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RENEWABLE ENERGY: The New York Power Authority seeks proposals to deliver as much as 575 MW of renewable energy to New York City through an existing transmission line. (Utility Dive)
ALSO: Environmental activists claim the New York Power Authority’s draft plan to create 3.5 GW of renewable power fails to do enough to help the state meet its clean energy goals. (City and State New York)
OFFSHORE WIND:
BIOMASS: The Burlington Electric Company in Vermont is negotiating to acquire full ownership of the state’s largest power producer, a wood-burning plant that has been controversial in recent years. (VT Digger)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Pennsylvania legislators consider measures that would legalize the use of e-scooters on public streets and create rules of the road for the vehicles. (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
HEAT PUMPS: A Massachusetts town pilots a new way of financing heat pump installations that could be scaled up to speed adoption statewide. (MassLive, subscription)
COMMUNITY CHOICE: Customers of Providence, Rhode Island’s community choice aggregation program will pay less this winter for a power supply that includes more renewable energy than the default utility product in the state. (Boston Globe)
GRID:
TRANSMISSION: Baltimore City Council considers whether to pass a resolution opposing a proposed 70-mile transmission line that some councilors say would damage farmland and hurt property values. (Baltimore Sun, subscription)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
COMMENTARY: Wind energy could lower electricity costs for Connecticut residents by lessening the impact of natural gas price spikes, says an energy analyst. (CT Mirror)
BIOMASS: Vermont environmental advocates say a wood-fired power plant, the state’s largest in-state power source, is both losing money and harming the environment, while the local electric department says the facility benefits ratepayers and the grid. (VTDigger)
CLEAN ENERGY: Pennsylvania, home to the country’s biggest shale gas production region, tries to balance a stable fossil fuel industry with emissions reductions and a clean energy transition. (Canary Media)
SOLAR:
OFFSHORE WIND: Supply chain issues are one of the major barriers to offshore wind’s progress in New Jersey, says a professor studying sustainable energy. (6abc)
NATURAL GAS: Twenty years since fracking began in southwestern Pennsylvania, there is growing evidence that the practice causes widespread adverse health impacts. (Observer-Reporter)
BUILDINGS: Maryland commercial property owners say a state requirement to report building emissions starting in 2025 is excessively burdensome, though environmental groups praise the measure. (RTO Insider, subscription)
TRANSIT: Philadelphia-area public transit is unlikely to get a state funding boost unless the legislature can agree to a new revenue source like increased taxes on gaming. (Spotlight PA)
GEOTHERMAL: The University of Massachusetts plans to power two new buildings on its flagship campus with geothermal energy, but neighbors are concerned about the disruptions the project could cause. (Greenfield Recorder)
ELECTRIFICATION: South Portland, Maine workshops a proposal to ban gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and other lawn equipment, but could exempt commercial landscaping operations. (Maine Wire)
COMMENTARY: The possible reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania would benefit the area’s union workers, says a representative from a state union coalition. (Lancaster Online)
When farmer Trent Gerlach found out a solar farm would be built on the land he had long worked in northwestern Illinois, he was disappointed.
“As a farmer, seeing that land taken out of production is difficult, when you farmed it for many years, you’ve been stewards to that land, fertilized that land, taken care of it as if it was your own,” he said.
Gerlach’s family had been raising corn, soybeans and livestock since 1968, and like many farmers, they leased farmland in addition to working their own land. And when the owner of one of those leased parcels decided to work with Acciona Energia to help site its High Point wind and solar farm, Gerlach initially was not enthusiastic.
“The thought of taking productive farm ground out of production with solar panels was not, in my personal opinion, ideal,” he said.
But Gerlach was determined to make the best of the situation.
Ultimately, that meant a win-win arrangement, where Acciona pays him to manage vegetation around the 100 MW array of solar panels that went online in early 2024. Gerlach does that with a herd of 500 sheep.
“We don’t own the land, we don’t get a say — that’s landowners’ rights, and I’m very pro that,” Gerlach recounted. “In U.S. agriculture, the biggest thing that gets farmers in trouble is saying, ‘that’s how we’ve always done it so that’s what we’re going to do.’ Renewable energy is probably not going anywhere, whether you’re for or against it, it’s coming, it’s what’s happening. As an agriculture producer, we’re going to adapt with it.”
Researchers around the country are exploring agrivoltaics, or co-locating solar generation with agriculture in a mutually beneficial way. Projects range from growing tomatoes in California to wild blueberries in Maine, with varying levels of success.
Acciona regional manager Kyle Charpie said that sheep grazing appears an especially promising form of agrivoltaics, and one that the company is likely to continue exploring globally. Solar operators need to keep vegetation controlled, and sheep are a more effective and ecological way to do it than mechanized mowing. Acciona has long had a sheep agrivoltaic operation in Portugal, Charpie noted, and two projects in Texas are underway.
“It’s incredibly cost-effective — sheep don’t break down like a tractor; if a tractor blows a belt, you’ve lost a whole day of cutting,” he said. “These grasses grow wickedly fast, it’s that constant presence of the sheep that’s been super super effective. It aligns with our sustainability goals.”
“It’s tough to say we’re the greatest renewable company in the world [if] we have a bunch of tractors running up and down our fields belching out CO2,” he continued.
Another advantage, Charpie said, is that at the end of the solar array’s lifespan, the land beneath it will be restored and refreshed.
“We have all these sheep now who will spend 30-plus years breathing, living, using their hooves to churn up ground, even dying; it’s the circle of life,” he said. “When these farms get turned back to the families, that soil condition will be wonderful.”
Gerlach’s family had about 50 ewes when the idea for grazing around the solar panels struck. He “hounded” Acciona, in Charpie’s words, to bring an agrivoltaic deal to fruition.
“He saw an opportunity here, and he has been his own best advocate, banging down the door, checking how close are we, when will we get our sheep here,” Charpie said.
Gerlach ultimately bought about 500 sheep of two types: Dorper and Katahdin, small breeds that can fit easily under solar panels.
“The panels create lots of shade — during the heat of the day, they’ll all be underneath the panels for shade,” Gerlach said. “In early mornings, late evenings they’re out grazing aggressively. They don’t bother the panels one bit.”
Gerlach said his family “used to raise livestock like everybody did back in the day,” and his farm has won awards for its cattle, but raising livestock has become less profitable in recent years. Agrivoltaics offer an opportunity to delve back into raising sheep, something Gerlach loves. A commercial sheep operation would only be possible with the payments for vegetation management, he said.
“Raising sheep in the United States is challenging because the market for sheep is not very high,” he said. There’s not much of a domestic wool market, and “the meat side of sheep and lamb never really caught on in the U.S. — we’re a beef, pork, poultry-consuming country.”
Gerlach sells the bulk of his lambs around the Easter season, and largely for kosher and halal consumption. Since that market is so limited, the ewes largely earn their keep being paid to graze.
“We love providing stewardship to the animals. That’s what U.S. agriculture was built on hundreds of years ago,” Gerlach said. “It marries really well with our crop production” on nearby land. “In agriculture you need diversification. By bringing sheep and livestock production in, we can afford to hire more full-time employees.”
Sheep are the livestock best suited to agrivoltaics, stakeholders agree.
“You can’t use cattle because they’re too large, they would rub on the panels and break them,” Gerlach said. “You can’t use goats because goats would climb on the panels, and they’re natural chewers, they would chew on the wires.”
The High Point solar array is divided up into separate plots with fences, “like perfect little pens for the sheep,” added Charpie.
In a bigger uninterrupted plot, a farmer would likely need to move water sources for sheep strategically around the area to make sure the animals cover the entire plot. Gerlach’s flock only grazes about a fifth of the Acciona solar array. He’s hoping to expand, though feeding and sheltering sheep during the winter when they can’t graze is costly.
“I’ve got three young kids. Hopefully we raise them in agriculture. It’s such a good practice for our young people to learn responsibility and stewardship,” Gerlach said.
“[The animals] come first, they get fed and watered and taken care of before us. Sometimes agriculture gets portrayed in a poor light, especially larger production agriculture. I try to really push that that’s not everybody. Talk to a local farmer, a local person — you generally see that we’re stewards of the land, we want healthy ground and livestock. That can marry in fine with clean energy.”
BATTERIES: California’s grid operator sets a new single-day peak battery discharge record of 8,300 MW after surpassing 10,000 MW of installed storage capacity. (PV Magazine)
SOLAR:
PUBLIC LANDS: The Biden administration designates the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off California’s coast, banning new offshore oil drilling and other development on more than 4,500 square miles of ocean. (Los Angeles Times)
OVERSIGHT: California officials work to fortify state climate and environmental regulations against a potential second Trump administration by preemptively preparing legal challenges and forging agreements with corporations. (New York Times)
OIL & GAS:
UTILITIES: Wyoming lawmakers consider industry-crafted legislation that would limit utilities’ liability for non-economic losses suffered from power equipment-sparked wildfires. (WyoFile)
WIND: California commercial fishermen file a lawsuit accusing state regulators of skirting federal law by issuing sonar testing permits to offshore wind developers along the state’s central coast. (Cal Coast News)
BIOFUELS: Oregon residents and advocates push back against a proposed biofuel transfer facility, saying it poses safety and environmental risks. (OPB)
HYDROGEN: A pet food company adds a hydrogen fuel cell truck to its California delivery fleet to test the technology’s scalability. (Biofuels Digest)
GEOTHERMAL: The federal Bureau of Land Management sells 66 geothermal leases on about 219,000 acres in Nevada and nets $7.8 million. (Las Vegas Sun)
EMISSIONS: California regulators begin crafting rules aimed at limiting dairies’ methane emissions, but advocates worry proposed exemptions could preemptively weaken them. (Canary Media)
NUCLEAR: Academic advocates cast doubt on a proposed advanced nuclear reactor under development in Wyoming, saying it will cost far more than other carbon-free energy sources and has a radioactive waste problem. (Casper Star-Tribune)
COMMENTARY:
GRID: President Biden announces $612 million for six projects to improve electric grid resilience in hurricane-affected communities. (NPR)
ALSO: More than 550 incarcerated men suffered in North Carolina prison cells without lights or running water for five days after Helene, until they finally were transferred to different facilities. (Intercept)
SOLAR: A nonprofit and a solar company partner to deliver 33 solar-plus-battery microgrids and dozens more portable batteries to western North Carolina communities that still lack power from Hurricane Helene’s damage. (Associated Press)
NUCLEAR:
HYDROELECTRIC: A Virginia town council budgets $272,500 for a feasibility study of using a pair of small-flow turbines to run its hydroelectric plant when the James River is low. (Lynchburg News & Advance)
OIL & GAS: Tennessee farmers protest the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plans to build a gas-fired power plant. (WZTV)
COAL:
CLIMATE:
COAL ASH: Tennessee officials learn about the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to spend $1 billion into improving how it stores coal ash byproducts. (Gallatin News)
EFFICIENCY: An Alabama electric cooperative offers energy efficiency rebates through a Tennessee Valley Authority program. (Cullman Tribune)
POLITICS:
COMMENTARY: An editor considers the complicated question of whether climate change is leading more people to move to mountainous Appalachia. (Cardinal News)
HEAT PUMPS: Maine has spent $135 million on heat pump incentives so far, with another $125 million expected in coming years, though none of the money has come from state tax revenue. (Portland Press Herald)
CLEAN ENERGY: The governor of Pennsylvania proposes redirecting $2.6 billion in unused tax credits to a new program to incentivize production of electricity that meets certain clean energy standards. (Spotlight PA)
OFFSHORE WIND:
WORKFORCE: A Philadelphia nonprofit trains people from low-income communities to work in clean energy trades. (Associated Press)
DECARBONIZATION:
SOLAR: The first commercial solar development in Erie County, Pennsylvania, is coming online this fall, leading the way for three more projects in the works. (Erie Times-News)
BUILDINGS: Building performance standards like those in place in New York City and Boston can help accelerate building decarbonization, according to a new road map from the Sustainable Markets Initiative. (Utility Dive)
HYDROPOWER: An environmental group offers to buy four hydropower dams on the Kennebec River in Maine with the goal of removing or modifying the structures to improve the river for Atlantic salmon. (Bangor Daily News, subscription)
EMISSIONS: Portland, Maine, explores ways to reduce the emissions of large cruise liners docked in port by strengthening transmission so ships can shut down engines and draw power from the grid. (Maine Public)
COMMENTARY: Maryland officials’ trip to Sweden offers valuable lessons in infrastructure development and the need for more education in the fight against climate change, writes the mayor of Annapolis. (Capital Gazette, subscription)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
DETROIT—In 1913, Henry Ford unveiled the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, reducing the time it took to make a Model T from 12 hours to 93 minutes and igniting a revolution in modern manufacturing. He later perfected the intricate choreography of worker and machine at the 600-acre Rouge plant, which opened in 1920.
On a sunny late-summer afternoon, I stood on a catwalk at the Rouge, peering down at the modern incarnation of that century-old industrial system. Half-built F-150 pickups rolled from station to station at four miles per hour. Each employee had about 45 seconds to perform their task — install a center console, affix a windshield, hook up the truck-bed door.
Ford’s industrial efficiency helped convert America, and eventually much of the world, to automotive transportation, and his factories attracted thousands of workers to Detroit. By the 1920s, it was the nation’s fourth largest city; in 1950 its population peaked at nearly 2 million. Early-20th-century Ford Motor Company casts a mythic aura over Detroit to this day.
“We’re steeped in our heritage,” said Liesl Clark, an architect of Michigan climate policy who now teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “We think a lot about being the state that put the world on wheels. We take a lot of pride in that.”
But Detroit’s industrial joyride hit speed bumps in the second half of the 20th century as the auto industry grappled with technological change, globalization, automation, and supply chains shifting south, Jonathan Smith, senior chief deputy director at the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, told me. As the jobs disappeared, Detroit’s population began emptying out; last year, it stood at just 633,218.
Now something new is stirring along the banks of the Detroit River. The city just notched its first year of population growth since 1957. A few buildings over from the clockwork marvel of Ford’s F-150 plant, another operation cranks out the electric version of the truck, loaded with a battery pack so powerful it can run a whole home. Farther afield, nascent battery plants are in the works, aiming to supply the Big Three automakers with American-made components for their emerging EV lineups.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat elected in 2018, has launched an ambitious effort to reinvigorate Michigan’s remaining industrial base by retooling it for the low-carbon era. Crucially, Whitmer led her party to win majorities in the House and Senate in 2022, giving Democrats full control of state government for the first time in nearly 40 years. They used that popular mandate to pass a series of climate laws last fall, including one of the nation’s most ambitious clean electricity targets. Whitmer has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds to a slew of cleantech factories where workers will make batteries for electric vehicles and new technologies to clean up buildings and electricity production.
Michigan is not the only state actively pursuing new factory investment; its efforts coincide with a generational shift in the nation’s capital, where politicians of both parties are disavowing neoliberal offshoring and embracing policies intended to bring manufacturing back to American shores. President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, incentivizes domestic production of electric vehicles and other energy technologies. But given its industrial legacy and highly trained workforce, Michigan is arguably the state best positioned to make the most of this new economic era.
“It was hard to find a lot of benefit for Michigan workers in … the globalization of some of these key industries, whereas Michigan workers absolutely can benefit from the reshoring and onshoring of existing critical technologies and new technologies of the future that there’s now a policy commitment to see built here in the United States,” Smith told me.
If Michigan’s bet on new clean energy manufacturing works out, it would offer the clearest test case nationally of the Biden-Harris strategy to make clean energy the engine of manufacturing revival. Of the top five states leading the climatetech factory buildout, per a tally by researcher Jack Conness, it’s the only one with unified state Democratic control, not to mention a strong and historically powerful union presence.
“Michigan’s package [of climate legislation] is really significant because it’s in a manufacturing state, it’s in a state where we understand industry,” said Clark, who previously ran Michigan’s environmental regulatory body for Whitmer. “We know we’re going to have to squeeze all the carbon we can out of industry, and we’re going to do that in a partnership with industry, so that we’re also getting the economic-development advantage as we’re moving along that road.”
At the same time, Michigan is one of the most closely divided swing states likely to decide the election between Vice President Kamala Harris, who vows to continue the clean energy policies she helped pass, and former President Donald Trump, who has threatened to undo them.
Michigan broke for Trump in 2016 by around 11,000 votes, part of the shattered “blue wall” that ushered him into the White House. In 2020, Michigan rejected Trump by 150,000 votes. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in the state’s September polling. Democrats may be ascendant in Lansing, but among the waterfront palaces of Grosse Pointe and the lakeside cornfields of the Thumb, the Trump-Vance signs come out in force.
I wanted to assess just how far Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing transformation has come ahead of the 2024 election. After a week of factory visits and interviews with business leaders and policymakers, it was clear that this revolution is further along in Michigan than almost anywhere else in the U.S. It’s also barely getting started.
Private companies have pledged more than $11 billion to build clean energy factories and projects in Michigan, by Conness’ count. Advocacy group Climate Power tallies more like $18 billion for cleantech factories, not counting clean power-plant commitments — money that’s expected to produce nearly 22,000 jobs.
But many of the big-ticket factories announced so far have yet to break ground. Michiganders are feeling only a fraction of the benefits the clean manufacturing boom could furnish; the full effects won’t come until long after the 2024 election is decided. That delay could jeopardize the whole project. For this battery-powered economic revival to succeed, the supporting policies that kicked it off need to stay on the books.
Detroit emanates from its namesake river like half a wheel, spokes flaring from the cluster of art deco skyscrapers at its center. I followed one of those spokes west past Dearborn, home to Ford and now a thriving Yemeni community, to a flat green land dotted by factories that look like oversized boxes. One of the largest of these houses Our Next Energy, a startup founded in 2020 by materials scientist Mujeeb Ijaz to bring back domestic production of the lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry.
This technology uses cheaper, more widely accessible materials and operates more safely than the nickel-based battery chemistries that have reigned in the EV market. But the first major U.S. company to commercialize it, A123 Systems, went bankrupt more than a decade ago when, among other setbacks, actual demand for EV batteries lagged behind industry hopes. A123 was ultimately sold to a Chinese firm, and several Chinese companies successfully scaled up LFP production, making it a viable choice for EV batteries even though it lacks the cell-level energy density of the nickel chemistries. Ijaz saw this unfold firsthand while leading vehicle battery development for A123. Years later, he thought the time was ripe to try again.
It took me a few tries to find the right door at Our Next Energy’s enormous complex. Once inside, an operations manager for the plant had me cover up my hair, don a dark blue lab coat, and slip on little coverups for my leather shoes. Just before we walked onto the factory floor, he instructed me to tell him if I felt dehydrated, because we were entering a controlled zone of near-zero humidity.
Our first stop was the anode room, where Our Next Energy makes the negative end of the battery. Inside a tall, shiny, 100-liter metal tank, a dough hook mixes a sludge of gray metal powder; a separate machine extrudes this graphite slurry onto a roll of copper, printing an anode.
A parallel system across the room does the same for the lithium iron phosphate cathode, which goes on aluminum foil. Both the anodes and the cathodes then go through an oven that solidifies and dehydrates them, after which they’re sliced into uniform sheets. Then comes assembly: An automated machine stacks alternating sheets of anode and cathode with a separator weaving in between. The resulting stack gets stuffed into a metal box and filled with a liquid electrolyte. After some quality checks, it’s ready to power a car.
And that’s where the tour ended. The 10 megawatt-hour “proto line” I saw was fine-tuning samples for potential customers; it occupied a mere corner of the 660,000-square-foot factory, which sat mostly empty.
The mini-factory proves that American workers are capable of producing the up-and-coming LFP batteries. But the battery market, like the solar-panel market, is all about scale, and that’s what Our Next Energy currently lacks.
The company has suffered a series of recent financial setbacks. It went out for Series C venture funding last year, but couldn’t close the deal (that was a tough time for climate venture capital broadly). To keep things running, management laid off 128 staff in November, roughly 25 percent of the workforce. In December, the board booted founder Ijaz from the CEO spot (but kept him around as chief technology officer) and replaced him with board member Paul Humphries, who held multiple executive roles at Flex, the global manufacturing specialist.
Earlier this year, Humphries fired more staff and convinced existing investors to fund the company’s operations through the end of this year. That pushed off the startup’s nagging existential questions for a while.
After the factory tour, I drove half an hour to the small city of Novi to visit Our Next Energy’s corporate headquarters, a glassy, open-floor-plan affair tucked into the wooded, pond-dotted Michigan landscape. Head of Strategy Deeana Ahmed acknowledged the company’s financial challenges and laid out a clear-eyed view of the tough road ahead.
Any would-be U.S. battery manufacturer has to confront the fact that imported cells and packs from China are far cheaper than anything made in the U.S., even with the current 25 percent tariff. Battery prices were higher when Congress drafted the IRA incentives, but since then, Ahmed told me, China’s battery industry has dumped product into the global market in what she considers an unsustainable effort to depress prices and smother emerging battery factories in the U.S. (Solar panel makers complain of a similar dynamic in their market.)
“Right now, what we’re seeing with the IRA is that it barely is enough to keep us competitive,” Ahmed said. “I was meeting with an investor recently, and they asked this question: ‘What happens if the IRA goes away?’ And it’s like, this is not feasible.”
Our Next Energy has already ordered machinery for its first gigawatt-hour-scale production line, which will make cells for stationary grid storage. But the real prize will be landing a large-scale EV supply contract, which would help secure financing for the full $1.6 billion factory expansion that the company has advertised (and which landed a $200 million grant from the state of Michigan, based on a forecast of creating 2,000 jobs). That would fill out the building I saw with 7 gigawatt-hours of annual production, using machines 25 times larger than the ones I saw, plus another 13 gigawatt-hours somewhere even larger.
“You have to spend $1 billion to $2 billion, minimum, to have a scale that is competitive,” Ahmed said. “Anything below that, you’re just losing money.”
If that investment comes through, Our Next Energy will offer entry-level jobs paying $20 to $35 per hour. The company’s preliminary workforce hasn’t unionized, Ahmed said, but “we respect the right of our workers to collectively bargain.”
Two years after the IRA passed, it’s still too early to see Our Next Energy in the full swing of domestic battery production. The factory holds great promise but lingers in a vulnerable, incomplete state, a dynamic that characterizes much of Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing buildout. Ford is still constructing its $2.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Calhoun County, to employ 1,700 workers, while GM builds a $2.6 billion battery plant in Lansing. Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese battery company, has received regulatory approval to build a $2.4 billion facility in western Michigan, which would employ more than 2,300 people. Gotion had to go to court to defend the project after a new slate of local leaders tried to block it based on the company’s ties to China.
Concerted state and federal policies have produced this flurry of factory commitments, but few of those 22,000 promised jobs have materialized yet. Market conditions are daunting, even with full-throated federal support; if that support wavers, the whole endeavor might crumble.
In between factory tours, I stopped in at the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the famous Diego Rivera mural of the Rouge plant’s Depression-era V8 production. Henry Ford’s son Edsel Ford commissioned the stirring work in 1932 — a scion of American capitalism partnering with a prominent Mexican communist.
In one panel, Henry Ford instructs engineers on the newly designed V8, an engine so powerful that he named the new car model after it. (Ford received letters from notorious bank robbers Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger thanking him for designing such a capable getaway vehicle, though some specialists doubt their veracity.) The museum docent told me that Rivera casts the formidable new engine in the guise of a pre-Columbian dog sculpture, with Ford as the high priest interpreting it for his flock.
Elsewhere in the soaring atrium, furnaces glow like volcanoes while muscular men of various races heave mighty engines onto carts and assemble the cars with freshly stamped chassis, radiators, and tires.
Now Ford is attempting to reconjure this legendary alchemy of invention and productivity for the electric era. The company has electrified two of its most iconic brands: the Mustang, which transformed from muscle car to nearly silent electric crossover SUV, and America’s best-selling pickup truck, the F-150, now available as the Lightning.
But, even with unprecedented state and federal support, Detroit’s automakers are having trouble recapturing the innovative breakthroughs that put them on the map a century ago.
The problem is, Ford hasn’t yet achieved its own century-old standard of a better car at a cheaper price. The cost of a Lightning can easily hit $90,000 with add-ons. Even at these exorbitant prices, Ford’s electric division lost $1.3 billion to earn $100 million in revenue during the first quarter this year. And it only sold 10,000 vehicles. Expenses will naturally be higher at the beginning of the clean energy buildout, but that’s not a sustainable way of doing business.
I had hoped to see how those electric pickups were made, to view the synthesis of American muscle and quiet efficiency. As it happened, my August visit to Michigan coincided with the Lightning factory’s regular summer shutdown to retool equipment for the fall production season, Ford representatives told me. That same week, Ford announced it had canceled its next EV release because it couldn’t make the economics work for a three-row electric SUV.
Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told the Financial Times, “These vehicles need to be profitable, and if they’re not profitable based on where the customer is and the market is, we will … make those tough decisions.” Henry Ford’s genius was to imagine new and better possibilities beyond what customers and the market could imagine; his present-day successors seem unwilling to push those boundaries.
Ford’s peers in Detroit’s Big Three have even less to show for their EV efforts. GM built the popular Bolt, which sold well at accessible prices, but recalled thousands of them to replace batteries, then abruptly discontinued the model. (GM later changed course, un-canceling the cancellation, but the Bolt still isn’t back in production.) GM’s current EV lineup swings hard into luxury, with Cadillacs and Hummers; its most affordable model is the recently released Chevy Equinox, starting at $33,600. Stellantis, corporate parent of Chrysler, only got around to introducing its first all-electric model in North America this year despite claiming that EVs will comprise half its sales by 2030.
The auto industry’s halting progress notwithstanding, the Whitmer administration has thrown its full-throttled support behind the shift to electric mobility.
Whitmer’s Healthy Climate Plan calls for 2 million EVs on the roads by 2030, served by 100,000 public charging ports (up from around 3,000 in the state today), said Justine Johnson, the former Ford mobility strategist who now helms the state’s new Office for Future Mobility and Electrification. The state government will transition all light-duty vehicles in its fleet to electric by 2033 followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2040.
Over the long term, though, the transition to clean vehicles will require dialing back production of automakers’ highly profitable gas-powered trucks and SUVs, and that will scramble the employment landscape in Detroit.
For the Whitmer team, the multi-decade planning horizon for the transition to electric mobility offers more time to prepare and manage the economic transition than, say, the sudden shocks of the Great Recession or the dot-com bubble bursting. The Big Three automakers responded to those crises with mass layoffs and cutbacks on benefits for remaining workers. In contrast, the EV transition can be one that Michigan workers and communities plan for and truly benefit from, Smith said.
“Nobody’s talking about phasing out ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles in the next year or two,” he added. “We’re going to continue to have a lot of stability in our auto sector in Michigan in the years to come.”
Some researchers have concluded that this shift will ultimately reduce the number of jobs in the sector, because EV drivetrains are more streamlined and less labor-intensive than ICE engine fabrication. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently analyzed all the steps and labor hours required to make electric and gas-powered vehicles and concluded that EVs can result in greater labor demand if you include the work of battery production. The latest data, published in March, seems to corroborate Whitmer’s theory that EVs can result in economic gains for Michigan, though the location of the battery factories will influence legacy autoworkers’ ability to transition.
Michigan’s battery and EV bets still look unsteady, but the state’s portfolio of new factory investments stretches well beyond the automotive sector.
In a different boxy building not far from Our Next Energy, I met Jose Nunez-Regueiro, the chief technology officer of Nxlite, a startup that has developed a novel way to make windows significantly more energy-efficient. Out on the factory floor, he opened up a porthole into a large metal chamber: A glowing pink haze filled the space, with twin lines of pulsing lavender tracking along two pipes at the top.
Nunez-Reguiero explained the pipes are hollow tubes of silver stuffed with magnetic filling. The machine ignites argon, oxygen, or nitrogen under intense pressure, turning it into cosmic pink plasma, which then collides with the magnets. That impact dislodges a plume of atoms, which sputter down onto a panel of glass at a thickness of 10 to 40 nanometers — a technique known as physical vapor deposition.
The transparent, ultra-thin coating blocks select infrared wavelengths, keeping heat out of a building or vehicle in the summer, or keeping it in during the winter. Upgrading windows this way could cut a house’s energy use by 40 percent, Nunez-Reguiero said. Better energy efficiency is an essential component of decarbonizing home heating and cooling, a major goal of both the Michigan climate plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Nxlite had the good fortune to move into a fully built and equipped glass factory. Like Our Next Energy, the startup is running pilot operations now before scaling up to full commercial production.
Over in Litchfield, about 100 miles west of Detroit, Whitmer had celebrated the early August opening of LuxWall, which fabricates gas-insulated window panes, another tool for decreasing building energy consumption. The company called this factory “the world’s first high-volume vacuum-insulating glass production facilities,” and announced plans to invest far more money in growing its operations in Michigan. LuxWall employs 87 people now but plans to eventually employ 450, aided by $6 million in state grants and over $31 million in federal money.
And last year, Michigan leaders were proud to close a $400 million factory commitment from Nel, a Norwegian company that makes high-tech electrolyzers for turning clean electricity into hydrogen. Electrolyzers could soon become the picks and shovels of the clean hydrogen gold rush, which promises to decarbonize tricky sectors like long-distance shipping and freight, steelmaking, and chemicals.
Michigan leaders hustled to make it happen. “It came down to two states — I’m not going to name the second state, but the governor of the second state said, ‘Hey, I’m too busy,’” Quentin Messer, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, recounted from his office in Lansing. “And Gov. Whitmer said, ‘Look, this is an opportunity. This is my responsibility, as leader of the state, to be closer-in-chief.’”
Whitmer flew out to Oslo herself and sealed the deal. Messer said it ended up being the largest foreign direct investment announced at the 2023 SelectUSA Investment Summit, the Department of Commerce’s annual conference to facilitate foreign investment in the U.S. economy.
That factory, though, hasn’t broken ground yet — one of many projects held up until the Internal Revenue Service decides how to structure its hydrogen tax credits.
Other manufacturers have operated in Michigan’s industrial landscape for decades, but added new lines in response to new federal and state incentives. Up in Saginaw, Hemlock Semiconductor has for years produced among the highest-grade polysilicon in the country. After Congress passed policies to encourage onshoring of microchip production and the solar supply chain, Hemlock broke ground on a $375 million expansion in October 2022.
Armstrong International’s history in the state dates back even further than Hemlock’s. In 1900, Adam Armstrong answered a newspaper ad offering free land and a building in Three Rivers, a farm town nestled among the cornfields south of Kalamazoo, to any company that could hire 15 people over five years. He relocated his machine shop from Chicago, and got to work in a 40-by-100-foot building crafting bicycle spokes, potato diggers, and railroad repair buggies. His great-great-grandson, Kurt Armstrong, told me the company no longer makes potato diggers, but the inverted bucket steam trap it commercialized in 1911 kicked off a thriving business in industrial thermal equipment that now spans 20 factories and offices worldwide.
Armstrong recently started construction on a 29,000-square-foot expansion in Three Rivers to produce industrial-grade heat pumps within 12 months, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. The company’s design captures heat in industrial facilities that would otherwise escape as waste, and concentrates it to recirculate into factory processes. It plays in the range of 150 to 200 degrees Celsius, assisting tasks like drying out pet food, distilling bourbon, pasteurizing soft drinks, and operating commercial-scale laundries.
Armstrong said the factory addition will employ 10 to 15 people to start, and that could grow based on demand.
“The reason why we stayed in that Michigan location is because there’s such a deep tie-in to the culture and community there,” Armstrong told me. “It’s the employees who make the company great, and you can’t just recreate that somewhere else.”
Armstrong’s expansion is a lot smaller than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory, but it’s bigger than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory that doesn’t yet exist. Michigan’s big-ticket factory commitments drive up the counts of dollars invested and jobs created, but they also require more diligence and risk assessment from their corporate backers, not to mention longer construction times. Meanwhile, the smaller-dollar expansions are putting people to work building tools most people have never heard of, but which serve the climate transition in tangible ways.
Michigan’s clean energy factories are slowly materializing, but the best is yet to come — assuming the underlying policies to support battery and solar manufacturing remain in effect. Michiganders are uniquely positioned to influence that outcome, by voting in a crucial swing state this November.
One of the big questions facing Democrats broadly in 2024 is whether their efforts to reinvigorate American industry will resonate with voters concerned about the nation’s economic outlook. When Joe Biden was the candidate, swing-state voters weren’t swayed. But the arrival of Harris on the ticket turned states that looked all but lost into toss-ups again. That creates room for a clean energy message to make a difference: Persuading tens of thousands of voters to support a domestic economic platform is more doable than swaying millions.
Measuring voters’ receptiveness to clean energy onshoring is tough to do, especially when, as in Michigan, the most exciting factories aren’t yet boosting local tax revenues and putting thousands of people to work in high-tech jobs. I wasn’t able to find a northern analogue to Dalton, Georgia, where an existing Qcells solar-panel factory used IRA incentives to rapidly grow to 2,000 full-time workers, and the benefits are already cascading across the city.
But Michigan brings two things to the effort that are hard to find together in the other states leading the factory boom: a fired-up state Democratic establishment that’s running on climate action and related jobs, and a newly galvanized union base.
Many of the top winners in clean energy manufacturing dollars have been states led by Republican governors or legislatures, who like the jobs but not the Democrats’ broader policy agenda — places like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Ohio.
Michigan, on the other hand, has a deep bench of liberal state leaders who ran on climate last cycle and won a historic majority.
“The governor had talked about it quite a bit before the election, and had worked with people across the state to develop the Michigan climate action plan,” state Senator Sue Shink, a Democrat from the Ann Arbor area, told Canary Media. “It had all the policies we [ultimately] enacted laid out in it, and talked about pathways to attaining those goals.”
After winning the statehouse, Whitmer and her allies passed a series of high-profile climate policies last year. Michigan committed to produce carbon-free electricity not by 2045, like California and New York, but by 2040. Other laws added labor standards and energy-justice provisions to the clean energy buildout, and created a Community and Worker Economic Transition Office to look out for the workforce amid the shifts to lower-carbon industry.
Knocking on doors for the 2022 election, Shink found that climate and clean energy were on voters’ minds. Weather fluctuations had messed with farmers’ planting schedules. Huge rainstorms had overwhelmed aging infrastructure and flooded homes. The 100-year-old Edenville Dam burst in May 2020. Diminished snowfall had been curtailing the cherished ski season.
While seeking to address carbon emissions, the politicians kept their focus on “making sure the quality of life in Michigan is as good as it can be,” Shink said.
Residents in her district, for instance, struggled with under-insulated homes, which drive up heating and cooling bills. The state laws created programs to take advantage of federal weatherization funds from the IRA, and “it’s making a huge difference in their lives, because they’re warmer, their house is more comfortable,” Shink said. This approach tracks neatly with how progressive data crunchers have advised Democrats to describe the massive and complex Inflation Reduction Act to voters.
Now Michigan Democrats have a package of legislative achievements to run on in November, which happens to complement the principal policy achievements of Harris’ vice presidency. In fact, Michigan politicians are pushing the Harris campaign to speak up more on the domestic manufacturing push, which Biden prioritized in his campaigning, per a recent Politico article. (Neither the Harris campaign nor the Trump campaign responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment for this article.)
Michigan also has another ascendant political force at work: unions.
Much of the country’s recent EV and battery factory investment has gone to Southeastern states, which attract companies with their “business-friendly environment” that includes decades of undercutting the power of organized labor. But unions have played a defining role in Detroit since Henry Ford, after some convincing, recognized the United Auto Workers in 1941.
Democratic state officials are vocally supportive of Michigan’s union heritage.
“We benefit a lot from the fact that we’ve had the UAW, IBEW, and others investing in workforce and helping with workforce training,” said Smith from the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. “I think most employers recognize that’s an asset to them and an asset to the state, not necessarily something that’s going to be a threat to their business model.”
Shawn Fain won the presidency of the UAW last year by running as a reform candidate who wanted to clean up after a string of corruption scandals took down leaders of the union’s long-reigning faction. He proceeded to rally the biggest autoworker strike in decades, and win concessions from the Big Three, including a clear pathway for workers to unionize at battery plants. The UAW has since organized workers at two Ultium battery plants, in Lordstown, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, winning wage increases and other benefits.
Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to appear on a picket line last year when he joined Fain at a GM plant near Detroit. Fain later appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and rallied behind Harris, countering Trump’s recent outreach to working-class voters by labeling him a “scab.”
If winning begets more winning, the political mobilization that’s starting to generate clean energy jobs in Michigan will be an asset for Democrats at the polls in November, something that wasn’t there in 2016 or 2020. If these forces keep Michigan in the Democratic column, that could help ensure the clean industrial policies stay on the books in Washington, giving Michigan’s factories more time to overcome headwinds and deliver on their promises of jobs and community revitalization.
SOLAR: Western Shoshone tribal members in Nevada push back on the Biden administration’s federal land solar plan, saying it puts a sacred massacre site proposed for national monument status in the path of energy development. (Las Vegas Review Journal)
PUBLIC LANDS: Advocates warn a second Trump administration would shrink or eliminate national monuments in the West, reopening fragile lands to oil and gas drilling, mining and other development. (Los Angeles Times)
OIL & GAS: An oil-shipping firm agrees to pay $3.3 million to settle an environmental group’s lawsuit alleging the firm discharged petroleum coke pollutants into the San Francisco Bay. (Bay City News)
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration proposes tweaking tax rules to make tribal-owned firms eligible for direct cash payments for clean energy projects. (E&E News, subscription)
UTILITIES:
GRID:
CLIMATE:
LITHIUM: A California lawmaker calls on Imperial County to rework a plan for dividing up lithium-related revenues, saying it does not comply with state law. (KPBS)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Trucking industry groups file a lawsuit seeking to block implementation of California’s clean fleets rules and zero-emission vehicle mandates. (Road & Track)
MINING: Wyoming lawmakers propose streamlining permitting for proposed rare earth element mines. (WyoFile)
CARBON CAPTURE: The U.S. Energy Department drafts a strategy for developing “dozens” of carbon capture and storage facilities by 2050 and building infrastructure, oversight, and a workforce to serve them. (E&E News, subscription; news release)
ALSO: Exxon Mobil announces it’s secured leases for 271,000 acres in waters off Texas for an offshore carbon capture project. (Reuters)
NUCLEAR: A newly updated U.S. Energy Department report makes a case for immediately launching a buildout of large-scale nuclear reactors in hopes of tripling the country’s current 100 GW of nuclear power capacity. (Canary Media)
COAL: Five of the biggest U.S. coal plants have set dates for closure or a shift to another fuel, and a sixth is reportedly planning to switch to natural gas as well. (Inside Climate News)
GRID:
UTILITIES: Oregon residents file a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit accusing the state’s largest natural gas utility of misleading customers about its carbon reduction plan and using that program’s funds to promote fossil fuels. (OPB)
POLITICS:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Delaware will use $14.3 million in federal funding to install chargers along I-95 as part of a multistate effort to reduce the emissions of the trucking industry. (WHYY)
GRID: The flooding that accompanied Hurricane Helene could push utilities in Appalachia to rethink the region’s power grid, described by one official as a “really far-flung set of distribution lines going up into the hills and serving different communities.” (Grist)
ALSO:
CLIMATE:
SOLAR:
CARBON CAPTURE: Exxon Mobil announces it’s secured leases for 271,000 acres in waters off Texas for an offshore carbon capture project. (Reuters)
EFFICIENCY: Louisiana receives $32 million in federal funds to weatherize and improve energy efficiency at senior living complexes. (NOLA.com)
UTILITIES:
OIL & GAS:
PIPELINES: Federal regulators assert they have the power to extend the deadline for the Mountain Valley Pipeline to build a spur into North Carolina despite the objections of environmentalists. (West Virginia Public Broadcasting)
POLITICS:
COMMENTARY: As Virginia deals with a surge of data center development, state officials should keep an eye on a utility’s proposal in Ohio that would require data centers to pay for at least 90% of the power they ask for, regardless of whether they end up using all of it, writes a columnist. (Virginia Mercury)
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