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Around the world, smelters use massive amounts of electricity — often generated by fossil fuels — to turn raw materials into aluminum. As more carbon-free energy comes onto the grid, these power-hungry facilities will get progressively cleaner. But smelters will never be entirely emissions-free until producers can solve a much trickier technical problem.
That’s because modern aluminum plants rely on a 19th-century process that uses big blocks of carbon, which account for almost one-sixth of the greenhouse gases associated with producing new aluminum globally. Replacing the blocks is crucial to decarbonizing this key industrial process.
Now the industry may be one step closer to reaching that goal.
Earlier this month, the Canadian firm Elysis said it hit a major milestone when it deployed an industrial-size, carbon-free anode inside an existing smelter in Alma, Quebec. Elysis is a joint venture of the U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa and global mining company Rio Tinto, both of which produce aluminum in the Canadian province.
“This is really a first for the aluminum industry, and a worldwide first as well,” François Perras, president and CEO of Elysis, told Canary Media.
Elysis installed its “inert,” or chemically inactive, anode technology in a 450-kiloampere (kA) cell, the same amount of electric current used in many large, modern smelters. The full-scale prototype is a significant step up from the company’s 100 kA pilot unit, which has produced low-carbon aluminum used in certain Apple laptops and iPhones, Michelob Ultra beer cans, and the wheels for Audi’s electric sports car.
Elysis launched in 2018 and has raised over 650 million Canadian dollars ($460 million) in investment for the effort, including from the governments of Canada and Quebec. The 450 kA cell will undergo several more years of testing as the company works to measure and validate how the larger unit performs inside a commercial smelter.
Rio Tinto, meanwhile, has already licensed the inert-anode technology from Elysis. The manufacturer plans to build a demonstration plant with 10 of the 100 kA cells at its existing Arvida smelter in Quebec, possibly by 2027, through a joint venture with the provincial government.
“We’re trying to replace a process that has been used for close to 140 years,” Perras said of the initiatives.
Elysis belongs to a small but persistent group spread across China, Iceland, Norway, and Russia that aims to disrupt the smelting method known as the Hall–Héroult process.
Smelting involves dissolving powdery alumina in a molten salt, which is heated to over 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Large carbon anodes are lowered into the highly corrosive bath, and electrical currents run through the entire structure. Aluminum then deposits at the bottom as oxygen combines with carbon in the blocks, creating CO2 as a by-product. It also releases perfluorochemicals (PFCs) — long-lasting greenhouse gases — as well as harmful sulfur dioxide pollution.
The anodes themselves are made using petroleum coke, a rocklike by-product of oil refining.
The Hall–Héroult process was revolutionary, but it is extremely energy-intensive. Most of the emissions associated with producing aluminum are tied to electricity production. In the United States, more than 70% of CO2 pollution from six operating smelters came from the power supply in 2021, according to the Environmental Integrity Project. (The U.S. now has four smelters left, three of which rely on fossil-fuel power.)
Another 20% of U.S. smelters’ carbon emissions were directly from the electrochemical process, the EIP study found. Smelting was also responsible for virtually all the PFCs reported by metal producers to the Environmental Protection Agency that year.
The solution to reducing electricity-related emissions is relatively straightforward: Deploy vast amounts of wind, solar, battery storage, and other clean energy sources. But completely eliminating emissions from the smelting process requires redesigning how the anodes and cells work — and researchers are only just beginning to develop commercial-size alternatives.
Smelting represents “the hardest-to-abate emissions from primary aluminum production,” said Caroline Kim, a technical analyst on climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s really important that we’re able to replace carbon anodes,” she added, noting that PFCs last for tens of thousands of years longer in the atmosphere than CO2 does.
Elysis and other inert-anode developers have been tight-lipped about the composition and performance of their technologies, often citing trade secrets. But Elysis’ industrial-scale prototype, as well as Rio Tinto’s future demonstration plant in Quebec, could provide key answers about whether inert anodes can become the game-changing solution that many aluminum and climate experts are betting on.
“Now that it seems like [Elysis’] technology can work, the question is more about, can it be done at full-scale, sustained operating conditions at or below current costs?” Kim said.
Perras didn’t say what kinds of materials Elysis uses in its anodes. “This is our secret sauce,” he explained. But generally, the idea is to use inert metallic alloys or ceramics that don’t contain carbon, and thus won’t release CO2 and PFCs when zapped with electricity.
Elysis has also swapped the horizontal design of typical smelting pots for a “vertical approach” that Perras said looks more like a battery. These and other technical changes are expected to increase the lifespan of anodes by several years, so aluminum producers won’t have to replace them as often as they do carbon blocks, ideally reducing costs.
Aluminum experts have pointed out that the new technology could, in theory, consume more total electricity than conventional anodes, which would raise smelters’ energy needs even higher. But Perras said that Elysis is focused on making its technology competitive on both costs and energy consumption. “What we are targeting, and what we’ve seen so far, is that the technology we have is in a similar bracket of operation ranges from the incumbent Hall–Héroult technology,” he said.
Eventually, aluminum companies will be able to install Elysis’ technology in existing smelters — whenever they decide to expand production or replace old smelting pots — or in new facilities, Perras said.
In the United States, Emirates Global Aluminium is planning a $4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, while Century Aluminum is evaluating sites for a plant in the Ohio and Mississippi River Basins. Given that Elysis is aiming to mature its full-scale technology by the end of this decade, it seems unlikely that the new U.S. facilities will use inert anodes initially.
The news of Elysis’ milestone comes as the Trump administration guts federal funding for industrial decarbonization projects domestically.
Ian Wells, the federal industrial lead on climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the United States should be making similar investments in large-scale innovation projects to remain competitive with other countries.
Still, “we want to see emissions reductions around the world,” Wells said. If Elysis’ technology works as promised, he added, “it could be a real win for climate, and something that could help aluminum production really compete in an increasingly carbon-conscious global economy.”
Steel is one of the world’s most traded commodities, with roughly one-third of the global supply crossing borders. That makes decarbonizing the carbon-intensive sector a challenge when different companies or governments rely on disparate criteria to determine the amount of emissions to attribute to a ton of steel.
That’s now changing. On Friday, two major industry associations in China and Europe each signed onto landmark agreements with the Australian nonprofit ResponsibleSteel to set internationally coherent standards for what qualifies as green steel. Together, the three organizations represent around 60% of global steel production.
On the face of it, green steel seems easy to tell from the dirtier variety. If iron is made in a direct-reduction facility that uses a zero-carbon fuel such as green hydrogen, and that iron is transformed in an electric arc furnace powered by clean energy, then the resulting steel is unequivocally green. But factories that meet those specifications are virtually nonexistent, given the high cost and limited availability of green hydrogen.
Early next year, the European Union will start charging levies on imports based on how much planet-heating pollution was produced in their manufacturing — a policy called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM. But it will be a struggle to determine how high the tariff should be on steel that wasn’t made with green hydrogen but didn’t come from a coal-fired blast furnace.
“When you’re measuring emissions from steel, how do you measure natural gas and coal that’s used? Are you including upstream emissions? Are you counting coproducts you might not sell as steel but as cement?” Annie Heaton, the chief executive of ResponsibleSteel, said Friday on a call from outside the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil. “You need transparency, otherwise you can get a 20%, 30%, even 40% difference between different kinds of clean steel.”
The two agreements with ResponsibleSteel are separate, bilateral deals with each regional group, the China Iron and Steel Association and the Brussels-based Low Emission Steel Standard organization.
The watchdog group SteelWatch, which was not involved in the agreements, praised what it called “technical folk doing the wizardry for interoperability.”
“Decarbonization of steelmaking is hampered by lack of disclosure, inconsistent data, and a confusing array of standards,” SteelWatch’s executive director, Caroline Ashley, who is based in the United Kingdom, said over email. “It is a positive step forward that the decarbonization standards of these three organisations — one Chinese, one European, and one global — are aligning.”
China and Europe are the most obvious markets in which to start this process. China produces more than half the world’s supply of steel, and Europe’s CBAM promises to remake the continent as the first major destination for lower-carbon versions of the metal. Just this month, Germany’s national rail company, Deutsche Bahn, launched a pilot program to acquire green steel for its tracks. Over the summer, a major Chinese steelmaker promised to send a debut shipment of green steel to Italy in a move experts saw as setting the stage for exporting more of the metal.
The agreement “marks an important milestone for China’s steel industry in actively practicing green development principles,” China Baowu Steel Group’s chief carbon-neutrality representative, Wang Qiangmin, said in a press release.
Frederik Van de Velde, the chief executive of ArcelorMittal Belgium, called the partnership “a game-changer for our industry” in the release.
“By aligning our standards, we are … shaping a global consensus on what defines low-emission steel,” he said.
ResponsibleSteel this month released its “interoperability framework,” setting out the principles that will enable translating carbon metrics across its various agreements.
Heaton said India could prove trickier to rope into a standard-setting scheme because the government in New Delhi already established its own certification standards for green steel last December. The United States may be reversing most of its industry efforts on green steel, but the federal government already has in place a procurement system with what Heaton called a “threshold definition of what it means for a state procurement entity to buy clean steel, and it’s not a million miles from” the standards ResponsibleSteel is setting in China and Europe.
Despite its backtracking on green steel, Heaton said, the U.S. has some green shoots. In what’s arguably the most significant American project now, Hyundai Motor Group is plowing ahead with a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana, with the intention to initially rely on natural gas but swap in green hydrogen sometime in the next decade. Cleveland-Cliffs may have abandoned its plans to rebuild an Ohio coal-fired steel plant as a green-steel factory, but the firm’s new strategic partnership announced last month with the South Korean steel giant Posco could lay the groundwork for future decarbonization efforts, particularly as the Pohang-based company advances other green-steel projects abroad.
Still, worldwide, the sector’s efforts to decarbonize face serious challenges. “There’s a trickle of projects going forward, but it’s really not looking very promising,” Heaton said. “The finance needs to flow. The demand needs to be there. The agreements need to be signed that would actually signal to steelmakers that they can invest in a way that’s viable.”
Creating a common language for what such investments would look like, she said, is a key step toward establishing those conditions.
“The ultimate goal is comparability,” she said. “Whether you’re a buyer or a lender, you’ll know the performance of a project you’re funding or buying from. You’ll know how it stacks up on a global scale.”
The Trump administration has ordered the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open for the next 90 days, citing an energy “emergency” that state utility regulators and regional grid operators say does not exist.
It’s the latest move in the administration’s expanding agenda to force aging and costly coal plants to keep running, despite warnings from energy experts and lawmakers that doing so will burden Americans with billions of dollars in unnecessary energy costs and environmental harms.
Tuesday’s emergency order from the Department of Energy was anticipated by Consumers Energy, the utility that owns and operates the 63-year-old facility. It’s the third such emergency order for the plant; the DOE issued its first directive in May, one week before the plant was scheduled to be retired, and then re-upped the decision in August.
State attorneys general are challenging the DOE’s authority to keep J.H. Campbell running. Environmental groups have also filed lawsuits to try to block the DOE’s emergency must-run orders for the J.H. Campbell plant, as well as similar directives for another fossil-fueled power plant in Pennsylvania. Opponents say the move is a blatant attempt to prop up a dying industry at the expense of everyday utility customers.
“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount. Coal is more expensive than modern resources like wind, solar, and batteries,” Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders, said in a Wednesday statement.
Consumers Energy reported in an October earnings call that the cost of keeping the plant running past its planned closure had added up to $80 million, which is more than $615,000 per day, from May to the end of September.
An analysis from the consultancy Grid Strategies found that a broad application of the DOE’s emergency authority to the more than 60 gigawatts of aging coal, gas, and oil-fueled power plants likely to face closure by 2028 could add nearly $6 billion in costs to U.S. consumers by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term.
In the emergency order issued late Tuesday night, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “I hereby determine that an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electricity, and other causes.” The DOE has authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to order utilities regulated by states to keep plants running under emergency circumstances.
But that claim of an emergency is belied by analysis from Consumers Energy and Michigan utility regulators, who determined in 2022 that the plant’s closure would not threaten grid reliability and that replacing it with fossil gas, solar, and battery resources could save customers $600 million through 2040.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages the transmission grid supplying power to about 45 million people in 15 states, including Michigan, has also determined that the J.H. Campbell plant is not necessary to maintain grid reliability.
“Michigan’s Public Service Commission, grid experts, and the utility all agree it’s time for Campbell to go,” Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said in a Wednesday statement.
Those reliability analyses focused on the summer months, when MISO’s grid is under the greatest stress from demand for electricity to support air-conditioning during heat waves. MISO does not face a near-term reliability challenge in winter months at present, according to a winter readiness assessment issued in October.
Aging coal plants are less reliable and more prone to unplanned outages than more modern power plants, according to a recent analysis of data from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. Environmental Protection Agency data shows that the J.H. Campbell plant stopped generating for multiple stretches this summer and fall, indicating it may not be a reliable resource during emergencies, Lenoff noted in a November interview.
“Mandating aging, unreliable and costly coal plants to stay open past their retirement is a guaranteed way to needlessly hike up Americans’ electricity bills and make air pollution worse,” Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a Wednesday statement.
The DOE may soon issue Section 202(c) orders requiring two coal plants set for closure this year in Colorado to stay running, according to reports.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration in February reported about 8.1 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire this year, including the 1.8-gigawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
Lenoff warned that the Trump administration appears “ready to issue additional orders to prevent the long-planned retirement of some of the dirtiest and oldest coal-burning power plants in the U.S. That amounts to a corporate bailout of coal at our expense.”
The startup Sortera Technologies has raised fresh funding to expand its tech-driven recycling operations — with an eye toward meeting rising U.S. demand for low-carbon aluminum.
Sortera uses advanced sensors and artificial intelligence to sort different types of aluminum found in old car parts and appliances. On Thursday, the company said it raised $45 million to fuel its next phase of growth, including from global investment firm T. Rowe Price Associates, venture capital fund VXI Capital, and Yamaha Motor Ventures, an arm of the Japanese manufacturer.
Sortera’s flagship facility in Markle, Indiana, currently processes about 100 million pounds of shredded metal per year to recover specific alloys — blends of aluminum that contain other elements to make them stronger and more durable. With the new investment, the startup plans to build a second plant next year, in Lebanon, Tennessee, to double its capacity to pick through gleaming scrap heaps.
The expansion comes as the United States is racing to shore up supplies of aluminum.
Part of that is driven by the Trump administration’s increased tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel, which have put pressure on U.S. manufacturers to produce more metal. Automakers are also using more lightweight aluminum instead of steel, including in battery-powered cars and hulking Ford F-150 pickup trucks. Data-center developers need more of the metal for their buildings and the technology inside, while some buyers are looking specifically for lower-carbon aluminum to meet decarbonization goals.
The U.S. is now playing catch-up. America’s production of new, primary aluminum has declined significantly in recent decades, and while plans are underway to build two new smelters, neither is expected to be fully on line this decade. Both projects will also need to secure huge amounts of cheap — and ideally clean — electricity at a time when that’s hard to come by.
Recycling aluminum, on the other hand, requires only about 5% of the energy that’s needed to produce the metal in power-hungry smelters. As a result, it’s generally a faster, cheaper, and lower-carbon way of making aluminum products.
“The domestic market is hungry for sustainable, high-quality recycled aluminum,” said Michael Siemer, Sortera’s CEO.
The country’s use of scrap will climb even higher once two new rolling facilities — which shape aluminum into plates, sheets, and coils — ramp up production. Steel Dynamics rolled its first hot coils at a $1.9 billion plant in Mississippi this summer. Novelis, which is partnering with Sortera to use the startup’s rescued aluminum, is slated to bring its $2.5 billion facility on line in Alabama later next year.
“For them to be green, they each are going to need an additional billion pounds of scrap aluminum,” Siemer estimated.
Despite the growing domestic appetite for aluminum, much of what the country recycles still gets exported overseas, particularly when it’s lumped together with other metals like copper, brass, and titanium. Magnets can easily pull out pieces of steel from scrap piles, but aluminum alloys are tricky to sort. That leaves behind roughly 18 billion pounds of mixed-metal material per year, about 10 billion of which include aluminum alloys, according to Sortera.
“We generally scoop it up, put it into ships, and send it to Southeast Asia,” where the metals are sorted by hand, Siemer said of the industry’s approach. “Or it’s made into low-value products in America, where you can melt the aluminum down” with the other metals, he added, likening the process to melting a box of colorful crayons into a functional, but less desirable, brown soup.
Sortera’s founders, Nalin Kumar and Manual Garcia, launched the company in 2020 to introduce more precision and automation to this sorting process. After spinning out of an Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy program that focused on recycling metals for lightweight vehicles and aircraft, the startup raised money from firms including Chrysalix Venture Capital and the Bill Gates–affiliated Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Sortera said the funding announced this week brings its total investment to about $120 million.
Other early-stage companies are working on new ways to pluck recyclable materials out of the gobsmacking amounts of garbage we generate every day. Greyparrot, for example, has developed AI camera systems that recycling firms can install to track aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic packaging as they move down conveyor belts. The startup Amp uses software-driven robotic systems inside its own plants to automatically sort materials.
But Sortera handles only scrap metal, and it hunts for only specific types of high-quality aluminum alloys — ones that manufacturers like Novelis are typically willing to pay more for. The company’s Indiana facility can also process scrap at high enough volumes to justify handling it domestically, Siemer said.
“They’re getting into a really interesting niche,” said Parker Bovée, who leads waste and recycling research for the consulting firm Cleantech Group. “If you can get pure sorted alloys, then you know exactly what you’re dealing with,” which makes the metal more valuable to the companies turning it back into car frames, engine blocks, or complex metal parts.
Bovée said that from an investment standpoint, he considers Sortera’s approach to be higher risk than a software-only solution, since it involves spending more capital to build facilities and machinery. Waste management in general “is a difficult industry to break into and make substantial inroads,” he said. But Sortera’s ability to capture sought-after alloys “makes them very impressive.”
Siemer added that Sortera will eventually use its technology to sort the other metals found in shredded scrap piles. But for now, he said, “We’re building a business on the aluminum.”
The Trump administration appears poised to force more coal plants to stay open past their planned closing dates — an unprecedented intervention in the power sector that is already making energy even more expensive for Americans.
The first signal of the strategy came in late May. A week before the J.H. Campbell coal plant’s scheduled shutdown, the Department of Energy directed the 63-year-old facility in Michigan to keep operating for 90 days. The agency has since re-upped that order, and the power plant’s owner, Consumers Energy, expects another extension later this month. Through the end of September, the move had already cost Consumers’ customers a total of $80 million, or roughly $615,000 per day.
But the J.H. Campbell plant is unlikely to remain the lone example. Despite the costs, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive who denies the severity of the climate change crisis, is reportedly intending to interfere in more long-planned coal plant closures — this time in Colorado.
Late last month, the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association revealed that DOE officials have indicated they will issue a Section 202(c) order to keep Unit 1 of the electric cooperative’s Craig Station coal plant online past its scheduled closure later this year. Tri-State provides power to member utilities that collectively serve over 1 million customers in rural Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
“Based on conversations with the U.S. Department of Energy, we believe that it is likely that we will receive an emergency order before the end of the year,” Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz told Canary Media. That puts the cooperative in a bind, given that “we do have legal requirements to close that unit, but we also are closing it for economic reasons,” he said.
Tri-State declined to disclose the costs it would incur due to an emergency order. But the cooperative’s broader plans to expand clean energy and close coal plants are expected to save its members $422 million over 20 years.
Another Colorado coal plant slated for closure this year is also likely to stay online, whether via DOE fiat or more typical state processes.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing a district in western Colorado, wrote a letter to the DOE last month asking it to stall the planned retirement of Comanche Unit 2, a more than 300-megawatt power plant owned by Xcel Energy. The utility estimated in 2018 that shutting down two Comanche units and building out renewables would save customers about $213 million over time. This week, Xcel Energy and state agencies petitioned Colorado regulators to delay the retirement of Comanche Unit 2 until the end of 2026 due to repeated failures at the newer Unit 3.
In both Michigan and Colorado, regulators and utilities had previously determined that shutting down the coal plants in question would not compromise grid reliability.
Still, the Trump administration said the J.H. Campbell plant needed to stay online due to summertime grid emergencies. No such emergencies came to pass this summer. In fact, the regional grid operator “had 10 times the amount of unused resources available to it than the amount of energy Campbell was providing,” said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders.
The Trump administration has also issued Section 202(c) orders forcing the Eddystone oil- and gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania to stay open.
These eleventh-hour orders come with both direct and indirect costs.
Power plants on the verge of closure reassign workers and defer maintenance. They stop purchasing fuel; the J.H. Campbell facility likely had to make an expensive rush order after receiving last-minute notice that it would have to operate. These direct costs associated with reversing closure plans can range from the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, as is the case in Colorado, utility customers are often already paying for energy infrastructure that will replace coal units, said Matthew Gerhart, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club’s Denver office. If the DOE orders Craig Unit 1 and Comanche Unit 2 to keep running, those customers will end up “paying twice, since they’re already paying for the replacement resources.”
Coal provided about 15% of electricity in the U.S. in 2024, a far cry from the 51% it provided in 2001. Swapping renewables and fossil gas in for the dirty power source has been a major driver of decarbonization for the nation’s grid.
About 8.1 gigawatts’ worth of coal-fired capacity, or 4.7% of the U.S. coal fleet, was scheduled to retire this year as of February, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That list includes the 1,800-megawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
These facilities are some of the most expensive plants to run within the coal fleet, which is itself the costliest source of electricity on the U.S. grid today, said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.
The think tank reported in June that coal-plant owners spent $6.2 billion more in 2024 than they would have spent for the same amount of electricity generated by coal in 2021. The 28% increase was driven by the rising costs of maintaining a power-plant fleet with an average age of 44 years.
The plants set to retire this year “are on the higher end of the cost increases we saw” compared to the U.S. coal fleet as a whole, Solomon added.
What’s more, “all these plants are likely to be less reliable and efficient, because the owners are reducing the amount of maintenance they’re doing,” she said. That means, ironically, they’re more likely to be offline when needed for the emergencies that are the DOE’s rationale for keeping them open.
Lenoff highlighted U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data that shows the J.H. Campbell units “kept going on and off” from July 1 through Sept. 30. “They’d operate for 24 hours, days on end — and then shut off.”
That’s problematic for two reasons, he said. First, under Section 202(c), the DOE is “only allowed to order the units to run during designated hours of emergency. But these units have been running 24 hours a day.” Second, weeks-long shutdowns indicate that the plants are unlikely to be available when the grid really needs them.
“Meanwhile, Campbell was racking up costs and polluting its neighbors and polluting Lake Michigan,” he said.
The Trump administration could foist enormous costs onto consumers if it ultimately pursues a policy of blocking most fossil-fuel retirements.
Americans are already struggling with utility bills that have been rising at more than twice the rate of overall inflation this year. Democratic candidates focused on energy affordability won races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and won two of five seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
In an August analysis, consultancy Grid Strategies estimated that if the DOE forced about 35 gigawatts’ worth of large fossil-fueled power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 to keep running, annual costs for utility customers could reach $4.8 billion by the end of Donald Trump’s term.
Add in the risk of forced operations of another 31.4 gigawatts of fossil-fueled power plants that are not slated for retirement but are around retirement age, and the yearly costs rise to $5.9 billion.
Michael Goggin, Grid Strategies executive vice president and author of the report, said that the latest data from Consumers Energy on the costs of J.H. Campbell indicate that “our August estimate stands, and if anything appears conservative.”
The DOE isn’t responsible for every coal plant that remains running past its sell-by date, Goggin noted. Grid operator PJM Interconnection has ordered the Brandon Shores coal plant and H.A. Wagner oil-fired plant in Maryland to run years past their planned closure, under a longstanding process to determine when retirements could threaten critical grid reliability. Xcel’s Monday petition asking state regulators to postpone the closure of Comanche Unit 2 is another example of how coal plants can be kept open through traditional processes.
That “reliability must-run” process has its critics. But it also has well-established rules that regional grid operators, state utility regulators, and other stakeholders follow.
The DOE’s use of Section 202(c) emergency authority under the Trump administration, by contrast, has broken with these decades-old rules. Critics fear the administration’s true goal is not to ensure grid reliability, but to unilaterally carry out a political agenda to bolster the fossil-fuel industry and undermine clean energy.
It’s not an outlandish argument. The Trump administration has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to propping up coal-fired power plants. It has also ordered the DOE to create a process by which the agency could usurp state and regional grid planning decisions to unilaterally declare any power plant in the country as critical. In July, the DOE issued a heavily criticized report claiming that coal-plant closures represent a major threat to grid reliability.
Meanwhile, the costs being pushed onto utility customers by the DOE’s existing must-run orders are starting to cause political tensions.
Last month, Kentucky’s attorney general and an electrical cooperative in the state filed a joint protest before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging PJM’s plan to spread the costs of keeping plants forced to remain open under DOE order across all utilities within the grid operator’s 13-state footprint.
Regulators are working out similar cost-sharing arrangements across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator region for the extra expenses borne by Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running. The logic is that the DOE’s orders claim that the plant is necessary for region-wide grid reliability, and that consumers across the region must therefore bear part of the burden.
These extra costs are coming at a time of rising utility rates in PJM, in MISO, and across the country, which intensifies the likelihood that individual states and utilities will balk at being asked to carry costs for power plants that nobody but DOE has said need to keep running.
“It’s a strange environment,” Goggin said. “There’s large load growth, and resource-adequacy concerns, and there are always going to be people arguing about not paying for something. But in this case it’s complicated by the fact that everyone wants to retire a plant that everyone has already signed off on.”
Legal challenges from state attorneys general and nonprofit groups are underway, but moving slowly. Lawsuits against the DOE’s Section 202(c) order for the J.H. Campbell plant are now awaiting review at the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure this case is heard” quickly, Earthjustice’s Lenoff said. But that process will likely stretch into the middle of next year, he said.
Meanwhile, Goggin said, with the DOE only forcing J.H. Campbell and Eddystone to stay open so far, “this has been flying under the radar a little bit.” But if the DOE moves ahead on Section 202(c) orders for the rest of the coal power plants set for closure this year, “we’re getting people ready to understand that this thing may be coming to your utility very soon.”
Representatives from all over the world are currently meeting on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belem, Brazil, to try and advance the global transition away from fossil fuels.
The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.
Today, that 1.5°C target is essentially impossible to meet, and the world is nowhere near on track to achieve the U.N.’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Even keeping warming below 2°C is a long shot. New estimates from the Rhodium Group suggest we’re on track for between 2°C and 3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with 2.8°C being the average outcome. Those figures would exacerbate extreme weather that has already worsened in recent years with far less warming.
It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.
The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.
Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.
Despite this progress, the line of actual, recorded emissions continues to tick up. This year’s COP comes amid global backpedaling on climate commitments and countless calls for a new, affordability-focused approach to the energy transition that proponents say is more pragmatic. The U.S. government, meanwhile, declined to even send a delegation to the event. (Trump administration officials had no problem carving out time to hawk natural gas to the European Union in Athens, Greece, last week.)
These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.
New York just slammed the brakes on rules that would’ve prohibited fossil fuels in new homes and businesses.
The Empire State was on the precipice of fully enacting the All-Electric Buildings Act that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in 2023. The first-in-the-nation standard requires most new buildings to install efficient, electric appliances such as heat pumps instead of health-harming gas, propane, and fuel-oil systems. Regulators finalized the rules in July; they were set to take effect Dec. 31.
But on Wednesday, the state agreed to not enforce the zero-emissions standard until the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals makes its decision on a two-year-old lawsuit challenging the All-Electric Buildings Act. Climate-advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice expects that’ll delay the landmark building code until at least the fall of 2026, as oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
The legislation “was a promise that New York would stop locking families into expensive, polluting fossil-fuel systems and start building for the future,” said Democratic Assemblymember Gabriella Romero on a Thursday call with reporters. “Delaying this law is a total betrayal of that promise.”
Putting the all-electric building code on ice is an abrupt about-face for the administration. On Oct. 1, the state filed a brief saying that New Yorkers would “suffer irreparable harm if the Code amendments are delayed from taking effect,” because it would allow new buildings to depend on fossil-fuel equipment that would generate greenhouse gases and local air pollution for decades to come. That, in turn, would drive up the health, agriculture, and broader economy costs imposed by worsening climate catastrophes.
But just over one month later, Hochul signaled openness to pausing the law after a group of 19 Democratic state legislators raised concerns about its affordability and impact on the grid. Multiple studies have found that the grid has ample room for all-electric new buildings, and making them the default would benefit the planet and people’s pocketbooks.
Hochul’s office has positioned the delay as a pragmatic step that could expedite implementation of the rule in the long term. By voluntarily pausing the law, Hochul may be trying to avoid a potentially multiyear holdup should the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court and get on its “shadow docket.” That emergency process is typically less transparent than the court’s usual decision-making protocol.
“The Governor remains committed to the all-electric-buildings law and believes this action will help the State defend it, as well as reduce regulatory uncertainty for developers during this period of litigation,” Ken Lovett, energy and environment spokesperson for Hochul, told Canary Media. She’s “resolved to providing more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for New Yorkers.”
Earthjustice argues that there’s no reason to expect that the groups challenging the law would’ve been able to hamper its implementation if the state hadn’t made the concession itself.
The plaintiffs in the case — including the New York State Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Propane Gas Association — allege that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts the all-electric buildings law. That same reasoning was used to overturn Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban. In July, New York prevailed when a federal district judge in the state rejected the argument.
Similar lawsuits are playing out in courts around the country, including a challenge to New York City’s own all-electric-buildings standard, which has been in effect since 2024.
Hochul’s decision to slow-roll building electrification is part of her administration’s realpolitik embrace of fossil fuels. Last Friday, New York regulators signed off on a Trump-backed underwater gas pipeline, after having denied the requisite permits three times before. The same day, her administration announced a deal to allow a gas plant that mainly powers cryptocurrency mining to keep operating for at least five years. She also has yet to sign a bill that repeals gas-hookup subsidies. Legislators passed it in June.
Hochul justified recent moves by saying the state needs to “govern in reality.”
“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach,” she said last week in a statement.
Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha said she’s deeply concerned about the administration’s trajectory. Reducing the lethal and expensive harms born of the climate crisis “is not an optional goal,” she said. “Really, we’re talking about a disruption to our economy if we don’t act — in the same way the pandemic disrupted our economy.”
In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.
To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO2, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO2.)
In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO2 the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.
To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO2 that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.
At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.
The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.
Have global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions gone up or down this year?
The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.
Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.
They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.
This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.
While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.
As of Sept. 30, Ohio lawmakers eliminated a key legal tool used to rein in air pollution from power plants and industrial sites. Now, advocates are suing to restore that right.
For decades, environmental groups in Ohio and elsewhere have used air nuisance rules in state plans as a catchall way to enforce the federal Clean Air Act. Ohio’s version let people take legal action against companies whose emissions “endanger the health, safety or welfare of the public, or cause unreasonable injury or damage to property.” The rule dates back more than 50 years.
Environmental groups have used air nuisance rules to file or threaten lawsuits against coal-burning power plants, iron and steel facilities, coke plants, and other industrial operations, which emit not only planet-warming greenhouse gases but also harmful pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead.
Defendants in cases brought under Ohio’s version of the rule have included Suncoke Energy, AK Steel–Middletown Works, Georgia-Pacific Corp., and Phthalchem. Consent decrees and settlements have produced orders or agreements to stop alleged nuisances, clean up waste, and expand monitoring.
But a last-minute addition to the state’s 3,156-page budget bill, House Bill 96, told the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cut that protection out of the state’s Clean Air Act plan.
“The air nuisance rule is the tool that Ohioans have to hold polluters accountable,” said Neil Waggoner, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign manager for the Midwest. “This is the state government saying … we’re going to take this away from you in the most secretive fashion possible.”
The Sierra Club is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with the Ohio Environmental Council, SOBE Concerned Citizens, and the Freshwater Accountability Project. The fifth plaintiff, Donna Ballinger, is a Middletown resident who lives close to iron and steel operations, which she claims cause nuisance conditions. An August report by the Environmental Integrity Project documented likely air quality problems in that area.
Experts warn that eliminating the right to file air nuisance complaints weakens Ohio’s enforcement of pollution measures at an already perilous moment for environmental regulation.
For months, the Trump administration has been rolling back federal pollution standards and making huge personnel cuts to the staff charged with enforcing the remaining rules and permits. The Ohio EPA has authority to enforce the Clean Air Act but doesn’t always pursue alleged violations.
“Both at the federal and state level, we’re seeing less enforcement,” said Miranda Leppla, who heads Case Western Reserve University’s Environmental Law Clinic and represents the Ohio Environmental Council and the Sierra Club in the lawsuit. “If Ohioans don’t have the ability to bring these enforcement actions on their own through the air nuisance rule, there’s a very serious concern that air quality will continue to degrade and Ohioans’ health will get worse.”
Echoing a recent law in Louisiana, HB 96 also blocks the Ohio EPA from acting on data that groups may collect through community air-monitoring efforts. Such data can fill important gaps and alert communities and enforcement officials to problems that may not be detected by EPA monitors miles away.
Ohio’s limits on using the data will particularly harm fence-line communities, Leppla said.
“At a time when Ohio is seeing renewed industrial building, including new facilities like data centers, as well as a greater federal push for more fossil fuels, it is more important than ever that Ohioans preserve their right to both collect air pollution data themselves and use that data to file suits against harmful air nuisances,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council.
The complaint, filed on Oct. 24 in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, asserts that lawmakers violated the single-subject rule in the Ohio Constitution when they tacked the air pollution provisions onto the massive budget bill.
“This is fundamentally unrelated to the main purpose of the biennial budget,” Waggoner said. “And it was stuck in here in an intentional way so that folks would not have an opportunity to see it, talk about it, or debate its merits.”
The Sierra Club, Ohio Environmental Council, and other groups raised a similar argument two years ago after eleventh-hour changes to a bill about poultry included a new definition of natural gas as “green energy.” That case, also at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, has been briefed, and parties are waiting for Judge Kimberly Cocroft to issue her ruling.
A 2019 decision in Paulding County, Ohio, rejected a challenge to the late amendment in the 2014 budget bill that tripled property-line setbacks for turbines on wind farms. That case wasn’t appealed and would not bind the court in Franklin County.
Despite the similarities, the new lawsuit is different because the ban goes beyond how state agencies operate, Leppla said. “The air nuisance rule was created specifically to allow Ohioans who are suffering from noxious air pollution and nuisances to protect themselves when the government does not act.”
HB 96 is not the first attempt to take away Ohioans’ right to bring air nuisance claims. In 2020, the first Trump administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed Ohio’s air nuisance rule, Waggoner noted.
The Ohio Environmental Council, the Sierra Club, Ballinger, and another Sierra Club member mounted a successful challenge in federal court, but due to delays in agency action it wasn’t until this February that the rule became effective again.
“And now here we are with the Ohio legislature attempting to remove it again, when it had already been found to be illegal to do so,” Leppla said.
To prevent another lapse, the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit have asked Judge Julie Lynch to grant a preliminary injunction against removing the rule while the case proceeds.
As defendants, the State of Ohio and the director of Ohio EPA have 28 days to file responses after the complaint was served. What happens next will depend on those filings and the judge’s rulings on any motions.
The Ohio attorney general’s office did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment. Ohio EPA spokesperson Bryant Somerville said the agency is reviewing the lawsuit but had no further response because the matter is in litigation.
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