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CARBON CAPTURE: A North Dakota electric cooperative is betting a $2 billion carbon capture project will allow a coal-fired power plant to comply with Minnesota’s law requiring carbon-free electricity by 2040, but critics say the plan is absurdly complicated and expensive compared to alternatives. (MPR News)
CLEAN ENERGY:
MATERIALS: The closure of three U.S. aluminum manufacturing plants, including one in Missouri, could threaten the transition to clean energy and electrification, experts say. (E&E News)
SOLAR: South Dakota’s largest solar project, a 128 MW installation near Rapid City, is scheduled to come online ahead of schedule. (South Dakota Searchlight)
CLIMATE: Nebraska’s 76-page climate action plan includes incentives for a host of energy efficiency, solar and regenerative agriculture projects. (Nebraska Examiner)
EMISSIONS: A new report calls on Chicago to set limits on emissions from certain commercial buildings that could grow stricter over time. (Chicago Tribune)
PIPELINES: Indigenous author and advocate Winona LaDuke says both North Dakota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are to blame for the policing costs and handling of Dakota Access pipeline protests in late 2016. (North Dakota Monitor)
BIOENERGY: An Irish company plans to invest $400 million at a Wisconsin ethanol plant to include a new large plant-based renewable natural gas production facility. (Journal Sentinel)
NUCLEAR: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signs a bill into law that updates legal language and allows the state to potentially enter into agreements for nuclear power projects. (SDPB)
COAL:
UTILITIES: WEC Energy Group taps Indiana utility NIPSCO’s president and COO to lead We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. (Journal Sentinel)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
One of California’s marquee programs for cleaning up transportation emissions is at a crossroads. Decisions made in the next few months could set the decade-and-a-half-old Low Carbon Fuel Standard on one of two very different paths.
One path, favored by fossil fuel and renewable natural gas interests, would lock in a market scheme that currently extracts billions of dollars per year from Californians at the pump and subsidizes crop-based and cow-manure-derived biofuels.
That would be a disaster, according to environmental advocates, who point to a growing body of scientific evidence showing that this approach, if extended until 2045 as proposed, would cause these biofuels to grow at a scale that would harm the climate and the environment.
The other path, proposed by environmental groups, transportation-decarbonization analysts and climate and energy researchers, would limit the scope of unsustainable biofuels in the program, and instead reorient it to support what experts agree should be California’s primary clean transportation pathway: electric vehicles.
To date, roughly 80 percent of LCFS funding has gone to combustion biofuels rather than electric vehicles. That’s simply incompatible with the state’s EV ambitions and needs, said Adrian Martinez, deputy managing attorney of nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice — and the imperative to reduce emissions from transportation, which account for nearly 40 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’ve got to eliminate our reliance on combustion,” he said, but “the program as designed will continue to provide lucrative incentives for combustible fuels well into the future.”
The regulator in charge of the LCFS program — and this high-stakes decision — is the California Air Resources Board. CARB’s board, which comprises 14 voting members, 12 appointed by the governor and two by the state legislature, holds a host of responsibilities around California’s energy transition. Those include shaping the state’s nation-leading EV policy, as well as determining its broad plans for achieving long-term greenhouse-gas reduction goals.
Critics say the LCFS program’s increasing support for biofuels is in direct contrast to both the EV targets and the climate goals also overseen by CARB — and that the program has been captured by deep-pocketed industries trying to greenwash the continued use of combustion fuels.
CARB has a chance to reform the program with an upcoming vote, initially set for this month, but now postponed to an undetermined future date. But its pathway to fixing the problems that plague LCFS is murky and messy at best.
Right now, the staff managing the LCFS program hasn’t given CARB board members an opportunity to pick a climate- and EV-friendly alternative. Instead, a December staff proposal provides only one option for the board to vote on later this year: a set of policies that Earthjustice forecasts would direct $27 billion over the coming decade toward biofuels and worsen effects on the climate, the environment and the prices that Californians pay at the pump.
CARB does have another option, however — an alternative proposal laid out by CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, created to advise the board on environmental-justice issues.
That proposal would cap the fast-growing share of crop-based renewable diesel flooding the state. It would also end the unusual structure that now allows biogas produced by dairy farm manure to offset a much higher amount of carbon emissions than any other source of alternative fuels.
And, importantly, it would make the core of the program — its carbon-offset marketplace — function in a much healthier way, proponents say. A torrent of cheap, polluting renewable diesel and dairy farm biogas credits have dragged down the price that LCFS credits can fetch for avoiding emissions, diluting the incentive to deploy new climate technologies and sapping what could be a key funding source for EV infrastructure in the state.
“The stakes are very, very high,” Martinez said. “That’s why you see so much attention focused on this — and a very broad and diverse coalition that is pushing for more systemic change to the program, versus more modest tweaks that will really just keep this market owned and dominated by fossil fuel interests.”
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard was born out of AB 32, the 2006 law that created the state’s carbon cap-and-trade market. Much like carbon markets, LCFS is meant to make companies pay for their carbon emissions by buying credits from technologies that reduce carbon emissions.
The program requires all fossil fuels refined and sold in California to meet increasingly stringent carbon-intensity targets. In practice, fossil fuel producers have to buy a bunch of LCFS credits from low-carbon transit sources operating in the state in order to comply. The goal is to create a system that taxes planet-warming fossil fuels to fund cleaner transportation alternatives.
But the LCFS has strayed from its initial focus on vehicle electrification and “advanced” non-crop-based biofuels to become “a swag bag for venture capitalists, big oil, big agriculture, and big gas, increasingly coming at the expense of low- and moderate-income Californians.” That’s how Jim Duffy, a 13-year veteran of the agency who served as branch chief of the LCFS program from 2019 to 2020 and retired in 2022, described the evolution of the program in comments filed with CARB.
Under the LCFS regulation adopted in 2009, dairy-manure-to-biogas projects did not receive special treatment compared to other sources of methane such as landfills and sewage treatment plants, Duffy wrote. Similarly, diesel fuels made from crops like soybeans were considered “only marginally better than fossil diesel.”
But in the years since, “the LCFS was revised to provide additional and unnecessary support to landfills and first-generation crop-based biofuels” and “to mitigate the methane problem created by the dairy industry itself,” Duffy wrote — despite the fact that evidence increasingly suggests that both sources harm the planet far more than they benefit it.
The result has been an increasing share of LCFS credits being supplied by renewable diesel and dairy-generated biogas.
CARB has justified these shifts with analysis indicating they will yield net positive climate impacts.
“The proposed amendments now under consideration will directly increase the program benefits in the most burdened communities, by reducing the carbon across the supply chain for fuels sold in California, as well as improving public health for fuels sold in California,” CARB spokesperson Dave Clegern said in an email to Canary Media. He cited data from CARB staff’s analysis of its proposal indicating that, by 2045, its plan will reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 25,586 tons, cut greenhouse gas emissions by 560 million metric tons and yield public-health cost savings of nearly $5 billion.
But critics say the agency is failing to account for the full scope of climate harms that will be caused by its continued emphasis on biofuels.
They warn that the sheer scale of California’s program — totaling some $4 billion per year — is driving investment in the wrong transportation alternatives. The consequences are dire, they say — not just within the state, but across the country and around the world.
Take renewable diesel, a fuel made from fats and oils processed to be identical to fossil diesel fuel. The U.S. increased production of the fuel by 400% between 2019 and 2022, and it is set to double it again this year, according to Jeremy Martin, senior scientist and director of fuels policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Unlike ethanol and biodiesel, which can only partially replace gasoline and diesel, renewable diesel has “no limit on how much can be blended,” Martin said. It could theoretically completely replace diesel fuel for trucks, buses and other vehicles. And California’s LCFS offers credits on top of the federal incentives the fuel receives, making the state the primary target of renewable diesel producers across the country.
As a result, the share of renewable diesel as a percentage of total diesel fuel use has skyrocketed in California compared to the rest of the U.S., as the chart below shows.
In a September meeting, Steven Cliff, CARB’s executive officer, highlighted a milestone for the LCFS program: As of mid-2023, California had “more than half of our diesel demand being met by non-petroleum-based diesel alternatives. This is a direct result of the LCFS program, and it’s bringing real climate and air-quality benefits to the state.”
In Martin’s view, that milestone is not a win, but a warning. It indicates that renewable diesel is “flooding the LCFS, drowning the policy — and it doesn’t make sense” on climate or environmental terms.
Once the demand for renewable diesel outgrows the supply of waste oils and other non-crop feedstocks that can be used to make the fuel in genuinely climate-friendly ways, it becomes highly likely that it will cause more greenhouse gas emissions than it will displace. Critics like Martin argue that demand has now reached this point, though it’s a contested question.
This additional demand for crop oils could mostly serve “to expand the cultivation of palm oil to replace the soybean and other oils made into fuel,” the Union of Concerned Scientists argued in comments to CARB. That, in turn, is likely to lead to more rapid deforestation in nations that produce large amounts of these crops, such as Brazil and Indonesia — an outcome that would cause far greater climate harms than whatever emissions reductions result from replacing fossil diesel.
To stop this, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups want CARB to set a limit on how much renewable diesel can receive LCFS credits. CARB staff’s proposal declines to set such a cap, citing renewable diesel’s climate and health benefits.
But CARB’s methodology is out of step with the latest science, according to multiple groups studying these issues. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for its part, says CARB’s analysis is “based on inaccurate claims of climate and air-quality benefits and associated health outcomes.”
In a recent comparison of five different models for evaluating the climate impacts of crop-based biofuels, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that only CARB’s own model shows a positive carbon-reduction impact.
And while the agency has a proposal to limit deforestation harms by setting “sustainability guidelines” for crops being used for renewable diesel, it applies only to feedstocks grown in the U.S., Martin noted. That’s a problem: California is on pace to consume 10 percent of global soybean oil supplies for renewable diesel, meaning a significant amount of the crop oil produced for the program will be grown under conditions CARB cannot police, he said.
Given that reality, Martin said, “If California declines to act — if they say, ‘This is evidence of success; look how little fossil diesel we’re using’” by replacing it with renewable diesel, “then, in fact, California is giving its support to a fuel that we know is unsustainable at these volumes.”
CLEAN ENERGY: For every dollar the Inflation Reduction Act put toward clean energy incentives, policy analysts say the private sector has matched $5.47, totaling nearly $750 billion in the first year after the law passed. (Grist)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE:
OIL & GAS:
COAL:
PIPELINES:
BUILDINGS: A New York City public housing pilot project currently underway shows promise in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making apartments more comfortable through window-mounted heat pumps. (Associated Press)
GRID: Connecticut regulators approve the first round of pilot projects in a new program aimed at testing innovative hardware and software to decarbonize the electric grid. (Energy News Network)
MINING: Tribal nation citizens urge a federal human rights commission to push back on a predicted uranium mining boom, saying Indigenous communities continue to suffer from Cold War-era extraction of the fuel. (Inside Climate News)
BIOFUELS: California advocates call on the state to overhaul its low-carbon fuel standard program to support and fund electric vehicles and charging infrastructure rather than biofuels. (Canary Media)
COMMENTARY: An ecologist suggests that solar projects designed to have synergy with agriculture and ecosystems can preserve farmland and natural environments as the U.S. builds out solar arrays. (The Conversation)
BIOFUELS: California advocates call on the state to overhaul its low-carbon fuel standard program to support and fund electric vehicles and charging infrastructure rather than biofuels. (Canary Media)
OIL & GAS: U.S. Coast Guard officials say an oil sheen spotted off southern California’s coast last week may have emanated from a natural seep on the ocean floor. (ABC News)
COAL:
SOLAR: New Mexico’s Supreme Court rejects investor-owned utilities’ bid to loosen the state’s community solar program’s rules. (Albuquerque Journal)
GRID: Federal regulators approve new rules allowing California’s grid operator to participate in an extended day-ahead power market once it goes live. (RTO Insider, subscription)
CLEAN ENERGY: A California power agency awards cities in the northern part of the state $11.5 million to help fund clean energy-related projects. (Daily Journal)
CLIMATE: The U.S. Energy Department awards five New Mexico startups over $6 million to research, develop and scale up climate technology. (news release)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES:
MINING:
COMMENTARY:
PIPELINES: Residents who live along the Mountain Valley Pipeline complain that Virginia regulators are ignoring erosion and pollution complaints as construction nears completion. (WVTF)
ALSO: The Mountain Valley Pipeline’s biggest stakeholder announces it will merge with its former owner, Pittsburgh gas company EQT, in a $5.5 billion stock deal. (Cardinal News; Bloomberg, subscription)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
SOLAR:
OIL & GAS:
COAL:
UTILITIES: The prosecution rests and defense begins its case in the trial of two former executives who are accused of scheming to collect bonuses by privatizing Jacksonville, Florida’s municipal utility. (WTLV)
CLIMATE:
Correction: Connecticut’s Innovative Energy Solutions Program is working with the consulting firm Strategen. An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the program and firm. Also, the participating company Kraken is not affiliated with the similarly named cryptocurrency company.
Connecticut regulators have approved the first round of pilot projects in a new program aimed at accelerating innovation across the electric grid.
Seven tech companies have received the go-ahead to partner with utilities Eversource or United Illuminating to test the potential of their hardware or software to help decarbonize the state’s electric grid.
The Innovative Energy Solutions Program is part of a broader effort by the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) to modernize the grid. It encourages utilities to embrace new technology while limiting the risk to ratepayers.
The selected companies were winnowed from an initial 50 applications. While some of the technologies have been deployed successfully elsewhere, none have been tested in Connecticut, said Julia Dumaine, PURA’s supervisor of strategy and operations. The projects, funded at a total of just under $10 million, were chosen after a multi-step review process that included scrutiny from a nine-member advisory council.
“Having these increasingly stringent reviews minimizes ratepayer risk,” Dumaine said. “These are technologies that have demonstrated the potential to provide real ratepayer and grid-level benefits.”
None are startups in the research and development phase — they are all prepared to scale up at a later date, she said.
After the pilots launch, each company has a set of metrics they must meet and will be required to report on them quarterly, said Eli Asher, a senior manager at Strategen, the consulting firm responsible for developing and administering the program.
“We will be gathering data on how effective the projects are,” he said. “At the end of the deployment period, we’ll have a cost-benefit analysis to inform the recommendations as to whether they should be fully deployed at scale across the state.”
The program allows the utilities to recover their costs for testing these new technologies, something they might be reluctant to do otherwise.
“I think it’s great to have regulators backing a program like this,” said Alex Ghanem, commercial manager for Piclo, one of the companies participating. “It’s a risk to test things out and it costs the utilities resources to do so. I think this is a great framework.”
Based in London, England, Piclo will work with United Illuminating to launch a grid flexibility market. They will recruit owners, operators and managers of any type of distributed energy resource — battery storage, electric vehicles, and other types of dispatchable power sources commonly known as DERs — to operate in an independent marketplace in return for compensation.
Piclo will work with DER aggregators on their platform. They will provide United Illuminating with local flexible DERs that represent alternative — and ideally, cheaper — places to buy energy than on the wholesale market when the utility has insufficient supply to meet customer demand.
Piclo is already operating in New York in partnership with National Grid.
“The penetration of DERs is disrupting the grid and the utilities need to pull on multiple different levers to manage that,” said John Bayard, Piclo’s chief commercial officer. “Grid flexibility marketplaces are one of the tools they can use.”
Another British company, Kraken, will also work with United Illuminating to help them better manage DERs.
Kraken’s platform “can connect to any kind of DER — electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart thermostats,” said Devrim Celal, chief executive officer. “We can connect to them in an effective way, monitor them in real time and control what they do.”
This pilot will focus on customers that use heat pumps and drive electric vehicles. The company will recruit ratepayers to sign up to use their mobile app, which will give Kraken access to their DERs. For example, they might tell the company what kind of EV and charger they have, and what time of day they need to have their car charged by.
“We will determine when is the best time to charge their cars to achieve low-carbon emission targets, and in exchange we’ll give them a reward,” Celal said.
The pilot is intended to help the grid run greener and more cheaply.
An EV charging software company called AmpUp will work with Eversource to try to balance electricity demand during peak periods by decreasing load at electric vehicle chargers. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., AmpUp will provide incentives to compensate charging station owners for decreasing charging during peak periods.
They are still working out what level of incentive might stimulate participation, as well as whether it might appeal to a workplace with four chargers as much as to a company operating a fleet of vehicles, said Matt Bloom, director of partnerships.
“We’re really excited,” he said. “It’s good to see the regulators take a little risk. This is a good way to innovate, see what we learn and whether it’s something Eversource could adopt long term.”
CLIMATE: The continental U.S. experienced its warmest winter on record, during which average temperatures throughout the Midwest and Northeast exceeded past averages by as much as 10°F. (Axios)
ALSO:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GRID: Four Congress members push the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to institute an incentive that would encourage the use of new technologies to increase capacity on existing and new transmission lines. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIFICATION: A recent study shows electric heat pumps reduce emissions compared to other heating systems, even when they run on fossil-fueled grid power. (Canary Media)
CLEAN ENERGY:
CARBON CAPTURE: The developer of a multi-state carbon pipeline says it remains open to contracts that offtake the carbon for enhanced oil recovery, despite sworn testimony that the project is for underground storage. (Reuters)
OIL & GAS:
UTILITIES: Clean energy advocates applaud Minnesota’s largest gas utility for drafting a $105 million decarbonization plan, but say it doesn’t move fast enough to meet state emission-reduction targets. (Energy News Network)
SOLAR: To get around New Hampshire’s 5 MW solar net metering cap, the town of Bow plans to develop 6 MW of capacity across three municipal sites — double the capacity of the largest array in the state. (Concord Monitor)
ALSO:
OFFSHORE WIND: The head of the Connecticut Port Authority says New York’s selection of the Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects promises more turbine assembly activity at the New London state pier. (The Day)
GRID:
CONSUMERS: Maryland lawmakers advance new residential ratepayer protections for those purchasing power from retail suppliers, including a price cap over the standard service offer. (Associated Press)
HYDROPOWER: Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, considers whether to remove or restore a former hydroelectric dam that provides an attractive backdrop for daily life but is structurally unsound. (Bangor Daily News)
CLIMATE:
COMMENTARY: New Hampshire’s consumer advocate writes that Eversource Energy is undertaking a $400 million transmission line upgrade project in a way that indicates the utility is “hoping nobody, or almost nobody, will notice.” (In-Depth NH)
UTILITIES: Clean energy advocates applaud Minnesota’s largest gas utility for drafting a $105 million decarbonization plan, but say it doesn’t move fast enough to meet state emission-reduction targets. (Energy News Network)
POLITICS:
PIPELINES:
CARBON CAPTURE: The developer of a multi-state carbon pipeline says it remains open to contracts that offtake the carbon for enhanced oil recovery, despite sworn testimony that the project is for underground storage. (Reuters)
EMISSIONS: Indiana regulators say they are limited in setting more stringent air pollution requirements, though former state officials say options are available to reduce pollution in areas that fail to meet air quality standards. (IPR)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: U.S. automakers are rebalancing budgets and laying off workers as they contend with shifting electric vehicle demand and higher labor costs. (Detroit News, subscription)
RENEWABLES: A new online tool allows users to see how much wind and solar power was generated on a certain date. (Des Moines Register)
BIOFUELS: Executives planning a sustainable jet fuel production plant in South Dakota say their company is undervalued and will offer an effective way for airlines to hit their emission-reduction targets. (South Dakota Searchlight)
COMMENTARY:
Climate and clean energy advocates weighing in on CenterPoint Energy’s ideas to decarbonize its natural gas business in Minnesota applaud the effort but say it falls short of what’s needed to meet the moment.
The state’s largest gas utility submitted an “innovation plan” last summer to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, which is taking public comments on the plan through March 15. Over the course of hundreds of pages, the utility proposes 18 pilot projects — from tree planting and geothermal to carbon capture and hydrogen blending.
Altogether, the utility is asking to spend more than $105 million on 18 pilot projects that it estimates will reduce the equivalent of around 330,000 metric tons of carbon emissions over the five year plan, which would represent about a 4% reduction, according to calculations by clean energy organizations.
The plan “is going to move us, but it’s not going to move as fast enough,” said Melissa Partin, climate policy analyst with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, one of several groups that have submitted comments on the plan.
The docket (M-23/215) stems from the Natural Gas Innovation Act, a 2021 state law that, among other things, authorizes gas utilities to collect money from ratepayers for projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Xcel Energy submitted a similar plan to state regulators late last year for its natural gas utility.
Gas utilities are expected to make up a growing share of the state’s climate pollution as the state’s electric utilities transition to 100% clean power by 2040. Two out of every three households heats their home with natural gas, and many industries rely on the fuel to operate medium and heavy machinery — a potentially daunting challenge as the state seeks net-zero climate emissions by 2050.
The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and other advocates have asked the Public Utilities Commission to supplement the pilot project spending with emission-reduction targets for the utilities.
While many of CenterPoint’s ideas look promising and some could eventually scale up to make a bigger impact, Partin said the Natural Gas Innovation Act will not alone drive the state across the finish line for its climate goals.
Other strategies will be needed, such as updating commercial and residential building codes, improving energy efficiency standards for appliances, and considering a ban on allowing any natural gas in new buildings, which, Partin said, “will be difficult in Minnesota’s current political climate.”
Utilities are somewhat hamstrung by the act’s requirement that half the budget for the initial plans must go to alternative fuels, which “stacks the deck” in favor of renewable natural gas and hydrogen, Partin said.
CenterPoint is already blending hydrogen into its system from a downtown Minneapolis facility, and so proposing additional such projects does not seem to fit the definition of “innovation,” Partin said. Meanwhile, a recent study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research found little to no climate benefit from blending hydrogen in existing gas supply lines, in part because hydrogen is less energy dense and more prone to leaking.
Joe Dammel, managing director of buildings for Fresh Energy, said CenterPoint’s plan “is definitely not a silver bullet; it’s not going to get us where we need to get.”
Energy News Network is an independent journalism service of Fresh Energy.
While praising the utility for its yearlong stakeholder process and for proposing new resources and changes to its business model, the plan shows that CenterPoint will not contribute “their fair share of the emissions reductions needed based on this,” Dammel said.
CenterPoint’s pilots for weatherization and retrofitting homes look promising, he said, but ideas for purchasing carbon offsets, selling gas-powered heat pumps and injecting hydrogen into the existing gas system have little chance of success.
CenterPoint’s proposal to create green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy, and blending it into the gas distribution system is not “scalable” and has limitations. Commercial gas heat pumps “are not a very viable technology,” Dammel said. Instead, the utility should focus on applying hydrogen technology to decarbonize industrial end users.
Dammel added that to reach the state’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal CenterPoint’s first plan would have to increase its emissions reduction six-fold, from 4% to 27%.
Audrey Partridge, policy director for the Center for Energy and Environment, said the pilot programs will lead to better data and a greater understanding of the potential energy sources and their carbon emissions.
“I’ve heard people describe it as throwing spaghetti at the wall,” Partridge said. “But we need to come up with all the possible solutions and pursue them on a small scale to see which ones are going to stick. These aren’t necessarily mature ideas, as you would see in other areas of energy. They’re very, very new.”
The pilots that could yield important advances include using heat pumps for large loads and electrification of low and medium heat processes in the industrial sector, she said. Residential deep energy retrofits and geothermal technologies will likely reduce natural gas consumption.
“We do hope that CenterPoint and Xcel get approval to move forward on these plans so that we can start to learn from them,” Partridge said.
The docket could begin a new path for CenterPoint, which only sells gas. The Minneapolis Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability, Healthy Homes and Environment, Patrick Hanlon, said CenterPoint’s plan allows the utility to provide “heat as a service,” a crucial distinction that gives room for innovations the city supports, including ground source networked geothermal systems, district energy and other approaches.
“Heat as a service allows CenterPoint to move away from natural gas and move towards some alternative, more climate-friendly sources of heat,” Hanlon said. The city also wants to ensure that residents are “not burdened” with the cost of the innovative pilots or switching to a different level of service, he said.
The attorney general’s office, which represents ratepayers, suggested the cost for some pilots outweighed the carbon benefits while suggesting the commission modify or deny sections of the plan.
“Portions of CenterPoint’s plan are not yet ready for primetime: several of the proposals lack necessary partners, and many lack sufficient detail to establish their prudence,” the office wrote. “Other proposed projects are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas savings CenterPoint suggests and unlikely to justify the astronomical cost to ratepayers.”
The attorney general and clean energy groups also raised concerns about CenterPoint’s request to exceed pilot budgets by as much as 25% without statutory approval. Clean energy groups also seek modifications to CenterPoint’s plan to recover the cost of projects.
The Public Utilities Commission is expected to hold hearings later this year before deciding on the plans for both utilities.
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