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Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.
When Mason Taylor was getting ready to graduate from high school in 2022, he thought he would have to take an entry-level technician job with a company in Tennessee.
Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and Tennessee. He had come to love the electrical courses he took in high school because there was always something new to learn, always a new way to challenge himself.
Driving to Tennessee for work would likely mean two hours commuting each day.
Taylor, now 21, just wanted to work close to home.
A summer apprenticeship learning how to install solar arrays helped him get on-the-job training and opened up connections to local work.
A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing.
Virginia ranks eighth in the nation for installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, but so far, major renewable energy projects have been clustered in the eastern and southern regions of the state. Increasing the popularity of solar power in the far southwestern corner of the state depends in part on the availability of trained workers like Taylor.
Andy Hershberger, director of Virginia operations for Got Electric, said the electrical contractor firm has had an apprenticeship program nearly since the company’s founding.
The company, which has about 100 employees total, with 40 in Virginia and an office in Maryland, has worked with Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, a commercial and public-sector solar developer, as far back as 2012.
More recently, the two companies began working to set up a training program that was more focused on solar. The catalyst was the former superintendent of Wise County schools, a school division that had signed up to put solar panels on its facilities. The superintendent saw the installation as an opportunity to get his students hands-on work on a renewable energy project.
Approximately three dozen apprentices have signed up for the program since 2022, including about 13 who are currently involved, Hershberger said. They work on a variety of solar projects, including on rooftops, carports, and ground-mounted installations.
“We have been utilizing this program to train students coming out of high school and basically growing the workforce side of this thing, so we have the necessary personnel to build these solar projects long term,” Hershberger said.
On top of hourly pay, apprentices get free equipment and a transportation subsidy, along with nine community college credits at Mountain Empire Community College, which provides classroom training before students step onto the job site.
“I mean, pretty much everything you need to know to go out and do any electrical job, you pretty much learned in that apprenticeship program,” Taylor said.
He was in the first cohort of 10 students who installed solar panels on public schools in Lee and Wise counties in 2022. A grant from a regional economic development authority paid the students’ wages while they earned credit at Mountain Empire Community College, which serves residents of Dickenson, Lee, Scott, and Wise counties, plus the city of Norton.
He got a job offer from Got Electric at the end of that summer.
This summer, Secure Solar Futures and Got Electric will join forces again to install more than 1,600 solar panels on the community college’s classroom buildings. The project was originally slated for 2024 but was delayed due in part to a separate project upgrading fire safety equipment in one of the buildings.
The 777-kilowatt solar power system will be connected to the electric grid, and Mountain Empire will receive credit for the power it generates.
Hershberger said he sees interest in solar growing.
“I think there’s always been folks that have adopted renewable projects, different types of energy sources. There’s always the standard interest in trying to save money for facilities and campuses and things like that,” he said.
Mountain Empire Community College offers solar training as a standalone career studies certificate or as part of its larger energy technology associate degree program.
In Southwest Virginia, a solar installation project is more likely to consist of adding panels to homes and businesses rather than building the large, utility-scale ground-based facilities more commonly seen in Southside Virginia, said Matt Rose, the college’s dean of industrial technology.
On a larger project, a single worker might have a specialized role, performing the same task across a large number of panels. On a smaller project, a worker is more likely to be involved in more aspects of the job.
“Our students need to have that comprehensive understanding and ability to be able to do it all,” he said.
Last year, 10 students graduated Mountain Empire with the solar installer certification. Many students who earn the certification perform solar installation work as one part of a more comprehensive job, such as being an electrician.
Rose said the college’s students typically start out making $17 or $18 an hour but can earn more as they become journeymen and master electricians.
Nationwide, the median salary for electricians is about $61,000.
In Lee County, population 22,000, the median household income is about $42,000.
The number of solar installers in Southwest Virginia is unclear. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t collect data on employment by technology, so residential solar installation companies are labeled as electrical contractors, along with all other electrical businesses, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Tony Smith, founder and CEO of Secure Solar Futures, measures the success of the company’s apprenticeship program person by person. At an April event to celebrate the completion of the first phase of solar panel installation for Roanoke schools, Smith asked about several of the students from the 2022 cohort from Lee and Wise counties by name.
Smith said it’s tough to replicate the apprenticeship program at various school divisions. Doing so requires the work of individual school systems and the regional community colleges, instead of being able to pick up the curriculum from one area and apply it at the next project site.
And all the partners — Smith’s company, participating schools and installation firms — face some uncertainty for each project. It’s challenging to pinpoint the timing of projects so that students have the time to participate during the summer months, he said.
“The things I learned in the apprenticeship program I’m still doing day to day,” Anthony Hamilton, 21, said. He completed the eight-week apprenticeship in Lee and Wise counties in 2022 alongside Taylor. He didn’t think it would turn into a full-time job. He doubted anyone really wanted to hire a kid just starting college.
He’s been with Got Electric ever since, working as an electrician primarily on commercial jobs. Hamilton’s solar experience has come in handy on recent installation projects at a poultry farm and at a YMCA facility.
Hamilton continued going to school at Mountain Empire and graduates this month with two associate degrees in energy technology and electrical. He’s also earned a handful of certificates in solar installation, air conditioning and refrigeration, and electrical fabrication, among others. With the nine credits he earned in the summer apprenticeship, he “already had a head start on everybody in the program.”
It wasn’t an easy journey, though.
He said he usually started his day around 6 a.m. and went to night classes after work that stretched until 9:30 p.m. Hamilton lives in Coeburn in Wise County, a 45-minute drive to the college campus. He’d get home late, then get up early and do it all over again. But his college was free through a local scholarship program that pays for up to three years of classes at Mountain Empire.
He’d like to stay with Got Electric and start preparing to take his journeyman’s license, which requires at least four years of practical experience on top of vocational training, plus an exam. From there, he’s got designs on moving up in the company and eventually becoming a master electrician.
On April 14, he was in the town of Abingdon, a few weeks into a three-month project installing a solar array at a large poultry farm that says it produces more than 650,000 eggs a day. The work so far entailed digging trenches and laying PVC pipe for the ground-mount solar system that will span one section of the farm’s expansive fields.
Taylor uses similar skills at work each day. But his work site looks a lot different from Hamilton’s.
It has taken Taylor some time to figure out how to stick close to home while working in his trade. He spent a year working with Got Electric immediately after finishing his summer apprenticeship, then left the company to work as an electrician in a local school system. He eventually returned to Got Electric for a few months, working at Virginia Tech putting solar on three buildings on campus in Blacksburg, three hours from home.
He discovered he didn’t like traveling for installation jobs that meant night after night in a motel room.
“That was the only complaint I had with it, about being away from home,” he said.
Now he’s an electrician at a state prison in Big Stone Gap. He has the same shift every day, in the same place, and drives 10 minutes home from work at the end of the day.
Taylor has also taken additional classes at Mountain Empire and wants to go back this fall to finish his associate degrees in HVAC and electrical. He eventually wants to open his own business as an electrician working locally. He’d like to be able to do small solar installation jobs. Solar hasn’t really caught on in far Southwest Virginia, he said — at least, not yet.
Rose, the dean at Mountain Empire, noted that once major solar projects are done, maintenance doesn’t require ongoing jobs, and most students who receive training in solar installation typically make it part of another job, such as being an electrician.
“We’re starting to see a lot more homeowners interested in [solar] locally as a way to offset increasing energy costs, but overall most of it is just a component of the job because there’s not enough demand,” Rose said.
Rose predicts interest in solar will grow as more homeowners and business owners look for ways to offset rising electric bills.
“As we all look at increasing energy costs, it’s going to make a lot more economic sense,” he said.
Energy independence, he added, fits with the character of Southwest Virginia.
“We’ve always been resilient people,” Rose said. “We’ve always been adapt-and-overcome people, and what better way than to basically control a little bit of your own power?”
This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.
American manufacturing has already surged in the clean energy sector, bringing with it significant economic rewards.
That’s the main takeaway from a census of U.S. clean energy factories, published today by the American Clean Power Association trade group. The report identifies 200 operating across 38 states as of early 2025. The production of solar panels leads the count with at least 90 facilities. About 65 factories are making batteries, while a smaller number produce equipment for onshore and offshore wind. A broader population of over 800 facilities plays a supporting role in the clean energy supply chain, manufacturing materials and subcomponents that turn the solar panels and batteries into full-fledged power plants.
Those facilities already contribute 122,000 jobs and create $33 billion of economic activity annually, which includes earnings, goods and services produced, and payments to supporting industries, ACP found. Notably, 73% of these factories operate in what the report describes as “Republican states” (as determined by presidential vote). That economic impact could grow to $164 billion by 2030 if the currently planned and announced factories come to fruition.
The report came out as ACP met for its annual conference in Phoenix, but the intended audience includes the Republican members of Congress who will soon vote on cuts to the slew of tax credits underpinning this factory buildout. The report asserts that the burgeoning cleantech factory sector could “be the foundation for American energy dominance that is built by Americans for Americans.”
“We have seen a tremendous amount of momentum over just even the past couple of years in clean energy manufacturing growth,” MJ Shiao, ACP’s vice president of supply chain and manufacturing, said on a press call Friday. “With stable tax and stable trade policy, we can really continue to amplify, grow that momentum.”
Clean energy leaders have spent the months since the November election hoping that the sheer economic dynamism their factories inject into Republican congressional districts could overcome President Donald Trump’s desire to unravel Joe Biden’s legacies. It didn’t help that the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, with its many highly targeted tax credits for clean energy deployment and manufacturing, on a party-line vote.
But enough Republican representatives publicly argued against a wholesale repeal of the credits to give cleantech insiders hope. Indeed, the House Ways and Means Committee declined to eradicate the credits entirely in its budget proposal from last week. But the proposed tweaks to many of the individual programs narrow their scope and could render them wholly unworkable nonetheless.
“If they are implemented as currently drafted, which we certainly hope they are not, we will see factories shutting down,” Shiao said. “We will see these American manufacturers have to lay people off, and we will see them having to tell their local business partners that they no longer have the opportunity to work with them.”
In that light, the ACP report reads as a tabulation of what the country could miss out on if policy changes underway in Washington bring the onshoring trend to a staggering halt.
The manufacturing job count could grow to 579,000 by 2030 if the other announced factory projects get built and come online. Total job count doesn’t confirm how desirable the work is, but these jobs happen to pay quite well, especially solar manufacturing salaries, which averaged $134,000 in 2024.
A Canary Media visit to the enormous QCells solar factory in Dalton, Georgia, last year showed why this work pays more than traditional manufacturing. The brand-new factories leverage considerable automation and robotic assistance for the heavy lifting and repetitive, high-precision tasks. Workers patrolled the lines and intervened when the machinery needed help. That greater output of an in-demand, high-tech product supported considerably higher pay than the carpet factories down the road.
“This is not our parents’ generation’s manufacturing,” Shiao said. “There is automation, there is robotics, there is AI in these facilities. And that’s a good thing, because these are high-tech, high-skill opportunities that are being brought into some of these communities that are really eager to find ways to keep their best, keep their brightest in the places that they grow up in.”
Across cleantech factories, annual earnings from clean energy manufacturing averaged $118,000, the study found, well above the average U.S. worker’s pay of $76,000.
It’s not just immediate employees who benefit, though. First comes the intensive but temporary construction phase. Once complete, the factories create additional work for support services in the region, such as shipping and delivery companies, food vendors, hotels for visiting customers, and waste disposal. Domestic manufacturing also relies on other component suppliers: Utility-scale solar panels sit on American steel trackers, covered in U.S.-made solar glass. The authors calculate that each job in a clean energy factory leads to three more in supporting industries.
This reality sounds a lot like the vision that Trump campaigned on last year, of growing jobs at home by restoring U.S. manufacturing from the ravages of globalization. He also repeatedly emphasizes a desire to secure more critical minerals for the U.S.; clean energy technologies provide much of the expected demand growth for those minerals.
“This administration talks a lot about an all-of-the-above energy strategy that facilitates American energy dominance,” Shiao said. “I think there needs to continue to be that recognition that solar, wind, energy storage are key pieces and critical pieces to realizing that growth, certainly in terms of the speed at which those projects can be deployed.”
The Ways and Means budget proposal dealt a blow to the cleantech industry’s hopes for a predictable investment landscape. It was also the opening volley of a weekslong negotiating process that will soon involve the Senate as well. Amid all that uncertainty, ACP has at least provided some fresh numbers on the value clean energy factories have created in their short moment of ascendancy, as well as helped clarify what’s at stake.
“We think we’ve got a winning message, one that is bringing positivity, and of course, economic growth to the country,” said John Hensley, ACP’s senior vice president of markets and policy analysis. “We’re going to continue to tell that story, and hopefully it lands on ears that are willing to listen.”
Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.
MITCHELL, S.D. — Matthew Pearson found a successful career in the wind energy industry purely by chance.
After graduating from high school in Vermillion, Pearson knew he didn’t want to pursue a four-year degree and instead scrolled through the list of majors offered at Mitchell Tech, one of the state’s four technical colleges.
“When I came to the wind energy program, I thought, ‘Well, that sounds kind of cool,’” Pearson, 28, recalled during a recent interview at Mitchell Tech, the only South Dakota college with a designated wind energy major.
He didn’t know it at the time, but he had stumbled into one of the fastest-growing, highest-paying trade fields in the state and nation.
While workforce shortages plague many industries and employers in the Rushmore State, great opportunities abound for skilled workers to build, operate, and maintain renewable energy facilities, including at wind farms. Meanwhile, strong partnerships between technical colleges, employers, and the Build Dakota scholarship program have forged a ready pathway to quickly and effectively fill the need for energy workers.
Pearson obtained a Build Dakota scholarship that paid all tuition for a two-year wind technology degree, then spent about $15,000 to complete another two-year major in electrical construction.
After graduation, he quickly landed a job wiring wind towers at locations around the country. He was initially paid about $80,000 a year, and after six years was making $127,000 plus a daily living fee of $140.
But now, with a fiancee and two children, Pearson is completing a circle by leaving fieldwork and returning to Mitchell Tech to become its only wind energy program instructor.
Pearson said that in addition to teaching the skills needed to thrive in the renewable energy field, he’ll also share the good news about their job prospects.
“There’s been a steady uptick in the need for workforce,” he said. “When I would get to a jobsite, there would be three or four companies there, and they’d always come over and ask, ‘Hey, you want to come work for us instead?’”
South Dakota is among the top three states nationally in percentage of energy generated from renewable sources, leaving it well positioned to provide both jobs in the field and trainers like Pearson who will help meet demand for workers.
About 77% of the power used in the state comes from non-fossil-fuel sources, largely from water and wind, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The state has three solar farms but no plans filed for more.
Since the mid-1950s, South Dakota has generated significant energy from its four hydroelectric power plants on the Missouri River.
And over roughly the past 15 years, the state has seen a tenfold increase in wind energy production, according to the state Public Utilities Commission. That growth has created a healthy number of construction and maintenance jobs.
In 2009, the state had 190 turbines capable of producing about 350 megawatts of electricity. At the end of 2024, South Dakota was home to 1,417 turbines able to generate about 3,600 MW of energy. The PUC also approved a 68-turbine project with a capacity of 260 MW and a $621 million price tag near Clear Lake in March.
“We’ve had just a tremendous expansion of wind energy in South Dakota,” said Chris Nelson, a PUC commissioner. “Today, though, we’re in a little bit of a lull.”
The expected slowdown is due to a lack of transmission lines capable of carrying more power, most of which heads east out of the state, Nelson said.
Despite the infrastructure challenges, renewable energy still has a bright future, he said. Two nonprofit energy consortiums that manage the power grid in the upper Midwest plan to spend a combined $37 billion to expand transmission capacity, including in South Dakota, over roughly the next decade.
At Lake Area Technical College in Watertown, students are offered two energy-related degree tracks, said President Tiffany Sanderson.
The energy technology major provides training in development and maintenance of energy systems, and the energy operations degree is aimed at managing an energy facility.
“In our energy programs, those are students interested in working with their hands and solving engineering or process-oriented problems,” she said. “They’re very mechanically minded and can figure out how to make sure power is produced reliably so people don’t have delays in service.”
During a recent tour of the technology labs, students used 3D printers, developed and analyzed system efficiency, and worked on unique projects like a solar-powered ice fishing shanty.
The two programs have about two dozen students combined, Sanderson said. In the 2023 graduating class, 100% of all graduates were employed within six months, with average salaries of $65,000 a year in the technology major and $69,000 a year in operations.
“That is for their first jobs in the industry, so those are tremendous opportunities for a brand-new graduate with two years of college education,” she said.
In May, Nathaniel Bekaert will become one of those new graduates from Lake Area Tech.
Bekaert, 28, grew up on a farm and came to the college after six years in the U.S. Army, which paid for almost all of his tuition, fees, and equipment costs.
After touring the Gavins Point Dam hydroelectric plant in Yankton on the Nebraska border and interning at the Big Stone Power Plant near the Minnesota border, Bekaert was sold on the idea of working as a mechanic in the energy field.
“The more you learn, the more you want to dive into it,” he said.
With his anticipated degree and work experience, Bekaert said he was recruited extensively by energy companies.
“The amount of energy companies coming in looking for workers is crazy, and you can’t really grasp how many companies are looking for energy students,” he said. “There are a dozen or more companies within 45 minutes from here that are actively looking for technicians and operators or people with some type of energy degree.”
As a native of the Watertown area, Bekaert has accepted a job close to home as a wind technician at the Crowned Ridge wind farm northeast of the city, where he will make $29 an hour plus a $5,000 signing bonus and a $200 annual stipend for work boots.
Crowned Ridge is operated by NextEra Energy, a Florida-based company that runs wind farms across the country. A recent check of NextEra’s website revealed 396 job openings, with 185 related specifically to wind energy.
“No matter what happens with fossil fuels, we can keep going [with renewable energy] and live off that, and it will benefit everybody in the world. And we won’t have to rely on another country,” Bekaert said of his career choice.
The South Dakota technical school system, which also includes campuses in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, has developed a close working relationship with the energy industry to ensure students learn the right skills and employers can tap into a pipeline of well-trained workers.
Lake Area Tech officials go into local public schools to promote energy and other trade jobs starting in elementary grades, Sanderson said.
At Mitchell Tech, Clayton Deuter, the vice president for enrollment services, said the college now offers a one-year wind energy degree instead of a two-year program, a change made after energy companies said some skills taught in the longer program could be obtained on the job instead.
Deuter said the energy programs at Mitchell Tech are an easy sell to students and their parents due to the low cost compared to a four-year college and the availability of Build Dakota scholarships in which students get tuition paid if they work in South Dakota for three years after graduation.
Mitchell Tech also offers a dual-enrollment program to high school students so they can have a wind energy degree from the college in hand by the time they graduate.
“You think about return on investment, and here you can take one year in the wind turbine program and you can graduate and make $80,000 to $100,000 a year,” Deuter said. “With student loan debt being so crazy, you don’t have to bankrupt yourself financially and be tethered to a student loan payment when you’re trying to buy a house and start a family.”
One of the state’s biggest renewable energy employers is Marmen Energy in Brandon. The Canadian-owned company has 285 employees who build wind towers up to 300 feet tall that are shipped to wind farms nationwide.
Aimee Miritello, human resources manager, said the company’s relationships with high schools and technical colleges form a pillar of its worker recruitment strategy to overcome a nagging lack of workers in the trade fields.
“Historically for us that has been one of our best ways of getting qualified employees,” she said.
Marmen has expanded its South Dakota plant to accommodate what Miritello said has been a steady increase in demand for wind towers across the country.
Marmen workers, who include welders, painters, and other construction tradespeople, make a good wage, are offered one of the best benefit packages in the region, and have strong opportunities for internal advancement, she said.
“Plus, they’re a part of making huge wind towers, so their pride in that is pretty big,” she said.
This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.
Federal regulators have rejected a controversial plan to fast-track new gas-fired power plants onto the grid that spans 15 states from Louisiana to North Dakota, handing a victory to critics who feared it could derail the region’s clean energy buildout and worsen the reliability problems it was meant to address.
Friday’s 2-1 decision from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that the Expedited Resource Addition Study (ERAS) plan put forward by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator failed to meet the standards for a “just and reasonable” way to solve MISO’s forecast grid shortfall of 4.7 gigawatts by 2028.
Like grid operators across the country, MISO suffers from a clogged interconnection process, preventing it from building enough new power-generation capacity to replace closing coal plants, meet fast-growing demand for electricity, and keep the grid up and running during winter cold snaps and summer heat waves.
MISO filed the ERAS proposal as an emergency measure meant to alleviate this problem — but only for fossil-gas power plants. The plan allowed utilities to receive interconnection agreements for “shovel-ready” gas power plants in less than 90 days. For the most part, the only projects eligible for this treatment would have been those built by vertically integrated utilities, a further point of criticism from energy experts who viewed the plan as circumventing the region’s competitive energy market.
Meanwhile, yearslong wait times would still be in store for the hundreds of gigawatts’ worth of projects in MISO’s existing queue, the majority of which are solar, wind, and battery installations.
But FERC’s decision found some key deficiencies in the ERAS plan. First, it “places no limit on the number of projects that could be entered in the ERAS process,” the commission’s opinion states, which “could result in an ERAS queue with processing times for interconnection requests that are too lengthy to meet MISO’s stated resource adequacy and reliability needs.” That could also cause the ERAS queue to become just as backed up as MISO’s existing queue for competitively proposed generation and energy storage projects.
These factors differentiated MISO’s ERAS plan from other fast-track interconnection proposals recently approved by FERC, such as one from grid operator PJM Interconnection that set a one-time window for up to 50 projects to apply for fast-track consideration, the decision notes. That process “reasonably balanced the need to address PJM’s resource adequacy challenges with the need to avoid an influx of projects that could overwhelm PJM’s interconnection process and lead to further delays.”
FERC’s decision dismissed MISO’s proposal “without prejudice,” meaning the grid operator may resubmit a revised emergency fast-track plan in the future. MISO spokesperson Brandon Morris said the grid operator “worked closely and collaboratively with stakeholders to develop ERAS as a temporary process that will enable urgent generation projects to be built more quickly. We will continue to engage with stakeholders as we evaluate options.”
Many utilities and state utility regulators in MISO’s territory backed ERAS, but a handful of state regulators, consumer advocacy groups, clean energy industry groups, and eight former FERC commissioners opposed it.
FERC commissioners David Rosner, a Democrat, and Lindsay See, a Republican, voted for Friday’s decision. Republican Chair Mark Christie voted against the rejection, and Commissioner Judy Chang, a Democrat, did not participate.
Christie noted in a separate dissent that he did not disagree with the majority’s critique but that he had been willing “to extend to both the states and MISO a trust that they would implement the ERAS proposal in a manner that would promote the construction of badly needed generation capacity that serves resource adequacy and reliability.”
Clean energy groups praised the decision.
“FERC’s role as an independent agency is to protect consumers, and ensure reliable affordable energy,” Christine Powell, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program, wrote in a statement. “The best way to do that is to let clean energy compete fairly and openly.”
Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.
DECATUR, ILLINOIS — A fistfight at a high school football game nearly defined Shawn Honorable’s life.
It was 1999 when he and a group of teen boys were expelled and faced criminal charges over the incident. The story of the “Decatur Seven” drew national headlines and protests led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who framed their harsh treatment as blatant racism. The governor eventually intervened, and the students were allowed to attend alternative schools.
Honorable, now 41, was encouraged by support “from around the world,” but he said the incident was traumatizing and he continued to struggle academically and socially. Over the years, he dabbled in illegal activity and was incarcerated, most recently after a 2017 conviction for accepting a large amount of marijuana sent through the mail.
Today, Honorable is ready to start a new chapter, having graduated with honors last week from a clean energy workforce training program at Richland Community College, located in the Central Illinois city of Decatur. He would eventually like to own or manage a solar company, but he has more immediate plans to start a solar-powered mobile hot dog stand. He’s already chosen the name: Buns on the Run.
“By me going back to school and doing this, it shows my nephews and my little cousins and nieces that it is good to have education,” Honorable said. “I know this is going to be the new way of life with solar panels. So I’ll have a step up on everyone. When it comes, I will already be aware of what’s going on with this clean energy thing.”
After decades of layoffs and factory closings, the community of Decatur is also looking to clean energy as a potential springboard.
Located amid soybean fields a three-hour drive from Chicago, the city was long known for its Caterpillar, Firestone Tire, and massive corn-syrup factories. Industrial jobs have been in decline for decades, though, and high rates of gun violence, child poverty, unemployment, and incarceration were among the reasons the city was named a clean energy workforce hub funded under Illinois’ 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA).
Decatur’s hub, based at Richland Community College, is arguably the most developed and successful of the dozen or so established statewide. That’s thanks in part to TCCI Manufacturing, a local, family-owned factory that makes electric vehicle compressors. TCCI is expanding its operations with a state-of-the-art testing facility and an on-site campus where Richland students will take classes adjacent to the manufacturing floor. The electric truck company Rivian also has a factory 50 miles away.
“The pieces are all coming together,” Kara Demirjian, senior vice president of TCCI Manufacturing, said by email. “What makes this region unique is that it’s not just about one company or one product line. It’s about building an entire clean energy ecosystem. The future of EV manufacturing leadership won’t just be on the coasts — it’s being built right here in the Midwest.”
The Decatur CEJA program has also flourished because it was grafted onto a preexisting initiative, EnRich, that helps formerly incarcerated or otherwise disenfranchised people gain new skills and employment. The program is overseen by the Rev. Courtney Carson, a childhood friend of Honorable and another member of the Decatur Seven.
“So many of us suffer significantly from our unmet needs, our unhealed traumas,” said Carson, who was jailed as a young man for gun possession and later drag racing. With the help of mentors including Rev. Jackson and a college basketball coach, he parlayed his past into leadership, becoming associate pastor at a renowned church, leading a highway construction class at Richland, and in 2017 being elected to the same school board that had expelled him.
Carson, now vice president of external relations at the community college, tapped his own experience to shape EnRich as a trauma-informed approach, with wraparound services to help students overcome barriers — from lack of childcare to PTSD to a criminal record. Carson has faith that students can overcome such challenges to build more promising futures, like Decatur itself has done.
“We have all these new opportunities coming in, and there’s a lot of excitement in the city,” Carson said. “That’s magnificent. So what has to happen is these individuals who suffered from closures, they have to be reminded that there is hope.”
Richland Community College’s clean energy jobs training starts with an eight-week life skills course that has long been central to the larger EnRich program. The course uses a Circle of Courage practice inspired by Indigenous communities and helps students prepare to handle stressful workplace situations like being disrespected or even called a racial slur.
“Being called the N-word, couldn’t that make you want to fight somebody? But now you lose your job,” said Carson. “We really dive deep into what’s motivating their attitude and those traumas that have significantly impacted their body to make them respond to situations either the right way or the wrong way.”
The training addresses other dynamics that might be unfamiliar to some students — for example, some male students might not be prepared to be supervised by a woman, Carson noted, or others might not be comfortable with LGBTQ+ coworkers.
Life skills are followed by a construction math course crucial to many clean energy and other trades jobs. During a recent class, 24-year-old Brylan Hodges joked with the teacher while converting fractions to decimals and percentages on the whiteboard. He explained that he moved from St. Louis to Decatur in search of opportunity, and he hopes to become a property manager overseeing solar panel installation and energy-efficiency upgrades on buildings.
Students take an eight-hour primer in clean energy fields including electric vehicles, solar, HVAC, and home energy auditing. Then they choose a clean energy track to pursue, leading to professional certifications as well as a chance to continue at Richland for an associate degree. Under the state-funded program, students are paid for their time attending classes.
Marcus James was part of the first cohort to start the program last October, just days after his release from prison.
He was an 18-year-old living in Memphis, Tennessee, when someone shot at him, as he describes it, and he fired back, with fatal consequences. He was convicted of murder and spent 12 years behind bars. After his release he made his way to Decatur, looking for a safer place to raise his kids. Adjusting to life on the outside wasn’t easy, and he ended up back in prison for a year and a half on DUI and drug possession charges.
Following his release, he was determined to turn his life around.
“After I brought my kids up here, I end up going back to prison. But at that moment, I realized, man, I had to change,” James told a crowd at an event celebrating the clean jobs program in March.
James said that at first, he showed up late to every class. But soon the lessons sank in, and he was never late again. He always paid attention when people talked, and he gained new confidence.
“As long as I put my mind to it, I can do it,” said James, who would like to work as a home energy auditor. Richland partners with the energy utility Ameren to place trainees in such positions.
“I like being out in the field, learning new stuff, dealing with homes, helping people,” James said, noting he made energy-efficiency improvements to his own home after the course.
Illinois’ 2017 Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA) launched the state’s clean energy transition, baking in equity goals that prioritize opportunities for people who benefited least and were harmed most by the fossil fuel economy. It created programs to deploy solar arrays and provide job training in marginalized and environmental justice communities.
FEJA’s rollout was rocky. Funding for equity-focused solar installations went unspent while workforce programs struggled to recruit trainees and connect them with jobs. The pandemic didn’t help. The follow-up legislation, CEJA, expanded workforce training programs and remedied snafus in the original law.
Melissa Gombar is principal director of workforce development programs for Elevate, a Chicago-based national nonprofit organization that oversaw FEJA job training and subcontracts for a Chicago-area CEJA hub. Gombar said many community organizations tasked with running FEJA training programs were relatively small and grassroots, so they had to scramble to build new financial and human resources infrastructure.
“They have to have certain policies in place for hiring and procurement. The influx of grant money might have doubled their budget,” Gombar said. Meanwhile, the state employees tasked with helping the groups “are really talented and skilled, trying their best, but they’re overburdened because of the large lift.”
CEJA, by contrast, tapped community colleges like Richland, which already had robust infrastructure and staffing. CEJA also funds community organizations to serve as “navigators,” using the trust and credibility they’ve developed in communities to recruit trainees.
Richland Community College received $2.6 million from April 2024 through June 2025, and the Community Foundation of Macon County, the hub’s navigator, received $440,000 for the same time period. The other hubs similarly received between $1 million and $3.3 million for the past year, and state officials have said the same level of funding will be allocated for each of the next two years, according to the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition.
CEJA hubs also include social service providers that connect trainees with wraparound support; businesses like TCCI that offer jobs; and affiliated entrepreneur incubators that help people start their own clean energy businesses. CEJA also funded apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs with labor unions, which are often a prerequisite for employment in utility-scale solar and wind.
“The sum of the parts is greater than the whole,” said Drew Keiser, TCCI vice president of global human resources. “The navigator is saying, ‘Hey, I’ve connected with this portion of the population that’s been overlooked or underserved.’ OK, once you get them trained, send their resumes to me, and I’ll get them interviewed. We’re seeing a real pipeline into careers.”
The hub partners go to great lengths to aid students — for example, coordinating and often paying for transportation, childcare, or even car repairs.
“If you need some help, they always there for you,” James said.
In 1984, TCCI began making vehicle compressors in a Decatur plant formerly used to build Sherman tanks during World War II. A few decades later, the company began producing compressors for electric vehicles, which are much more elaborate and sensitive than those for internal combustion engines.
In August 2023, Gov. JB Pritzker joined TCCI President Richard Demirjian, the Decatur mayor, and college officials for the groundbreaking of an Electric Vehicle Innovation Hub, which will include a climatic research facility — basically a high-tech wind tunnel where companies and researchers from across the world can send EV chargers, batteries, compressors, and other components for testing in extreme temperatures, rain, and wind.
A $21.3 million capital grant and a $2.2 million electric vehicle incentive from the state are funding the wind tunnel and the new facilities where Richland classes will be held. In 2022, Pritzker announced these investments as furthering the state goal of 1 million EVs on the road by 2030.
Far from the gritty industrial environs that likely characterized Decatur workplaces of the past, the classrooms at TCCI feature colorful decor, comfortable armchairs, and bright, airy spaces adjacent to pristine high-tech manufacturing floors lined with machines.
“This hub is a game changer,” said Keiser, noting the need for trained tradespeople. “As a country, we place a lot of emphasis on kids going to college, and maybe we’ve kind of overlooked getting tangible skills in the hands of folks.”
A marketing firm founded by Kara Demirjian — Richard Demirjian’s sister — and located on-site with TCCI also received clean energy hub funds to promote the training program. This has been crucial to the hub’s success, according to Ariana Bennick, account executive at the firm, DCC Marketing. Its team has developed, tested, and deployed digital billboards, mailers, ads, Facebook events, and other approaches to attract trainees and business partners.
“Being a part of something here in Decatur that’s really leading the nation in this clean energy initiative is exciting,” Bennick said. “It can be done here in the middle of the cornfields. We want to show people a framework that they can take and scale in other places.”
With graduation behind him, Honorable is planning the types of hot dogs and sausages he’ll sell at Buns on the Run. He said Tamika Thomas, director of the CEJA program at Richland, has also encouraged him to consider teaching so he can share the clean energy skills he’s learned with others. The world seems wide open with possibilities.
“A little at a time — I’m going to focus on the tasks in front of me that I’m passionate about, and then see what’s next,” Honorable said. He invoked a favorite scene from the cartoon TV series “The Flintstones,” in which the characters’ leg power, rather than wheels and batteries, propelled vehicles: “Like Fred and Barney, I’ll be up and running.”
This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.
Sydney, 16 April 2025 – A new satellite analysis from global energy think tank Ember has identified 40% greater methane emission from Australia’s coal mines than officially reported. The analysis finds that current reporting methods fail to capture the full scale of emissions, with significant implications for both domestic policy and global steel supply chains.
The collaborative study, based on TROPOMI satellite data analysed by energy intelligence from Kayrros, examined six key coal mining clusters that account for 79% of Australia’s black coal production in Queensland and New South Wales. The analysis, which compared emissions from 2020 and 2021 identified elevated coal mine methane emissions in both states, with a significant discrepancy in New South Wales.
While the study only accounted for two thirds of black coal production in New South Wales, it identified methane emissions within these limited clusters at twice the level that was officially reported state-wide.
Through a comparative assessment of open-cut coal mining in NSW, the study further identified coal mine methane emissions 4-6 times greater than officially reported through company-led estimates.
These findings largely support the diverse array of international and peer-reviewed satellite estimates that have identified considerably higher methane emissions from Australia’s coal mines. This includes a recent aircraft study that identified emissions over Hail Creek mine could be 4 to 5 times than currently reported.
Following a year-long national inquiry into methane measurement approaches in Australia, the Federal government has initiated an Expert Panel to provide advice on atmospheric measurement of fugitive methane emissions in Australia and a departmental review on company-led emissions estimates on open-cut coal mines.
These findings highlight not only the critical importance of these reviews, but the urgency in which Australia needs to improve its emissions reporting, especially within its steel-making coal supply chains.
The study encompassed over 90% of Australia’s metallurgical coal production, a large portion of which is presently exported to the EU. This share of exports will soon be subject to strict emissions reporting requirements under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Without necessary improvements, these new regulations could jeopardize significant export opportunities.
This discrepancy in emissions reporting points to the risks of relying on self-reported data and underscores the need for more accurate and independent monitoring.
The study also finds that without major changes to Australia’s existing coal mine methane reporting inventory, the country’s policymakers and international steel-making supply chains will remain in the dark about the total scale of Australia’s coal mine methane emissions.
London, 8 April – The world reached a new milestone as low-carbon sources – renewables and nuclear – provided 40.9% of the world’s electricity generation in 2024, passing the 40% mark for the first time since the 1940s, according to a report by global energy think tank Ember.
Renewables were the main driver of overall clean growth, adding a record 858 TWh in 2024, 49% more than the previous high in 2022. Solar was the largest contributor for the third year running, adding 474 TWh to reach a share of 6.9%. Solar was the fastest-growing power source (+29%) for the 20th year in a row. Solar electricity has doubled in just three years, providing more than 2,000 TWh of electricity in 2024. Wind generation also grew to 8.1% of global electricity, while hydro’s share remained steady at 14% – the single largest renewable source.
“Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition,” said Phil MacDonald, Ember’s managing director. “Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world’s ever-increasing demand for electricity.”
Ember’s sixth annual Global Electricity Review provides the first comprehensive overview of the global power system in 2024 based on country-level data. It is published today alongside the world’s first open dataset on electricity generation in 2024, covering 88 countries that account for 93% of global electricity demand, as well as historical data for 215 countries.
The analysis finds that, despite the rise in renewables, fossil generation saw a small 1.4% increase in 2024 due to surging electricity demand, pushing global power sector emissions up 1.6% to an all-time high.
Heatwaves were the main driver of the rise in fossil generation, accounting for almost a fifth (+0.7%) of the increase in global electricity demand in 2024 (+4.0%), mainly through additional use of cooling. Without these temperature effects, fossil generation would have risen by only 0.2%, as clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures.
“Amid the noise, it’s essential to focus on the real signal,” continued Mr MacDonald. “Hotter weather drove the fossil generation increase in 2024, but we’re very unlikely to see a similar jump in 2025.”
Aside from weather effects, increasing use of electricity for AI, data centres, electric vehicles and heat pumps is already contributing to global demand growth. Combined, growing use of these technologies accounted for a 0.7% increase in global electricity demand in 2024, double what they contributed five years ago.
The report shows that clean generation growth is set to outpace faster-rising demand in the coming years, marking the start of a permanent decline in fossil generation. The current expected growth in clean generation would be sufficient to meet a demand increase of 4.1% per year to 2030, which is above expectations for demand growth.
“The world is watching how technologies like AI and EVs will drive electricity demand,” continued Mr MacDonald. “It’s clear that booming solar and wind are comfortably set to deliver, and those expecting fossil fuel generation to keep rising will be disappointed.”
Beyond emerging technologies, the growth trajectories of the world’s largest emerging economies will play a crucial role in defining the global outlook. China and India are already shifting towards meeting their growing electricity needs with clean energy.
More than half of the increase in solar generation in 2024 was in China, with China’s clean generation growth meeting 81% of its demand increase in 2024. India’s solar capacity additions in 2024 doubled compared to 2023. These two countries are at the forefront of the drive to clean power and will help tip the balance towards a decline in fossil generation at a global level.
“Cleantech, not fossil fuels, is now the driving force of economic development,” concluded Mr MacDonald. “The era of fossil growth is coming to an end, even in a world of fast-rising demand.”
Gas stoves increase the chances of getting cancer, with nearly double the risk for kids than for adults.
That’s the stark top-line finding of a recent study by a team of researchers from Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; and other organizations. The study builds on prior work by the group that found that gas stoves emit benzene, a potent carcinogen also found in secondhand cigarette smoke — even when the cooking appliances are turned off.
“This is a new piece of evidence that shows that gas cookers are toxic for your health and that something needs to be done,” said Juana María Delgado-Saborit, head of the environmental health research laboratory at the Jaume I University in Spain, who was not involved in the study. “We know that benzene exposure is associated with cancer. … [The authors] have put a number on ‘How big is the problem?’”
The work is just the latest in a growing body of peer-reviewed research demonstrating that gas-burning stoves and other appliances harm not only future generations with their planet-warming emissions but also have direct health consequences for people who use them now. These appliances spew a wide range of pollutants, including deadly carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides linked to respiratory diseases.
Around the U.S., cities and states are taking steps to limit new gas appliances. New York state is pursuing standards to ensure most new buildings will be all-electric. And in California, updates to infrastructure rules and a supportive statewide energy code are already tipping the economics toward all-electric construction.
But efforts to encourage clean cooking also face strong political headwinds. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, vetoed a bill last year to label gas stoves with a health warning. On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose” gas stoves. And at the U.S. Capitol this week, the Republican-controlled House proposed axing federal tax credits that currently make it easier for Americans to choose more energy-efficient, all-electric appliances.
In the new study, the team used benzene measurements from gas stoves in 87 homes, analyzing the health risks for the highest-emitting 5% of stoves by modeling how the carcinogen lingers in different rooms across several types of U.S. housing.
There’s no safe level of benzene exposure. But a common statistical limit for an acceptable level of exposure to the chemical is one person in a million getting cancer over a 70-year lifetime.
Researchers found the added lifetime cancer risk associated with benzene from gas stoves is much higher. For example, in homes that use gas stoves often and without ventilation, the risk from just the benzene that drifted into bedrooms ranged from about two to 12 in a million additional cancer cases for children and from about one to six in a million for adults, according to the modeling.
Accounting for exposure across the whole home, gas stove benzene increased cancer risk for kids by up to 1.85 times the risk for adults.
Ventilating with a high-efficiency range hood or by opening the windows could help decrease the risk, the team found, but couldn’t eradicate it completely.
“The only way to eliminate the exposure is to replace a gas or propane stove with a non-emitting induction or other electric stove,” Rob Jackson, senior author of the study and Earth systems professor at Stanford, told Canary Media.
About 38% of U.S. households cook with blue flames. Across those roughly 47 million homes, the team estimates that 6.3 million Americans are breathing in benzene from their gas stoves at the levels modelled.
How do you know if your gas stove is one of the most polluting? “You don’t,” Jackson said.
Jackson wants policymakers to incentivize a transition to electric cooking. “The switch from dirty fossil fuels to cleaner electricity will save lives and make us healthier,” he said. “The World Health Organization believes that breathing any extra benzene is bad for us, no matter how small the amount.”
“Who wants to breathe more carcinogenic benzene than we have to?”
Maine’s new energy-efficiency plan is projected to lower electricity bills for the state’s residents — even those who don’t directly benefit from its rebate and incentive programs.
The plan, set to go into effect in July, is heavily focused on getting electric heat pumps in as many homes as possible. It comes as other states debate rolling back efficiency programs funded by utility customers as a short-term fix to rising energy prices. Maine’s strategy takes the opposite approach: It leverages investments in efficiency and electrification to lower rates for everyone.
“This is bucking the trend,” said Michael Stoddard, executive director of Efficiency Maine Trust, the agency that administers the state’s energy-efficiency plans. “This is our pathway to managing electricity prices while also transitioning the consumers of our state to the highest-efficiency, lowest-polluting equipment that is available.”
Maine has been an aggressive adopter of home heat pumps in recent years. In 2019, the state set the goal of deploying 100,000 heat pumps by 2025, a target it blew by two years ahead of schedule. The state now aims to get another 175,000 heat pumps up and running by 2027. Maine is also a member of a five-state coalition that is collaborating to boost heat pump adoption, lower prices, and train installers throughout New England.
The state’s new energy-efficiency plan is geared toward continuing this progress. It is centered largely on the idea of “beneficial electrification,” a somewhat jargony term that refers to switching from fossil fuels to electricity wherever the move would save money and cut emissions. There are plenty of opportunities to make that swap in Maine, where roughly half of households keep warm with heating oil, which can be pricey and inefficient.
Over the next three years, the incentives in the plan are forecast to support 38,000 new whole-home residential heat pump systems — including 6,500 in low-income households — and weatherization for 9,900 houses. A low-income household can get rebates of up to $9,000 for heat pump installations, and homes at high income levels qualify for up to $3,000. The incentives do not offer any money for residential fossil-fuel-burning equipment.
This strategy should decrease annual heating costs by more than $1,000 each for homes that switch to heat pumps from oil, propane, or electric baseboard heat, but it is also expected to lower electricity prices across the board, Stoddard said. Efficiency Maine Trust estimates the plan will suppress electricity rates by more than $490 million over the long term.
How? Utilities have certain fixed costs, such as maintaining power lines. To pay for them — and this is a bit of a simplification — they essentially divide the expense by the amount of power they expect customers to use in a year, and add that number to the rate they charge per kilowatt-hour. When more heat pumps come online, power demand goes up, so the fixed costs are spread out over more kilowatt-hours, lowering bills for the average consumer.
Accomplishing that effect depends on finding ways to make sure much of the added demand occurs during off-peak hours, when there is plenty of room for more power to flow along the lines without building out more infrastructure and thus increasing the utilities’ fixed costs. To achieve this timing, Maine’s plan includes demand-response programs that pay consumers for using less energy at peak times, an incentive for low-income residents to buy electric vehicles with chargers that can be set to work at off-peak times, and other measures.
“We’ve already invested a lot of money in the grid, and yet it sits largely unused for many hours of the day,” Stoddard said. “If we can find ways to manage consumption so that it is occurring during off-peak periods, then it will maximize the use of the grid infrastructure and spread the fixed costs of the utility across many more kilowatt-hours.”
Maine’s plan also includes an innovative program that calls for Efficiency Maine Trust to negotiate with retailers and distributors for discounted prices on electric water heaters and for agreements to keep the equipment in stock. The strategy is particularly effective at getting people to switch from fossil-fuel water heaters in moments when their old equipment has failed and they are searching for an affordable, easily available replacement, said Erin Cosgrove, director of policy and programs for the nonprofit Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships.
“This program is unique for the Northeast,” she said.
More states have prioritized electrification in their efficiency programs in recent years, said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director for the research group American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Massachusetts, for example, phased out its incentives for oil and gas equipment last year, and Washington, D.C., has also eliminated rebates for fossil-fuel-powered systems and appliances.
“What a lot of programs across the country are doing is recognizing that providing incentives for fossil-fuel-based systems doesn’t achieve their goals,” he said. “Most of the leading states are prioritizing efficient electric appliances like heat pumps going forward.”
Energy-efficiency programs have traditionally centered the big-picture goal of helping consumers lower their energy use to save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, whether that energy comes from an oil-delivery truck, a natural gas pipe, or over power lines.
Amid rising concern about climate change, however, more states have looked for ways to amplify the emissions impact of their programs. The solution has been to limit or eliminate incentives for fossil-fuel equipment and lean into electrification, which can often save consumers money and almost always reduce the emissions associated with heating and cooling their homes.
“When you use those additional metrics, you realize some of those old measures don’t make sense anymore,” Kresowik said.
It isn’t easy to trace the flows of electricity across a high-voltage transmission grid that spans 15 states from Louisiana to North Dakota. It’s harder still to differentiate the clean electrons from the dirty ones.
But doing so is necessary for states, companies, and other entities to track real progress toward decarbonization goals. Ultimately, it can be done — so long as you have the right data sources and the willingness to conduct some tricky analysis on power plant emissions and how power moves on the grid.
Just ask the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the country’s largest grid operator by geography, and Singularity Energy, a startup developing open-source carbon emissions accounting software. In March, the partners unveiled a “consumed emissions” dashboard, revealing the carbon footprint of electricity within MISO regions, states, and even individual counties, measured on an hour-by-hour basis.
That data is useful for utilities offering “green tariff” programs that promise climate-focused customers a certain share of renewable or carbon-free energy. It also helps states with zero-carbon or renewable energy targets determine the emissions impacts of importing power from out of state versus shuttering fossil-fuel power plants and building clean generation within their own borders.
Those were the two use cases detailed by Jordan Bakke, MISO’s director of strategic insights and assessments, during an April 23 workshop. “Our members and states are pursuing emissions goals both on their own behalf and on behalf of end customers,” he said. “The request that has been given to MISO is to fill that need for temporal, spatial, and timely granularity of emission estimations across our footprint.”
Greg Miller, research and policy lead at Singularity, said similar approaches could help companies that have contracted with wind and solar farms or nuclear power plants to determine how much of that carbon-free power is actually reaching their data centers, factories, and office buildings from hour to hour. That’s a big deal for corporate clean-energy buyers like Google and Microsoft that have committed to serving a growing amount of their enormous power needs with carbon-free electricity.
Singularity is one of many companies working on providing these increasingly complex grid-emissions calculations.
Software providers such as Electricity Maps, Flexidao, and Kevala are tracking power plant emissions and energy flows across swaths of Europe and North America. Companies like REsurety and WattTime have built “marginal emissions” methods to calculate the impact of clean energy generated at different times on regional grids. Major clean energy investors like Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and HASI are building carbon-tracking methods. And the EnergyTag international consortium has developed “granular certificate” standards to track hourly emissions associated with clean energy contracts.
But MISO’s consumed-emissions dashboard brings a new level of detail, Miller said. “We can’t trace individual electrons, just like we don’t trace water molecules in a river,” he said. “But we can trace larger power flows from generators to the loads where these flows are going.”
Two key data inputs feed Singularity’s emissions outputs for MISO’s new dashboard. The first is its fine-grained estimates of how much carbon is being emitted from individual fossil-fuel power plants — a seemingly simple calculation that’s actually quite complicated to nail down.
“Every generator’s efficiency is described in its heat rate — how much fuel it needs to burn to generate a unit of electricity,” Miller explained. Heat rates change from hour to hour, depending on factors ranging from the outdoor temperature to whether generators are running at maximum efficiency or are just being started up.
Singularity worked with nonprofit and research partners on a project called the Open Grid Emissions initiative to develop a method for calculating those constantly shifting emissions rates using public data and open-source methodologies. In the past year, it has developed a way to use available historical data to estimate those emissions changes in real time, Miller said. Experts in the field can check the methodology themselves “because it’s all modeled off publicly available data.”
The second key source of information at play for MISO’s dashboard is more proprietary — the power-flow data used to assess how much electricity from fossil-fueled power plants and all other sources is reaching the nodes on MISO’s transmission network on an hourly basis. That includes “information about how much power is getting generated and injected to the grid, how much power is getting withdrawn for loads, and the power flows for each transmission line in that network,” Miller said.
The platform that Singularity developed for running that analysis, dubbed CarbonFlow, uses open-source methods to reach its conclusions, he said. But the input data itself is kept confidential, both to protect the competitive interests of the power plant operators in MISO’s energy markets and to comply with federal mandates meant to protect critical infrastructure.
The end result isn’t as complete a picture as some might imagine, Miller emphasized. MISO only tracks power down to the individual substations that convert high-voltage power to lower voltages for use on distribution grids, for example, not to individual customers.
And while the dashboard’s emissions data will be made available on a near-real-time basis at the regional and state level, users have to wait a month after the end of each quarter to look at the hourly data for counties. That’s to avoid revealing operational information about fossil-fueled power plants in those counties to competitors, at least in timeframes that would allow them to act on it in ways that could give them unfair advantages.
Nonetheless, publicly accessible data at the hourly and county level is breaking new ground in the world of grid carbon accounting, Miller said. “This may be for only one region in the U.S. But it proves it’s possible to calculate this data — and other grid operators can do it too, if this data were required more broadly in accounting standards.”
Kathleen Spees, a principal with consultancy The Brattle Group, would like to see MISO and Singularity’s approach picked up by more grid operators. “At the least, they have to start providing the data,” she said.
Brattle was hired by the Illinois Commerce Commission to help develop the state’s Renewable Energy Access Plan, a road map for how the state can meet its mandate to reach 100% carbon-free power by 2045. Illinois already gets more than half of its power from in-state nuclear plants and is aiming to dramatically expand its use of solar and wind power from both within and outside its borders.
“But Illinois, like many states, is highly interconnected with its neighbors,” Spees said. “You can’t just reduce the fossil emissions in your state and say you’re done.” In fact, “if you ramp down gas in Illinois and ramp up coal somewhere else, that’s counterproductive” to the state’s carbon-cutting goals.
That’s why grid operators must be in the picture. The energy markets they run don’t account for carbon emissions today, although some grid operators are starting to make certain emissions data available to participants. But “over time, they have to create the mechanisms for trade,” Spees said, “so that the states that value green energy and avoiding carbon emissions have valid signals.”
Utilities and regulators need hard data to start translating these commonsense understandings of how grids work into real policy decisions with dollars and cents attached to them, Spees said. “We’re not talking minor academic interest here — we’re talking real money. What fraction of the enormous amount of capital going into our sector can ignore carbon implications? It has to be validated.”
That’s going to be complicated, particularly in Illinois, which is served both by MISO throughout most of the state and by PJM Interconnection, a grid operator serving 13 states from Virginia to the Chicago region. But the work has to start somewhere, and “the contribution that MISO is making here is really pushing the envelope in terms of the technical advance of what they can offer,” she said.
Singularity CEO Wenbo Shi pointed out another key use case for MISO’s data: informing “green tariff” programs that are available in most states. Green tariffs offer customers — usually corporate buyers looking to add clean power — the option to pay higher rates to secure a greater share of renewable or carbon-free electricity than what is available from the utility’s general mix of generation.
But to balance things out, each transfer of clean-power ownership rights from a utility to a customer must then be subtracted from the utility’s mix for other customers, lest it be “double-counted” as the same resource belonging to multiple end users.
“Once you can do that, you know exactly who gets what, and what’s left,” Shi said. “This eliminates the risk of double-counting.” The new MISO dashboard can help utilities make these calculations, he said. To accurately allocate clean electricity to the right customers, utilities must first understand their whole supply mix — and those that are part of a regional grid like MISO also need to factor in the energy that they purchase from the wholesale market.
Singularity has worked with utility Southern Co. to deploy such a system to provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their energy mix and emissions, Shi said. In MISO, one of the first users of the grid operator’s consumed-emissions data-tracking capabilities has been utility Entergy Arkansas, which offers green tariffs for customers such as steelmakers.
To be clear, MISO is explicitly not using its consumed-emissions data to inform “market-based” carbon accounting, Miller said. That’s the term for contractual arrangements that establish ownership of a unit of clean energy, such as the renewable energy certificates created under Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scope 2 Guidance, the gold standard in emissions accounting.
At the same time, the GHG Protocol is in the midst of changes that may make the kind of tracking Singularity is doing quite useful for market-based accounting, Miller noted.
Today, companies can offset emissions associated with their electricity use through clean energy purchases that are averaged out over the course of a year, and which can come from sources far removed from a company’s power-using facilities.
Those loose accounting rules helped enable corporate spending in building more clean energy when solar and wind were rare and expensive, and when linking their generation and delivery to a corporate customer’s actual energy consumption was less important. But clean energy has now become the cheapest and most common source of new grid capacity, which means that when and where new clean energy is being built — and whether it’s actually being used by the facilities of the companies claiming it — matters much more.
The data center boom is pushing these issues to the forefront for utilities and regulators. Data center expansions being proposed to feed the AI ambitions of tech giants are threatening to overwhelm the capacity of power grids in key markets across the country, including states like Wisconsin that lie within MISO’s grid footprint.
These ballooning load forecasts are driving utilities and grid operators to propose fast-tracking new fossil gas-fired power plants. But that threatens to undermine the aggressive clean-energy targets set by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other companies driving the data center boom, giving them impetus to seek cleaner options.
Just how the GHG Protocol’s rules on clean electricity accounting should work is a contentious subject, with major clean-energy buyers split on issues such as the well-publicized debate over whether they should aspire to 24/7 clean power at their facilities or invest in projects that will reduce the most emissions.
Singularity hasn’t waded into those debates, Shi said. But the technology that it and competing firms are developing can provide the tools necessary to allow clean-energy buyers and states to go beyond high-level and potentially misleading understandings of their emissions — and get closer to actually measuring those crucial figures.
Singularity is “tracing everything, whether it’s based on power flows or contracted,” Shi added “There are technologies that are being deployed that can solve that problem.”
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