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WEST UNION — Nearly 20 years ago, Cindy Dotson bought more than 200 acres of farmland and forest in her native Doddridge County. The property is beautiful — but there’s one part Dotson doesn’t care for. At one end sits a massive, yellow tank painted with a bygone advertisement: an eye sore that renders the section of property mostly useless.
The ten-foot above-ground storage tank, accompanied by an underground oil or gas well and guarded by barbed wire and wooden stakes, is just one of the thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells littered across the state.
With no living mineral rights owner and no existing operator, the oil tank and well have sat untouched on Dotson’s property for the last 15 years. She’s concerned about its proximity to a creek, where cattle used to drink. And now, she leases the land to tenants who share those concerns.
“We would just like it to be plugged so that we can reclaim this property, and we never have to worry about anything leaking out of it,” Dotson said. At times, she says she sees a film she thought was oil leaking at the base of the tank but has never been able to confirm it.
But unless she shells out the cash herself, the well will remain a concern for Dotson until the state gets around to plugging it.
Both orphaned and abandoned wells no longer produce oil or gas. But abandoned wells still have a solvent owner, while orphaned wells don’t — either because the company went out of business or there is no existing record of the driller. So here, the responsibility of plugging and remediating these wells falls to the state. And it’s a massive undertaking that West Virginia regulators don’t have many resources to tackle.
Now, the state is getting some help: up to $212 million from the federal government to plug orphaned wells. But even then, for West Virginia, it’s only a drop in the bucket.
Thousands of orphaned wells are littered throughout West Virginia but are most heavily concentrated in Ritchie, Tyler and Doddridge counties. Some date back to the early 20th century, while others are more recent. Some are hazardous and leak large amounts of methane, while others don’t. But all are a result of operators abandoning them after bleeding them dry of their natural resources.
Under West Virginia law, oil and gas companies are responsible for plugging and remediating their wells, and a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection says the agency often pursues enforcement measures. But despite that, wells across the state remain abandoned and unplugged.
Now, this new influx of federal cash from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will allocate $4.7 billion to states, tribes, and the Federal Bureau of Land Management in an effort to address some of the damage left by the oil and gas industry, according to the federal Department of the Interior.
The newly established federal program is a key part of the Biden administration’s efforts to curb the release of methane — a greenhouse gas that greatly contributes to global warming. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the unplugged, non-producing oil and gas wells emitted 275,000 metric tons of methane in 2020; equivalent to emissions of more than 1.7 million gasoline-powered vehicles driven in one year.
West Virginia’s DEP, along with 23 other states, received an initial $25 million grant from the federal program earlier this year, which is the first of three expected rounds of funding the Biden administration is set to award. With that, the state’s Office of Oil and Gas estimates it can plug 202 orphaned wells in West Virginia, which it has decided to outsource to contractors, despite criticism.
Beyond the initial grant, West Virginia is likely to receive a total of $117 million in formula grant funding and has an opportunity to receive an additional $70 million through the performance grant portion of the federal funding — resulting in an overall total of $212 million.
Historically, progress on remediating orphaned wells has been slow. The state used to only be able to afford to plug one or two wells a year. More recently, state lawmakers directed more money to the issue, which enabled the DEP to remediate six wells last fiscal year and 22 this fiscal year, according to spokesman Terry Fletcher.
But the $212 million boost in federal funding will speed up the pace. It could go as far as to help plug roughly 1,700 orphaned wells. However, this would still only be a fraction — about 26% — of the documented orphaned wells scattered across the state.
In reality, the need could be much larger because the exact number of wells isn’t known, largely due to the fact that wells drilled before 1929 were not required to be registered with the state. Because of that, there are tens of thousands of undocumented orphaned oil and gas wells scattered throughout the state, according to the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. And the state’s current estimates also don’t account for all the thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that are likely to become orphaned in the future.
“This is just scratching the surface,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute. “That’s just the orphaned wells. There’s another 12,000 abandoned wells and tens of thousands of undocumented orphaned wells in West Virginia.”
Among those undocumented orphaned wells is the one on Dotson’s property.
Dotson maintains the fencing around the giant above-ground storage tank that accompanies the well, fearful of a car hitting it and causing a leak — all she really can do at this point.
The monthly visits by a gathering company to empty the tank stopped years ago when there were no longer any remaining living mineral rights heirs and Dotson couldn’t get anyone else to pump the tank. She even briefly considered plugging the well herself, but the cost was too high to afford.
Now, her frustration is only further exacerbated by the slim chance that any portion of the millions in federal funding the state is getting will go towards the well on her land because of its undocumented status.
“So, again, we can do nothing. We’re stuck,” Dotson said. “So, what is the state doing for these undocumented orphaned wells? If there’s thousands of them, they need to do something about them also.”
As an Ohio uranium enrichment plant opened this month, yet another study questioned whether nuclear power from small modular reactors can compete with other types of electricity generation.
Centrus Energy’s new plant in Piketon produces high-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The fuel will contain between 5% and 20% fissile uranium, or U-235, which is the range needed for various types of small modular reactors, or SMRs. The current fleet of large nuclear reactors uses fuel with up to 5% U-235.
Large nuclear plants have had problems competing with other types of electricity generation in recent years. Ohio’s House Bill 6 would have mandated ratepayer spending of more than $1 billion to subsidize the 894-megawatt Davis-Besse plant and 3,758-megawatt Perry plant in Ohio, for example. Lawmakers repealed that law’s nuclear subsidies after alleged corruption came to light.
Now the question is whether small modular reactors designed to produce up to 300 MW of electricity can compete better.
Huge gigawatt-scale nuclear plants can have economies of scale because their power output grows faster than increases in capital and operating expenditures.
“However, the extensive customization of many of the currently deployed reactors undercuts much of that economy,” said William Madia, a nuclear chemist and emeritus professor at Stanford University who is now a member of Centrus’ board of directors.
The lack of a standard design also makes it harder for large reactors to get replacement parts when needed. “Things like large-scale forgings are in short supply globally,” Madia noted.
In contrast, small modular reactors can be built in indoor factories and then sent to where they’ll be used. That avoids site-by-site mobilization costs, as well as weather problems that might interrupt construction.
“But the real driver is standardized design,” Madia said. So eventually, production can take place on assembly lines. And that should produce its own economies.
All in all, “the capital cost for SMRs is much lower than GW-scale machines,” Madia said. Also, if the choice is between lower-cost modular reactors and huge ones, “many, many more utilities can afford a few billion dollars on their balance sheets. Very few can handle $10-plus billion.”
No small modular reactors are operating commercially in the United States yet.
“Right now, if you’re looking to spend money on bringing new generation online, you have tech that you know works with wind and solar and storage,” said Neil Waggoner, federal deputy director for energy campaigns at the Sierra Club.
An analysis published this month by the journal Energy estimated the levelized cost of electricity, or LCOE, for different types of small modular reactors. The LCOE basically reflects the average costs for producing a unit of power over the course of a generation source’s lifetime.
Small modular reactors “seem to be non-competitive when compared to current costs for generating electricity from renewable energy sources,” the Energy study found.
Comparing intermittent resources like wind and solar to “dispatchable resources with small land footprints is a flawed exercise,” said Diane Hughes, vice president of marketing and communications for NuScale Power. Nuclear energy from small reactors requires little new transmission infrastructure, she added. So, “the cost per plant is comprehensive in a way that one solar array or wind farm is not.”
Yet the Energy study found renewables would still be more competitive even with added system integration costs that would roughly double the levelized cost of electricity.
“These costs can stem from batteries, but there are also many other means of flexibility that can be used,” said Jens Weibezahn, one of the study’s corresponding authors and an economist at the Copenhagen Business School’s School of Energy Infrastructure.
Weibezahn’s group got similar results when they compared the projected market value for energy from small modular reactors with the weighted market value for renewable electricity at the time of generation. Costs for dealing with radioactive waste “will add a significant additional economic burden” on nuclear technologies, he added.
A March 2023 study by Colorado State University researchers suggested the economics for SMRs wouldn’t be dramatically better than those for large reactors. The researchers also found the levelized costs of electricity for different types of small modular reactors would be substantially higher than that for natural gas power plants without carbon capture.
However, “natural gas plants release tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases which engender societal and environmental costs,” said the paper in Applied Energy. Adding in carbon capture increased the estimated levelized cost of energy for the natural gas plants to the general range for the small modular reactors.
Commercial methane-fired power plants with carbon capture are not yet running at scale. The American Petroleum Association has objected to proposed rules that might effectively require such equipment.
How things will shake out in the future is unclear, said Jason Quinn, who heads the sustainability laboratory at Colorado State University and is the corresponding author for the March study. But, he added, “typically decisions are driven on economics, and current SMR estimates show them not to be a commercially viable solution as compared to other technologies.”
For now, initial production at the Centrus HALEU plant will meet a commitment to the Department of Energy. Centrus expects the plant will employ up to 500 direct employees when it moves to full-scale commercial production, said Larry Cutlip, vice president for field operations. Supporting industries will provide work for another 1,000 to 1,300 people. And all those workers could stimulate economic activity for roughly eight times as many jobs, he added.
Centrus already plans to supply HALEU fuel to TerraPower and Oklo, Inc. Each company has its own individual SMR design and is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission toward having the designs certified.
Oklo plans to build two sodium-cooled fast reactors in Piketon near the Centrus’s HALEU production plant. Each of the SMRs could supply up to 15 MW of electricity and more than 25 MW of clean heating, said spokesperson Bonita Chester.
Plans call for the SMRs to supply some carbon-free electricity for the Centrus facility. Other possible customers for electricity include commercial, industrial or municipal entities.
“As for the clean heating output, we envisage potential industrial partners and applications for district heating systems,” Chester said.
The ability to sell or otherwise use the heat as well as electricity could potentially lower the average costs.
“We are committed to ensuring that our electricity and heating output remain competitive with other forms of energy generation,” Chester added. “Our technology benefits from simplified design and cost-effective materials, making it an economically effective option.”
NuScale plans to deploy a dozen 77-megawatt small modular reactors in Ohio and another dozen in Pennsylvania for Standard Power data center projects by 2029. Those pressurized water reactors can use low-enriched uranium and won’t need HALEU, Hughes noted.
Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk expects HALEU and small nuclear reactors that rely on it will be competitive.
“People appreciate the importance of baseload power, and I think that will be even more important as we further decarbonize the electricity economy,” Turk said. That will appropriately include more wind and solar energy, “but it’s good to have that baseload power to make it all work in the end.”
Electricity from SMRs will be “a real source of energy security and energy resilience,” Turk added. “You need diversification, but you need to have a variety of different inputs going into the system.”
“Nuclear certainly can provide baseload, but it does this at a cost significantly higher than an integrated renewables-based system,” Weibezahn said.
A bigger question may be whether there will be enough carbon-free electricity.
The Department of Energy estimates the United States will need to triple nuclear energy production to about 300 GW by 2050. That growth will be driven by advanced nuclear technologies, much of which will use HALEU.
“If we want to meet our climate goals and meaningfully reduce carbon emissions, we need all sources of clean energy, including wind, solar and nuclear energy,” said Jess Gehin, associate lab director for nuclear science and technology at Idaho National Laboratory. “Current projections show that we cannot meet our climate goals without nuclear energy.”
This article originally appeared in Stateline.
A 60-mile pedestrian and cycling trail in Arkansas, an electric street sweeper in Oregon and truck parking facilities in Florida don’t appear to have much in common — let alone any similarity with a conversion of California highways to toll roads or a roundabout in Michigan.
But all of the projects will be paid for by the Carbon Reduction Program, a five-year, $6.4 billion federal program to reduce the tailpipe emissions that contribute to global warming. The program, known as the CRP, was authorized in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the $1.2 trillion federal investment in everything from roads and bridges to the electrical grid.
The CRP is small in comparison to, say, the infrastructure law’s $40 billion pledge to fix the nation’s bridges. Yet it could be mighty for bringing to life what are known as transportation alternatives, or small-scale infrastructure designed to take cars off the road and therefore reduce emissions. They include sidewalk installation and improvements, pedestrian walkways, bike lanes and trails, and bike share programs.
It takes much less money to make an impact on transportation emissions with such programs, said Kevin Mills, vice president of policy at Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which advocates for money for walking and bicycling trails and has been keeping a close eye on how the CRP will boost funding for its priorities.
“This program has a big purpose and not a great amount of money given the task before us,” Mills said. “What becomes important is that we make the most of what’s a fairly modest-sized new program so that we can prove its value and hopefully grow it going forward. That puts a premium on things that will give you a big bang for the buck.”
While the broader infrastructure bill was under consideration, many U.S. House Democrats wanted it to devote even more money to climate change-related measures and less to highway projects. After it passed, 16 Republican governors grumbled about an internal Federal Highway Administration memo that encouraged states to emphasize existing repairs, public transit and bike lanes over projects to expand highways.
In the coming weeks, states must submit carbon reduction strategies that demonstrate how they’ll use federal money to reduce transportation emissions. In their strategies, states will be required to identify specific projects and approaches to reach the goals in their CRP plans, said Elle Segal, an advocacy outreach director at Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. The federal program requires that states explain by Nov. 15 how they’ll reduce emissions.
States have some leeway to shift as much as 50% of the money for carbon reduction toward other federally funded transportation projects that don’t have an explicit greenhouse gas reduction component. Some states have done just that, to the disappointment of climate activists and progressive transportation planners. (States also can transfer money from those other federal formula programs to the carbon reduction program.) In some cases, a transfer is a temporary measure and money will shift back; dollars for carbon reduction began flowing to states a year before the carbon reduction strategy plans were due and some states hadn’t yet outlined their priorities for cutting emissions.
In Maryland, the state is focusing on three areas to reduce transportation sector emissions, said Deron Lovaas, who leads the Environment and Sustainable Transportation program for the Maryland Department of Transportation. The most pressing strategy, he said, is to increase the number of electric vehicles on the road, beginning with cars, sedans, pickup trucks and SUVs, followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. That includes steering federal money to electrify the vehicle fleet used by state and local governments.
Up next is reducing overall traffic or vehicle miles traveled. That involves an “array of measures,” Lovaas said, including investments in public transportation, such as rail, bus and shuttle service, and making sidewalks and roads safer for bicyclists and pedestrians and those in wheelchairs.
It’s critical that states go on the record about what they’re doing with their carbon reduction strategies, he said. That will allow states to learn from each other and will provide accountability for how federal money is being spent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s an important document because carbon reduction from transportation is challenging and requires a multi-year strategy,” Lovaas said. “So that’s how we’re seeing this document. We’re seeing it as important not just for informing the Carbon Reduction Program, but also reflective of Maryland’s broader strategy to decarbonize transportation.”
Many states — including California, Colorado and Massachusetts — already had laws in place that address transportation emissions. Washington’s approach to its CRP strategy, for example, builds upon its 2021 State Energy Strategy. In Oregon, the state’s Carbon Reduction Strategy evolved from its 2013 plan to reduce carbon emissions by 2050 and a statewide transportation strategy that was updated this year. Statewide greenhouse gas emissions goals are codified in state law and executive order in Oregon, as well.
“We built the carbon reduction program on that strong base of actions,” said Brian Hurley, a mitigation program manager with the Oregon Department of Transportation. “We did not have to start from scratch.”
A description by the Minnesota Department of Transportation may best reflect a hard truth in many parts of the country when it comes to carbon reduction policies, regardless of political affiliation: “Land use patterns and unsafe, inconvenient alternatives make driving alone the most convenient choice for many Minnesotans. Cars in Minnesota are mostly powered by fossil fuels, which emit carbon pollution and other air pollutants.”
“Some states are actually way ahead of us federally, in terms of their level of climate ambition and the creativity that they’ve brought to this and the steps they’ve taken,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told The Washington Post last year. “Others, we’re pulling along and really working to encourage them.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, this summer vetoed a budget provision that would have allowed state agencies to seek federal money through a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to improve energy efficiency in buildings. But Florida hasn’t turned down $320.4 million in CRP transportation funding the state will receive over five years. In its Carbon Reduction Strategy, Florida plans to call for reducing single-occupancy vehicle trips as well as for making it easier to use vehicles or modes of travel with lower emissions. The state’s strategy will also call for using construction techniques with lower emissions.
Florida will use $46 million to build 26 truck parking areas with commercial EV charging stations and other amenities. Safe places for truckers to rest have long been at a premium, but the growth in e-commerce has put even more trucks on the road, further straining the parking supply. And without a place to stop for federally mandated rest periods, truckers spend additional time on the road looking for safe places to park, which means more time spewing CO2 out of tailpipes. Truck parking shortages are considered a “national safety concern” by the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Freight Management and Operations.
Florida is also planning to invest big in its SUN Trails system, Huiwei Shen, the chief planner at the Florida Department of Transportation, said during a Rails-to-Trails Conservancy seminar earlier this year. The non-motorized, shared-use paths received a one-time infusion of $200 million from the state legislature this year.
“It’s a great time for trails in Florida,” Shen said. “It would contribute greatly towards the vision of a statewide interconnected trail system in Florida, and we want to be the No. 1 trail destination internationally.”
In Oregon, the state has $82 million to spend over five years. It set aside $13 million of that for projects in smaller cities and rural areas and for tribes; the federal program requires 65% of the money to go to larger metropolitan areas. Since the bulk of the money will go to parts of the state with more congestion, the state DOT wanted to help smaller communities make some progress on reducing carbon emissions, too, said Rye Baerg, a climate program coordinator with the Oregon Department of Transportation. Among the projects are e-bike lending libraries, solar streetlights and even electric-powered street cleaners sized specifically to clean pedestrian and bike paths so that they’re safer and therefore more attractive to users.
“We had a lot of counties, a lot of small cities, interested in charging and those types of things,” Baerg said. “I think that we saw a lot of interest in our first round of call for projects and I expect to see even more interest now that people know what types of things we’re funding and have a better sense of what the program is next year.”
The small changes add up, said Lovaas, with the Maryland transportation department. For example, if Maryland invests in a new transit line using Carbon Reduction Program money, it can multiply the effect of municipal or state policies that encourage transit-oriented development, Lovaas said. Invest in safe street programs, he added, and it reduces the number of trips people make by car and reduces their emissions.
“So for the short trips, you actually can replace them with walking or biking or rolling or some non-motorized mode,” he said. “You add all that together and you get a pretty big effect.”
Refunds for unlawful utility charges are a top priority for Maureen Willis, the veteran litigator who became Ohio’s new consumers’ counsel this month.
The Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel is a state-funded agency that represents ratepayer interests in gas and electric utility cases, including matters relating to House Bill 6, the 2019 law at the heart of Ohio’s nuclear and coal bailout scandal. The office also works for legislative reform to promote competition, eliminate subsidies and protect energy affordability for vulnerable groups.
The Energy News Network spoke with Willis about her agenda as Ohio’s official advocate for residential ratepayers.
“If consumers are charged and there’s a decision by the court or even a federal agency that the charges were unlawful or unreasonable, we think they should get the refund all the way back to when they paid it,” Willis said.
Instead, a majority on the Ohio Supreme Court has held that a 1957 case against “retroactive rulemaking” forbids refunds of charges, called riders. That’s the case even if the court holds the charges are otherwise unlawful or unreasonable and even if the riders were not part of a full ratemaking case.
So, even though the Ohio consumers’ counsel has helped consumers avoid $433 million in charges since 2009, they’re still out $1.5 billion in refunds. That makes the wins something of a “hollow victory, because you’re not getting that money back,” Willis said. “But we will continue to fight.”
“We want to advocate for consumers to get energy at the least cost,” Willis said, noting the agency generally considers itself agnostic on the source of electricity. Nonetheless, “renewables are becoming more and more economic, and that certainly is something that we take into account in the mix,” Willis said.
A 2023 report by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology found that 99% of U.S. coal plants are more costly to keep running than replacing them with new solar, wind or energy storage.
Yet HB 6 and regulatory rulings before it require Ohio ratepayers to subsidize costs for two 1950s-era coal plants. OCC continues to contest those charges.
“To the extent that there are subsidies built into the rate and those subsidies are attached to monopoly rates, it creates a problem” by undermining the market, Willis said. “In Ohio, we do rely on the competitive market to bring consumers lower prices and greater innovation.”
“From our perspective, energy efficiency is a good thing,” Willis said, noting that it can help reduce people’s utility bills. Ten years ago, Ohio law required utilities to meet an energy efficiency standard. Back then, OCC was among parties pushing regulators to require FirstEnergy to bid that energy efficiency into a capacity market auction, which lowered costs to consumers. But in 2019, HB 6 gutted Ohio’s energy efficiency standard.
Now, though, consumers can get energy efficiency products and services from competitive suppliers, Willis said. So, “we would say that the utility really has no business to be in the energy efficiency business anymore.” OCC also objects to “shared savings,” which it views as extra profits for utilities.
A bipartisan bill to let utilities run voluntary energy efficiency programs is pending in the General Assembly. Supporters say utility-run programs can make savings simpler for consumers and can produce benefits for all ratepayers by reducing system-wide demand.
OCC has “always battled” electric security plans, or ESPs, Willis said. “We believe they are crony capitalism.”
A traditional ratemaking case requires utilities to show all their projected costs and revenues, based upon actual data from a representative test year. ESP cases don’t require that detailed scrutiny. They allow utilities to raise rates for isolated issues, without presenting those charges in the context of all of a company’s financial activities. And utilities can reject any change regulators might try to make to a plan — effectively giving them unequal, outsized bargaining power, Willis said.
Along those lines, OCC supports Senate Bill 143, which would get rid of ESPs and strengthen corporate separation between utilities and their affiliates.
OCC opposes Senate Bill 102, which would require periodic rate cases but still allow multiple riders. And the bill would let utilities use projections instead of actual data from test years in full ratemaking cases. Challengers also would have fewer opportunities to conduct pre-hearing discovery from utilities and others.
Discovery procedures are “truth-finding tools,” Willis explained. “To the extent you put limits on those, you’re saying, ‘We don’t really want you to get to the truth; you’re just going to have to accept what the utility has filed.’”
“It’s really an unfair situation where we’re stayed when it comes to protecting consumers,” Willis said. “But when it comes to charging consumers rate increases, there’s no stay on those.”
A Sept. 22 filing by OCC asked the PUCO to lift the stay in the four HB 6-linked cases. An Oct. 2 filing by FirstEnergy opposed ending the stay but did not address the argument that it’s unfair to continue the stay while the company has a separate case seeking more money from ratepayers.
OCC filed a complaint with federal regulators last month, asking them to review utilities’ “supplemental” transmission projects. As things stand, neither the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission nor the grid operator PJM reviews charges for those projects before utilities ask state regulators to let them pass along the costs to ratepayers. Nor does the PUCO scrutinize the charges, Willis said.
Since 2017, Ohio utilities have added more than $6 billion for “supplemental” projects to their local transmission plans in Ohio, according to the complaint. By filing its complaint, OCC hopes “that someone starts looking at these projects for need, cost-effectiveness and prudence,” Willis said.
OCC is also concerned about the pending transfer of the Energy Harbor (formerly FirstEnergy Services) nuclear plants to Vistra for one of that company’s subsidiaries to run. “We want to make sure that the competitive market is protected,” Willis said.
While the grid needs to be updated, Willis doesn’t want it done through “gold-plating.” Generally speaking, that involves adding pricey equipment that’s not really necessary. The added spending increases the base on which a utility earns a return on investment.
Instead, Willis wants regulators to scrutinize any grid modernization plan carefully: “Is it really needed? And who is benefitting? Is it really to the benefit of residential consumers?” she asks.
“Payment assistance is something we’re always going to be looking at,” along with the prices charged to low-income customers, disconnection data and more, Willis said. “Part of our advocacy must certainly be to protect the at-risk consumers.”
BJ Johnson and Julie Blumreiter have nothing against electric trucks.
But the duo think the rush to electrify heavy-duty transportation misses an important reality and leaves a yawning gap, which they hope to fill with the engine technology they developed as doctoral students at Stanford University.
Blumreiter and Johnson co-founded ClearFlame Engine Technologies to market engine technology that allows trucks, generators and other motors to run on a variety of low-emissions fuels like ethanol, methanol or liquid ammonia. While these fuels are not zero emissions, various studies have shown pure ethanol’s life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are roughly 40% to 50% less than petroleum-based fuel.
Johnson and Blumreiter argue that it will take years to electrify trucking in the U.S., not to mention other countries, hence an affordable, low-emissions diesel-type engine that can run on various fuels can be a boon to reducing transportation sector emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy, industry sources and major investors have taken interest.
In 2017, Johnson and Blumreiter were chosen among the first cohort in Argonne National Laboratory’s Chain Reaction Innovations fellowship program, providing mentorship and access to Argonne’s emissions testing and other equipment. Blumreiter and Johnson moved to the Chicago area for the fellowship, where the company has been based since. ClearFlame has raised close to $50 million in series A and B funding, has about 50 employees and pilot projects underway with major corporations.
John Wall, former chief technology officer for the global engine maker Cummins, has been an adviser since the Stanford days. He sees ethanol-fueled trucks with ClearFlame technology providing an important “bridge” to zero-emissions transportation.
“Too many people want to say everything will be battery electric, let’s forget about anything else,” said Wall, who also previously worked in diesel research for Chevron. “I’m quite optimistic about battery electric in a number of applications, but some will be hard. Long haul trucking is one of them, and power generation. You don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. If you can get 40% emissions reductions now, let’s do that and work on the rest.”
Johnson and Blumreiter emphasize that their technology is also well-suited to developing countries, where electrification of transportation is not on the horizon, but feedstock for ethanol — like corn or sugar cane — is available. And depending on the market, ethanol may be significantly more affordable than diesel.
“This is not just a California solution, this is a global solution to a global problem,” Blumreiter said. “Fundamentally our technology is that we can make the diesel engine design and everything that is good about it operate on any fuel. You can choose fuel based on cost and regional availability.”
Several pilot projects are underway with trucks on the roads using engines retrofitted with ClearFlame technology. Blumreiter said she could not name the companies doing the pilots, but they involve at least one major truck stop company and fleet managers who sit on the startup’s fleet advisory council.
ClearFlame markets the technology to allow ethanol or other fuels to be burned in the same type of engine that burns diesel, but at a hotter temperature, which is necessary for ethanol and other fuels to combust.
“If you get it hot enough, anything burns,” Johnson said. “We changed the plumbing on the engine so these fuels operate fine. At its heart, it is very simple. The devil is in the details.”
ClearFlame relies on U.S.-based manufacturers to build its technology, which can be retrofitted into diesel engines. Ultimately they hope original equipment manufacturers like Cummins will decide to build engines with the technology.
Wall said he sees that as a very real possibility, since it is “easy” for a manufacturer to incorporate ClearFlame’s technology into standard diesel engines.
“If a customer calls up and says, ‘I’d like to buy a thousand engines like this every six months for 10 years,’ then you get very interested,” he said. “Now BJ and Julie are working with some of the big fleets to have them understand the technology. the feedback I’ve heard so far is quite positive.”
Testing has shown that ClearFlame’s engine technology achieves equal or greater torque compared to traditional diesel engines, and it eliminates the need for filtering out particulate matter and other after-treatment for pollution.
It’s easier to add pure ethanol to existing fueling stations, ClearFlame supporters say, compared to the infrastructure upgrades necessary for electric charging, or alternative fuels like compressed natural gas or hydrogen. Wall added that trucking companies often run trucks on a major transportation corridor — like Interstate 65 — for about four years, then the trucks are sold to work in regional markets or local deliveries. So adding electric charging or hydrogen infrastructure to major corridors would not support the existing truck market structure, but fueling stations throughout the country could provide pure ethanol, and ClearFlame engines could also burn E85 fuel — with 85% ethanol — that is already widely available.
Johnson said ClearFlame technology could also be used in marine engines, locomotives and other heavy equipment. Mining giant RioTinto is an investor, as the engine technology could help mining companies power their huge machines while reducing emissions. Wind Ventures, an affiliate of major Latin American energy company Copec, is also an investor. Johnson noted that excess wind energy could be used onsite to produce liquid ammonia fuel for ClearFlame engines.
“Trucks are our beachhead,” Johnson said. “One of the beauties of diesel engines is they get used everywhere. A lot of pieces of equipment have a diesel engine-shaped hole in the middle.”
The company CK Power is piloting ClearFlame’s technology in its mobile gensets, generators targeted for use in utility infrastructure and electric vehicle charging stations. Solar is increasingly used by utilities and for EV charging. But Clayton Costello, CK Power vice president of corporate strategy, said there is “no technology yet on the marketplace” that can replace a mobile fuel-burning generator in many situations.
“As there’s more federal spending [on reducing emissions] and customers have more demand for lower-emissions technology, we see a need in many industries for these types of platforms,” Costello said.
Blumreiter and Johnson say they feel they are going against the grain in the clean energy startup world, where much attention is focused on zero-emissions and electrification as opposed to low-emissions technologies; and where software and advanced materials are more common focuses than relatively straightforward hardware.
They are also somewhat non-traditional cleantech startup founders. Blumreiter is one of relatively few women in the space; and Johnson is African American and a former national team member in swimming, having started the sport late and peaked in the pool at the same time he was developing the engine technology.
“Competing at a very high level [in swimming] puts the challenges now in perspective,” said Johnson, who was ranked second in the U.S. and ninth in the world in 2013. “It’s not the first time I’ve tried to do something hard.”
He became deeply interested in climate change around when the film “Inconvenient Truth” was released, “and it became clear climate change would be the issue of our generation.”
Blumreiter grew up in Wisconsin and always had a keen interest in volunteering. As an undergraduate at Stanford, she took a class in thermodynamics because it was at a convenient time, but realized “this is it! Intellectually I was captured — hook, line and sinker.”
She figured her professional and humanitarian interests would progress on parallel paths, but with ClearFlame she feels like she is pursuing her passion for technology innovation while also making the world a better place, she said.
“It’s no surprise that people who are doing something that’s completely different than the prevailing approach to decarbonization are two people who don’t look like your average founders,” Blumreiter said. “That leads to us taking a more global view and never losing sight of affordability and equity as ingredients in what solutions get to market.”
Semi-trucks frequently run on ethanol blends or “renewable diesel” or biodiesel, widely available at service stations. But conventional diesel engines can’t run on pure ethanol or methanol.
Renewable diesel and biodiesel have higher particulate matter emissions than ethanol, while also coming from feedstocks that are not always easily and widely accessible — like animal fats and used cooking oil.
“Ethanol is two carbons and an oxygen and some hydrogen; diesel are larger-chain hydrocarbons, so is renewable diesel — it’s the longer chains that tend to form soot,” Blumreiter said.
Wall said that as the aviation industry tries to reduce emissions, renewable diesel is likely to be increasingly used, diverting availability from the lower-value trucking industry. Meanwhile, as electric cars become more prevalent, demand for ethanol-blend gasoline may go down, lowering ethanol’s market price and making it an even more attractive option for truck fuel, he theorized.
Ethanol has been widely criticized as a false hope for climate mitigation, since growing corn involves significant greenhouse gas emissions and also uses land that might otherwise be growing food. There has been much debate about ethanol’s life cycle carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels, but proponents argue that when best practices are used, its life cycle emissions are significantly lower than traditional diesel or gasoline.
“We didn’t set out to make an engine that ran on ethanol,” Blumreiter said. “Ethanol is something [the U.S.] invested in decades ago for energy security reasons. It wasn’t necessarily cheap or clean then, but it is now.”
Clean energy incentives like California’s Low Carbon Fuels Standard and Inflation Reduction Act funds for alternative fuels and fueling infrastructure could help the deployment of ClearFlame’s technology. Johnson said that funds from the Volkswagen settlement and the federal Diesel Emissions Reduction Act could also be used for retrofitted ethanol-burning engines.
But Blumreiter said she feels the company’s success isn’t dependent on incentives; she thinks affordability and convenience will drive deployment, after more testing and pilot programs are completed.
Johnson likes to think of ClearFlame as the “Tesla of heavy duty.”
“Tesla was close to a trillion dollars [in valuation] before OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] took electric vehicles seriously,” Johnson said. “We’re on fundamentally the same path. You have to go to the market, and prove people want this.”
The following commentary was written by Charles Hua, policy analyst at Rewiring America; Ana Sophia Mifsud, a manager within the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) carbon-free building team; and Robin Lisowski, managing director of policy at Slipstream. See our commentary guidelines for more information.
The Inflation Reduction Act is an unprecedented investment in clean energy and provides a transformative opportunity for Michigan to move toward a healthier, more affordable, and safer future.
By signing this groundbreaking bill into law last year, President Biden directed nearly $400 billion in federal funding for climate initiatives through a mix of tax incentives, grants, and loan guarantees. Depending on household income, Michigan residents can take advantage of tax credits — and soon up to $14,000 in rebates — for making homes less dependent on fossil fuels and more efficient, including technologies like heat pumps and insulation.
But still, states like Michigan have a huge role to play by leveraging these millions in federal funding to invest in clean energy and ensure households are powered by resilient, healthy, and affordable sources of energy.
Michigan has already taken steps toward securing the benefits of clean energy. In 2020, Governor Whitmer committed the state to economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050. A year later, the state developed the MI Healthy Climate Plan (MHCP) that charts a path to reach a goal halving emissions by 2030. Just last week, Governor Whitmer was one of the 25 members in the bipartisan coalitions of the U.S. Climate Alliance who committed to collectively reach 20 million residential electric heat pump installations by 2030 — potentially quadrupling the number of residential heat pumps currently in operation. The state legislature is currently considering implementing a clean energy standard, which could single-handedly put Michigan over three-quarters of the way to its 2030 climate goals.
Unfortunately, bad faith actors determined to keep homes reliant on inefficient and dirty energy sources would have you believe that Michigan lawmakers are wheeling and dealing behind closed doors to ram through sustainable initiatives without any public debates. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy has been soliciting feedback from the public on implementation priorities for the MHCP, and Governor Whitmer has already signed several bipartisan pieces of climate legislation into law.
The benefits these clean energy initiatives will bring to Michigan households can’t be understated.
This June, Michigan paid the 11th highest rate for energy in the country: 19 cents per kilowatt per hour — well above the national average. This is even more harmful to low-income communities. While the average Michigan household spends 3% of its annual income on energy, low-income households spend upwards of 15%. Furthermore, in the Midwest the cost of fossil fuel expenditures for heating has steadily increased since 2019. We can expect for fuel costs to continue to increase in Michigan. A recent analysis of Michigan’s gas utility, Consumer Energy, which provides gas service to nearly 2 million Michigan households, predicts that gas bills will increase 49% in 2030 compared to 2021. This is partly because the utility plans to spend $11 billion in infrastructure investments in their gas distribution system between now and 2030.
By installing a heat pump, which can both heat and cool a home using electricity, the Department of Energy estimates that many American households can save significantly on operating costs. Households will have one appliance that does the job of both a fossil fuel heating system and a traditional AC unit — and does both jobs better. Heat pumps are more effective at maintaining a comfortable and consistent temperature, even during peak summer or winter days, and are 3 to 5 times more efficient than most fossil fuel heating systems. Households that heat with delivered fuels, like propane, are expected to benefit most.
Induction stoves are also safer than gas options. Induction stoves are also safer than gas options. 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US are linked with emissions from gas stoves, and cooking for just one hour can aggravate the condition. In fact, 75% of emissions from a gas stove — including the carcinogen benzene — leak even when the stove itself is off.
Of course, Michigan will have to build out the infrastructure to support carbon neutrality by 2050. But doing so will mean jobs. Since the IRA was signed a year ago, nearly 200,000 clean energy jobs have been created in the Great Lake State to support electric vehicle manufacturing alone. In fact, the state is predicted to see a GDP growth increase of 2.5% above the current baseline growth rates by 2050 as a result of the clean energy jobs and IRA investments.
Clean energy is the future Michigan residents want. More than half of Michiganders supported the IRA when it first came out, and a whopping 71% wanted the state to secure more federal dollars. A poll released in April showed 73% of Michiganders want their government to do more to keep energy bills affordable — and these federal incentives offer a distinct opportunity to do just that.
Federal funding offers the state a huge opportunity to bring in long-term jobs and help households switch to safer, more affordable, and more efficient appliances. It’s the future that all Michiganders deserve.
With two-plus decades of retail experience, Rachel Brown well knew her internal fraud detector should be on high alert when weighing any offer touted as “free.”
That’s why the retired quilt store owner paused — and did her homework — when a tempting overture for no-cost rooftop solar crossed the transom of her Augusta County home a year ago.
Brown’s research involved querying her utility-savvy nephew, Everett Brubaker, who assured her that Dominion Energy’s solar plan targeting elderly and low-income Virginians is indeed a legitimate deal.
“Everett would not be recommending anything that wouldn’t be good for me,” she emphasized. “It came from a very trusted source. That really mattered to me.”
Brubaker’s nod motivated his aunt to sign up for solar.
And, true to its promise, the only money she has spent — all voluntarily — was on ingredients for the chocolate caramel oatmeal cookies she baked for the SunDay Solar crew that arrived Sept. 12 to attach a 12-panel array atop her house. The 5-kilowatt system was scheduled to go online this month.
“Just the idea that this will help me move off fossil fuels is exciting,” Brown said about a system configured to cut her power bill by at least one-third.
“I know Dominion is a huge corporation and my little electric bill is nothing to them. But I’ll be saving and that’s big for someone on a fixed income.”
Brubaker, based in the nearby Shenandoah Valley city of Harrisonburg, is an outreach specialist on the Energy Solutions team at Community Housing Partners. His employer is the largest of roughly a dozen nonprofits statewide qualified to perform weatherization services.
Linking homeowners who live paycheck-to-paycheck to a suite of age- and income-qualifying programs is the bread and butter of that network. Those connections are all about enhancing affordability, adding value and ensuring residents are safe and healthy in their homes.
However, that holistic approach falls flat, Brubaker said, if he doesn’t devote time to building relationships with people who have every right to be wary of anything promoted as free.
“For my Aunt Rachel, that little 5-kilowatt system is a gamechanger,” he said. “But seniors are inundated with scams about solar so it’s nearly impossible to sift through what’s legitimate and what isn’t.
“It’s important that there be comfort and trust.”
While Brown credits Dominion’s “charitable” action, the investor-owned utility isn’t as altruistic as she might think.
The three-year program — which carries the cumbersome name, Income and Age Qualifying Solar — grew out of 2019 legislation (HB 2789) introduced by Del. Israel O’Quinn of Bristol.
O’Quinn, a Southwest Virginia Republican, called on both Dominion and Appalachian Power to craft pilot programs geared at offering energy efficiency and solar incentives to low-income and elderly customers. After it became law, utility regulators at the State Corporation Commission rolled out program rules in 2021.
Dominion and its contractors began installing the small-scale arrays last October. Thus far, they’ve served 116 households, and more are in the pipeline.
The no-hidden-fees program includes a 25-year warranty for panel maintenance and repairs.
While activating small arrays — they range from 3 kW to a maximum of 5 kW — might not be a juggernaut, Dominion’s maxim is that every kilowatt matters as the utility transitions to renewable power.
“While not the largest, they provide meaningful benefits to customers, especially in areas that may not otherwise be near a solar installation,” said Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton.
The initial legislation, which covered both utilities, called for a total investment of $25 million in the solar portion.
In Dominion territory, costs for the rooftop installations are shared among all customers via a demand-side management rider, Slayton said. Briefly, those initiatives modify consumer demand for energy by deploying financial incentives and behavioral changes.
One prerequisite is that each solar installation be paired with an energy efficiency makeover, via a related Dominion endeavor, so homes are as airtight as possible beforehand.
It never pays to outfit a leaky home with photovoltaic panels, Brubaker said, adding with a laugh that homeowners must partake of their energy efficiency “vegetables” before indulging in a solar dessert.
Brown checked that box in the spring when workers from the Local Energy Alliance Program — a sibling organization to Brubaker’s CHP — conducted an energy audit on her all-electric, early 1970s home in Verona.
“They added insulation and made sure my house was sealed up,” Brown said. “The energy efficiency part really matters.”
In addition to saving money, Brown figures the panels on her roof will serve as a lesson in environmental stewardship for her 13-year-old granddaughter, Emma Rose.
“All that I do and know and share influences her,” Brown said. “So, if this can increase the percentage of renewable energy for her future, I’m all for it.”
Emma Rose bonded with her grandmother because she spent so much of her childhood at the Staunton quilt shop Brown operated with her daughter, Emma Rose’s mother, for 23 years. They opted to close the store in March 2020.
“I’m now 76 and happy to have reached that age,” Brown said, reflecting a bit on how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped her life. “My philosophy was always to be more open, sharing and nonjudgmental. But it became more pronounced after the pandemic set in.”
While the Pennsylvania native stuck with her longtime passions of cooking, gardening and creating pottery, she also began noticing opportunities where she could grow differently.
Planet preservation became a priority — and she figured she could start by greening her energy supply.
She’s now hoping that leery friends and neighbors will be open-minded and trusting enough to follow her solar lead. They’re the doubters who repeatedly told her, “Just wait until the bill comes,” when she relayed her story about taking a chance with Dominion.
“But it never did,” Brown said. “Maybe it sounds too good to be true, but it is true. I haven’t paid a penny.”
Wisconsin has ambitious climate plans, but the Republican-controlled legislature has refused to pass funding to carry them out.
That’s why Wisconsin city and state leaders are especially glad for a nearly $5 billion federal initiative meant to help states and municipalities advance climate action plans.
The Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act, has already provided a $3 million planning grant to Wisconsin’s Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy, as well as smaller grants to the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission and four tribal governments within the state’s borders.
“This is a really awesome kickstart to emissions reductions in the state,” said Maria Redmond, director of the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy.
“The challenge in Wisconsin is we haven’t been able to get a lot of resources [for climate programs] because the legislature hasn’t allocated them. The last three budget cycles, the governor proposed significant funding for climate action, including for this office. None of that has been approved. Through this grant, we can get a lot more done.”
The program this year awarded $250 million in non-competitive grants to states, tribes and major metropolitan areas for climate action planning. The entities that received the planning grants can then apply for implementation grants totaling $4.3 billion to carry out their climate action plans.
The implementation grant application deadline is April 1, 2024. In a guidance document released in September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it anticipates awarding 30 to 115 such grants ranging between $2 million and $500 million.
Redmond said the state has “already been doing a lot of work on decarbonization,” including in keeping with Gov. Tony Evers’ 2020 action plan, and “this gives us the resources to really ramp up this work locally,” including by “identifying pathways to reduce emissions, renewable deployment, optimizing energy efficiency, innovating in transportation, and improving our building stock,” and also potentially looking at agriculture, forestry and carbon sequestration.
Wisconsin lawmakers have pushed legislation that limits municipalities’ ability to pursue climate goals, like a ban on local zero-emissions mandates and a bill that would prevent local governments from operating pay electric vehicle charging stations. They’ve also thus far declined to pass a bill enabling community solar, and rebuffed advocates’ requests for legal clarity on third-party-owned solar.
Justin Backal Balik is the state program director for Evergreen Action, which was among organizations offering the administration input on designing the federal program. He said the grants are “tailor-made for a state like Wisconsin at this particular moment in time, when you have the leadership of Gov. Evers that has articulated a clean energy plan to achieve 100% decarbonization in the electricity sector, and also looking at the industrial sector and clean transportation goals.”
“One of the reasons Evergreen advocated for the [Climate Pollution Reduction Grant] was that it is specifically designed to focus on sectoral transformations and unmet funding needs — Wisconsin has a lot,” Backal Balik continued. “The policy vision is there, and particularly with the capacity Wisconsin has with the $3 million planning grant, there are a number of directions they could go in. This is a generational opportunity that’s not going to come around again, an opportunity to meet a good chunk of the unmet funding needs that have popped up as a result of the Republican intransigence in the legislature.”
Redmond said the $3 million planning grant has allowed her office to hire a full-time community engagement facilitator and another full-time staffer, basically doubling the staff. The planning grant is also used for carrying out analysis, modeling, community outreach and status reports over a four-year period.
Environmental justice is a focus of the funding, and a key metric in the scoring system for implementation grants. Redmond said this dovetails with Wisconsin’s focus on equity and inclusion.
“Understanding lived experience is one of the things we’re most excited about” augmenting with the planning grant dollars, she said. “This gives us the ability to go out to communities instead of having them come to us. It’s also about supporting organizations working in communities, making sure we are not expecting them to volunteer their time.”
That could include honorariums for people to attend community meetings.
“We’re asking people to step away from their lives, maybe in the evening when they need child care, or to step away from their jobs,” she said.
Redmond said the state is also planning to work with Illinois and Minnesota to “make sure we are in alignment with state plans, and not working against each other” — especially since Wisconsin metropolitan areas overlap with those states.
Allison Carlson, executive director of the Wisconsin Local Government Climate Coalition, said staff capacity is a common need for local governments on the climate front, and she’s glad the planning grants can be used to hire staff.
“A lot of local governments have one person dedicated to climate action, probably being shared with other departments like recycling; they have a lot of other things on their plate,” she said. “We need to be making sure we’re building capacity in local governments and in communities to sustain efforts over time.”
Backal Balik noted the planning grants are meant to help governments make sense of all the incentives and opportunities on the table.
“EPA is really encouraging states and other jurisdictions to use the CPRG process to step back and look at their federal funding deployment strategy as a whole,” he said. “You have Solar for All here, and direct pay here, so many different pieces. The planning process is asking states to think about how all these funding streams can be accessed together. The parts are pretty consequential in their own right, but you have the opportunity to really scale up the impact of what all the federal investments can achieve.”
States or metro areas that received planning grants can serve as coordinating entities to collaborate with other government bodies to seek grants. Redmond said her office is eager to work with Wisconsin municipalities and agencies on meeting their climate goals, and will hold nine regional meetings for that purpose.
The Wisconsin Local Government Climate Coalition is also focused on helping municipalities participate in the CPRG program.
“Many member communities have their own climate action or clean energy plans in place. They’ve done data analysis, engaging with their communities to understand what the needs are — a lot of them are already making strides,” she said. “One of the big barriers is: where are the dollars to actually do these things? The competitive CPRG grants and other IRA funds are allowing communities to put their plans into action.”
She added that “a lot of the climate action plans were already in place or in process, not necessarily prompted by the CPRG process.”
“But what the CPRG process does is create opportunity to align the needs of local communities with the state and other stakeholders, so we can leverage even more IRA dollars and become more organized together.”
Kelly Hilyard is the sustainability coordinator for the city of Middleton, not far from Madison. She said the office has been stymied by legislative inaction around electric vehicles. They had applied for federal funding for electric vehicles under the Carbon Reduction Program, a program separate from CPRG under the U.S. Department of Transportation. But the county had to switch its proposal to seek funding for LED lights instead because of constraints placed on the program by the legislature.
Hilyard said the city “scrambled” to put together a proposal to transition their street lights to LEDs, which was necessary “low-hanging fruit,” but they still hope to seek federal funds for electric vehicles.
Since being part of a seven-city collaboration on an energy plan in 2020, Middleton has been “ticking things off” on a list of priorities like increased building efficiency and putting solar on city buildings. They are working on a battery storage project at the police station, where a planned microgrid had to be scaled back because of the pandemic.
Hilyard said the city has not been very focused on the CPRG thus far, but is looking for multiple sources of federal and other funding for its goals, and for the advance study and planning needed to bring goals to fruition.
“It’s chicken or the egg — what information do you need to get the grant to do the work, and how do you get the grant to get the information?” she said. “You have to work it from both ends constantly.”
A top priority is energy efficiency for the city’s affordable but often aging and inefficient housing units. A separate federal grant is helping the city take inventory of its housing stock.
“Once you stack all those incentives, decarbonizing entire neighborhoods becomes possible,” she said. “You can do major projects, and reduce the energy burden for people most affected by climate change and high energy bills.”
La Crosse environmental planner Lewis Kuhlman is hopeful that federal programs like the CPRG could help the city acquire more electric city buses or other electric vehicles, as well as creating an electric bike share program.
The city’s sustainability efforts have largely been through a partnership with the company Johnson Controls, which has provided the city with solar, energy efficiency and other energy investments, with a performance contract guaranteeing savings. The partnership helped the city access solar despite the state’s failure to clarify the legality of third-party-owned solar, which has made it more difficult for municipalities to finance solar energy.
“Huge grant opportunities like this are going to take collaboration, because communities the size of LaCrosse don’t really have the staff to implement or prepare for a grant like this,” Kuhlman said. “There are so many different types of projects that can get funding; we need to keep an eye on what we have in our plan — and how can that fit into what’s available for funding? And do state regulations allow it?”
The implementation grants are meant to help states and municipalities meet their climate goals; reduce hazardous air pollutants, especially in disadvantaged communities; complement other funding sources for greenhouse gas reductions; and create programs that are replicable and scalable. The agency is encouraging collaborative proposals that cross local and state lines. Points in the competitive grant scoring process are awarded based on criteria including the funding need, the extent of emissions reductions, benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities, and community outreach.
Redmond noted that doing extensive engagement, figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and meeting the application deadline all in six months will be a challenge.
“One of the things that keeps me awake at night is the timeline,” she said. “We need to have a thoughtful and meaningful process” in a tight time frame, “but we’ll make it happen.”
Milwaukee’s Climate and Equity Plan calls for making the city carbon-neutral by 2050, and creating green jobs that drive racial and economic equity. The city proposes to do this through projects including clean energy, a green jobs accelerator, and transportation electrification.
Erick Shambarger, Milwaukee director of environmental sustainability, said they hope CPRG funding will help the city implement its long-standing ambitious climate goals. He said other municipalities in the metropolitan area that received the grant have taken inspiration from Milwaukee in crafting climate action plans of their own.
“It took several years for us to get our climate plan together, and we don’t have that kind of time relative to getting everything in place for these implementation grants,” Shambarger said. “We don’t want to start from scratch. We want to share lessons we’ve learned; we don’t want to reinvent the wheel on planning processes.”
He said a key focus of the planning grant is a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which has never been done for the region as a whole. He said that the metro group still hasn’t decided where to focus their CPRG-related plans.
“It could be everything from a major transportation project to a focus on buildings,” he said. “It could go in a lot of different directions. We’ve been doing pilot projects, but this will really be important to take it to the next level.”
Marco Marquez is the Wisconsin state director for the organization Action for the Climate Emergency, which mobilizes youth. He said IRA programs could provide federal funding for multiple climate-related initiatives that young people are passionate about and that affect them directly — like electric school buses and energy efficiency and updated HVAC systems in aging school buildings. He said young people are especially frustrated by the inertia of the Wisconsin state legislature on such issues.
“It’s unfortunate that we see a lot of effort from elected officials trying to dictate how each municipality can run and what they’re able to seek in terms of funding,” he said.
The funding available under the IRA and the potential for entities to apply for it without going through the state legislature holds much promise, he added. While his organization has not been specifically focused on CPRG, he sees it as symbolic of larger trends and opportunities.
“This is an amazing opportunity for young people to rewrite and rethink how our society should operate,” Marquez said. “And climate is the justice issue.”
Four states — Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota — declined to participate in the CPRG program. Metropolitan areas in those states that received planning grants can still participate. In Iowa, the Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas received planning grants and can apply directly for CPRG implementation funds.
Backal Balik said advocates hope the CPRG dollars can not only help work around inaction from the legislature in Wisconsin and other states, but actually change a state’s direction on climate as people see the benefits of the funding play out.
“As in Wisconsin, the program is purposely designed to achieve emissions reductions in states where they wouldn’t otherwise occur,” he said. “It’s not just moving money around, but incentivizing the next round of leadership. We had administrations willing to act but with constraints outside of their control. This is a moment in time where they can get a huge chunk of resources to move forward their climate vision.”
As the growth of Xcel Energy’s demand response programs in Minnesota lags a state target, some stakeholders say it’s time to expand the use of third-party companies to enroll customers.
Demand response refers to a broad range of voluntary programs in which utility customers agree to reduce energy use during periods of peak demand. The best-known programs involve smart thermostats or other technology that remotely switch off customers’ air conditioners in short increments when the electric grid is under stress.
The programs are expected to play a bigger role as the country transitions to more variable, renewable generation such as wind and solar power. Having the ability to shift customers’ energy use into hours when those sources are providing lots of clean and inexpensive electricity could help lower costs, reduce fossil fuels use, and improve reliability.
In Minnesota, Xcel Energy operates one of the country’s largest demand response programs. A 2019 analysis by the Brattle Group ranked its portfolio eighth in the country as a percentage of peak demand. More than half of that capacity comes from its “interruptible tariff” program, in which commercial and industrial customers are offered bill savings in return for committing to curtail electricity use if called upon by the utility. The next largest source is its residential air conditioning Saver’s Switch program, which has enrolled more than 60% of homeowners with air conditioning.
As of 2017, the company had 850 megawatts of demand response capability in its Minnesota territory, about 10% of its system peak demand. That year, Xcel and state utility regulators agreed to a target of growing demand response enrollment by 50% over six years — an increase of 425 megawatts by 2023.
Earlier this year, Xcel reported slow progress toward that target, saying it had added just 117 megawatts in the previous half-decade. The company said the COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to recruit new participants and caused some of those in Xcel’s programs to go out of business.
The company also expressed confidence that program growth would be robust in 2023 and that it would achieve the target. The company continues to install smart meters, allowing more market demand response programs such as time-of-use rates that encourage customers to shift energy consumption. Other demand response programs involve customer-owned batteries, electric vehicles, building control systems and grid-connected appliances.
“We are very close to meeting the target this year, incentivizing growth through creative marketing, sign-on bonuses and a variety of new demand response offerings that give our customers choices to best fit their needs,” Xcel said.
Meanwhile, some clean energy and industry groups say Xcel’s apparent struggles to meet the demand response target shows there is a need for competition in the space.
In August, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission heard debate over whether to allow the use of demand response aggregators — third-party companies that sign up customers for programs and then sell the capacity into wholesale markets. Xcel and other utilities argued against permitting retail aggregators because of unease over how they would impact the grid.
The commission voted 3-2 to table the topic.
Commissioner Joseph Sullivan said utilities will need more resources than just solar, wind and battery storage to maintain a resilient grid as fossil fuel plants close. Demand response is a flexible resource that can be an alternative to a gas power plant, he said. Sullivan said he has been surprised by how little Xcel uses demand response. Xcel tested but did not use demand response once last summer, he said.
“I think there is a tremendous opportunity for Xcel to be doing more,” Sullivan said.
Xcel has told the commission that exercising demand response programs too often increases the risk of participants dropping out.
Frank Lacey, a founder and former chair of Advanced Energy Management Alliance, which represents demand response companies, said Xcel and other utilities don’t embrace demand response because building new generation is more profitable, offering a guaranteed rate of return. “Utilities have an inherent conflict in growing demand response,” Lacey said.
But the programs save consumers money, with programs sometimes paying six times their cost. They offer a way for utilities to balance loads when solar and wind production fluctuate and fossil fuel plants no longer exist to fill in the gaps. Lacey said he hopes Minnesota looks again at the aggregator issue.
“What’s the expression about shutting the barn door after the horse escapes?” he said. “If you wait until you need it, you won’t recognize you need it until you need it, and it’s too late at that point.”
A Cleveland, Ohio, green bank is leading a multi-state effort to secure a chunk of $7 billion in funding for low-income residential solar installations under the federal Inflation Reduction Act.
Growth Opportunity Partners, a community development corporation focused on underserved, low- and moderate-income communities in Ohio, is spearheading an application by about 20 counties in seven states that are collectively seeking $250 million to help low-income residents access solar power. It operates the GO Green Energy Fund, the nation’s first Black-led green bank program.
Growth Opps CEO Michael Jeans recently spoke with the Energy News Network about how GO Green Energy fits into the nonprofit organization’s broader mission to help underserved communities.
Through consulting and capital services, Growth Opps is “providing financial solutions in communities that have been underinvested in and disadvantaged,” Jeans said. As Growth Opps worked in those communities in Ohio’s urban and rural areas, however, he and colleagues saw that people’s health and well-being were a big concern.
Conversations with health executives, foundations and others led to the concept of the GO Green Energy Fund as a way to address some of the causes of health problems at a community level, as opposed to a case-by-case basis.
“We may, at a systems level, be able to create access for those who would like to see a better life for themselves, who would like to see cleaner communities,” Jeans said.
Growth Opps was incorporated in 2015, and the GO Green Energy Fund began in 2020 — two years before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Among other things, the law authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to implement its $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the EPA says is meant to mobilize “financing and private capital for greenhouse gas- and air pollution-reducing projects in communities across the country.”
“Thankfully for us, there’s natural alignment,” Jeans said.
“We are the Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition,” Jeans said. “It’s a county-by-county regional focus across multiple states and an opportunity for there to be equity in the process.”
Growth Opportunity Partners is the lead applicant. The coalition’s members include roughly 20 counties and their communities in Ohio and states from Missouri, Indiana and Michigan to parts of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia. Group members in Ohio are Cuyahoga, Summit, Franklin, Hamilton and Montgomery counties, which include the cities of Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton.
The coalition hopes to get $250 million under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund’s $7 billion Solar for All category, which aims to tackle barriers to disadvantaged communities’ participation in distributed solar generation.
“These dollars need to be catalytic. This is a seed investment for this work,” Jeans said, meaning the funding is meant to spur additional funding from other sources, including capital markets, businesses, philanthropy and other sources. Otherwise, “we will have undercapitalized the effort this is going to take.”
Jeans said the group hopes to hear back from the EPA sometime in the winter, with a possibility for funds to start flowing in July. With disruption in Congress, however, those goalposts could move.
“There are other things that come along with that,” Jeans said, including whether rooftops are ready for solar. Also, “under the rest of our legacy work at Growth Opps, are there other things we should be considering? Should we look at appliances for upgrades? Weatherization to further save money? There are incentives and rebates that are available at the household level.”
“If we can get [distributed solar power] to the homes that have high energy burdens — meaning too much of their check is going to pay for the cost of utilities, then we can have significant impacts here,” Jeans said.
The work can provide job benefits for people in disadvantaged communities, too. “We’re in a position to add skills, increase income and increase opportunity while cleaning up the environment for our families and our neighbors,” Jeans said.
“There’s a level of trust that has to be earned,” Jeans said. “When places have been underinvested in and people have been disinvested in, then it’s difficult to believe that the next knock on the door is one that’s welcome.”
Earning that trust calls for caring and listening to people about their needs and lived experiences, Jeans said. “We know these people. We know many of the occupants in these communities. We have a diverse team, and we’ve grown up in many of these communities.”
“The second barrier is: things have price tags. And when you are early in market it’s going to cost more,” Jeans said. For him, that’s why the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding opportunities matter — to bridge gaps and act as a catalyst to create markets.
“This is every bit a decisive decade for us,” Jeans said. “We need to reduce emissions and begin to make a turn by 2030.”
Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be slashed by 43% by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year. And global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak before 2025 to limit warming to either 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. The world is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, but limiting emissions can help avoid the worst consequences.
Funding under the Inflation Reduction Act will call for reports to the EPA or other agencies. And grants to nonprofits like Growth Opps generally require reports on how funds were used. For Jeans, though, success is about more than reports.
“Our impact is our measure,” he said. “How those whom we serve are better off is how we measure significant return on investment.”
Editor’s note: Growth Opportunity Partners receives support from the George Gund Foundation, which also provides funding to the Energy News Network. Foundations and other donors to the Energy News Network have no oversight or input into the editorial process and may not influence stories. More about our relationship with funders can be found in our code of ethics.
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