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COAL: The Biden administration finalizes rules blocking new federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, but Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon says he will work with the incoming Trump administration to overturn the ban. (The Hill, news release)
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY: A Colorado city considers offering a renewable energy company more than $4 million in tax rebates if it establishes a manufacturing facility locally. (Gazette)
UTILITIES:
CLIMATE: Data show Boulder, Colorado has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24% over the past six years, with the biggest reductions coming from buildings and transportation. (Boulder Daily Camera)
BIOFUEL: California advocates push back on a plan to produce fuel pellets from wildfire mitigation work for export to Europe and Asia, saying it would pollute port communities. (Los Angeles Times)
GEOTHERMAL: A Colorado startup proposes a 20 to 80 MW geothermal plant on a private ranch in the western part of the state. (Ouray County Plaindealer)
PUBLIC LANDS: Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning is named president of an environmental group after tightening rules on public land oil and gas drilling and coal leasing during the Biden administration. (Associated Press)
COMMENTARY: A California columnist says popular bakeries’ opposition helped sink Berkeley’s natural gas-tax ballot measure, and urges the restaurant industry to work together to electrify. (Los Angeles Times)
A top executive with Minnesota’s largest utility says data center growth will not prevent it from meeting the state’s 100% clean electricity law, but it may extend the life of natural gas power plants into the next decade.
“As we take all of that coal off the system — even if you didn’t add data centers into the mix — I think we may have been looking to extend some gas (contracts) on our system to get us through a portion of the 2030s,” said Ryan Long, president of Xcel Energy’s division serving Minnesota and the Dakotas. “Adding data centers could increase the likelihood of that, to be perfectly honest.”
Long made the comments at a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission conference this fall exploring the potential impact of data centers on the state’s 2040 clean electricity mandate.
The expansion of power-hungry data centers, driven by artificial intelligence, has caused anxiety across the country among utility planners and regulators. The trend is moving the goalposts for states’ clean electricity targets and raising questions about whether clean energy capacity can keep up with demand as society also tries to electrify transportation and building heat.
Minnesota PUC commissioner Joe Sullivan organized last month’s conference in response to multiple new data centers projects, including a $700 million facility by Facebook’s parent company Meta that’s under construction in suburban Rosemount. Microsoft and Amazon have each acquired property near a retiring Xcel coal plant in central Minnesota.
“We need to ensure that our system is able to serve these companies if they come,” Sullivan said, “and that it can serve them with clean resources consistent with state law.”
Alongside concerns about whether clean energy can keep up with new electricity demand, there’s also an emerging view that data centers — if properly regulated — could become grid assets that help accelerate the transition to carbon-free power. Several stakeholders at the Oct. 31 event shared that view, including Xcel’s regional president.
A 100-megawatt data center could generate as much as $64 million in annual revenue for Xcel, enough to help temper rate increases or cover the cost of other projects on the system, Long said. He said the company wants to attract 1.3 gigawatts worth of data centers to its territory by 2032, and it thinks it can absorb all of that demand without harming progress toward its 2040 clean energy requirement.
Long said data center expansion will not change the company’s plans to close all of its remaining coal-fired power plants by 2040, but it may cause them to try to keep gas plans operating longer. Ultimately, meeting the needs of data centers will require more renewable generation, battery storage, and grid-enhancing technology, but rising costs and supply chain issues have slowed deployment of those solutions.
Other utilities echoed that optimism. Julie Pierce, Minnesota Power’s vice president for strategy and planning said the company has experience serving large customers such as mines in northeastern Minnesota and would be ready to serve data centers. Great River Energy’s resource planning director Zachary Ruzycki said the generation and transmission cooperative “has a lot of arrows in its quiver” to accommodate data centers.
Ruzycki noted, too, that much of the interest it has received from data center developers is because of the state’s commitment to clean energy. Many large data center operators have made corporate commitments to power them on 100% carbon-free electricity, whether from renewables or nuclear power.
Pete Wyckoff, deputy commissioner for energy at the Minnesota Department of Commerce, expressed doubts about the ability to meet unchecked demand from data centers. Even with the state’s recent permitting reforms, utilities are unlikely to be able to deliver “power of any sort — much less clean power — in the size and timeframes that data centers are likely to request.”
He sees hydrogen, long-duration batteries, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear among the solutions that will eventually be needed, but in the short-term the grid could serve more data centers with investments in transmission upgrades, virtual power plants, and other demand response programs.
“These solutions can be deployed faster and cheaper than building all new transmission and large clean energy facilities, though we’ll need those, too,” Wyckoff said.
Aaron Tinjum, director of energy policy and regulatory affairs for the Data Center Coalition, said data centers provide the computing power for things like smart meters, demand response, and other grid technologies. The national trade group represents the country’s largest technology and data center companies.
“We can’t simply view data centers as a significant consumer of energy if they’re all helping us become more efficient, and helping us save on our utility bills,” Tinjum said.
He also pointed to data centers’ role in driving clean energy development. A recent report from S&P Global Commodity Insights found that data centers account for half of all U.S. corporate clean energy procurement.
The true impact of data centers on emissions and the grid is complicated, though. Meta, which participated in the recent Minnesota conference, says it matches all of its annual electricity use with renewable energy, but environmental groups say there is evidence that its data centers are increasing fossil fuel use and emissions in the local markets where they are built.
Amelia Vohs, climate program director with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, raised concerns at the conference about whether data center growth will make it harder to electrify transportation and heating. She pointed to neighboring Wisconsin, where utilities are proposing to build new gas plants to power data centers.
“This commission and the stakeholders here today have all done a ton of work and made great progress in decarbonizing the electric sector in our state,” Vohs said. “I worry about possibly rolling that back if we all of a sudden have a large load that needs to be served with fossil fuels, or [require] a fossil fuel backup.”
The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office argued that state regulators need to scrutinize data center deals to make sure developers are paying the total cost of their impact on the system, including additional regulatory, operational and maintenance work that might be required on the grid.
In an interview, Sullivan said he was impressed by tech companies’ interest in having data centers in Minnesota because of the 2040 net zero goal, not despite it. They want to buy electricity from Minnesota utilities rather than build their own power systems or locate in neighboring states, he added, and the October meeting left him confident that “we can deal with this.”
President-elect Trump spent his campaign promising to tear into electric vehicle incentives and emission regulations. A growing contingent is preparing to fight him on it.
For starters, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and other automakers plan to ask the incoming president to keep in place Biden administration tailpipe emissions standards that would push them toward phasing out combustion vehicles. While they don’t all love the regulations, they’ve already invested billions of dollars into EVs and just want the rules governing that transition to stay consistent, the New York Times reports. The same goes for the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 EV incentives: automakers and dealers say repealing them would hurt sales and put their huge EV investments at risk.
If something does happen to those incentives, California is coming up with a backup plan. Gov. Gavin Newsom this week proposed relaunching the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program to once again incentivize EV purchases, promising that “we’re not turning back on a clean transportation future.” Officials in the governor’s office told the Associated Press that the state could exclude Tesla from those rebates to incentivize competition, something Trump’s pal Elon Musk called “insane.”
Meanwhile, the $7.5 billion for EV chargers allocated under 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is in safer territory. The program so far hasn’t made much progress deploying chargers, but its funding will largely be allocated to projects and nearly impossible to roll back by the time Trump takes office, experts tell Politico.
🕰️ Every second counts: Biden administration officials say they’ll race to allocate the remaining $46 billion from four climate and infrastructure bills before the year ends, but $303 billion will remain that cannot be spent until after Trump takes office. (Washington Post)
👷 Offshore wind’s newest defenders: Industrial unions are emerging as a somewhat unlikely source of support for offshore wind and may be uniquely positioned to help defend the nascent industry’s momentum under a second Trump presidency. (Grist)
🏦 Good news for a green bank: A federal green bank program could survive the next four years, assuming the Trump administration follows the law, as its funding has already been formally committed and is supporting projects in red and blue states. (Canary Media)
🔌 Uncertainty on efficiency: Advocates anticipate a mixed bag for energy efficiency under Trump’s second term, expecting cuts in federal funding but noting that efficiency standards benefit U.S. manufacturers and have long had bipartisan support. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Duke Energy builds an electric vehicle charging station near Charlotte, North Carolina, that includes a solar farm and two battery storage systems, and could become a model as commercial trucking companies electrify their fleets. (WFAE)
ALSO:
PIPELINES: Natural gas producer EQT announces it’s selling a stake in its pipeline network to asset manager Blackstone for $3.5 billion, which includes the Mountain Valley Pipeline. (Reuters, news release)
HYDROGEN: Four partners have withdrawn from a regional network building an Appalachian hydrogen hub due to the inclusion of strict carbon emission limits in a tax credit to incentivize production. (Mountain State Spotlight)
CARBON CAPTURE:
CLEAN ENERGY: Federal officials award more than $3.6 million to 20 Tennessee farms and businesses to install solar power and energy efficiency upgrades. (Tennessee Lookout)
OIL & GAS: Sources close to Trump’s transition team says he plans to “go strong” on liquified natural gas exports. (Reuters)
GRID:
OVERSIGHT:
COMMENTARY: Dominion Energy’s filings reveal that data centers are single-handedly driving its escalating projections for new power demand, calling into question the utility’s proposal to build more gas-fired power plants and delay the transition to clean energy, writes a columnist. (Virginia Mercury)
GRID: The Biden administration announces a $4.9 billion loan guarantee to help finance the first phase of the 578-mile Grain Belt Express transmission line, which aims to move solar and wind energy from Kansas to Missouri and beyond. (E&E News)
ALSO: An Indiana utility, regulators, and other stakeholders reach a settlement that would require large new load customers like data centers to make long-term commitments to pay for the costs to serve them to avoid costs shifting to consumers, a “landmark” deal supported by ratepayer advocates. (Utility Dive; Indiana Capital Chronicle)
SOLAR:
STORAGE: A new 100 MW battery storage project brings Michigan utility Consumers Energy’s total storage portfolio to 400 MW, or about 5% of peak electricity demand. (Michigan Public)
NUCLEAR: The timeline for reopening a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan next year could be delayed after inspectors found more defects than anticipated in the plant’s steam generator system. (Detroit News, subscription)
PIPELINES: While President-elect Trump reportedly wants to revive the Keystone XL pipeline, the former project developer no longer owns the pipeline system that it was intended to complement, and portions of the line previously installed have been dug up and would require new local permits. (Politico)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
FOSSIL FUELS: The Biden administration proposes tighter nitrogen oxide emission limits for new natural gas plants, though the regulation’s fate is unclear with the incoming Trump administration. (Utility Dive)
TRANSPORTATION: Climate group Sunrise Movement organizes members in Kansas City to make demands for more reliable and cleaner public transportation. (The Pitch)
LAW: A Missouri attorney pleads guilty to tax evasion after his involvement in local planning decisions to convert a former golf course to a solar project and to demolish a local power plant. (Missouri Independent)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes offering rebates on electric vehicle purchases if the incoming Trump administration eliminates a federal EV tax credit, while suggesting the incentive program could exclude Tesla cars. (Associated Press, Sacramento Bee)
ALSO: Colorado awards three municipalities $1.5 million to develop an electric bicycle sharing program. (BizWest, subscription)
NUCLEAR:
SOLAR:
UTILITIES: Public Service Company of New Mexico proposes adding 430 MW of new solar capacity and battery storage, including a planned array near the defunct San Juan coal plant. (Solar Industry)
GRID:
OIL & GAS:
COAL: Utah lawmakers propose legislation to close perceived gaps in a 2023 law aimed at blocking the Intermountain Power Association coal plant’s 2025 retirement. (Utah News Dispatch)
LITHIUM: A Utah lithium mining firm idles its Great Salt Lake operations and lays off 186 employees, citing low commodity prices. (KUER)
BUILDINGS: A Colorado town considers requiring homeowners to offset outdoor energy use for pools, spas and snowmelt systems by installing solar and batteries or paying a fee. (Vail Daily)
PUBLIC LANDS: Federal officials push back on Western states’ legal bid to seize “unappropriated” public lands, saying the case rests on “weak foundations.” (WyoFile)
CLIMATE: California’s public employee pension fund says it has invested $53 billion in climate solutions over the last year, though advocates are still urging it to divest from ExxonMobil. (ESG Dive)
SOLAR: Virginia solar advocates rail at Appalachian Power’s proposal to reduce net metering credits by more than 70%, arguing that doing so would hamper adoption of rooftop solar systems. (Cardinal News)
OIL & GAS:
CARBON CAPTURE:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
TRANSITION: West Virginia regulators grant an extension to Longview Power subsidiaries to build a 1,200 MW gas-fired power plant and solar array at the site of a former coal plant. (WV Metro News)
GRID:
NUCLEAR: A company begins manufacturing centrifuges at a Tennessee factory that separate out uranium fuel to power commercial nuclear reactors. (Knoxville News Sentinel)
UTILITIES: The Tennessee Valley Authority has received about 1,600 comments so far on its proposed long-term resource plan, which includes construction of several new gas-fired power plants. (Chattanooga Times Free Press)
POLITICS: Critics worry a conservative think tank’s policy proposals that have been called a blueprint for the Trump administration could reduce access to flood insurance and hamper local governments that rely on National Weather Service data for disaster preparedness. (Houston Chronicle)
COMMENTARY: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to promote nuclear power in the state are intended to attract more data centers, not to benefit state residents, writes an opinion editor at a college newspaper. (Cavalier Daily)
SOLAR: Developers hope to finish construction next year on a solar-powered microgrid on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota that aims to reduce energy costs and provide backup power to the small community. (Energy News Network)
ALSO:
PIPELINES: The Iowa Supreme Court affirms a lower court ruling that Summit Carbon Solutions has temporary access to private property owners’ land for surveying despite claims that the practice is “invasive.” (Iowa Capital Dispatch)
COAL:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: President-elect Trump’s potential to withdraw $7,500 federal tax credits on electric vehicles could result in a 27% drop in sales for electric cars and trucks, experts say. (New York Times)
NUCLEAR: Data center developers’ interest in both large and small-scale nuclear reactors to meet their power needs is creating opportunities for contractors with specialized experience in the field. (Construction Dive)
GRID: A clean energy analyst says federal regulators’ decision to give states more of a say in transmission cost planning was a “Kumbaya moment” that will hopefully prevent court challenges to the federal rule. (Utility Dive)
BATTERIES: Federal energy officials finalize a $1.3 billion loan for a company to finance an Indiana plant that will make lithium-ion battery separators used mostly in electric vehicles. (Reuters)
CLEAN ENERGY: A Nebraska village receives $100,000 in federal clean energy funding to install a solar project at a wastewater treatment facility. (High Plains Journal)
A solar-powered microgrid project backed with funding from the Biden administration aims to reduce energy burdens and provide backup power to a tiny northern Minnesota tribal community.
The Pine Point Resilience Hub would serve an elementary school and community center in Pine Point, an Anishinaabe village of about 330 people on the White Earth Reservation.
In June, the project was selected to receive $1.75 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Storage for Social Equity (ES4SE) Program, which helps underserved and frontline communities leverage energy storage to make electricity more affordable and reliable. It’s part of a slew of Biden administration funding related to grid resilience and energy equity that has spurred several tribal microgrid projects across the country.
The developers, locally owned 8th Fire Solar and San Francisco-based 10Power, hope to finish the project next year, and have also secured funding from Minnesota’s Solar for Schools program and foundation grants but said they still need to raise about $1 million. They’re also counting on receiving about $1.5 million in federal tax credits, which face an uncertain future with the incoming Trump administration.
“The idea of the microgrid is to help with infrastructure,” said Gwe Gasco, a member of the White Earth Nation and the program coordinator with 8th Fire Solar, a thermal solar company based on the reservation.
Tribal communities were largely bypassed during the massive, federally funded push under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to bring electricity to remote rural areas of the country. As a result, grid infrastructure on many reservations remains insufficient to this day, with an estimated 1 in 7 Native American households on reservations lacking electricity connections, and many more contending with unreliable service.
On top of higher-than-average electric reliability issues, tribal communities also generally pay higher rates for electricity and face higher energy burdens due to poverty and substandard housing.
On the White Earth Reservation, these challenges are most pronounced in Pine Point, where one-third of residents live in poverty. Gasco said the area is among the first to suffer from outages, with eleven occurring over the last five years, according to the Itasca-Mantrap Electric Cooperative that serves the area.
The Pine Point Resilience Hub project will build on an existing 21-kilowatt solar array, adding another 500 kilowatts of solar capacity along with a 2.76 megawatt-hour battery storage system, enough to provide about 12 hours worth of backup power for residents to be able to charge cell phones, power medical equipment, or stay warm in the event of a power outage.
Gasco said the microgrid could be especially important in the winter, given the area’s “brutally cold” weather and reliance on electric heat. They also hope it will reduce utility costs, though they are still negotiating with the local electric co-op on rates for power the system sends and receives from the utility’s grid. Itasca-Mantrap President and CEO Christine Fox said it doesn’t set net metering rates, which are determined by its electricity supplier.
The project developers hope to qualify for additional federal tax credits by using equipment largely produced in the U.S., including Minnesota-built Heliene solar panels, inverters made in Massachusetts, and Ohio-produced solar racks.
The developers have partnered with the Pine Point School District, which plans to incorporate the microgrid into an Ojibwe-language curriculum on renewable energy. A monitoring interface will allow students to see real-time data in the classroom.
“It’s powerful to me that this (project) is at a school where we’re hoping to inspire the next generation of kids,” said Sandra Kwak, CEO and founder of 10Power, a for-profit company that specializes in developing renewable energy projects in tribal communities.
Corey Orehek, senior business developer for Ziegler Energy Solutions, which has been hired to do the installation, said they plan to work with a local community college to train students for solar jobs.
“One of the things that we want to drive in this is workforce development,” Orehek said. “We want to leave something that’s not only a project that’ll last 30 years but provide the training and experience for community members to either start their own energy companies or become contractors in the clean energy workforce.”
The resilience hub is the second such project announced by a Minnesota tribe in just recent months. The Red Lake Nation received $3.15 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Local Government Energy Program in late September for a behind-the-meter microgrid project at a secondary school.
The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is also working with Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative to build a $9 million microgrid with U.S. Department of Energy funding. The electric cooperative will install a 4 megawatt-hour energy storage system and add a 1 megawatt solar system at the reservation in suburban Minneapolis.
It’s unclear whether federal funding for such projects will continue in President-elect Trump’s second term, but for now tribal energy advocates see microgrids as a good solution to both lower energy burdens and improve reliability.
“This is a great opportunity to create a success story in terms of leveraging cutting-edge technology, being able to help frontline communities, and for tribes and co-ops to work together,” Kwak said.
CLIMATE: Oregon regulators vote to reinstate the state’s landmark climate plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions after a court invalidated the 2021 program over a technicality. (Oregon Capital Chronicle)
ALSO: A western Colorado city seeks public input on its proposed energy and climate resilience action plan. (Post-Independent)
OIL & GAS: Federal regulators charge Phillips 66 with violating environmental laws for allegedly discharging hundreds of thousands of gallons of industrial waste from its Los Angeles-area refinery into county sewer systems. (Mercury News)
UTILITIES:
WIND: U.S. Sen. James Risch, an Idaho Republican, says he will work with the incoming Trump administration to kill the controversial proposed Lava Ridge wind facility on federal land in the southern part of the state. (E&E News, subscription)
SOLAR:
STORAGE:
TRANSITION: Northwestern New Mexico officials advance a proposed freight rail line aimed at spurring industrial development in the wake of a coal plant’s 2022 retirement. (Albuquerque Journal)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A Nevada city brings an electric vehicle charging system online to power its police and municipal fleets. (news release)
COMMENTARY: California regulators say their agency’s recent tweaks to the state’s low carbon fuel standards inadvertently incentivize “pollution-heavy practices over sustainable, low-impact solutions.”(Los Angeles Times)
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