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STORAGE: A company opens the first U.S. long duration, sodium-ion battery manufacturing plant in western Michigan in what officials call a “milestone for the battery industry.” (WWMT)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Minneapolis-St. Paul’s regional public transit agency will buy 20 electric buses to put in service by 2026 to help meet emission-reduction targets. (Star Tribune)
GRID: A federal judge upholds a decision to block a land swap needed to complete a major transmission line between Iowa and Wisconsin, creating more uncertainty for the project. (E&E News, subscription)
CLEAN ENERGY:
WIND: North Dakota regulators approve plans for a 200 MW wind project that includes an 18-mile transmission line. (North Dakota Monitor)
PIPELINES: At a North Dakota Republican Party convention, a resolution objecting to the use of eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines falls two votes short. (North Dakota Monitor)
AIR QUALITY: Wildfire smoke helped keep Fargo, North Dakota, on an annual ranking of the 25 worst U.S. cities for short-term particle pollution. (MPR News)
POLITICS: The top GOP candidates for Indiana governor say they would take steps to emphasize coal and reshape the state’s utility oversight board. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
GRID:
BIOGAS:
COMMENTARY:
GRID: Texas’ grid manager increases its forecast for large-scale users from 111 GW to 152 GW — a 37% increase by 2030 that places even more pressure on an already wobbly power grid. (Dallas Morning News)
PIPELINES: Mountain Valley Pipeline officials say cost of the nearly completed project has grown to $7.85 billion, more than $220 million higher than its latest cost estimate in February. (Roanoke Times, Cardinal News)
SOLAR:
WIND: Dominion Energy readies its first batch of monopiles for placement as it begins construction of its offshore wind farm near Virginia. (Virginian-Pilot)
OIL & GAS:
TRANSITION:
NUCLEAR: Years of delay and tens of millions in cost overruns in Georgia Power’s expansion of nuclear Plant Vogtle will likely push utilities away from such large projects toward small modular reactors, experts say. (E&E News)
UTILITIES:
POLITICS: West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice vows to fight new U.S. EPA rules requiring coal-fired power plants to reduce or capture 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. (West Virginia Watch)
GRID: Eversource jabs at Connecticut’s utility commission, saying it hasn’t been “a constructive regulatory environment” and announcing a $500 million decrease in grid investments over the next five years; the governor will reappoint the commission’s chair regardless. (CT Mirror, Hartford Courant, CT Mirror)
ALSO:
FOSSIL FUELS:
FINANCE: A number of Schoharie County towns sue New York state over the constitutionality and fairness of its solar and wind project taxation rules. (CBS 6)
POLICY: Climate advocates and policymakers say the New York Power Authority hasn’t been transparent enough in its planning to comply with the Build Public Renewables Act for anyone to see if the agency is on track to meet its mandates. (Canary Media)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WIND: The Brigantine, New Jersey, city council pushes for fellow municipalities and its county board of commissioners to use legal action to fight offshore wind development. (Press of Atlantic City)
SOLAR:
GRID: Power outages stemming from severe weather across the U.S. have surged 74% in the past decade compared to the decade before, showing another tangible effect of global warming, a climate group’s analysis finds. (Guardian)
ALSO:
OFFSHORE WIND:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
AIR QUALITY: Nearly 40% of U.S. residents were exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution last year, an increase from the year before thanks to wildfires and extreme heat. (Guardian)
HYDROGEN: A U.S. Energy Department advisory committee says the clean hydrogen industry isn’t growing fast enough and needs further federal help to meaningfully help the U.S. reach net-zero emissions by 2050. (E&E News)
PUBLIC LANDS: A wave of new federal rules and plans aim to leverage public lands for clean energy development while protecting vulnerable ecosystems. (Canary Media)
SOLAR:
OVERSIGHT: As Georgia’s regulatory board goes years without elections, a group of Black voters appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to shift from at-large elections to having each commissioner elected by voters in the district where they live. (Grist/WABE)
PIPELINES: Environmental groups sue to challenge federal regulators’ approval of an extension for the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s spur into North Carolina, arguing the project has changed so much the pipeline should be required to start the permitting process over. (Cardinal News)
GRID: The Biden administration finalizes a transmission permitting streamlining rule and plans to spend $331 million to add more than 2,000 MW of grid capacity in the West. (Heatmap, news release)
ALSO: California’s grid operator proposes investing $6.1 billion in 26 infrastructure projects aimed at expediting renewable energy project interconnections before 2035. (Reuters)
STORAGE:
SOLAR: A New Mexico company breaks ground on a $50 million solar tracking equipment manufacturing facility near Albuquerque. (Solar Power World)
COAL:
POLLUTION: The American Lung Association finds four New Mexico counties have excessively high levels of ozone pollution, including three in oil and gas producing regions. (NM Political Report)
OIL & GAS:
NUCLEAR:
HYDROPOWER:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES: Oregon regulators reject consumer advocates’ bid to dismiss Portland General Electric’s requested rate increase, saying the proposal must go through the lengthy review process. (Oregonian)
COMMENTARY: A California columnist celebrates the closure of 21 Western coal plants over the past two decades, but warns that shuttering the 32 remaining facilities may be even more difficult. (Los Angeles Times)
GRID: Virtual power plants, dynamic line ratings, and other advanced grid technologies could open up space on the grid for more electricity while staving off the need for costly, time-consuming transmission construction, a new U.S. Energy Department roadmap finds. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
EMISSIONS:
WIND: The world installed a record 117 GW of new wind power generation capacity last year, up 50% from the year before, a wind power advocacy group finds. (The Hill)
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Black Americans are more likely than other racial groups to say they’re “very” or “fairly” concerned about pollution, and are more likely than White Americans to be displaced by environmental contamination, a survey finds. (The Hill)
CARBON CAPTURE: Illinois bills would add a series of restrictions on carbon sequestration and pipeline projects as developers seek to capitalize on the state’s geology and lucrative federal tax credits. (Energy News Network)
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Cities across the U.S. are building out electric vehicle charging networks to meet anticipated EV growth. (Utility Dive)
POLITICS: House Republican leaders are poised to cut a provision to reverse the Biden administration’s LNG permitting ban from critical foreign aid packages. (E&E News)
TRANSMISSION: A federal judge rejects tribal nations’ and advocates’ bid to halt work on a segment of the SunZia transmission project in a culturally and ecologically significant part of southern Arizona. (Associated Press)
MINING:
OIL & GAS:
CLIMATE:
WIND: A Colorado electric cooperative and wholesale power supplier agree to purchase the full output of a 200 MW wind facility in the eastern part of the state. (news release)
UTILITIES:
COAL:
GEOTHERMAL: The federal Bureau of Land Management plans to exempt some geothermal exploration projects from environmental reviews to expedite development. (E&E News, subscription; news release)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: An Arizona community college launches an electric vehicle technician training course. (news release)
COMMENTARY: Nevada advocates urge the federal Bureau of Land Management to push utility-scale solar projects toward low-conflict, previously disturbed public lands. (Nevada Independent)
Just about every week, Shawn Grant, who works for Salt Lake City-based Rocky Mountain Power, gets an inquiry from another utility looking for information about the company’s Wattsmart battery program.
“We want to do something. … How did you guys do it?’” Grant, the company’s customer innovation manager, says he’s often asked. “We’re always fielding those questions.”
The program pays customers with solar who opt to install battery storage systems for the ability to use that stored electricity to help balance flows on the electric grid.
For customers, the benefits come in the form of lower electric bills and backup power in case of an outage. For Rocky Mountain Power, which has 1.2 million customers in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, the program allows the company to harness the collective power stored in those distributed batteries to shave electric demand when it spikes rather than calling for more generation from a traditional power plant, among other uses.
“We’re using every battery every day to reduce demand on the grid,” Grant said.
The concept is known as a virtual power plant, and grid operators, utilities, state regulators and lawmakers across the country are increasingly exploring the possibilities. They are seen as a cost-effective way to aid an electric grid that in many parts of the country is increasingly embattled by power plant retirements as well as difficulties building new, cleaner generation and the transmission lines they need — all at a time when huge projected electric demand increases loom.
“We’re now in this load-growth era,” said Robin Dutta, acting executive director at the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association, a solar and storage industry group focused on Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. “When you’re mitigating peak demand growth at the source, that’s perhaps the most cost effective way to modernize the grid.”
Nearly 800,000 American homes installed a new solar or solar and energy storage system in 2023, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. That growth set a record, with about 6.8 gigawatts installed, a 12% increase from 2022. Electric vehicles, another potential grid resource as a store of energy, also broke a sales record last year, despite consumer uptake being slower than some expected.
“These are devices that people are buying anyway because they’re faster, better, cheaper and virtual power plants allows everybody to leverage these devices while putting some money back in the pockets of people that bought the thing in the first place,”said Brian Turner, a director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group
The U.S. Department of Energy found in a report last year that large-scale deployment of virtual power plants “could help address demand increases and rising peaks at lower cost than conventional resources, reducing the energy costs for Americans — one in six of whom are already behind on electricity bills.”
They’re not a new concept, the DOE noted, adding that most existing virtual power plants are so-called demand response programs. In Virginia, for example, the commonwealth for years has run a program that enrolls hundreds of public facilities (airports, universities, K-12 schools, municipal buildings, water treatment plants and others) that agree to reduce or shift their electric demand to relieve strain on the grid. The DOE report says deploying 80 to 160 gigawatts of virtual power plants by 2030 could save about $10 billion in annual grid costs and would “direct grid spending back to electricity consumers.” At that scale, virtual power plants could meet between 10 and 20% of peak electric demand. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a research nonprofit focused on sustainability, called virtual power plants “a valuable and largely overlooked resource for advancing key grid objectives,” including reliability, affordability, decarbonization and electrification, among others.
However, many states are starting to take notice of the potential:
Experts who study and run the nation’s electric grid are worried about the pace of the energy transition. Old coal and gas plant retirements are accelerating, driven by economics, state clean energy policies and utilities’ own decarbonization goals. At the same time, massive backlogs in the queues to connect new power resources — overwhelmingly wind, solar and battery projects — in the regional transmission organizations that run the grid in much of the country mean big delays in replacing that retiring power generation. And after roughly a decade of flat electric demand, load growth is projected by many experts to explode as a result of transportation, industrial and home heating electrification, as well as a surge in data center development, among other factors. Throw in the fact that the construction of new transmission lines, essential to get excess power to where it might be urgently needed, has also stagnated and a problematic picture emerges.
“Most utilities in the country are planning on pretty significant load growth,” said Turner from Advanced Energy United. ”They could plan to build a new peaker plant or they could plan to ‘build’ VPPs.”
That’s where utility incentives come into play.
Generally speaking, Turner said, utilities that operate transmission and distribution systems are more friendly to the idea. Companies that also own their own generation, – and make a sizable chunk of their income from guaranteed profits on building new plants – , might not like the idea of a program that erodes the business case for a pricey new facility.
“That’s why we have utility commissions,” Turner said. “They exist to say to the utility that virtual power plants are a cheaper option for the ratepayer and therefore you should implement it.”
However, even companies that might have resisted the idea are facing such dire electric-demand growth scenarios that virtual power plants may be attractive ways to get more flexibility out of the grid more quickly than building new generation.
“This is a way to get the capacity online faster and oftentimes cheaper,” Turner said. “Meeting that load growth is a real challenge in a lot of places.”
ELECTRIFICATION: A new Department of Energy program aims to help manufacturers develop next-generation heat pumps that can replace large buildings’ rooftop heating and cooling systems and save U.S. businesses as much as $5 billion annually. (Utility Dive)
ALSO: Clean energy advocates and professional cooks continue to work to electrify restaurant kitchens and homes in Berkeley, California, even after a court shot down the city’s natural gas-hookup ban. (Guardian)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
OIL & GAS:
EMISSIONS:
GRID:
NUCLEAR: Experts are divided on whether Georgia Power’s costly, long-delayed expansion of its nuclear Plant Vogtle heralds a new era for nuclear power development or will discourage future investment in the power source. (Grist)
SOLAR: New York officials confirm Tesla’s Buffalo solar panel factory uses panels made by a competitor on its roof, not its own product. (Investigative Post)
CLIMATE:
GRID: The New England grid operator’s newest transmission study finds the region has to spend up to $26 billion over the next 26 years to bulk up its transmission network — a large sum but roughly comparable to spending in recent decades. (CommonWealth Beacon)
ALSO: Two Connecticut municipalities sue to stop a state-approved transmission line expansion, calling the plan an “aesthetic eyesore and an unjust blight.” (Only In Bridgeport)
SOLAR:
COAL: Federal energy analysts believe April coal exports will be slashed by about a third because of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse and subsequent Port of Baltimore closure. (The Hill)
BUILDINGS:
NUCLEAR:
STORAGE: Pennsylvania’s utility commission issues new battery storage guidelines for utilities that allow them to use non-wires distribution reliability projects and possibly own them on a case-by-case basis. (Utility Dive)
UTILITIES:
CLEAN ENERGY: A town in Massachusetts’ Berkshires region is undertaking weatherization measures, installing electric vehicle chargers and installing solar arrays to achieve net-zero by 2050. (Berkshire Eagle)
TRANSIT: Rhode Island’s public transit agency says piloting no fares on its most popular bus route increased ridership by nearly 100,000 riders but cost it $2.7 million, calling the cost unsustainable. (Rhode Island Current)
EQUITY:
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