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A new state law aimed at expanding gas and nuclear power plants in Ohio may also provide opportunities for solar developers — if they can overcome other policy and political barriers.
Solar industry advocates say House Bill 15, signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in mid-May, contains several technology-neutral provisions that could benefit clean energy projects, including property tax breaks for siting them on brownfields and former coal mines. The law also loosens restrictions on behind-the-meter electricity generation and lowers the overall tax burden for new power plants.
“This is just smart economic development. We need the energy,” said Michael Benson, board president of Green Energy Ohio, whose members include a variety of clean energy companies. In his view, a market-based approach should work in favor of renewables and battery storage, which can generally be deployed more quickly and cheaply than power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Much of the public discussion around the legislation focused on its repeal of coal plant subsidies mandated by HB 6, the 2019 law at the heart of Ohio’s ongoing public corruption scandal. HB 15 also will end the use of “electric security plans,” which let utilities add special charges to customer bills without reviewing all revenue and expenses in a full rate case.
But many of the measures in HB 15 are meant to encourage new electricity production in the state.
“We should open the market to dispatchable energy generation to address future energy shortages,” the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Roy Klopfenstein (R-Haviland), said in his February testimony, in which he also noted growing energy demand from data centers and other large electricity users, and energy supply issues raised by grid operator PJM Interconnection. The term “dispatchable” is often used to refer to power plants that can be turned on or off as demand requires, as opposed to solar or wind without battery backup.
Most of the law’s incentives for new energy production are technology-neutral, however.
Under HB 15, new electricity production on brownfields and minelands designated as priority investment areas will be exempt from property taxes for five years. Grants of up to $10 million each will be available to clean up or prepare the sites for construction. And the Ohio Power Siting Board will speed up its review of energy projects in those areas.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” said Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate for The Nature Conservancy in Ohio. Last year the organization estimated that Ohio has more than 600,000 acres of minelands and brownfields suitable for renewable energy production. The sites often have good access to roads and transmission lines, too.
As Mellino sees it, solar in priority areas would avoid objections raised by some people about displacing farmland. And counties with renewable energy bans could presumably modify them to allow development in priority investment areas without affecting other parts of their jurisdictions, she suggested.
The law also removes a restriction that has required behind-the-meter generation to be located on the premises of the customer who is using the power. The change might allow data centers to tap into gas-fired backup generators on an adjacent property, for example. But it could also create new opportunities for clean energy-powered microgrids, in which a group of customers share solar panels and a large battery.
“That is significant, all by itself,” because it provides more flexibility, said Dylan Borchers, an energy attorney with law firm Bricker Graydon in Columbus, Ohio. Just as importantly, the law “allows essentially a portfolio approach for customers and energy resources.”
In other words, multiple businesses could form a shared “self-power” system with equipment for electricity generation or battery storage on adjacent land or on premises controlled by one or more of them. Such a system could include numerous generation or storage facilities, allowing a cluster of data centers, factories, or other large energy users to combine multiple behind-the-meter resources, whether they be natural gas, solar, batteries, or small nuclear when it becomes available.
The ability to combine resources means customers wouldn’t necessarily need lots of land to add renewable energy, said Benson. “If you want the most power quickly and cleanly, you can use rooftops and parking lots and build out a lot of small-scale generation.”
The law also reduces the overall tax burden for new electricity production. Local governments may collect less revenue but still welcome the jobs and other spending that come with new energy investments. And less stringent requirements might even benefit some communities when new power generation is sited, Borchers suggested.
Ohio’s current tangible personal property tax rates have been so high that companies have often used “payments in lieu of taxes,” also known as PILOT programs, to avoid getting walloped by huge tax bills as soon as energy production starts. But counties face somewhat strict requirements for how they must allocate PILOT payments. Developers that take advantage of the lower tax rates available under HB 15 may have more financial flexibility to be able to fund some projects that local governments want most, such as a new fire station or community center, Borchers said.
Taken together, the provisions in HB 15 promise to make it easier to build more solar in the state, industry representatives say.
The governor and legislature saw “the urgent need to expand energy generation as Ohio confronts rapidly increasing demand and the threat of escalating costs and supply shortages,” said Will Hinman, executive director for the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio. “House Bill 15 is a critical step towards addressing these challenges by reducing barriers to energy development — including utility-scale solar projects.”
The law still requires projects to meet multiple criteria to benefit from its provisions. For example, power-generating facilities and transmission lines exceeding certain thresholds may need approval from the Ohio Power Siting Board. The state’s director of development must approve local governments’ designations of priority investment areas. And self-power systems have to be independent of the main power grid.
The biggest downside is that the new law left in place a 2021 statute, Senate Bill 52, which requires utility-scale renewable energy developments to get local approval, said Molly Bryden, a climate and sustainability researcher with think tank Policy Matters Ohio.
Under that earlier law, 34 of Ohio’s 88 counties have banned new solar generation in all or part of their territories. Even where the local law doesn’t bar a new project, local officials can still block projects before a developer even seeks a permit from the Ohio Power Siting Board. A county representative and a township representative also get to vote with state siting board members on whether facilities get a permit, even for some projects that were in the grid operator’s queue before the 2021 law.
Another law took effect in early 2023, letting local governments limit small solar and wind projects that connect to the grid but don’t otherwise fall within the scope of the 2021 law.
Requirements of the 2021 and 2023 laws don’t apply to generation fueled by natural gas, coal, or nuclear power. And Ohio’s high court has ruled local governments can’t ban or regulate gas wells and related infrastructure or even enforce broader zoning laws that would prevent such development.
Lawmakers also cut out provisions from an earlier version of HB 15 that would have allowed community solar development. Community solar lets residential customers save money by sharing the electricity from a local solar array, which doesn’t have to be on their own property.
“There’s still a real need for permitting reform,” Bryden said.
The global chemicals industry is big, and it’s dirty. Chemical plants consume lots of fossil fuels, both to power the high-temperature, high-pressure processes involved and often as a feedstock for the chemicals produced. And to maximize production, those plants are typically built to be as large as possible.
Todd Brix, CEO of startup OCOchem, has a different vision for how to build a modern chemicals industry: Manufacture lots of small machines that are powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels to do the work.
“The way we make cars, the way we make TVs, the way we make semiconductor chips should be the same way we make chemicals plants,” Brix said.
Last week, the company’s pilot plant in Richland, Washington, started producing a class of chemicals known as formates, used in everything from deicing airplanes to preserving animal feed. But instead of the conventional hot, dirty method of combining methanol with carbon monoxide derived from fossil fuels, OCOchem makes formate with just water and carbon dioxide inside four 1.5-meter electrolytic modules.
OCOchem fills those modules with water and carbon dioxide and then zaps the solution with electricity, causing an electrochemical reaction that yields formic acid, a combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Chemically speaking, it’s “one of the simplest molecules you can imagine,” Brix said — basically, “CO2 with two hydrogen atoms attached to it.”
The $5 million project can make up to 60 tons of formic acid per year. That’s not a lot, compared with the roughly 1 million tons per year of formates produced globally. But being able to deliver an industrial chemical cost-effectively in such small amounts is one of the selling points, Brix explained.
“Once you want to scale out and make more formate, you just make more modules. That’s the power of economies of scale of mass production,” he said. “We can rapidly scale that technology out, and make a lot of little chemical plants, and stack them together.”
Factory-built modular devices are being tried out across various industries, from fertilizer to steel — and they are even being considered for nuclear power. It’s already a winning pathway in the renewable energy sector, where mass-produced solar panels and lithium-ion battery cells have seen costs drop steeply as production volumes increase and manufacturers consistently improve each new generation of products.
“What the solar industry does is mass-produce solar panels — and what we are trying to do is mass-produce chemical plants,” Brix said. “That allows you to dramatically lower the costs over time.”
Tiny chemicals-production cells are a bit more complicated than solar panels, of course. But OCOchem’s electrolytic cells aren’t taking on anything as dangerous as nuclear fission. Brix described the process as akin to “artificial photosynthesis.” Plants use water, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the energy from sunlight. OCOchem cells, which operate at ambient temperatures and pressures, electrify water and carbon dioxide and emit only formic acid, which is corrosive but not flammable or explosive.
Using electrolysis to produce formate is far from a unique idea, said Brix, who worked at Chevron, Intel, and Microsoft before founding OCOchem in 2020. In fact, researchers have been trying to do it for decades. But the efforts he’s aware of have struggled to expand cells to a size that can support commercially viable volumes.
“We started with a reactor that was 10 square centimeters in size,” Brix said. “We’ve scaled that up by a factor of 1,500.” OCOchem has developed patented technologies that can handle the required current density, or electrical throughput, to achieve this increased size and manufactures these key components itself. It then works with a contract manufacturer to assemble them into cells, which otherwise use off-the-shelf equipment from other electrolysis-based industries.
OCOchem raised $5 million in 2023 and has secured federal and state grants for its early technology development, as well as an undisclosed amount of early-stage support from Halliburton Labs, the tech accelerator of oil services company Halliburton. The four cells in the pilot facility are the first it’s produced via this assembly-line process, Brix said, but the company is preparing to scale up its manufacturing to meet orders for more than $300 million in prepurchase contracts.
Those contracts are for the formate it will make, not for the equipment itself, he noted. “Our goal is to be the developer of the technology and operator of the plant and share ownership of the plant with various partners.”
OCOchem’s process emits no carbon dioxide, unlike the fossil-fuel-based processes used to make formates today, Brix said. Much of the world’s supply of the chemicals is from factories that are part of China’s expanding coal-fed chemicals industry. Whether OCOchem’s formate is considered low-, zero-, or negative-carbon depends on two key factors: the carbon footprint of the electricity used to make it and the carbon dioxide going into its cells.
Right now, OCOchem plans to get its CO2 “from the highest purity and cheapest sources we can find,” Brix said. “That turns out to be biogenic CO2,” or gas captured from ethanol plants, breweries, wastewater-treatment facilities, and similar sources. Some of that CO2 is used today as coolant in refrigeration and for carbonating beverages. CO2 that can’t find industrial purchasers is either captured at the expense of its emitter or, far more often, vented into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change.
Plenty of industries, ranging from sustainable aviation fuel to lower-carbon cement, are planning to rely on captured CO2 to decarbonize. Consulting firm EcoEngineers studied OCOchem’s process and found that every ton the company produces could avoid a combined 7.2 tons of CO2 emissions, compared with fossil-fuel-fed formate production, both by displacing fossil fuels and fixing captured CO2 in the formic acid it makes.
But OCOchem doesn’t need a “green premium” for its low-carbon bona fides, Brix said. Instead, it’s relying on offering customers a cost-competitive alternative to formate shipped from overseas. That’s not possible with its pilot-scale facility today, he stressed. But “even at 10,000 tons per year, which is a small chemical plant, we’ll have lower cost of production” than typical fossil-fuel-fed plants. “We can say, ‘Whatever your market price is, we’ll meet it.’”
More chemical markets beckon. Formic acid can be processed into a number of organic compounds, including many now made from fossil fuels, he said — “not because they’re higher performance, or cleaner, or cheaper, but because they do the job good enough.”
Formates and formic acid could also serve as “hydrogen carriers,” Brix said. Hydrogen, when it’s produced in ways that don’t cause greenhouse gas emissions, can be used to cut the carbon impact of industries from steelmaking to shipping. It’s unlikely that OCOchem’s formates would be a cost-effective source of hydrogen at large volumes, but they could serve as a convenient medium for transporting hydrogen in trucks, he said.
The trick is to find cost-effective ways to separate the hydrogen molecules from the formates once they reach their destination, said Ye Xu, associate professor of chemical engineering at Louisiana State University. Xu specializes in research in surface chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis — the fundamental study of the interaction of solid catalysts with molecules. He’s been working on a project to crack hydrogen from formates in a way that’s economically viable—one of many being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“If you need to transport huge quantities of hydrogen atoms, you have to compress hydrogen gas under extremely high pressure. That causes cost problems and safety problems,” Xu said, especially for chemicals being transported by truck or train. Hydrogen-bearing formates, by contrast, are “not flammable. They don’t explode. They are not toxic. These are some very attractive characteristics.”
When it comes to separating the hydrogen atoms from formate molecules at the end of the journey, so far “the stumbling block is the speed of the reaction,” he said. “Formates are stable substances and slowly decompose on their own.” Speeding up the process requires a catalyst, and “according to the scientific literature, the only catalyst that works is palladium” — a costly metal, which, like the chemically similar platinum, is already in high demand for electronics, automotive, and many other industrial uses.
Xu’s search for substitute catalysts to make formate a viable hydrogen carrier involves massive computational research as well as collaboration with scientists doing real-world research. In a way, Brix noted, it’s a similar process to the years of research that have gone into OCOchem’s core technologies, such as the gas-diffusion electrodes that allow it to electrolyze water and CO2 at commercial-scale volumes.
Taking such experiments from laboratory to pilot project to commercial production may be labor-intensive and costly. But building, testing, and redesigning the next generation of technologies is a lot easier and faster on an assembly line than as part of a complicated, yearslong engineering, procurement, and construction project to build large-scale facilities, Brix said.
“We’ve built the best little Lego block we can. Now we want to stack the Lego blocks together,” Brix said, and “just build more and more stacks. And from there, it’s rinse, lather, repeat.”
Li-Cycle once seemed like a leader among the startups trying to recycle electric vehicle batteries in the U.S. Now it’s mired in bankruptcy proceedings.
The company’s board replaced the CEO and CFO in a decision announced May 1, when Li-Cycle publicized that it was looking for buyers. A potential deal with mining giant and lead creditor Glencore evidently had not come to fruition: Two weeks later, a Canadian bankruptcy court appointed Alvarez & Marsal Canada Securities to oversee a sale of Li-Cycle’s assets. A Li-Cycle spokesperson referred Canary Media to the company’s public bankruptcy announcements.
Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June. In the meantime, Glencore has loaned $10.5 million to keep things going during the proceedings. Glencore also entered a “stalking horse” offer of $40 million for most of Li-Cycle’s holdings, setting a floor for bidding (if any other investors want a piece of the action). Glencore could emerge with a real deal on its hands, but it won’t be recouping the $275 million it previously invested in Li-Cycle.
“The Company represents a compelling investment opportunity, uniquely positioned to benefit from rapid growth in the battery materials and [lithium-ion battery] recycling market, amid increasing global focus on sustainability and critical raw material supply chain resilience,” Alvarez & Marsal pitch in a flyer for the sale.
That “compelling” opportunity amounts to five battery shredding plants, a massive unfinished recycling center in Western New York, and a business predicated on the growth of a nascent North American EV supply chain that currently faces far-reaching disruption from the Trump administration. A buyer would not be able to fully recycle any batteries without spending a few hundred million dollars more, and even then, it’s not clear they would make any money doing so.
The startup’s collapse underscores the struggles of the fledgling battery recycling industry in general. A few years ago, the sector was flush with venture capital and charting out rapid timelines for commercializing breakthrough technologies that would enable the transition to EVs while minimizing mining. The sector was also seen as a way to achieve the bipartisan goal of reducing dependence on China, which dominates the global battery supply chain.
Li-Cycle was founded in Canada in 2016 and went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC (generally a red flag for early-stage cleantech companies). Its engineers developed a technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs while they’re submerged in liquid; this prevented fires and saved considerable effort compared with painstakingly discharging and dismantling the packs for processing.
Li-Cycle successfully built five “spoke” facilities to collect and shred whole electric vehicle battery packs, turning them into the powdery mixture known as black mass. The spoke operations have paused in Arizona, Alabama, New York, and Ontario, while a German outpost continues to function during bankruptcy proceedings. Collectively, these facilities can break down up to 40 kilotons of batteries a year.
The spokes were supposed to feed their black mass to Li-Cycle’s hub in Rochester, New York, which would refine it and isolate useful battery materials to reintroduce into the supply chain. This never came to pass because Li-Cycle halted construction in fall 2023, citing runaway costs. It became clear that Li-Cycle needed to find a lot more cash to complete the nearly 2-million-square-foot site.
The company hoped for a lifeline from the Biden-era Department of Energy: In November, its Loan Programs Office finalized a $475 million loan for Li-Cycle to complete the recycling hub. But Li-Cycle never drew on that federal money because it couldn’t secure additional private funding to hold in reserve, as stipulated in the loan terms.
Li-Cycle is not the only battery recycling firm in a tough spot. Since last year, a number of challenges have beset the industry.
The adjacent U.S. EV sector has seen slower growth than expected, which has in turn reduced the urgency of building out a North American battery supply chain. Core battery materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt have plummeted in price, lessening the value of whatever recyclers might glean. And battery makers have increasingly turned to lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based chemistries, further reducing the value of recycling these batteries.
In the past year, a fire destroyed the largest battery shredding plant in the U.S., Interco’s Critical Mineral Recovery site in Missouri. Reno, Nevada–based Aqua Metals ran low on funds and laid off staff while it searched for financing to build a commercial-scale recycling line. Ascend Elements delayed construction of its flagship recycling plant in Kentucky, citing a customer’s decision to postpone buying the recycled materials. In March, Ascend canceled plans to make cathode active materials in Kentucky to focus on precursor materials and lithium carbonate.
Redwood Materials is the rare bright spot. The venture by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel raised a couple billion dollars and has been building out a major compound in the desert outside Reno, not far from Tesla’s factory there. In 2024, Redwood Materials broke down 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries and earned $200 million in revenue from recycled materials.
The industry’s challenges come as the Trump administration says it aims to expand U.S. mineral supplies. Paradoxically, the administration has taken steps to undermine the fledgling U.S. EV and battery industries, which are the big drivers of demand growth for rare earth metals. The budget bill passed by the House last week would strip tax incentives for EV purchases and battery installations, weakening demand for the domestic supply chain that recyclers like Li-Cycle hoped to serve — and making the tough road for recycling firms even tougher.
Modern farming depends on massive amounts of ammonia fertilizer, almost all of it made from fossil gas in enormous chemical plants. These facilities use high heat and pressure to split that gas, mostly made up of methane, into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere, and the hydrogen is mixed with air, where it bonds with the nitrogen under high pressure via the century-old Haber-Bosch process.
The resulting ammonia is a carrier for the nitrogen that plants crave, but producing it this way is highly carbon-intensive, accounting for nearly 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions today. And that ammonia can be costly. The farmers who purchase it are subject to severe price spikes tied to the volatile fossil gas market. Transporting the fertilizer to farmers from where it is produced also adds hundreds of dollars per ton.
Outside the town of Boone, Iowa, startup Talusag and Landus, one of the state’s biggest farming cooperatives, are working on a new method for producing ammonia — tapping electricity to make the chemical from water and air, using technology that could be deployed at modular scale across the country and around the world.
Talusag’s first pilot-scale facility in North America, built at a cost of about $5 million and powered by on-site solar, is capable of producing 1 to 2 tons of ammonia per day, said Talusag CEO and co-founder Hiro Iwanaga. Earlier this year, a test batch was applied to farm fields, marking the first commercial delivery of “green ammonia” from a small-scale facility in North America, according to the partners.
Talusag has already started building a larger project in the nearby town of Eagle Grove, Iowa, that will be capable of producing up to 20 tons of ammonia per day. That facility, which Iwanaga said will cost about $15 million and be running later this year, will tap into grid supplies of wind power, which provides nearly three-fifths of Iowa’s annual electricity generation.
Twenty tons per day is a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 14 million metric tons of ammonia produced in the U.S. last year or the approximately 240 million metric tons produced globally. But Iwanaga is hoping that his company’s modular systems, which can run on intermittent renewable electricity and be sited closer to farms, can start to provide an alternative to fossil-derived ammonia that’s cheaper and more reliable.
“We only deploy projects where we are cost-competitive or better with the incumbent competition,” he said.
That’s fairly straightforward in the markets that Iwanaga and his team initially targeted. The startup launched in 2021 “largely as a philanthropic venture” to help farmers in developing countries, he said, where fertilizer is far more expensive due to shipping costs. Its first project uses solar power at a nut farm in Kenya, for example. Talusag is pursuing more projects for remote farms, as well as for mining operations that use ammonia to produce explosives, where transportation costs are a significant burden.
But even in America’s agricultural heartland, Talusag can propose long-term contracts at set prices at or below the cost of ammonia shipped via pipeline from the Gulf Coast and then by tanker trucks to further-flung farms, Iwanaga said.
There’s an important caveat to that, however. Talusag’s ammonia is only cost-effective in U.S. markets if generous federal incentives for producing hydrogen with low or zero carbon emissions remain in place — a prospect that is looking increasingly uncertain.
Talusag’s facilities use electrolyzers to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The gas, commonly called “green hydrogen,” is then fed into miniaturized versions of the gigantic Haber-Bosch reactors at industrial ammonia plants. That chemical process yields no greenhouse gas emissions — and if it uses clean electricity, it’s completely carbon-free.
Those green credentials are a nice “ancillary benefit” of the green ammonia that Landus plans to obtain from Talusag’s two Iowa facilities, said Brian Crowe, the cooperative’s vice president of strategic initiatives. But far more important to Landus and its farmer-owners are the prospects of securing a lower-cost source of fertilizer that’s made closer to home, he said.
Landus was first introduced to Talusag back in 2022, when ammonia prices rose to nearly double their typical levels, due in large part to the global disruptions to fossil fuel supplies caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Crowe said. Landus buys, stores, and transports tens of thousands of tons of ammonia per year for its farmer-members, and the agriculture industry at large was “kind of scrambling to figure out, how do we hedge against this?”
The Talusag offering “seemed like a practical solution,” he said. “Make it close to where it’s needed, do it modularly, and lock in the price to create more price stability. They produce it, we take it and pay them for it — or they don’t, and we don’t.”
Iwanaga noted that Landus isn’t taking on financial risk with these projects. Talusag pays for building and producing its green ammonia. That structure puts the pressure on Talusag to deliver on the quality and the low price it has promised to buyers.
But it also potentially provides the company with the long-term revenues it needs to secure project financing, rather than relying on equity capital. Talusag raised a $22 million Series A round in 2023 and is exploring projects with other farmer cooperatives in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, as well as outside the U.S., Iwanaga said.
Shorter supply lines and fixed long-term prices are valuable features of Talusag’s modular model for producing green ammonia. But Iwanaga conceded that the company’s future in U.S. markets hinges on a key federal incentive that may not be around much longer — the 45V hydrogen production tax credit created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a reconciliation bill that calls for all but eliminating the federal clean energy tax credits created under the IRA. That includes ending 45V credits for any project that can’t begin construction before the end of 2025.
Talusag’s two projects in Iowa would squeak under that deadline, and the company may be able to start additional projects before year’s end, Iwanaga said. But if the final bill does kill the 45V credit, that would rule out starting up any other U.S. projects for the foreseeable future, he said.
Robin Gaster, research director at the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., noted that would-be commercial-scale producers of ammonia fertilizer made from green hydrogen face a tough road in U.S. markets.
“It’s an interesting idea for developing countries, partly because there are supply-chain issues so often,” he said. But “I would be surprised if there were places in the United States where the supply chain and commodity costs were so bad that green ammonia is a competitive option.”
The economics of green hydrogen production do not stand up on their own without subsidies like the 45V tax credit, he said. Today, hydrogen produced in the U.S. with fossil gas — referred to as “gray hydrogen” — costs between $1 and $2 per kilogram, depending on the price of fossil gas, whereas green hydrogen costs $5 per kilogram and up. “The first question is obviously on cost, and whether they expect this to rely on subsidies forever.”
Crowe noted that there’s an important distinction between green hydrogen used to make ammonia for agriculture and green hydrogen that could potentially be used for industries such as trucking, shipping, and steelmaking. Farmers need ammonia now, and enormous quantities of gray hydrogen are already being used to produce it, while retooling industries like trucking and shipping to use hydrogen would require massive investments in new systems and infrastructure.
The on-again, off-again nature of U.S. clean hydrogen policy has made long-term commitments to green ammonia a tough sell. Some companies that announced ambitious plans to produce green ammonia in 2023 and early 2024 failed to follow through with real-world investments after the Biden administration instituted more stringent clean-energy tracking rules for the 45V credit than industry groups had hoped for. Cutting off the tax credit completely would make the economics of such projects even worse.
Iwanaga pointed out that Talusag’s technology has some advantages over large green ammonia projects, however. For one, the company’s modular systems can be manufactured and deployed in small increments, an advantage over gigantic chemicals facilities, so that exposes Talusag’s investors to less risk, he said.
Talusag’s systems were also designed expressly to run on intermittent clean power, like the solar power serving off-grid or remote farms that were its initial target customers, he said. Most electrolyzer technologies don’t perform as efficiently when they’re forced to ramp up and down frequently to follow fluctuations in power supply. Talusag must deal with those challenges as well, but has incorporated several design features that minimize the efficiency losses, he said.
Talusag’s green ammonia technology isn’t the only one designed to use solar and wind power when it’s available. But being able to do that is a prerequisite not just for systems that rely on their own solar power, but also for grid-connected systems trying to capture the cheapest power available — which more and more frequently is also the cleanest.
Take the wind energy that makes up an increasing share of the electricity flowing across Midwest power grids. Iowa is the second-largest wind power producer after Texas, with 59% of its annual net generation coming from wind in 2023. Other Upper Midwest states heavy on wind power as of 2023 include South Dakota at 55% of annual net generation, North Dakota at 36%, and Minnesota at 25%.
Wind farms produce when the wind is blowing, which isn’t always when most customers are using electricity — and the more surplus wind power is available, the cheaper it is, Iwanaga said. That creates strong long-term prospects for using excess wind energy to make hydrogen, which could eventually make up for the absence of federal clean-hydrogen incentives, Iwanaga said — even if the economics aren’t there yet.
A similar concept has informed a long-running green ammonia project being conducted by the University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and other groups. Since 2013, an on-site wind turbine has generated power used to electrolyze hydrogen and turn it into green ammonia. In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature created a $7 million grant program to incentivize farmer ownership of green ammonia.
Rural electric cooperatives — member-owned and -operated entities that supply power to the most sparsely populated parts of the country — may also be interested in green ammonia projects that can capture the value of wind power that might otherwise need to be curtailed, Iwanaga said. “If we can absorb some of those peaks, there are cases we are looking at where the rural electric cooperatives think it could potentially lower the cost of power.”
Gaster noted that access to cheap electricity could allow green hydrogen to compete economically with traditional ammonia production. “The cost of generating hydrogen is almost all in inputs — it’s all in the electricity,” he said.
It’s hard to say how the climate benefit of making green ammonia might stack up alongside the benefit of producing green ammonia locally, Iwanaga said. “It’s up to each customer to judge how valuable that is.”
Crowe said that Landus hasn’t yet considered the prospects of earning money from the carbon emissions prevented by buying Talusag’s green ammonia. “We don’t know exactly how it’s going to be monetized yet. But to have that in our back pocket in the future is, I think, valuable.”
A correction was made on May 29, 2025: A previous version of this story misattributed a statement regarding Talusag’s Series A fundraising and its work with prospective customers to Crowe. The information was shared with Canary Media by Iwanaga.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Sixteen states, the District of Columbia, and more than a half dozen environmental groups have alleged in a lawsuit that the Trump administration has indefinitely and unlawfully frozen funds for a nationwide electric vehicle program.
The complaint was filed on Thursday last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are asking the judge to require the Trump administration to unfreeze the funds and distribute them to the states according to a formula established by Congress.
During the Biden administration, Congress appropriated $5 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, also known as NEVI, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The money would have been disbursed each year to all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to build a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors.
“Transportation is the leading source of climate pollution in the U.S., and halting the NEVI program directly threatens our progress toward clean, reliable transportation options — especially in the Southeast, where EV infrastructure is still catching up,” said Megan Kimball, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “In rural and urban areas alike, more charging access means cleaner air, economic growth, and real savings for families. We’re defending that future.”
The legal challenge coincided with a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday that found the U.S. Department of Transportation is unauthorized to withhold the congressionally appropriated funds. The Transportation Department could petition Congress to pass a law to rescind the funds or change the NEVI program, the GAO wrote, but it can’t act unilaterally.
A department spokesperson said in a prepared statement that the GAO report “shows a complete misunderstanding of the law” and “conflicts with Congress’ intent.”
Less than three weeks after Trump was elected to a second term, the Transportation Department ordered states to stop distributing their funds for fiscal years 2022-2025, worth about $2.7 billion. States could reimburse contractors for money already spent, but no new funding could be obligated.
DOT justified the funding freeze by saying the Federal Highway Administration was “updating the NEVI Formula Program Guidance to align with current policy and priorities.”
The GAO report concluded that the Transportation Department erroneously froze funding when it determined that funding was available only for signed project agreements. Instead, the GAO wrote, the effective date for funding was much earlier: when the law made money for the program available for obligation.
Some agencies delay their funding distribution while trying to comply with legal requirements for a program, the GAO wrote. In the NEVI case, however, DOT imposed requirements that exceed what the law prescribes. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires states to submit plans to DOT, but does not provide authority for the secretary of transportation to approve or disapprove such plans.
A DOT spokesperson said the GAO was “cherry-picking language in the program statute.”
The agency is updating NEVI program guidance, according to the spokesperson, “because the implementation of NEVI has failed miserably, and DOT will continue to work in good faith to update the program so it can be utilized more efficiently and effectively.”
Attorneys for the environmental groups — including CleanAIRE NC, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, West End Revitalization Project, Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — wrote that in blocking the distribution of funds, the Trump administration directly defied congressional directives.
The funding freeze nullified more than 150 state implementation plans, according to court documents, which harmed local communities. NEVI requires EV charging stations in the first phase to be installed every 50 miles along the federally approved Alternative Fuel Corridors, and that they be within one mile of those routes.
“By reducing access to reliable public charging,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote, “DOT and the FHWA are restricting electric vehicle owners’ ability to travel and use their EVs, increase their fuel costs, delay EV purchases, worsen health impacts from vehicle pollution, and deprive communities of promised public investment.”
In the Charlotte, North Carolina, metro area, for example, air quality — such as levels of ozone and particulate matter — has worsened, according to the 2025 American Lung Association State of the Air Report. The largest city in North Carolina, Charlotte is ringed and bisected by several highways clogged with cars.
“Tailpipe pollution is a public health crisis — fueling asthma, heart disease, and respiratory illness in communities already overburdened by environmental harm,” Jeff Robbins, executive director of CleanAIRE NC, said in a prepared statement. “NEVI is a vital step toward reducing that harm through zero-emission transportation. Freezing the program blocks progress and keeps our most vulnerable residents breathing dirty air. Clean air and climate justice cannot be put on hold.”
Interstate 85 and U.S. Highway 70 run through many underserved communities in Alamance County, North Carolina, about 30 miles west of Durham.
“For decades, communities like ours in Alamance County have been denied access to basic infrastructure,” said Omega Wilson, codirector of the West End Revitalization Association. “The NEVI program offers a real chance to change that — with public investment in EV charging that finally includes rural Black and brown neighborhoods. Suspending the program delays critical investments, widens infrastructure disparities, and sends the message that once again, the taxpayers who’ve been left behind the longest will be the last to benefit.”
Brooke Canova was nervous after she and her husband bought their Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the enormous, classic pickup truck.
She wasn’t worried about running out of charge and being stranded on the road, or whether the truck would have enough oomph to merge onto a speeding highway. Canova, a health and physical education teacher and mother of a preteen son in Charlottesville, Virginia, fretted about the vehicle’s size.
“I’m not going to be able to drive this!” she recalled thinking. “It’s too big. How will I park it?”
The purchase was a sort of compromise: Her husband had long wanted a truck, and she finally agreed to go along if it was electric.
As it turns out, the vehicle has enough cameras to help Canova manage its girth. It can parallel park itself in self-driving mode. What’s more, she can drive to Richmond, Virginia, and back on one 320-mile charge. And since her rooftop is equipped with 27 solar panels, it costs her family less than $6 a month to charge the truck at home.
“It has been a lot of fun,” Canova said, especially as a woman driving a big truck that’s electric to boot. “It’s sort of a conversation piece. People are like, ‘Wow, look at you in that thing!’”
That’s just the reaction Generation180 is hoping to provoke. Headquartered in Charlottesville, the nonprofit has recruited Canova and some 7,000 other “EV ambassadors” nationwide to spread the word about their experiences online and in person.
While the group supports policies to speed the clean energy transition, its core mission is to “inspire and equip” people to adopt clean energy in their own lives, said Executive Director Stuart Gardner. EV ownership, he said, is a vital “stepping stone” to other clean energy actions.
Gardner’s team has long encouraged people to drive electric. But last year, their research found remarkable gender disparities among the “EV curious” in Virginia. Women said helping the environment was a top reason to drive electric, tied with saving money. Yet just a quarter of women had heard “a lot” about EVs, compared to nearly half of men.
The Virginia survey was backed up by other studies, which showed just 30% of women had some familiarity with EVs, compared to over half of men. In all, more than 70% of EV owners are men.
“There was an obvious disconnect, Gardner said. The “I’ll Drive What She’s Driving” campaign, now in its second year, was born.
The initiative is focused on reaching women in the suburbs — auto-dependent areas where electric vehicles are ideal for short trips and where many new-car buyers live, said Gardner. Suburbs also “tend to be evenly split Democrat and Republican,” he said, “So, they [offer] a great opportunity to say, ‘Hey, EVs are for everyone.’”
At the crux of the effort is the belief that people in general and women in particular are skeptical of the increasingly polarized information landscape and are looking for reliable messengers.
The women EV owners Generation180 has identified did a lot of research first, said Shakaya Cooper, program manager with the group. Much of that homework involved talking to friends and colleagues, she said. “They’re intentional in their research, and they are going to people that are trusted sources, for sure.”
That’s where volunteer ambassadors like Canova come in. Last fall, she brought her F-150 Lightning to a car show tied to a downtown Charlottesville event, where various EV makes and models were on display. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she’s also attended college basketball games with a suite of other women to talk about going electric.
“It was just a really nice vibe — talking to people about their cars, what they like, what they don’t like,” she said, having “those really approachable conversations between moms.”
Beyond official functions organized by Generation180, Canova and her family undoubtedly pique EV curiosity in their community by milking all the Lightning’s bells and whistles in their daily lives.
One popular feature is the “frunk,” a trunk in the front where a combustion engine would normally go. With a drainage hole and light insulation, it can act as a cooler. Plus, the entire vehicle is equipped with outlets — making it perfect for tailgating.
“One of our favorite things to do with the truck is tailgate because we plug in an [electric] pellet grill and a griddle and a TV — all into the truck bed, which has been a lot of fun,” she said. “We tailgated for a Little League game the other day; the whole team was there.”
After a year with the Lightning, Canova and her husband were so sold on driving electric that when her treasured Ford Escape perished last summer, she replaced it with a used Tesla. “We haven’t really encountered any moments where we’ve been desperate to have a gas vehicle,” she said. “We’re all in.”
Some 340 miles south of Charlottesville in Bostic, a tiny town in the North Carolina foothills between Charlotte and Asheville, Terri Watts and her husband are equally thrilled with their EV but for very different reasons.
As the owners of a high-end chauffeur service, they use their fleet of 17 premium vehicles to transport customers to wine and beer tours, weddings, and scenic vistas in this tourist-heavy corner of the state. One of their most popular rides is a Rivian, especially among clients who have their own EV at home and are committed to a low-carbon lifestyle.
“It’s another offering that fits what some people are looking for,” said Watts, who is also a Generation180 EV ambassador. “I think it allows us to maybe get more business. There are people who, unless [they can get] an electric vehicle, they’re not interested.”
From a financial perspective, the Rivian is a no-brainer. The couple paid tens of thousands of dollars less for it than their other luxury vans, and its operating costs are much lower. There are no oil changes, and they can fully charge it overnight at their house for $15. If a driver needs to use a public fast charger, the price might run as high as $45. By contrast, filling up one of their conventional SUVs with premium fuel runs between $55 and $75.
The Rivian’s style and performance has also won converts. “It’s really nice. It’s very roomy on the inside,” Watts said. “It’s got the speed that you can’t beat.”
One recent weekend, she added, a pair of women had wanted a sedan for their sightseeing tour, but it was booked. They rented the Rivian instead and enjoyed it so much they reserved it again for the next day of their trip. “They were super impressed,” Watts said.
In addition to having person-to-person conversations about their EVs, scores of women including Watts and Canova have blogged about their experiences for Generation180. The group has also identified social media influencers who’ve rented EVs and posted about activities ranging from the novel to the mundane, like charging at the shopping center while buying groceries.
“The individuals have been moms, families, single women,” Cooper said, “just sharing, ‘I could go hiking in the rural part of North Carolina or in a rural part of Virginia and still be able to charge.’”
Cooper and other advocates acknowledge that long road trips in EVs still require more planning than those in conventional gas-powered vehicles. And the price of entry to drive electric, while falling, is still too high for many.
Lawmakers in both Richmond and Washington, D.C., have sought in recent years to alleviate these barriers to EV adoption. Biden-era tax credits for new and used electric vehicles lower upfront costs. A nationwide commitment to charging infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is critical for peace of mind on long road trips.
In Virginia, state lawmakers created an electric vehicle rebate program four years ago but have yet to fund it. In a move most observers say is illegal, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin last year announced Virginia won’t follow a 2021 state law that commits it to standards set by California’s Clean Cars program — which requires automakers to sell more electric cars in the coming years.
At the federal level, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars for states to build charging stations, also likely in violation of the law. Just before the Memorial Day weekend, House Republicans muscled through a massive tax bill that, in addition to dealing other blows to clean energy, would end the electric vehicle tax credits and charge EV drivers new fees. The legislation is now in the hands of the Senate, which could make changes.
“It’s really unfortunate. It really hurts the more rapid adoption of electric vehicles,” said Gardner, who says the credits and rebates should be preserved. But, he added, the turbulence in Washington reinforces the value of his group’s “I’ll Drive What She’s Driving” campaign.
“We’re seeing now that policy can be very fragile,” he said. “But trusted messengers and the clean energy constituencies that we’re building — those have real staying power.”
A correction was made on May 27, 2025: The caption for the first image in this story originally misidentified Brooke Canova as the person on the right. Canova is on the left.
Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.
The sputtered drone of a vacuum pump filled the former milking barn that now houses Kennebec Valley Community College’s heat pump lab. Instructor Dave Whittemore, who held the yellow vacuum in one hand and displayed an app tracking atmospheric pressure on his phone in the other, explained in a raised voice how to do an “evacuation,” ridding the heat pump of air and moisture to avoid malfunctions down the road.
“The longevity of the equipment is important,” said Whittemore, who teaches students how to install the increasingly popular electric heating and cooling units. “If it’s not done right, then it’s going to fail prematurely. And that’s the biggest reason that I personally try to keep up with industry best standards and I pass that on to my students.”
Six years ago, Gov. Janet Mills traveled to the college to sign a bill aimed at transforming Maine’s market for heat pumps, an environmentally friendly alternative to oil furnaces and gas boilers, and set a goal of installing 100,000 units by 2025.
The state, now a national leader for heat pump adoption, met that goal two years ahead of schedule, and Mills once again traveled to the rural Somerset County campus to announce a new target: another 175,000 heat pumps by 2027.
Maine needs skilled workers to reach this goal, demanding training initiatives from all corners of the state to build HVAC, refrigerant, and electrical knowledge in the clean energy workforce. Without a strong pipeline, the state risks delays in reaching its heat pump target, putting its climate goals at risk.
So far, rural counties have seen some of the fastest rates of clean energy worker growth, according to state data. In Somerset County, where KVCC is located, the number of clean energy workers has grown by 44% since 2020.
As part of this push, the community college launched a high-tech heat pump training lab in 2021 and has trained over 300 students. The initiative is one of many clean energy programs the school offers as part of a broader, state-supported effort to meet Maine’s goal of reaching 30,000 clean energy jobs by 2030.
Efficiency Maine, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees the state’s energy efficiency programs, has invested more than $400,000 in installation and weatherization training programs at KVCC and supports 29 similar programs at other institutions each year.
Another key piece of state support comes through the Governor’s Energy Office’s Clean Energy Partnership, which has awarded nearly $5 million in grants for clean energy training and apprenticeship programs across the state since 2022 and has seen over 3,500 participants. Businesses have also developed their own on-the-job training programs to help meet demand.
But the state still faces a daunting challenge: It must employ more than 14,000 new workers to reach its goal of 30,000 clean energy jobs by the end of the decade. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of workers in the field grew by less than a thousand.
While the state says it remains dedicated to this goal, some in the industry worry federal funding cuts and tariffs could create challenges for the workforce development pipeline.
Heat pumps have emerged as a pillar of Maine’s clean energy strategy: The units can reduce carbon dioxide emissions between 38% and 53% compared to a gas furnace, according to a 2022 study in the academic journal Energy Policy, and have been touted as a way to reduce energy costs.
Rural areas have historically spent more on energy bills and participated less in residential energy and efficiency financing and rebate programs to lower costs, according to a state report from 2023. To help rural Mainers overcome geographic barriers in accessing cost-lowering energy initiatives, the state must bolster its rural workforce, according to a 2018 study the Island Institute produced in partnership with the Governor’s Energy Office.
The demand for cleaner energy has grown not only in response to the state’s climate goals, but also as Maine’s electricity costs rise. A Maine Monitor analysis showed that electricity costs increased at the third-highest rate in the U.S. between 2014 and 2024.
A Maine Monitor analysis of 2023 U.S. Department of Energy and Bureau of Labor Statistics data prepared for E2 shows that two-thirds of the state’s clean energy jobs were in the energy-efficiency sector, while about a fifth of jobs were in renewables.
Workforce development has become a priority for the state as the clean energy industry grows, said Tagwongo Obomsawin, the program manager for the state’s Clean Energy Partnership, noting that it can provide good paying jobs for Mainers and reduce energy costs.
“Employers are definitely a really important part of the picture, but we don’t want to leave out anyone,” Obomsawin said. “We recognize that training providers, academia, state government, organized labor, and industry all have a role to play in making sure that we have a robust system that supports people in finding job opportunities, getting access to training, and localizing the benefits of the energy transition.”
Heat pump training is just one of several clean energy programs offered through the Maine Community College System, which includes KVCC. The system works with industry and state leaders to grow the workforce. The network of schools also trains students in electric vehicle maintenance, fiber optics, aquaculture, and more.
Dan Belyea, the system’s chief workforce development officer, said short-term training and scholarship funding are centered on needs that arise in the industry, which the schools gauge by looking at labor market data and talking to employers. Programs that are highest in demand tend to include electrical and heat pump training, Belyea said.
In 2022, KVCC hoped to use a nearly $250,000 grant from the Clean Energy Partnership to offer programs on electric vehicles and NABCEP solar photovoltaic installation. But trouble finding instructors and low interest among students made it difficult to launch.
Other clean energy workforce initiatives have popped up across the state. Some employers run their own heat pump or solar installation training labs, and several adult education programs and nonprofits also offer classes designed to help people move into the industry.
PassivhausMAINE, a Freeport-based organization, received $180,000 in Clean Energy Partnership money in 2022 to host training programs on the state’s energy code. The company ran 29 trainings across the state, from Portland to Presque Isle.
Naomi Beal, executive director of passivhausMAINE, noted that getting enough students to attend the training was easier in areas like Portland but trickier in more rural areas.
“I always feel like it’s very important to consider when going into Greenfield or Machiasport or wherever that there are just not that many people. … So if we get five people showing up, that’s probably statistically way more interest than [a larger number of attendees] down in Portland,” Beal said. “We just try to be patient and persistent with the smaller towns and the smaller attendance.”
In Freeport, Scott Libby, the owner of Royal River Heat Pumps, walked through his training center as he explained that all his workers go through heat pump training that starts with the basics, regardless of experience, to ensure each worker is equipped to handle the job.
“A lot of these heat pumps have 12-year warranties,” Libby said. “That’s 4,380 days. The most important day is Day 1. It needs to be installed properly.”
Libby, who has worked with the U.S. Department of Energy on workforce development and sits on a new energy-efficiency workforce subcommittee being developed by the Governor’s Energy Office, said he’s aware of a number of different workforce development initiatives but that it’s difficult to comprehend how they all work together.
He said some forms of programming aren’t sufficient for what’s actually needed in the field: Students who sit through a six-week or six-month program that teaches the basics of how heat pumps work may come out with little to no hands-on experience with a power tool or climbing a ladder.
Libby emphasized the need for more collaboration between different workforce development efforts and a more systematic approach, with quality checks in place. He suggested putting more thought into designing industrial arts and home economics programs in middle and high schools to introduce students to different career pathways early on.
He also said more stringent licensing requirements could help with the quality of workers moving into the field. As it stands, there is no specific licensing required to install heat pumps in Maine, though workers need an Environmental Protection Agency Section 608 license to deal with the refrigerant used inside the unit, and an electrical license to complete the wiring.
He acknowledged that new regulation could “cripple” workforce development efforts but said the move is imperative to control the level of training workers receive and make sure everyone is qualified to install heat pumps. There are hundreds of contractors listed as qualified heat pump installers on Efficiency Maine’s website, a list he said in his opinion should be much shorter.
At KVCC’s heat pump lab, Whittemore gestured at eight heat pumps mounted on prop walls used for training, listing the types of new units he hopes to get soon — ideally through donations from companies who have given units in the past.
Regulatory changes to refrigerants that went into effect this year mean the school needs to replace the heat pumps it uses to train students.
“Most of the procedures with the new refrigerants are the same. It’s just that we can’t put this new refrigerant in these existing heat pumps,” he said. “So I’ve got to get eight new heat pumps.”
The broader challenge he sees for the industry is tariffs, which he fears could lead to higher equipment prices and lower demand. This, in turn, could mean a lower need for workers.
“I think that’s going to slow this down,” he said.
Maine has two years to reach its goal of installing 275,000 heat pumps and five years to reach its goal of 30,000 clean energy jobs. But uncertainties in building Maine’s workforce lie ahead.
The Clean Energy Partnership Project, which has funded many of the state’s clean energy workforce development programs, typically announces new grants in the summer, but the Governor’s Energy Office stopped short of committing to another round of funding this year.
“We can’t predict the future, but the existing programs that we have will continue on for at least another couple of years,” Obomsawin said.
She said a partnership the Energy Office has with the Department of Labor to provide career navigation services will continue into 2026, as will workforce development programs that received funding and are already operational. But she cautioned that it is still too early to know what impact policy changes at the federal level will have on the clean energy sector.
Efficiency Maine said that the state is still on track to achieve its heat pump goals — at least for now. Executive Director Michael Stoddard said that the heat pump rebate program has funding from the Electric Utility Conservation Program and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for at least the next three years.
However, some smaller initiatives, such as a revolving loan to help Mainers buy new heat pump systems, face uncertainty as the federal grants funding the project are in flux.
Libby, of Royal River Heat Pumps, has 40 years of HVAC industry experience and said funding uncertainty will make it a challenge to reach the state’s heat pump goal.
“I think it’s definitely going to be harder,” Libby said. “I mean, I’m not ready to give up on it yet. I don’t think anybody is ready to give up on it.”
This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.
A correction was made on May 27: A previous version of this story misstated the name of the Freeport-based organization that received Clean Energy Partnership money. It is passivhausMAINE, not PassivHaus.
Despite challenges in key markets like the U.S., the global shift to battery-powered vehicles is moving along.
Last year, more than one in five new cars sold worldwide were either fully electric or a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV), per a new International Energy Agency report. This year, EVs and PHEVs will make up more than one-quarter of new car sales, IEA forecasts.
China, the world leader in EV and battery manufacturing, continues to also lead the way on EV adoption. A total of over 17 million fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were sold around the world last year — and more than 11 million of those were in China alone. PHEVs are growing particularly fast in China. The country saw nearly double the number of PHEVs hit the road in 2024 as it did in 2023. Almost half of all cars sold in China last year were EVs or PHEVs.
Europe is the next-biggest region for electric vehicle adoption, but it stagnated a bit last year. Roughly the same number of EVs and PHEVs were sold across the continent as in 2023. Growth has tapered off in large part because large European countries like France and Germany have phased out EV subsidies in recent years. Still, sales grew last year in over half of the European Union’s 27 member states — and they climbed significantly in the United Kingdom, the second-largest auto market in Europe.
The U.S. electric vehicle market saw modest growth in 2024. About 10% more EVs and PHEVs took to the road in the U.S. than in the year before, a marked slowdown from 2023’s growth rate but not a bad outcome given some of the apocalyptic forecasts from analysts. It’s notable that the sector saw growth despite Tesla, the dominant player in the U.S. EV landscape, recording a decline in sales.
EV sales in 2024 were also bolstered by emerging markets, where over 60% more EVs and PHEVs were sold than in 2023. India and Thailand are among the largest markets in this category, though they were far from the fastest growing — meanwhile, Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia all saw a rapid rise in EV sales.
The outlook for this year is solid. The IEA expects more than 20 million EVs and PHEVs to be sold worldwide as China keeps expanding its massive EV fleet. Sales in Europe could rebound a bit as new policies incentivizing EVs go into effect. EV adoption in emerging markets will continue to grow on the strength of increasingly affordable Chinese models.
The biggest question mark is the U.S., where tariffs, policy rollbacks, and the likely repeal of the consumer EV tax credit — and possibly manufacturing incentives, too — could seriously dampen adoption of electrified models. But even if the worst case for EV adoption unfolds in the U.S., it’s just one country. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will keep on moving toward EVs.
Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.
A plan to nearly double the amount of electricity drawn from naturally occurring heat deep below Mendocino and Sonoma counties could create thousands of new jobs in the region.
The Sonoma-Mendocino GeoZone project still faces a long list of legal, regulatory, and financial hurdles before construction, but the developer is already thinking ahead to hiring.
Sonoma Clean Power CEO Geof Syphers said the not-for-profit power producer is committed to hiring local workers for at least 30% of the jobs it creates. Meeting that goal, he said, will depend on building partnerships with local education and workforce development programs, along with a long-term commitment from California to streamline geothermal energy.
“We’ve been building partnerships with schools and trades and landowners and public officials, permitting agencies,” Syphers said. “But what really needs to happen before the permitting phase begins is we have to change state laws.”
Clean energy makes up a small but growing slice of Mendocino County’s employment, accounting for just under 600 jobs in 2023, according to an analysis of federal data by the nonprofit Environmental Entrepreneurs, which advocates for state and local policies benefiting the environment and economic interests.
Mendocino County workforce and education officials are taking note, gradually ramping up programs to train students to weatherize buildings, install and maintain solar projects, and take on other related construction roles.
Noel Woodhouse, an instructor who runs Mendocino College’s sustainable construction and energy technology program, said the program has already evolved since launching in 2011 and will continue to do so. He’s confident that his students’ skills in cleantech, solar, and sustainable building would easily transfer to geothermal construction — especially since the non-credit certificate program could rapidly train a large number of students in a short time.
“Our students come out of our program with experience in heavy equipment machinery and ready workers for that type of project,” Woodhouse said.
Clean energy jobs pull in a wide range of professional skills, from plumbing and electrical work to pouring concrete and operating equipment.
“What I love is the people who work in oil and gas know exactly how to operate 100% of the equipment on a geothermal job site, and it’s the same wages,” Syphers said.
Geothermal energy is harnessed by drilling deep below the earth’s surface to access naturally occurring heat. The steam flows to a turbine to drive a generator that in turn produces electricity — a process that can occur 24 hours a day.
Mendocino County, along with neighboring Sonoma and Lake counties, sits on one of the country’s prime geothermal zones. The world’s largest complex of commercial geothermal power plants, known as The Geysers, is located in the Mayacamas Mountains near where the three counties connect. Owning the majority of the units there, Calpine Corporation generates about 725 megawatts of electricity using geothermal energy. Sonoma Clean Power’s GeoZone proposal aims to build another 600 megawatt geothermal power plant.
The labor needed to develop 600 megawatts of new geothermal energy capacity will require hundreds of white-collar workers and thousands of construction workers during the building phase, and the project will create about 1,000 permanent jobs, Syphers said.
“Today, about 400 people from Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino work at The Geysers,” Syphers said. “If we can roughly double that for permanent jobs, that’s very exciting to me.”
As director of employer partnerships for Mendocino College, Pamela Heston-Bechtol’s job is making connections between students and employers. She combs through job postings at least once or twice a week and distributes opportunities to respective departments.
“It’s giving our students as much exposure as possible to be able to see themselves in those jobs by inviting industry to our advisory committees and inviting our students to job shadowing,” Heston-Bechtol said.
The Mendocino County Office of Education also offers career technical education programs with various pathways for youth. Eric Crawford, the office’s director of career and college programs, and Natalie Spackman, a workforce development coordinator with North Bay Construction Corps, together work with high school seniors interested in construction trades to complete a 14-week program.
“At the end of the instruction, they get a tool belt, and then they go out for boot camp for two weeks, and they work with contractors for 80 hours on a live build site and find out what it’s really like to do the work,” Crawford said, noting that this helps students determine which type of work interests them most.
At the completion of camp, the contractors are invited to interview students and potentially offer them jobs.
The newest career technical education program set for Ukiah High School, called Roots of Success, will train high school students specifically for green energy fields. However, Spackman said that basic training in construction gives students skills that transfer to a variety of work, especially given the state’s regulations for the trades to go green.
“No matter where they go, contractors ultimately work for their customers — what’s in demand?” she said. “The skills that they’re learning, that’s going to translate.”
Leaders from both the high school and college workforce development programs agree that while there’s plenty of work for their students and a growing demand for clean energy workers, trades training is hindered by a severe shortage of teachers.
Crawford said anyone with three years of experience in a specific field can get a designated subject teaching credential and become qualified by the state of California. Woodhouse said that Mendocino College’s minimum qualifications include an associate degree and experience in the field.
Other challenges, Woodhouse said, are those stacked against the students in a county with high rates of substance abuse and poverty. To address those, he highlighted support systems at the college that include a food pantry, mental health services, and transportation, among others.
Kevin Vasquez says participating in the Mendocino College program changed the course of his life.
When he was 11 years old, Vasquez received a message at school that his father wouldn’t be able to pick him up. He had been deported.
“I felt violated that they took my dad from me,” he said. “I started drinking alcohol, trying to escape.”
The quiet habit morphed into an addiction that left him aimless and jobless in his 20s. Yet he remembered his father, an immigrant from Mexico who had worked tirelessly in stone masonry to give him a better life. He knew he needed to make something of that life, but he needed help first.
He went through rehabilitation, where a counselor suggested he check out Mendocino College’s construction program. For Vasquez, that program sparked light in the darkness.
“It got me back out there, doing what I love, which is building with my hands,” said Vasquez, who now offers help to other students as a lab tech.
For Vasquez, the prospect of GeoZone tapping into more renewable energy within the county brings an exciting opportunity to put his skills to use at a potential union job.
Mendocino County’s hiring contractors are small, and while they offer great one-on-one experiences, Woodhouse said, they’re not unionized.
Syphers shared that Mendocino County workers won’t need to be union members to work on the GeoZone project.
“You don’t have to be a union signatory to get hired through a union and then work on these projects,” he said. “That gives you an option to decide later if you want to become a signatory and be part of the union.”
The construction phase for GeoZone is projected to be six or seven years out, but Syphers said those years will be spent cultivating relationships with local schools, unions, and smaller contractors.
Ultimately, he hopes the state will streamline permitting and make long-term commitments to invest in geothermal work.
“That’s how we actually get unions to open apprenticeship centers in Mendocino County,” Syphers said.
While the Biden administration helped streamline the geothermal process nationally, most of California’s geothermal opportunities are not on federal land, he pointed out. Sonoma Clean Power has worked with California Assemblymembers Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, and Chris Rogers, D-Santa Rosa, to introduce assembly bills 526, 527, and 531, which all aim to advance geothermal energy development.
“Everyone universally agrees California is the best place in the United States to do this if the permitting changes,” he said, noting that the state requires a full environmental review that can take anywhere from two to eight years. “This region has enough geothermal potential to support areas beyond Sonoma and Mendocino. That’s really, really valuable for the state.”
This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.
The Trump administration appears poised to cancel billions of dollars of federal funding meant to help U.S. industries convert to cleaner alternatives to burning fossil fuels.
States can’t match the federal government’s spending power, but there are steps they can take to reduce industry’s emissions, support jobs and economic growth in places burdened by industrial pollution, and help prepare U.S. companies for global markets increasingly demanding lower-carbon commodities and products.
So says a March report from think tank RMI and environmental advocacy organization Evergreen Action that examined the industrial decarbonization plans of 25 states and Puerto Rico. The authors came up with a list of recommendations — and warnings — for states aiming to keep up the momentum on industrial decarbonization.
To be clear, “states can’t just look at what other states are doing and copy it,” said Molly Freed, RMI senior associate and co-author of the report. “What works in a steel and cement state is not going to be effective somewhere that’s canning and bottling stuff.”
But some common lessons can be drawn, she said. The first is not to try and recreate the federal government’s “massive capital grants,” namely, the $6 billion awarded to sites from steel mills to snack factories under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Industrial Demonstrations Program, which is now potentially on the Trump administration’s chopping block.
“States don’t have the initial funding to do that — and they have to balance their budgets every year, so it’s fundamentally not a good format for them,” Freed said.
That’s too bad, because many industrial companies rely on “first mover” public financing to lower the risk of making big investments, said Melissa Hulting, director of industrial decarbonization at the think tank Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “Early adopters want help with these initial capital costs.” That’s particularly true of certain heavy industries like steel and cement, which have massive capital assets like blast furnaces and cement kilns that will need to be replaced or significantly retrofitted to cut emissions.
But other strategies represent lower-hanging fruit — in particular, replacing fossil-fueled boilers with industrial heat pumps and electric boilers, said Jeffrey Rissman, industry program director at the think tank Energy Innovation.
These technologies are well-suited to electrifying steam heating for food and beverage processing, chemicals production, pulp and paper mills, and other low-temperature processes that make up roughly 30% of U.S. industrial thermal energy demands.
Heat pumps, especially, are far more efficient at converting energy into heat than fossil-fueled boilers, Rissman said. These technologies are already being deployed today and can save companies money compared to fossil-fueled systems in some applications.
“It’s not like we need to solve fundamental engineering challenges here,” he said.
Putting some public money into the up-front costs of electrification could certainly help move things forward, Rissman said. And in some cases, states may still have access to federal dollars to make that happen.
Take the $4.3 billion issued to 25 state, local, and tribal governments through the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program. That’s one of many Inflation Reduction Act initiatives that had funding frozen in the early weeks of the Trump administration but which have since seen dollars begin flowing again after court orders demanded a restart.
The largest of the industrial decarbonization projects funded by those grants is Pennsylvania’s $396 million Reducing Industrial Sector Emissions program, which is currently accepting applications for everything from electrification, energy efficiency, and process-emissions reductions to on-site renewable energy, low-carbon fuels, and efforts to cut fugitive methane emissions.
Industry is Pennsylvania’s top-emitting sector, responsible for about 30% of statewide emissions, Louie Krak, infrastructure implementation coordinator at the state Department of Environmental Protection, said at a January webinar hosted by the policy institute Center for American Progress.
About 60% of that industrial climate pollution comes from the iron and steel industry, which is a much tougher sector to cut emissions from than lower-heat industrial processes, RMI and Evergreen Action’s report notes. “My advice is, take advantage of federal resources while they’re still around,” Krak said.
That includes smaller-scale federal funding sources, he added. For example, the Department of Energy’s Industrial Training and Assessment Centers program provides grants of up to $300,000 to help small and medium-sized manufacturers implement energy-efficiency projects. That’s ”not an insignificant amount,” Krak said.
A handful of states are looking at spending their own money to boost industrial decarbonization. One way to do that is to tap into state and regional programs that collect fees from polluting industries, such as California’s greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative encompassing 11 Northeastern states, and Washington state’s cap-and-invest program, RMI and Evergreen Action’s report notes.
In California, lawmakers are considering the state’s greenhouse gas reduction fund as a source of money for AB 1280, a bill that proposes expanding programs that support factory electrification and thermal energy storage. One existing initiative that the bill would extend has already directed about $90 million to such projects over the last few years, said Teresa Cheng, California director at Industrious Labs, an advocacy group that supports the legislation.
“This is even more necessary now that federal support has backslid,” Cheng said. Roughly 35,000 polluting industrial facilities now pay into the greenhouse gas fund, and “that money should go back into cleaning up those facilities, commensurate with their polluting profile,” she said.
Another funding avenue proposed by AB 1280 is low-interest loans from the state’s Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, Cheng said. RMI and Evergreen Action’s report highlights the role that state-backed “green banks” — entities tasked with lending to projects that reduce carbon emissions and air pollution — could play in reducing capital costs for industrial decarbonization.
That could eventually include part of the $20 billion in green bank funding created by the Inflation Reduction Act that has been frozen by the Trump administration and is now being fought over in court. Regardless of the outcome of that dispute, state green banks still have their own money to lend, Rissman noted.
“Buy clean” mandates now in place in nine states, which require state agencies to purchase concrete, steel, and other industrial outputs that are made via lower-carbon processes and using lower-carbon inputs, can further incentivize industries to invest in decarbonization, Rissman said.
Those programs can also provide reporting and compliance structures that companies will need to meet demands for lower-carbon products from corporate buyers, he said. And U.S. firms that export to Europe will be looking to avoid the looming Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism fees on high-carbon imports, set to go into effect in the coming years.
States have regulatory “sticks” they can use to back up the “carrots” of grants, loans, and other incentives for industrial decarbonization. Cap-and-trade or cap-and-invest programs impose costs on polluting industries, for example. Or states can implement rules like the ones passed by Southern California air regulators, which require industrial and commercial customers to replace fossil-fueled water heaters, boilers, and process heating with electric systems within the next decade, Cheng said.
Colorado has both carrots and sticks in place, Wil Mannes, senior program manager of industrial decarbonization initiatives for the Colorado Energy Office, said during January’s webinar. The state passed a climate law in 2021 that set emissions limits on industrial facilities, with rules mandating a 20% reduction in those emissions by 2030 compared to 2015 levels. But it has also opened a $168 million competitive tax credit program and a $25 million grant program for industrial facilities to install improvements that reduce greenhouse gases, which means Colorado is “not heavily dependent on federal support for what we already have in the works,” Mannes said.
“Future of gas” proceedings are another way to spur industrial electrification, said Yong Kwon, senior policy advisor for the Sierra Club’s Living Economy program. California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York are among the states that have launched these discussions to craft long-term plans for reducing customers’ reliance on fossil gas delivered through utility pipelines.
In Illinois, state regulators and other stakeholders are considering proposals for industrial pilot projects that try out different rate structures for companies that switch from gas to electricity, Kwon said. “What if we selected a demonstration site and funded the facility to adopt the technologies, and also worked with utilities to provide them with preferential rates based on studies we’ve done? What would be the result of that, both on public health and on the cost to the industrial user?”
Regulations and up-front financing are both important policy levers. But widespread industrial decarbonization won’t take off unless companies are confident that the investments they’re making will eventually pencil out financially.
“The operational costs are really key,” Hulting said. “If we can get those down, I think we’ll see a lot of implementation happening because these electrified technologies are largely more efficient. It’s an energy-efficiency boost.”
Electric industrial heating faces a core challenge in the U.S. — the spark gap, or the cost difference between fossil gas and electricity. Cheap domestic gas supplies have undercut the economics of industrial electrification over the past two decades, and while gas prices have been rising over recent months, so have electricity costs.
Underneath these broad averages lie significant regional differences, however. Low spark gaps have spurred electric industrial heating investments in certain parts of the country, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which tracks such projects across the U.S. And most utilities offer industrial rates and pricing structures that can shift the balance toward electrification.
Narrowing the spark gap down to where it encourages industrial electrification relies on two important variables, Kwon said — “making electricity cheaper and making gas more expensive.” Policies that drive up gas costs aren’t exactly a political winner, however. So industrial electrification advocates have focused on making electricity cheaper.
One way to do that is to “give industry access to wholesale electricity rates,” he said. Over the long run, increasingly cheaper renewable energy will drive down electricity costs at large, he explained. But power generated by solar and wind is already quite cheap when it exceeds grid demand. In fact, grid operators are being forced to curtail excess renewable energy at certain times of the year in sun- and wind-rich parts of the country, which sometimes see wholesale electricity prices drop into negative territory.
That’s why industrial electrification proponents are eager for states to create routes for industrial customers to access these cheap wholesale prices, rather than remaining on the retail utility rates that shield customers from these price swings. Access to bulk electricity price differentials is particularly essential for making the business case for thermal-energy storage technologies, which convert electricity to heat and store it for long durations.
In return, big industrial customers can act similarly to utility-scale batteries on the grid, Kwon said — storing excess power when prices are low and using it to reduce their grid demands when power is scarce. That’s already happening in Northern European countries such as Denmark, where variable electricity rates that offer inexpensive off-peak pricing encourage industries to use and store ample wind power, he said. “That’s essential — and that’s a place where we hope states will pick up.”
Just how this concept can be applied depends on what kind of utility rates and energy market structures different states have, Rissman said. For decades, utilities have negotiated special rate structures with particularly large and power-hungry facilities, such as steel furnaces and aluminum smelters. And competitive energy markets like those in Texas, or across some Northeastern and Midwestern states, allow large customers to contract with retail energy providers in ways that let them access wholesale energy market prices, he said.
But these arrangements are largely kept private since they constitute a competitive advantage for the industries that are getting them, he noted. What’s more, rate programs still need to protect factories or facilities from being exposed to the enormous price spikes that can occur at times of power shortage or grid emergency — at least, for all but the handful of industrial players willing to take the risks involved. At the same time, wholesale pricing structures shouldn’t allow industrial customers to avoid paying their fair share of power grid investments or other costs that are bundled into retail rates.
In California, advocates have proposed regulations to allow industrial decarbonization projects to access low-cost renewable energy through some kind of exposure to or pass-through of the state’s wholesale energy market, Cheng said. Last year, state regulators launched a proceeding to explore the potential for such “flexible” rate structures for large industrial companies, she noted. But “it’s pretty early on — we don’t have the answers yet.”
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