a sibling organization to Brubaker’s CHP — conducted an energy audit on her all-electric, early 1970s home in Verona.
“They added insulation and made sure my house was sealed up,” Brown said. “The energy efficiency part really matters.”
In addition to saving money, Brown figures the panels on her roof will serve as a lesson in environmental stewardship for her 13-year-old granddaughter, Emma Rose.
“All that I do and know and share influences her,” Brown said. “So, if this can increase the percentage of renewable energy for her future, I’m all for it.”
Emma Rose bonded with her grandmother because she spent so much of her childhood at the Staunton quilt shop Brown operated with her daughter, Emma Rose’s mother, for 23 years. They opted to close the store in March 2020.
“I’m now 76 and happy to have reached that age,” Brown said, reflecting a bit on how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped her life. “My philosophy was always to be more open, sharing and nonjudgmental. But it became more pronounced after the pandemic set in.”
While the Pennsylvania native stuck with her longtime passions of cooking, gardening and creating pottery, she also began noticing opportunities where she could grow differently.
Planet preservation became a priority — and she figured she could start by greening her energy supply.
She’s now hoping that leery friends and neighbors will be open-minded and trusting enough to follow her solar lead. They’re the doubters who repeatedly told her, “Just wait until the bill comes,” when she relayed her story about taking a chance with Dominion.
“But it never did,” Brown said. “Maybe it sounds too good to be true, but it is true. I haven’t paid a penny.”
Wisconsin has ambitious climate plans, but the Republican-controlled legislature has refused to pass funding to carry them out.
That’s why Wisconsin city and state leaders are especially glad for a nearly $5 billion federal initiative meant to help states and municipalities advance climate action plans.
The Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act, has already provided a $3 million planning grant to Wisconsin’s Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy, as well as smaller grants to the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission and four tribal governments within the state’s borders.
“This is a really awesome kickstart to emissions reductions in the state,” said Maria Redmond, director of the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy.
“The challenge in Wisconsin is we haven’t been able to get a lot of resources [for climate programs] because the legislature hasn’t allocated them. The last three budget cycles, the governor proposed significant funding for climate action, including for this office. None of that has been approved. Through this grant, we can get a lot more done.”
The program this year awarded $250 million in non-competitive grants to states, tribes and major metropolitan areas for climate action planning. The entities that received the planning grants can then apply for implementation grants totaling $4.3 billion to carry out their climate action plans.
The implementation grant application deadline is April 1, 2024. In a guidance document released in September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it anticipates awarding 30 to 115 such grants ranging between $2 million and $500 million.
Redmond said the state has “already been doing a lot of work on decarbonization,” including in keeping with Gov. Tony Evers’ 2020 action plan, and “this gives us the resources to really ramp up this work locally,” including by “identifying pathways to reduce emissions, renewable deployment, optimizing energy efficiency, innovating in transportation, and improving our building stock,” and also potentially looking at agriculture, forestry and carbon sequestration.
Wisconsin lawmakers have pushed legislation that limits municipalities’ ability to pursue climate goals, like a ban on local zero-emissions mandates and a bill that would prevent local governments from operating pay electric vehicle charging stations. They’ve also thus far declined to pass a bill enabling community solar, and rebuffed advocates’ requests for legal clarity on third-party-owned solar.
Justin Backal Balik is the state program director for Evergreen Action, which was among organizations offering the administration input on designing the federal program. He said the grants are “tailor-made for a state like Wisconsin at this particular moment in time, when you have the leadership of Gov. Evers that has articulated a clean energy plan to achieve 100% decarbonization in the electricity sector, and also looking at the industrial sector and clean transportation goals.”
“One of the reasons Evergreen advocated for the [Climate Pollution Reduction Grant] was that it is specifically designed to focus on sectoral transformations and unmet funding needs — Wisconsin has a lot,” Backal Balik continued. “The policy vision is there, and particularly with the capacity Wisconsin has with the $3 million planning grant, there are a number of directions they could go in. This is a generational opportunity that’s not going to come around again, an opportunity to meet a good chunk of the unmet funding needs that have popped up as a result of the Republican intransigence in the legislature.”
Redmond said the $3 million planning grant has allowed her office to hire a full-time community engagement facilitator and another full-time staffer, basically doubling the staff. The planning grant is also used for carrying out analysis, modeling, community outreach and status reports over a four-year period.
Environmental justice is a focus of the funding, and a key metric in the scoring system for implementation grants. Redmond said this dovetails with Wisconsin’s focus on equity and inclusion.
“Understanding lived experience is one of the things we’re most excited about” augmenting with the planning grant dollars, she said. “This gives us the ability to go out to communities instead of having them come to us. It’s also about supporting organizations working in communities, making sure we are not expecting them to volunteer their time.”
That could include honorariums for people to attend community meetings.
“We’re asking people to step away from their lives, maybe in the evening when they need child care, or to step away from their jobs,” she said.
Redmond said the state is also planning to work with Illinois and Minnesota to “make sure we are in alignment with state plans, and not working against each other” — especially since Wisconsin metropolitan areas overlap with those states.
Allison Carlson, executive director of the Wisconsin Local Government Climate Coalition, said staff capacity is a common need for local governments on the climate front, and she’s glad the planning grants can be used to hire staff.
“A lot of local governments have one person dedicated to climate action, probably being shared with other departments like recycling; they have a lot of other things on their plate,” she said. “We need to be making sure we’re building capacity in local governments and in communities to sustain efforts over time.”
Backal Balik noted the planning grants are meant to help governments make sense of all the incentives and opportunities on the table.
“EPA is really encouraging states and other jurisdictions to use the CPRG process to step back and look at their federal funding deployment strategy as a whole,” he said. “You have Solar for All here, and direct pay here, so many different pieces. The planning process is asking states to think about how all these funding streams can be accessed together. The parts are pretty consequential in their own right, but you have the opportunity to really scale up the impact of what all the federal investments can achieve.”
States or metro areas that received planning grants can serve as coordinating entities to collaborate with other government bodies to seek grants. Redmond said her office is eager to work with Wisconsin municipalities and agencies on meeting their climate goals, and will hold nine regional meetings for that purpose.
The Wisconsin Local Government Climate Coalition is also focused on helping municipalities participate in the CPRG program.
“Many member communities have their own climate action or clean energy plans in place. They’ve done data analysis, engaging with their communities to understand what the needs are — a lot of them are already making strides,” she said. “One of the big barriers is: where are the dollars to actually do these things? The competitive CPRG grants and other IRA funds are allowing communities to put their plans into action.”
She added that “a lot of the climate action plans were already in place or in process, not necessarily prompted by the CPRG process.”
“But what the CPRG process does is create opportunity to align the needs of local communities with the state and other stakeholders, so we can leverage even more IRA dollars and become more organized together.”
Kelly Hilyard is the sustainability coordinator for the city of Middleton, not far from Madison. She said the office has been stymied by legislative inaction around electric vehicles. They had applied for federal funding for electric vehicles under the Carbon Reduction Program, a program separate from CPRG under the U.S. Department of Transportation. But the county had to switch its proposal to seek funding for LED lights instead because of constraints placed on the program by the legislature.
Hilyard said the city “scrambled” to put together a proposal to transition their street lights to LEDs, which was necessary “low-hanging fruit,” but they still hope to seek federal funds for electric vehicles.
Since being part of a seven-city collaboration on an energy plan in 2020, Middleton has been “ticking things off” on a list of priorities like increased building efficiency and putting solar on city buildings. They are working on a battery storage project at the police station, where a planned microgrid had to be scaled back because of the pandemic.
Hilyard said the city has not been very focused on the CPRG thus far, but is looking for multiple sources of federal and other funding for its goals, and for the advance study and planning needed to bring goals to fruition.
“It’s chicken or the egg — what information do you need to get the grant to do the work, and how do you get the grant to get the information?” she said. “You have to work it from both ends constantly.”
A top priority is energy efficiency for the city’s affordable but often aging and inefficient housing units. A separate federal grant is helping the city take inventory of its housing stock.
“Once you stack all those incentives, decarbonizing entire neighborhoods becomes possible,” she said. “You can do major projects, and reduce the energy burden for people most affected by climate change and high energy bills.”
La Crosse environmental planner Lewis Kuhlman is hopeful that federal programs like the CPRG could help the city acquire more electric city buses or other electric vehicles, as well as creating an electric bike share program.
The city’s sustainability efforts have largely been through a partnership with the company Johnson Controls, which has provided the city with solar, energy efficiency and other energy investments, with a performance contract guaranteeing savings. The partnership helped the city access solar despite the state’s failure to clarify the legality of third-party-owned solar, which has made it more difficult for municipalities to finance solar energy.
“Huge grant opportunities like this are going to take collaboration, because communities the size of LaCrosse don’t really have the staff to implement or prepare for a grant like this,” Kuhlman said. “There are so many different types of projects that can get funding; we need to keep an eye on what we have in our plan — and how can that fit into what’s available for funding? And do state regulations allow it?”
The implementation grants are meant to help states and municipalities meet their climate goals; reduce hazardous air pollutants, especially in disadvantaged communities; complement other funding sources for greenhouse gas reductions; and create programs that are replicable and scalable. The agency is encouraging collaborative proposals that cross local and state lines. Points in the competitive grant scoring process are awarded based on criteria including the funding need, the extent of emissions reductions, benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities, and community outreach.
Redmond noted that doing extensive engagement, figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and meeting the application deadline all in six months will be a challenge.
“One of the things that keeps me awake at night is the timeline,” she said. “We need to have a thoughtful and meaningful process” in a tight time frame, “but we’ll make it happen.”
Milwaukee’s Climate and Equity Plan calls for making the city carbon-neutral by 2050, and creating green jobs that drive racial and economic equity. The city proposes to do this through projects including clean energy, a green jobs accelerator, and transportation electrification.
Erick Shambarger, Milwaukee director of environmental sustainability, said they hope CPRG funding will help the city implement its long-standing ambitious climate goals. He said other municipalities in the metropolitan area that received the grant have taken inspiration from Milwaukee in crafting climate action plans of their own.
“It took several years for us to get our climate plan together, and we don’t have that kind of time relative to getting everything in place for these implementation grants,” Shambarger said. “We don’t want to start from scratch. We want to share lessons we’ve learned; we don’t want to reinvent the wheel on planning processes.”
He said a key focus of the planning grant is a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which has never been done for the region as a whole. He said that the metro group still hasn’t decided where to focus their CPRG-related plans.
“It could be everything from a major transportation project to a focus on buildings,” he said. “It could go in a lot of different directions. We’ve been doing pilot projects, but this will really be important to take it to the next level.”
Marco Marquez is the Wisconsin state director for the organization Action for the Climate Emergency, which mobilizes youth. He said IRA programs could provide federal funding for multiple climate-related initiatives that young people are passionate about and that affect them directly — like electric school buses and energy efficiency and updated HVAC systems in aging school buildings. He said young people are especially frustrated by the inertia of the Wisconsin state legislature on such issues.
“It’s unfortunate that we see a lot of effort from elected officials trying to dictate how each municipality can run and what they’re able to seek in terms of funding,” he said.
The funding available under the IRA and the potential for entities to apply for it without going through the state legislature holds much promise, he added. While his organization has not been specifically focused on CPRG, he sees it as symbolic of larger trends and opportunities.
“This is an amazing opportunity for young people to rewrite and rethink how our society should operate,” Marquez said. “And climate is the justice issue.”
Four states — Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota — declined to participate in the CPRG program. Metropolitan areas in those states that received planning grants can still participate. In Iowa, the Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas received planning grants and can apply directly for CPRG implementation funds.
Backal Balik said advocates hope the CPRG dollars can not only help work around inaction from the legislature in Wisconsin and other states, but actually change a state’s direction on climate as people see the benefits of the funding play out.
“As in Wisconsin, the program is purposely designed to achieve emissions reductions in states where they wouldn’t otherwise occur,” he said. “It’s not just moving money around, but incentivizing the next round of leadership. We had administrations willing to act but with constraints outside of their control. This is a moment in time where they can get a huge chunk of resources to move forward their climate vision.”
As the growth of Xcel Energy’s demand response programs in Minnesota lags a state target, some stakeholders say it’s time to expand the use of third-party companies to enroll customers.
Demand response refers to a broad range of voluntary programs in which utility customers agree to reduce energy use during periods of peak demand. The best-known programs involve smart thermostats or other technology that remotely switch off customers’ air conditioners in short increments when the electric grid is under stress.
The programs are expected to play a bigger role as the country transitions to more variable, renewable generation such as wind and solar power. Having the ability to shift customers’ energy use into hours when those sources are providing lots of clean and inexpensive electricity could help lower costs, reduce fossil fuels use, and improve reliability.
In Minnesota, Xcel Energy operates one of the country’s largest demand response programs. A 2019 analysis by the Brattle Group ranked its portfolio eighth in the country as a percentage of peak demand. More than half of that capacity comes from its “interruptible tariff” program, in which commercial and industrial customers are offered bill savings in return for committing to curtail electricity use if called upon by the utility. The next largest source is its residential air conditioning Saver’s Switch program, which has enrolled more than 60% of homeowners with air conditioning.
As of 2017, the company had 850 megawatts of demand response capability in its Minnesota territory, about 10% of its system peak demand. That year, Xcel and state utility regulators agreed to a target of growing demand response enrollment by 50% over six years — an increase of 425 megawatts by 2023.
Earlier this year, Xcel reported slow progress toward that target, saying it had added just 117 megawatts in the previous half-decade. The company said the COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to recruit new participants and caused some of those in Xcel’s programs to go out of business.
The company also expressed confidence that program growth would be robust in 2023 and that it would achieve the target. The company continues to install smart meters, allowing more market demand response programs such as time-of-use rates that encourage customers to shift energy consumption. Other demand response programs involve customer-owned batteries, electric vehicles, building control systems and grid-connected appliances.
“We are very close to meeting the target this year, incentivizing growth through creative marketing, sign-on bonuses and a variety of new demand response offerings that give our customers choices to best fit their needs,” Xcel said.
Meanwhile, some clean energy and industry groups say Xcel’s apparent struggles to meet the demand response target shows there is a need for competition in the space.
In August, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission heard debate over whether to allow the use of demand response aggregators — third-party companies that sign up customers for programs and then sell the capacity into wholesale markets. Xcel and other utilities argued against permitting retail aggregators because of unease over how they would impact the grid.
The commission voted 3-2 to table the topic.
Commissioner Joseph Sullivan said utilities will need more resources than just solar, wind and battery storage to maintain a resilient grid as fossil fuel plants close. Demand response is a flexible resource that can be an alternative to a gas power plant, he said. Sullivan said he has been surprised by how little Xcel uses demand response. Xcel tested but did not use demand response once last summer, he said.
“I think there is a tremendous opportunity for Xcel to be doing more,” Sullivan said.
Xcel has told the commission that exercising demand response programs too often increases the risk of participants dropping out.
Frank Lacey, a founder and former chair of Advanced Energy Management Alliance, which represents demand response companies, said Xcel and other utilities don’t embrace demand response because building new generation is more profitable, offering a guaranteed rate of return. “Utilities have an inherent conflict in growing demand response,” Lacey said.
But the programs save consumers money, with programs sometimes paying six times their cost. They offer a way for utilities to balance loads when solar and wind production fluctuate and fossil fuel plants no longer exist to fill in the gaps. Lacey said he hopes Minnesota looks again at the aggregator issue.
“What’s the expression about shutting the barn door after the horse escapes?” he said. “If you wait until you need it, you won’t recognize you need it until you need it, and it’s too late at that point.”
A Cleveland, Ohio, green bank is leading a multi-state effort to secure a chunk of $7 billion in funding for low-income residential solar installations under the federal Inflation Reduction Act.
Growth Opportunity Partners, a community development corporation focused on underserved, low- and moderate-income communities in Ohio, is spearheading an application by about 20 counties in seven states that are collectively seeking $250 million to help low-income residents access solar power. It operates the GO Green Energy Fund, the nation’s first Black-led green bank program.
Growth Opps CEO Michael Jeans recently spoke with the Energy News Network about how GO Green Energy fits into the nonprofit organization’s broader mission to help underserved communities.
Through consulting and capital services, Growth Opps is “providing financial solutions in communities that have been underinvested in and disadvantaged,” Jeans said. As Growth Opps worked in those communities in Ohio’s urban and rural areas, however, he and colleagues saw that people’s health and well-being were a big concern.
Conversations with health executives, foundations and others led to the concept of the GO Green Energy Fund as a way to address some of the causes of health problems at a community level, as opposed to a case-by-case basis.
“We may, at a systems level, be able to create access for those who would like to see a better life for themselves, who would like to see cleaner communities,” Jeans said.
Growth Opps was incorporated in 2015, and the GO Green Energy Fund began in 2020 — two years before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Among other things, the law authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to implement its $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the EPA says is meant to mobilize “financing and private capital for greenhouse gas- and air pollution-reducing projects in communities across the country.”
“Thankfully for us, there’s natural alignment,” Jeans said.
“We are the Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition,” Jeans said. “It’s a county-by-county regional focus across multiple states and an opportunity for there to be equity in the process.”
Growth Opportunity Partners is the lead applicant. The coalition’s members include roughly 20 counties and their communities in Ohio and states from Missouri, Indiana and Michigan to parts of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia. Group members in Ohio are Cuyahoga, Summit, Franklin, Hamilton and Montgomery counties, which include the cities of Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton.
The coalition hopes to get $250 million under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund’s $7 billion Solar for All category, which aims to tackle barriers to disadvantaged communities’ participation in distributed solar generation.
“These dollars need to be catalytic. This is a seed investment for this work,” Jeans said, meaning the funding is meant to spur additional funding from other sources, including capital markets, businesses, philanthropy and other sources. Otherwise, “we will have undercapitalized the effort this is going to take.”
Jeans said the group hopes to hear back from the EPA sometime in the winter, with a possibility for funds to start flowing in July. With disruption in Congress, however, those goalposts could move.
“There are other things that come along with that,” Jeans said, including whether rooftops are ready for solar. Also, “under the rest of our legacy work at Growth Opps, are there other things we should be considering? Should we look at appliances for upgrades? Weatherization to further save money? There are incentives and rebates that are available at the household level.”
“If we can get [distributed solar power] to the homes that have high energy burdens — meaning too much of their check is going to pay for the cost of utilities, then we can have significant impacts here,” Jeans said.
The work can provide job benefits for people in disadvantaged communities, too. “We’re in a position to add skills, increase income and increase opportunity while cleaning up the environment for our families and our neighbors,” Jeans said.
“There’s a level of trust that has to be earned,” Jeans said. “When places have been underinvested in and people have been disinvested in, then it’s difficult to believe that the next knock on the door is one that’s welcome.”
Earning that trust calls for caring and listening to people about their needs and lived experiences, Jeans said. “We know these people. We know many of the occupants in these communities. We have a diverse team, and we’ve grown up in many of these communities.”
“The second barrier is: things have price tags. And when you are early in market it’s going to cost more,” Jeans said. For him, that’s why the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding opportunities matter — to bridge gaps and act as a catalyst to create markets.
“This is every bit a decisive decade for us,” Jeans said. “We need to reduce emissions and begin to make a turn by 2030.”
Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be slashed by 43% by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year. And global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak before 2025 to limit warming to either 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. The world is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, but limiting emissions can help avoid the worst consequences.
Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act will call for reports to the EPA or other agencies. And grants to nonprofits like Growth Opps generally require reports on how funds were used. For Jeans, though, success is about more than reports.
“Our impact is our measure,” he said. “How those whom we serve are better off is how we measure significant return on investment.”
Editor’s note: Growth Opportunity Partners receives support from the George Gund Foundation, which also provides funding to the Energy News Network. Foundations and other donors to the Energy News Network have no oversight or input into the editorial process and may not influence stories. More about our relationship with funders can be found in our code of ethics.
This story was originally published by Grist.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan isn’t known for sunny weather. Yet in recent years, it’s seen a strong push for solar energy — including in Traverse City, the largest community in northern Michigan. Along the M-72 highway, rows of huge solar panels gleam in the sun, covering about 30 acres of grassy field.
In the shade underneath the panels are sheep.
This is called “solar grazing,” where livestock are placed on solar installations to keep vegetation in check. Sheep have grazed at the site for the past three summers, eating grass and depositing droppings along the rows of panels.
Bart Hautala, operations manager for Heritage Sustainable Energy, said hosting some 30 sheep is a win-win: Sheep eat the grass, and that prevents foliage from shading the panels.
“It’s a multiuse land now,” he said. “It’s environmentally friendly. We’re helping out a farmer. He’s got more space to put more sheep.”
But across the state and the country, similar collaborations between farmers and companies have faced roadblocks.
Solar power is central to the nation’s transition to renewable energy, including in Michigan, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. Reaching that goal will require a lot of land, and some solar companies, researchers, and farmers are trying to use land for both agriculture and renewable energy — a practice called agrivoltaics. But local opposition has hampered those efforts, and solar advocates say Michigan is a prime example of how townships can slow renewable energy development.
This debate is playing out around the country, as people grapple with what a transition to clean energy actually means. A May 2023 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found that across 35 states, there are 228 local restrictions strong enough to stop projects. That opposition has grown steadily, up 35% from the year before. And local restraints severely restrict renewable development, according to a 2022 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Michigan exemplifies the tension between solar and local concerns. Since townships decide where renewable energy projects are located, residents have a lot of say and many have placed moratoriums on solar and wind. The Sabin Center found that as of last May, 26 local Michigan governments had delayed or blocked utility-scale developments, the most of any state in the study. It didn’t compare restrictions to the number of existing projects, but 118 wind and solar projects are already operating or under development, according to the state. As more are proposed, much of the focus is on the relationship between solar and farmland.
“Michigan has the most restrictive measures when it comes to siting solar on agricultural land,” said Matthew Eisenson, who authored the May report. “There’s a lot of apples to oranges, but I think Michigan just has the most activity on this issue of anywhere.”
Debates over renewable energy have roiled communities in the state. A group called Michigan Citizens for the Protection of Farmland petitioned to block utility-scale solar on agricultural land last spring, though they withdrew it. In some places, residents have recalled officials who approved projects they didn’t agree with.
Milan Township, in southeast Michigan, held a recall election last spring after residents voiced concerns about an ordinance that would have allowed large solar projects on agricultural land. Stephanie Kozar was elected township clerk during that recall. She’s spent her whole life in Milan, and said it was a rough time for the community.
“There have been rifts between friends, between relatives, between acquaintances, because it is such a hot topic, and there are so many strong opinions and emotions about it,” she said.
The township’s original ordinance allowing solar on agricultural land had passed during the height of the pandemic, which Kozar said raised issues of transparency. Since then, she said, more people have started attending meetings and gotten involved in local politics.
“We’re just trying to make the township a place where people want to come, want to live, and keep it in the agricultural spirit,” she said. “It’s about what the majority of our township wants. And that’s our biggest goal, is making sure that their voices are heard.”
Local opposition to renewable projects can often be nuanced, rooted in a wide array of reasons. Those include concerns about a project’s impact on the environment and economy, and extend to governmental failures to consult Indigenous tribes, according to a 2021 study by Science Direct. Some rural communities worry that losing farmland to solar could fundamentally change their culture.
“I think this is a hot-button in most townships, one way or the other,” said Bob Schafer, the supervisor of central Michigan’s Keene Township, who took on the job after his predecessor was narrowly voted out during another recall election held last spring.
Schafer stressed that people there have a variety of opinions on renewable energy — many people support it, and some oppose “mega projects” but not smaller installations.
“All the landowners have some say,” he said, “both those that are trying to obtain a project and those that may be surrounded by a project. We’re trying to find a balance.”
But that balance is hard to strike, and some Michigan lawmakers are trying to streamline the path to renewables. With a slim Democratic majority, Michigan’s legislature is tackling a heap of ambitious climate legislation this fall.
Abraham Aiyash, a Democrat from Hamtramck, is the house majority floor leader and one of the sponsors of a climate package. He and other lawmakers want the state to have the power to approve utility-scale projects, which he said is necessary to reach their climate goals.
“There is no other way,” he said. “If we are not setting a rapid pace for investing in solar and wind we will not meet the energy centers that we are going to be setting.”
Still, Michigan has a deep history of local decision-making, and for some, the idea of transferring power to the state is unacceptable. Judy Allen, the director of government relations for the Michigan Townships Association, said doing so would create a one-size-fits-all approach.
“It’s not a cookie-cutter situation, and that’s why we think it’s incredibly important that you have that local voice and that local process in terms of location and permitting,” she said — even when it means farmers can’t do what they want with their lands. Read Next
As utility-scale renewables expand, some Midwest farmers are pushing back
Michigan isn’t the only state debating who should approve renewable projects. Ohio’s legislature gave authority to counties to block them in 2021, and local opposition has stymied what’s projected to be some of the biggest renewable energy growth in the country — based on large projects planned on farmland and funded by Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
Despite those roadblocks, project development hasn’t stopped, and Ohio utilities are on track to meet their renewable requirements, said Matt Schilling, the director of public affairs for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and the Ohio Power Siting Board.
“We are continuing to see more development projects come into the power siting board,” he said. “I think time will tell, but the work is still going on.”
States like Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin have seen local challenges as well. But unlike Michigan, those states have the authority to approve large renewable projects — even if local opinions differ.
In Michigan, township control is a big problem for companies, governments, and individuals trying to develop renewable energy, said Scott Laeser, a senior advisor for the Rural Climate Partnership and a farmer in southwest Wisconsin.
“If the opposition were to continue to advance, I think there would be some legitimate concerns about whether we can meet the renewable energy goals that states like Michigan, and quite frankly, the nation have,” he said.
According to Laeser, who has been involved in renewable energy planning for years, outside interests have also gotten involved in local debates, often spreading misinformation. “Some of the opposition is being funded by fossil fuel energy interests who don’t want renewable energy to succeed,” Laeser said. “So there’s a lot of complex dynamics that are mixed up in all of this.”
One way to turn down the temperature may be through projects that use land for both agriculture and energy production.
Proponents see solar grazing and other farm collaborations as an answer to the debate around land use in Michigan. Some studies back that up; a Springer survey in Houghton, Michigan, and Lubbock, Texas, found that most respondents were more likely to support solar projects if they incorporated agriculture. In practice, however, that can be difficult.
Samantha Craig has worked as a shepherd for about six years, first with her husband, and now their children. The family is based in Van Buren County in southwest Michigan, where they manage Craig Farms Katahdins — and a flock of over 200 sheep.
The pandemic and inflation have made the past few years tough, Craig said, and solar could be a path toward a steady income and long-term viability for farmers, as solar operators pay them to lease land or graze down grass.
Craig is excited about the prospect of sheep as vegetation managers. The farm’s website has a section called “lambscaping,” and the family has partnered with United Agrivoltaics, which works to help solar providers and farmers set up solar grazing. Still, Craig hasn’t been able to get her sheep on any solar farms yet. The logistics can be challenging; sheep need water, routine care, and shelter — things many existing solar sites aren’t built to accommodate — and it can cost a lot.
Local ordinances, zoning, and bureaucracy can also mean a lot of red tape. Craig had hoped to get her sheep onto a nearby solar farm, but she hasn’t gotten far with the local government.
“It was just definitely disappointing not to have the sheep out there this summer,” she said. “We were really hoping that that would come to fruition.”
Increasing tensions around renewables complicate potential partnerships. Craig’s neighboring township voted against solar on agricultural land in August and is now being sued by the solar company. To the east, Milan Township, which held the spring recall election, only wants solar erected in industrial areas, which township clerk Stephanie Kozar said excludes collaborations between large-scale solar and farming.
“We feel solar panels, even with crops or animals of some sort, it’s still a very industrial-looking project,” she said. “And so we feel like the industrial zoned area is probably the most appropriate place for it.”
Despite many hurdles, some still think partnering solar and agriculture will play an important role in debates around land use. Charles Gould is an educator at Michigan State University Extension. He started working at the intersection of farming and renewable energy about a decade ago, when farmers began asking him for advice on solar company lease agreements.
Since then, he’s delved into the dynamics of local governance, farming, and solar power. Gould said many farmers have come to see solar lease agreements as a sort of retirement package, and some consequently bristle at local efforts to restrict solar development, seeing them as a threat to their chances at financial stability.
“It evolved to, ‘This is a takings issue,’” he said. Farmers were asking, “How does a township have the right to tell me how to use my land?”
Of course, farmers are far from united on the issue. Some don’t like the idea of using their land for renewables. Gould agrees that areas like brownfields and right-of-ways should be considered for solar projects before farmland. But he said the many benefits of solar–agriculture collaborations mean it’s imperative to work with local governments and those who have concerns about the impacts of solar on their communities, something echoed in a federal study on successful collaborations.
As Michigan pursues its renewable energy goals, companies will continue to approach communities with these plans, according to the extension service. To help local governments tackle solar planning and zoning, Gould and others created a guide that includes templates for solar-specific ordinances and steps on how to plan for various situations.
The goal of this work is to help communities, solar companies and farmers hash out plans before the panels go up.
“Really, if we want to be successful at this, we need to back up and think ahead of time before that solar project is on board,” Gould said. “Bring all the partners together, have them all sit down and figure out what that’s going to look like.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/agriculture/in-michigan-not-so-sunny-prospects-for-solar-farms/.
Massachusetts officials are proposing policy solutions to address a bureaucratic backlog that municipal leaders and clean energy advocates say is bogging down one of the state’s most successful drivers of clean electricity purchases.
Nineteen communities across the state are waiting for public utility regulators to rule on proposed community choice aggregation plans, in which local governments negotiate with power suppliers for lower prices or a higher share of renewables.
Some of these municipalities have been waiting for more than two years to launch their programs. Another 16 are waiting to see if the state will let them modify existing programs. As the proposals languish, municipalities are missing out on chances to save residents money and cut carbon emissions.
In response to this backlog, the state energy department has proposed a new system to streamline the process, though many advocates are highly skeptical of these guidelines.
“I’m not sure that the way they’ve drafted them is really going to address the backlog,” said Martha Grover, sustainability manager for the city of Melrose, which first adopted community choice aggregation in 2015 and has held off updating the program in recent years because of the delays.
In addition, state Rep. Tommy Vitolo has introduced a bill that would require faster response times and allow municipalities to make some changes to programs without seeking state approval.
Massachusetts was the first state to introduce these programs, as a part of electricity restructuring legislation passed in 1997. The policy allows individual cities and towns or groups of municipalities to use the promise of a built-in customer base to negotiate with power suppliers for prices. Generally, residents are automatically enrolled but can opt out at any time.
The Cape Light Compact, a group of 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, formed the state’s first aggregation program in 2000. The idea was slow to catch on, however, until electricity prices started rising in 2013 and 2014, prompting more municipalities to seek alternatives. Today, there are 168 municipal aggregation plans active in the state, saving consumers more than $200 million annually, according to a report from the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
Though not explicitly an emissions reduction program, aggregation also allows municipalities to include more renewable energy in their portfolios than legally required. And many of them do exactly that: 76 of Massachusetts’ aggregation programs included extra renewable content in 2022, according to the consumers alliance. Another 40 communities let individual residents opt-in to higher levels of renewable energy. In 2022, Massachusetts’ green energy aggregation programs increased demand for renewable energy in the state by more than 1 million megawatt-hours, the Green Energy Consumers Alliance calculated.
“There is no other program in the commonwealth that produces cleaner electrons without subsidy,” said alliance executive director Larry Chretien.
The delays were first caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a statement from the state energy department. Additionally, the complexity of the rules and requirements for a successful application have also slowed things down, state officials and municipal leaders agree. Each time regulators rule on a plan, any new precedent set by that ruling must be complied with by all future applicants. This requirement makes it hard for municipalities to understand the rules and forces frequent revisions. It also makes it more painstaking for the state to ensure a proposal meets the ever-changing slate of requirements.
“There are now 168 approved plans and we are held accountable to rules and ways of operating that are buried in the footnotes,” Grover said.
The state has responded to the backlog by releasing draft guidelines that summarize and simplify the detailed requirements. It has also issued an application template and proposed an expedited approval process for municipalities that use the template.
“Addressing these delays is a top priority for the [Department of Public Utilities], and we look forward to announcing finalized guidelines that will help facilitate a timely review of applications,” said department chair Jamie Van Nostrand.
For many municipalities, however, the guidelines make no changes to the process, but only formalize the existing approach, which many say amounts to micromanagement. At least eight cities and towns have filed testimony so far arguing that the proposal erodes local control and would be unlikely to speed up approvals. The draft guidelines would make the process “more burdensome and less efficient,” testified Michael Ossing, city council president in Marlborough, which adopted community choice aggregation in 2006, saving residents an estimated $26 million over the past 17 years.
“Aggregation should be under municipal control,” said Anthony Rinaldi, an Amesbury city councilor. “We should control how we implement the program, how we inform our citizens. But they want to control every little thing.”
Vitolo’s bill offers an alternative approach. It would address the delays by requiring the state to issue a decision on aggregation applications within 90 days. If this deadline is not met, a program would automatically be approved. If regulators rejected a program, and applicants resubmitted an amended plan within 30 days, the state would then have 30 days to issue a decision.
The bill would also allow cities and towns to make certain changes — including periodic changes to prices and product offerings, means of providing notifications to customers, and sharing translated materials — to their programs without returning to utility regulators for approval. Vitolo points to Boston, which launched a community choice program in 2021, as an example: the city wants to distribute translations of its information materials, but can’t do so without getting in the slow-moving line for approval.
“It’s been frustrating,” Vitolo said. “We want to allow these aggregators to make simple straightforward changes without going to the [state].”
Vitolo’s bill had a committee hearing in late September. Now supporters must wait to see if it gains traction in the legislature.
The rig operator was stumped. He’d been making good progress, but now something blocked the way forward. The operator, Denny Mong, stared at an unassuming metal tube in the ground — the fossil of an oil well. Spread around it was an array of industrial detritus and steel tools like giant surgical implements, which sunk into the spongy Western Pennsylvania meadow.
Above the hole, Mong’s rig, which towered 50 feet into the air, suspended a vertical ramrod. When it dropped, the ramrod only shot 17 feet into the ground before slamming to a stop. Earlier, Mong had managed to reach more than 500 feet deeper into the well. Then this obstruction, whatever it was, sent him back to the start.
Clearing it — prime suspects included metal casing, rocks, or a tree branch — would allow him to send cement and pea gravel into the hole, which reached hundreds of feet into Appalachian rock formations. Once an active oil well, now it was an environmental nuisance and the target of an ambitious federal cleanup program.
The well needed to be decommissioned, along with at least 21 more spread across woodlands and fields in McKean County, Pennsylvania. The job fell to Mong and other employees of an oil service outfit called Plants & Goodwin, which specializes in plugging so-called orphan wells. Oil and gas companies are supposed to plug and clean up wells that they’ve drilled, but if they go bankrupt or otherwise disappear, that responsibility falls to the state, which then contracts with companies like Plants & Goodwin. If left festering, these wells can leak contaminants into surrounding groundwater or release methane, a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Uncorking a well in this part of Appalachia reveals a blend of oil and gas that has a nauseous maté color and gurgles like witch’s brew. After generations of drilling, the remnants of both vernacular backyard digs and professional oil operations pockmark the land. Since drillers operated for more than a century with little regulatory oversight, documentation of well locations is scarce and cleanup quality is inconsistent.
“Until the 1970s there were no strong plugging standards in place,” said Luke Plants, who heads Plants & Goodwin. “People just shoving tree stumps down a well to plug it, or a cast iron ball or something like that.”
The exact number of orphan wells nationwide is unknown. In late 2021, The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission, a multi-state organization, had more than 130,000 orphan wells on record but estimated that anywhere between 310,000 and 800,000 remained unidentified. That year the federal government took notice, folding $4.7 billion into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states handle their orphan well inventories. The first batch of that money has trickled down to states and has been distributed to contractors like Plants & Goodwin. It’s easily the most funding ever spent to address the problem, but both states and pluggers are now facing hurdles as they begin to identify and plug wells.
The state oil and gas regulators responsible for issuing well-plugging contracts are typically understaffed. As a result, the pace of contract assignment in some states has been inconsistent, making it difficult for plugging companies to staff up and plan ahead. Well pluggers are also few and far between. Since oil operators tend to avoid the costly work of well capping, the service has remained a niche industry. Plugging companies have also struggled to find trained workers, not to mention the specialized equipment required to plug wells. Along the way, some states have handed out millions of dollars in contracts to a subsidiary of an oil company with hundreds of compliance violations.
All the while, the oil and gas industry continues to spawn new orphan wells — magnitudes more than the number being plugged. Between 2015 and 2022, more than 600 oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy, leaving thousands of wells unplugged. Market downturns affecting oil prices during the mid-2010s pushed many operations to insolvency. And even in times of industry booms, wells near the end of their production lifespans often end up in the hands of small oil patch operators with tight margins. Further, state laws requiring companies to post collateral for their wells in case of bankruptcy are meager. This combination of weak rules and bankruptcies has caused orphan well inventories to balloon. For example, Pennsylvania’s list of 20,000 orphan wells grows by about 400 each year; the state has plugged just 73 wells with the federal money that began to arrive last year.
In the muddy pasture in northwest Pennsylvania, Mong was trying to unclog his way to the well’s bottom. Using a rig attachment called a cherry picker — imagine a four-foot steel clothespin — he worked to spear unknown detritus from the depths. Next to the hole lay 30-foot-long clay-frosted tubes of steel casing already hauled out. After reducing the borehole to a hollow dirt cavern, the pluggers will pour cement until it nearly fills to the surface and top the rest of the way with gravel, insulated by steel casing to protect groundwater. They will then decapitate the casing to a few feet below ground and cover it with dirt.
For the pluggers, the work is a bespoke combination: a little science and a lot of art. Sharp intuition, engineering know-how, grit, and luck imbue each effort. One capping can take anywhere from three days to three months, sometimes costing more than $100,000.
A lot needs to happen to orphan wells before they’re plugged — at least on paper. The state has to identify them, the threat they pose, the costs to plug them, and search for any elusive owner to pin the costs on. And while that’s a process states have handled for many years, most state plugging programs have relatively small budgets and staff compared to the well inventories. Now, federal funding is compelling those programs to exponentially increase the number of well-capping contracts, an impossible task without bigger staffs and nimbler processes.
In a normal year, the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), which regulates oil and gas production in the state, might contract plugging for 30 wells. According to former CalGEM employees, decommissioning even that number of wells had the agency running on all cylinders.
“Available staffing for oversight was definitely a major limiting factor,” said Dan Dudak, who was the Southern District Deputy of CalGEM from 2011 to 2020, and now acts as a consultant on well-plugging projects. In just the last five years, the department “lost a lot of their institutional knowledge” in three different leadership changes, he said. Nonetheless, CalGEM revealed an $80 million project last July to cap 378 wells with funding from state and federal money along with industry fees.
Other states also have catching up to do. One 2022 Ohio state audit observed that its Department of Natural Resources struggles to meet orphan well program spending targets, in part due to staffing shortages. “[T]he Division can only increase efforts dedicated to well plugging preparation work as fast as it can recruit, train, and hire permanent employees,” the audit claimed, recommending that the agency double its staff to post plugging contracts in a more timely fashion and consider outsourcing the task of drafting contracts.
Pennsylvania has 70 well inspectors and a tally of around 20,000 orphan wells. According to Neil Shader, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, the agency is considering hiring more inspectors to increase its oversight. Earlier this year, the state legislature approved a $5.75 million budget increase for DEP, some of which may boost its well plugging contract capacity.
Still, the pace of contract creation in Pennsylvania has put pluggers in a precarious place. Plants said that when Pennsylvania received $25 million in its first batch of federal funding, he staffed up. A torrent of contracts were awarded but then stopped — leading from feast to famine. A six-month gap meant furloughs and mothballing equipment. “It costs contractors a tremendous amount of money to do all that,” he said. “You end up creating an incentive to not scale at all, just stay small.”
To expedite aspects of the contract-drafting process, DEP has signaled that it may outsource some of that work. Meanwhile, Ohio is putting some of its federal money into an expedited process called the Landowner Passover Program, where approved landowners who find orphan wells on their land may act as a surrogate for the state, awarding a contract to a plugger that Ohio will pay for.
Ohio has 44 contractors on its rolls and utilizes a pre-approval process for its pluggers to maintain quality control. Pennsylvania’s DEP is considering adopting its own vetting process, according to Shader, the agency spokesperson. Without it, there is no central parapet to separate under-qualified contractors from federally funded plugging. “There are not enough defined rules in place,” said Plants. “And even the rules that are there don’t get followed so well all the time.”
Not much stands in the way of a corner-cutting contractor. In remote pockets of Appalachia, improperly dumping chemical fluids from a site or shoddy plug job could go unnoticed. “I think it’s even less likely to get checked now,” Plants said. “Because nobody wants to limit the pool of potential well pluggers. We need to get more pluggers involved — whether that plugging is being done correctly or not.”
Last year, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management addressed that anxiety by announcing that parties with significant outstanding violations, such as contractors with a poor service record or operators with environmental infractions, wouldn’t receive state contracts. “I feel pretty confident that we would not be issuing contracts to operators that had significant outstanding violations — either on the contracting side of things or on the environmental protection side,” he said.
For a plugger, non-compliance could mean illegal dumping or improperly sealing a well; for an operator, it might mean abandoning a well without plugging it. But such policies can be difficult to implement when oil and gas companies sometimes operate through a bevy of subsidiaries in multiple states.
In December of last year, the Pennsylvania DEP awarded Next LVL Energy contracts to plug 30 wells in the state. The company is a subsidiary of Diversified Energy, an energy giant that has amassed a massive number of wells at the end of their lives, stoking fears that the company is likely to orphan them. According to one class action lawsuit against Diversified in West Virginia, around 10 percent of its 23,309 wells in the state are technically abandoned but unplugged. Just this year Pennsylvania inspectors slapped the operator with around 300 new or unresolved operational violations. (The state DEP didn’t respond to a request for comment on Next LVL’s contracts.)
Ohio has also given half of its first installment of federal money, $12.5 million, to Next LVL Energy to oversee the plugging of as many as 320 wells. To the southeast, West Virginia has given the company a similar sum to plug 100 wells. Spokespeople for both state environmental agencies defended their decisions, noting that they followed state and federal guidelines while selecting pluggers. “We will keep a close eye on implementation,” said Andy Chow, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Should any violations in this contract be discovered or otherwise come to our attention we will review those actions.”
In West Virginia, Next LVL isn’t plugging any wells associated with Diversified, according to Terry Fletcher, chief communications officer with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “At the time the contracts were awarded, Next LVL had no outstanding environmental violations in the state,” he added.
Finding qualified workers for the oil field is no easy feat, either. The last decade has seen drops in oil prices that rendered many fossil fuel companies insolvent, along with a shift to shale exploration, which requires fewer workers. As a result, job openings have dwindled and many qualified workers have left Appalachia.
Plugging wells also requires skilled labor. Thus, the limited number of qualified workers is in high demand. That’s good for wages, but without a large workforce to fill positions as states push out contracts with increasing frequency, another problem arises: “You just get this arms race for the same small pool of workers,” said Plants. “That’s not actually helpful for scaling or expanding the supply side of this business.”
Plants has brought in experienced pluggers from Texas oil fields to help train up a new generation of skilled Pennsylvania hands. “We want to develop a local workforce that understands this work,” he said. But “you can’t just put whole crews of inexperienced people out there.”
There’s a lot of on-the-job training, but that extra work advances his vision. Some of his most recent hires came from area high schools and technical schools, where he has made a pitch: “We want to give you a long-term career.”
Bronson Knapp, who owns Hagen Well Services in Ohio, has faced similar challenges. “The good old farm boy is hard to find,” he said. A worker shortage is one of the reasons Ohio is behind on well pluggings. The state has awarded new contracts even as work from previous contracts hasn’t been completed. “We awarded 380 wells this year, but our contractors are still 400 wells behind us,” said Jason Simmerman, the orphan well program engineer with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
Rigs used to plug wells can be hard to come by, too. Drilling technology may advance, but orphan well-plugging is frozen in time. The tech required is often vintage, which means pluggers are on the prowl for a shrinking number of rigs that may be older than the wells they plug. It’s not unusual for a plugger in New York to look as far as Texas for a used rig. Mong’s rig was from the 1950s. Another rig at a nearby work site was manufactured in 1981 and welded to the bed of a Vietnam War-era military truck.
On the whole, a few recent high school graduates on Plants’ payroll might not seem like bellwethers of a next-generation workforce. But some experts watching the federal orphan well program contend that a well-plugging wave could revive regions whose economic fates are tied to dwindling resource extraction sectors. “The most positive thing that could happen is that we begin to get more companies plugging wells, especially in rural, distressed areas to help their local economies,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank focused on economic and environmental sustainability in Appalachia.
“Oil and gas industries have lost thousands of jobs over the last decade,” he told Grist. “This is helping people who lose their jobs” and providing “a way for people to transition into cleaning up this mess of the last 150 years.”
The federal program includes requirements and guidance to help ensure that the work on the ground benefits workers. In order to qualify for funding, states must ensure that plugging contracts meet standards outlined by the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that guarantees government-funded labor matches average pay rates for similar work in a region, known as the prevailing wage.
Failure to follow the federal government’s requirement risks its scrutiny. For example, last year the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature passed a law dictating how much a contractor might receive to plug a well as part of Pennsylvania’s orphan well program. The amounts allocated were a fraction of typical costs, likely leaving contractors unable to pay their workers the prevailing wage. With federal money tied up in the program, the Department of Interior filed a brisk response warning that the law could threaten Pennsylvania’s ability to comply with program standards and that the state could be cut off from federal funding.
In Ohio, Davis-Bacon requirements appear to have an effect on well-capping work not funded by the federal program. Though the Buckeye State doesn’t have any wage requirement for general well-plugging work, cappers who have taken contracts appear to be paying higher wages — whether or not the job is federally funded. “Because nobody wants to make one wage one day and another the next day, our contractors that are working on our federal program are taking that perspective and paying those wages across the board now,” said Simmerman, Ohio’s orphan well program engineer.
Out west, California is working to nurture a workforce at a much larger scale. Last year, the state legislature passed a law directing the California Workforce Development Board, or CWDB, to launch apprenticeship programs to train new classes of well pluggers. It could become a model for skilled labor creation. Its first pilot program is using the expertise of a Kern County well-capping company, California Legacy Well Services, which is creating a plugging curriculum to fold into existing training provided by Local 12, the International Union of Operating Engineers. As a result, union-affiliated labor will represent part of the well-plugging workforce.
The thinking is two-pronged: access to quality jobs and layoff mitigation. That means offering good work to skilled laborers vulnerable to the energy transition. “So rather than just worry about the loss of jobs, it’s an opportunity to think about the new jobs for trades workers,” said Tim Rainey, executive director of CWDB. The program is in the early stages, but it offers a glimmer of what an effective orphan well program could yield.
Organized labor in California’s oil fields is of two types: industrial unions and trades unions. Members of industrial unions cultivate skills on a worksite, while trades unions learn the ropes through training apprenticeships like the ones CWDB is developing.
A quirk in California law may lock out the industrial unions. The law requires “a skilled and trained workforce” for capping jobs, an innocuous-sounding phrase that refers to highly technical requirements in the state labor code that disqualify oil workers from industrial unions such as the United Steelworkers, or USW.
Norman Rogers, a spokesperson and member of USW Local 675 in Southern California, called the legislative sleight of hand “a control job.” Trades unions “have a larger workforce and are able to influence the political landscape,” he said. “They can have all sorts of people go to lobby.”
By expanding the language to characterize eligible workers as “skilled and trained or covered by a labor management agreement,” the law could tap into tens of thousands of union workers represented by USW, Rogers said.
The question of who dominates the green jobs of tomorrow remains an open one. Despite the many bottlenecks, the orphan well program could be an attractive coda to the fossil fuel era if it benefits workers.
“We drilled the first oil well in America,” said James Kunz, an administrator at the Pennsylvania Foundation for Fair Contracting, who has worked to ensure favorable wages in state capping contracts. “We have the scars of that and a real opportunity.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/abandoned-oil-well-job-solution-pennsylvania/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
👋 Hello and welcome to Energy News Weekly!
The Biden administration is about to get more young Americans working for the planet.
Last week, the White House announced it’s launching an American Climate Corps. The workforce training and service program aims to get young people ready for climate and clean energy fields. It will put an initial cohort of 20,000 to work installing clean energy technologies, restoring coastal wetlands to prevent flooding, and taking on other jobs in climate-vulnerable communities.
It’s all reminiscent of the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired young people to fight forest fires, build wildlife refuges, and take on other environmental jobs during the Great Depression.
Flash forward to the 21st century, and a Climate Corps has been a priority for Democratic lawmakers. The Biden administration initially proposed the work program as part of its Build Back Better infrastructure plan, but it was left out of the Inflation Reduction Act. But by combining programs and funding authorized in the climate law and other legislation, the White House has created something pretty close to the program it’s been working toward for years, Inside Climate News reports.
There are a lot of details we don’t yet know about the American Climate Corps, including how interested workers can apply and how much they’d be paid. But for now, there’s a White House website where you can share if you’re interested in joining or otherwise helping the burgeoning corps out.
This article originally appeared in Canary Media.
Local Law 97, New York City’s groundbreaking, multistage effort to rein in carbon emissions from its big buildings, is facing its first major test — and it’s just a preview of the much steeper challenges to come.
Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams released proposed guidelines for how owners of the worst-performing buildings can comply with the law’s mandate to curb emissions by 2024. Next year, the city will begin imposing fines on buildings that haven’t reduced their emissions below certain thresholds, with even steeper cuts and rising fines to come in 2030 and 2040.
The response to the new compliance guidelines was swift. Real estate owners opposed to the law reiterated long-standing complaints that the mandates will force them to choose between paying steep fines or making efficiency investments that don’t make economic sense today.
Environmental activists countered with evidence that near-term compliance is not nearly as costly as opponents say it will be. They also worry that two parts of the proposed regulations, which would allow laggard buildings to postpone compliance for two years and use clean-energy purchases to offset continued building emissions after that date, amount to a surrender by the Adams administration to real estate interests at the expense of fighting climate change.
“Mayor Adams is proposing a gigantic giveaway to his real estate buddies that’s going to increase pollution and crush jobs,” said Pete Sikora, climate and inequality campaigns director of New York Communities for Change and a former member of the Local Law 97 advisory board.
That’s why Sikora’s group and a host of environmental and community activists are protesting what they describe as loopholes in the new proposed guidance. The conflict over these proposals underscores a key tension around the broad goal of decarbonizing buildings: how to balance the carrots with the sticks. If the cost of meeting the law’s emissions-reduction mandates is too high, building owners may simply choose to pay the fines instead, an outcome that does little to help the climate.
But building-efficiency experts agree that meeting the law’s 2024 targets should be relatively simple for the vast majority of commercial and multifamily residential buildings in New York City. As evidence, they point to the fact that 89 percent of buildings covered by the law are already in compliance with its requirements, including many older buildings that are harder to retrofit to become more energy-efficient. They also note that alternative compliance options have been established for more challenging buildings such as low-income housing.
“I do not believe there is a serious building professional in this city who would say that a building making a good-faith effort, absent very unusual circumstances, would not be able to get under the 2024 limit,” said Sikora. “In some buildings, they could do it almost immediately if they wanted by making some very basic changes — putting in LEDs [and] aerated shower heads, insulating exposed heating pipes, tuning the boiler correctly” and other such remedial actions.
What will be harder, he said, is meeting Local Law 97’s longer-term goals. Roughly 70 percent of the city’s buildings do not yet comply with the law’s tougher targets of cutting carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2019 levels by 2030.
Hitting that end-of-decade figure in particular will require far more extensive efforts to switch from the oil- and fossil-gas-fueled systems that heat the majority of buildings today to electric heat-pump systems or low-emissions steam heat systems. It will also require deeper building-efficiency retrofits to ease stress on the power grid.
Difficult as it may be to pull off, it’s crucial to meet these targets. Buildings contribute 70 percent of the carbon emissions in New York City, which means “we will not achieve our climate goals without addressing buildings,” said John Mandyck, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Green Council, which has played a key role in creating the law and monitoring its implementation. While building owners have been waiting for key guidelines on how the law will be enforced, with last week’s proposed guidance, “the compliance pathway is now evidently clear,” he said.
But the ongoing political fight over the law’s short-term targets could derail these longer-term efforts, Sikora said. New York City officials estimate the costs of hitting the law’s 2030 targets to range from $12 billion to $15 billion. If building owners don’t start making investments now, they run the risk of missing the law’s targets, which are designed to reduce the city’s carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, he said.
“The law’s limits are achievable and affordable,” he added — a view backed by the Urban Green Council and other groups. The 2024 targets were meant to “get the most polluting buildings here to cut their pollution as a warmup to the 2030 requirements, which are quite a bit tougher.”
Environmental groups have two key complaints about the regulation proposed by the Adams administration last week.
The first is the proposal to allow the roughly 11 percent of buildings not yet hitting their targets to escape fines through 2026 if they make a “good-faith effort” to get on track. Some environmental groups argue that building owners have already had four years to prepare for 2024 targets and shouldn’t be rewarded for inaction.
“Responsible landlords are already doing that, not just to cut pollution but to save money on bills, too, and raise the property value,” Sikora said. “The mere fact that some landlords are incompetent doesn’t mean they should be let off the hook.”
But in Mandyck’s view, the good-faith exemption is a reasonable approach to forcing buildings that are behind schedule to meet the law’s mandates. Since Local Law 97 was passed in 2019, “we had Covid; we had supply-chain delays,” he noted. “It took the appropriate amount of time for regulations to unfold. And we’re now months away from compliance. So we have two options: We fine all those buildings and forfeit the carbon savings, or we find a pathway for compliance.”
The law’s fines — $268 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions that exceed an individual building’s cap — equate to “the highest price of carbon in the world,” he noted. “Do we tie up the administrative courts and start issuing fines? Then people are paying fines and not doing investments in the buildings. We need carbon savings — we don’t need fine revenue.”
Tristan Schwartzman, energy services director and principal at New York City–based building engineering consultancy firm Goldman Copeland Associates, agreed that a two-year extension could help a number of his clients that “do have a path that’s going to be arduous but feasible” to meet their compliance deadlines.
To qualify for the good-faith exemption, “you have to have a plan in place; you have to show that you’ve done something that’s been impactful,” he said. “There are a lot of hurdles you’re supposed to jump — but those are hurdles you’re supposed to be jumping anyway.”
But as Sikora and other environmental groups point out, it’s virtually impossible to discern whether owners of noncompliant buildings are indeed acting in good faith. These critics fear that the exemption will instead offer a two-year reprieve from fines for a subset of property owners who have been working to undermine the law.
Those efforts include a lawsuit filed last year by groups representing residential cooperative buildings in the borough of Queens demanding that the law be overturned. They also include millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying by the Real Estate Board of New York, a politically powerful group led by Douglas Durst, the owner of high-profile properties including some that are out of compliance with the law, such as the Bank of America Tower at 1 Bryant Park in Manhattan.
The group issued an analysis in January claiming that the fines from Local Law 97 could add up to $213 million for 3,780 buildings in 2024 and $902 million for 13,544 buildings in 2030, citing these findings as proof of “significant economic disruption that will occur if property owners are not provided adequate tools to reduce emissions.”
But Sikora noted that these figures misrepresent the financial impact on individual buildings and their tenants.
He cited the example of Bob Friedrich, the board president of Glen Oaks Village, a 2,900-unit co-op in Queens, who has been an outspoken opponent of Local Law 97 and a plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the law. Friedrich has claimed that Glen Oaks would have to invest about $24.5 million to upgrade its gas and oil boilers to seek to comply with the law, and may still face an estimated $400,000 per year in fines from 2024 to 2030.
But divided among 2,900 units, that fine adds up to about $130 per unit per year through 2030, or “the equivalent of a parking ticket,” Sikora said. Similar economics apply to many other properties, making the law’s fines far from the death blow that many property owners have claimed they will be, he said.
Offering noncompliant buildings a route to avoid penalties for failing to achieve the relatively lax 2024 standards also risks setting a bad precedent for the much tougher 2030 targets, he added. That makes the good-faith exception a potential “signal to landlords and others that, well, maybe they’ll be delayed too.”
It’s certainly true that the carbon-intensity of New York City’s electricity supply will influence the emissions impact of building electrification, Sikora said. But that doesn’t mean building owners should be able to use clean-energy accounting to avoid investing in fundamental efficiency improvements.
And that brings us to the second key criticism environmental groups have made against the Adams administration’s proposed regulations. This critique centers around the role of renewable energy credits (RECs) — contracts between building owners and clean-energy producers — in the Local Law 97 scoring regime.
Today, building owners can use RECs to procure clean electricity that can be delivered to the larger New York City grid to offset their building’s emissions from electricity usage. But environmental groups have been demanding that the Adams administration set a more stringent standard, one proposed by the Local Law 97 advisory board and supported by energy experts, to limit the use of RECs to offset no more than 30 percent of a building’s total emissions.
The problem with RECs, Sikora said, is that Local Law 97 doesn’t require that they be “additional,” or tied to paying for a renewable energy project that wouldn’t have been built without the money from their purchase. Instead, building owners can purchase RECs from already existing clean-energy projects and use them to comply with the law.
That’s a problem, because in New York state, as with many other parts of the country, these RECs are becoming so plentiful that they offer building owners a much cheaper path to compliance than investing in energy-efficiency upgrades to their properties.
Today, New York City gets most of its electricity from fossil-fueled power plants. But with new transmission lines capable of carrying massive amounts of zero-carbon energy into New York City now being built and expected to be complete by 2026, building owners will soon have access to plenty of RECs from clean-energy projects that have already been built.
The Real Estate Board of New York has pushed for expanding the opportunities to use RECs to offset not just building emissions associated with electricity consumption but all building emissions. The new proposed compliance guidelines did not take up that proposal — but it also declined to institute the 30 percent cap that environmental advocates are pushing for.
It’s important to note that buildings that take the good-faith alternative pathway will be barred from using RECs to meet their requirements. But Sikora said the real danger of the current REC policy is that it could be extended to 2030 and later, threatening the law’s more ambitious longer-term goals. The Urban Green Council has estimated that 40 percent of multifamily properties and 80 percent of office buildings could offset their emissions over their 2030 limits through the use of RECs alone.
That’s a problem because “in reality, it’s not possible for the city and the state to reduce pollution unless they reduce pollution at the source — at the buildings,” Sikora said. “And that means they have to get a lot more energy-efficient.”
Green groups including Sikora’s are calling for the Adams administration to put a REC cap into place and reconsider the good-faith exemption over the coming month of public comments and hearings on the proposed rules.
Sikora didn’t downplay the challenge of paying for the deep efficiency and electrification efforts that New York City buildings will need to undertake to meet Local Law 97’s longer-term mandates. But he sees a much larger role for public funding to close that gap — and while city and state agencies are providing money through a variety of programs, it isn’t yet enough, he said.
“We think the city and state should apply billions of dollars per year to decarbonize the building stock,” he said. That big one-time transition away from gas or oil to heat pumps is a big cost.” On the other hand, “we do not think the city needs to subsidize affluent [building] owners.”
That work must start with increased funding for the variety of affordable-housing units that are currently allowed to comply with the law via so-called “prescriptive pathways,” he said. The Urban Green Council estimates that rent-controlled apartments, public housing and other affordable-housing units make up one-third of all buildings covered by Local Law 97.
Mandyck noted that the new proposed guidance provides more clarity on how those buildings can comply via “commonsense” measures, such as insulation on water heaters and steam pipes and thermostats or temperature controls on radiators.
But Schwartzmann contended that many of these buildings “are really poorly maintained because they don’t have money to maintain them properly,” due to the challenging economics of financing improvements in rent-controlled buildings or tight budgets for public housing. “The city should be throwing money at that problem, not pushing it downstream.”
Last week’s proposed regulations also included a booster for buildings exploring the switch from fossil-fueled to electric heating, primarily via heat pumps — a new credit that increases the value of electrifying at least part of their heating demands.
The new credit system “not only gives you a zero-emissions equivalent for the electricity it uses, it gives you a negative” carbon score, said Jared Rodriguez, a principal with Emergent Urban Concepts and adviser to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. “It’s a very clear signal that they want you doing at least partial load electrification — and that you’ll get some credit for it.”
That’s an important boost for a technology that still costs more than fossil-fueled boilers and furnaces, both in terms of upfront equipment and installation costs and in ongoing utility costs, Schwartzman said. “There was a real hesitancy to move toward these electrified options because they’re not going to save you money at this point, because electricity costs more than gas,” he said.
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act will help make efficiency and electrification more affordable via tax credits and incentives for equipment, installation and workforce training, Mandyck noted. City officials have said they will pursue funding from a variety of federal sources, such as “green bank” loans, to ease the cost burden.
The New York state government is also funding efforts to bring down the cost of novel decarbonization technologies, he added. Some examples include a $70 million initiative to develop window-mounted heat pumps that both cool and heat apartments and the $50 million Empire Building Challenge that’s targeting high-rise commercial and residential buildings for complex efficiency and electrification retrofits.
“Because of the scale of New York City and the state…we’re going to spur innovation that’s going to help the whole market,” he said. Local Law 97 is just the most ambitious of a number of similar mandatory building-performance standards already in place in cities including Boston, Denver and Washington, D.C. and in states including Colorado, Maryland and Washington, he noted.
Finally, it’s important to remember that the climate emergency requires building owners to think differently about the costs and benefits of efficiency and electrification, Mandyck said. “We need to think about payback differently. Climate is a life-safety issue now. Nobody asks what the payback is to put a sprinkler safety system in your building. There’s no payback there — if there isn’t a fire.”
.svg)
