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PIPELINES: Iowa regulators approve the controversial Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline, and for developers to use eminent domain to acquire property, though the project still needs approval in the Dakotas. (Iowa Capital Dispatch)
ALSO:
CLEAN ENERGY: District energy systems that heat and cool buildings in Minneapolis-St. Paul and beyond are facing increasing pressure to decarbonize and reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Volkswagen will invest $5 billion in electric vehicle startup Rivian under a new joint venture to share EV architecture and software that could benefit Rivian’s roughly 8,000 workers in Illinois. (Reuters; Crain’s Chicago, subscription)
NUCLEAR:
SOLAR:
GRID: Indiana energy groups aren’t concerned about a new MISO outlook forecasting a potential future capacity shortfall, though they are urging more robust planning and avoiding plant retirements. (WTHR)
UTILITIES: A utility operating in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula withdraws a request for a permanent waiver in how it counts customer outage credits required under a new state law aiming to improve reliability. (Michigan Advance)
COMMENTARY:
CLIMATE: Economists say former President Trump’s plans to repeal Biden administration climate policies would put U.S. manufacturing investments at risk and send jobs back overseas. (New York Times)
ALSO:
STORAGE: Energy storage capacity installations jumped 84% in the first quarter of 2024 from the year before, with utility-scale installations more than doubling year-over-year. (Utility Dive)
CLEAN ENERGY:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WIND: With 21 of its planned 62 wind turbines completely installed, Vineyard Wind claims to now be the largest operating wind project in the country, pushing 136 MW to the grid. (electrek)
OIL & GAS:
POLITICS: As the coal industry’s influence fades, former President Trump’s campaign has drifted from his promise to end “the war on coal.” (E&E News)
CARBON CAPTURE: Louisiana officials announce two new carbon capture projects, frustrating residents who say the technology will prolong the use of fossil fuels. (Associated Press)
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Black residents in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” call on the U.S. Justice Department to protect them against the ongoing expansion of the region’s petrochemical industry and its pollution. (Floodlight)
NUCLEAR:
OIL & GAS: California researchers find more than 100,000 oil and gas wells in the Western U.S. are in wildfire-prone areas, compounding health and safety risks that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. (The Hill)
ALSO: A federal Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction in Nevada garners zero bids. (E&E News, subscription)
UTILITIES: Some Western utilities are operating without insurance as coverage becomes prohibitively expensive amid increasing wildfire hazard. (Bloomberg)
CLIMATE:
POLITICS: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon pays a law firm $800,000 in state funds as a down payment to fight Biden administration power plant regulations, public land rules and a proposal to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin. (Cowboy State Daily)
SOLAR:
WIND: California’s energy commission publishes its final offshore wind strategic plan with a goal of bringing 25,000 MW of capacity online by 2045. (Recharge News, subscription)
HYDROPOWER: Pumped hydropower storage developers step up outreach to the Navajo Nation after federal regulators rejected several proposed projects due to tribal opposition. (Bloomberg Law)
CLEAN ENERGY:
EMISSIONS: A southern California grand jury finds many cities are failing to recycle organic waste, resulting in increased landfill methane emissions. (Voice of OC)
NUCLEAR: Some residents of a Wyoming coal community are slow to support a proposed advanced nuclear reactor, saying they don’t like project-backer Bill Gates’ politics. (Casper Star-Tribune)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Arizona transportation officials seek public input on plans to expand its electric vehicle fast-charging station network. (Arizona Daily Star)
COMMENTARY:
The operators of the decades-old energy systems that heat and cool buildings in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul have ambitious plans underway to reduce emissions.
The mostly hidden networks of insulated pipes connected to centralized heating and cooling equipment are known as district energy systems. They’ve long been championed as an energy efficient way to heat and cool campuses or downtowns, especially in cooler climates.
Many, though, are connected to fossil fuel facilities, and the systems’ high efficiency alone won’t be enough to help schools, cities, and companies meet their goals of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury or sooner. Climate pledges by these institutional customers are now driving efforts to repower district energy systems with clean energy.
University district energy systems began initiatives to reduce emissions years ago and “now in the last five years we’re seeing a lot of emphasis on this from cities and towns,” said Rob Thornton, president and CEO of the International District Energy Association.
In Minneapolis, Cordia Energy, the private company that operates the largest downtown district energy system, is replacing natural gas boilers with electric models. And in downtown St. Paul, officials are seeking federal funding for a project to recover heat from a wastewater treatment plant and reduce energy use for a system currently powered by electricity and biomass.
“We’re doing decarbonization at the rate that our customer base is asking for and we can economically withstand,” said Jacob Graff, Cordia Energy’s north region president. Customers connected to its downtown Minneapolis system range from stadiums and high rises to apartments and medical facilities.
The concept of district heating has been around for centuries, with its roots in the networks of hot water pipes built in ancient Rome. Some of the first modern steam-based systems were built in New York in the 1880s. Today, the United States has more than 700 district energy systems heating and cooling buildings in downtowns, universities, medical campuses, towns and communities.
Cordia Energy’s Minneapolis system opened in 1972 to serve the 57-story IDS Center, still the tallest building in Minneapolis. Today, the steam and chilled water system manages seven plants that heat and cool the IDS and more than 100 other buildings, including U.S. Bank Stadium, Target Center, and the convention center.
Hennepin County owns and operates a much smaller district energy system, connected to a downtown trash incinerator, that primarily serves county buildings and Minneapolis City Hall.
District Energy St. Paul began in the early 1980s after then-Mayor George Latimer hired Swedish engineer Hans Nyman to replace the aging steam system with a hot-water central heating system. Latimer wanted to create a national model of district energy and he largely succeeded. District Energy St. Paul has the largest hot water system in the country, with more than 200 buildings.
Together, the two systems serve some of the state’s biggest buildings, which have emerged as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in both cities. In Minneapolis, 65% of the emissions are from commercial, multifamily and industrial buildings. St. Paul’s data is similar.
Cordia plans to reduce emissions from its Minneapolis system by 30% by 2030 before reaching net zero by 2050. Xcel Energy’s green tariff program will offset around half the electricity Cordia uses this year, and it wants to buy more credits if they become available.
The company is replacing older engine-driven chillers with electric models at the former Dayton’s department store, where it has operations. Chillers modulate the temperature inside buildings and can be powered by electricity or natural gas. Geothermal is another potential solution being studied.
A potential geothermal project “hasn’t cleared the economic hurdles yet,” Graff said. “I think we’ll eventually get there.”
Minneapolis customers are not alone in seeking to reduce emissions from district energy systems, Graff said. San Francisco will be Cordia’s first system to decarbonize using hydropower from a dam the company owns in Yosemite National Park.
Downtown St. Paul’s district heating system is owned and operated by a company called District Energy, which recently worked with the city and the regional planning agency on a $152 million U.S. EPA grant application to tap heat from a regional wastewater plant for the city’s system. It would include a project with Xcel Energy to pay for an electric boiler and hot water storage.
District Energy president and CEO Ken Smith said half the system already has been decarbonized through biomass, solar thermal and renewable energy credits. An analysis showed that recovering heat from the Metro Wastewater Treatment Plant, which manages 170 million gallons of water daily, could produce 60 megawatts of thermal energy, and heat pumps could lift the temperature up to the system average.
If District Energy receives the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, the system would go live in 2028 and allow District Energy to provide 92% of energy from carbon-free or carbon-neutral sources, far ahead of its goal of net zero by 2050.
“This certainly would be able to accelerate that by 30 years,” Smith said. “From everything we’ve seen, there’s nothing like this, certainly not in the United States, and I don’t believe there’s anything like it at this scale in Canada, either.”
St. Paul Resilience Officer Russ Stark said District Energy’s emissions represent a small portion of the total greenhouse gases in the city. Still, around 50,000 tons of carbon would be eliminated annually, and that’s “very impactful,” he said.
The wastewater project would allow District Energy St. Paul to expand to more buildings, decarbonizing them in the process, Stark said. Adding clients “is not a simple process but we’ve been talking a lot about that being an exciting part of the project,” he said. “I don’t know how many major city downtowns there are where there’s an opportunity to largely decarbonize most of the downtown in the way that we can.”
A one-size-fits-all solution for decarbonizing district energy systems doesn’t exist, as most are unique based on customers and geography. Not all can be inexpensively retrofitted for electricity, and the ongoing office and commercial real estate fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic adds risk to financing projects.
Thornton, of the district energy association, said electricity pricing can escalate quickly, especially in summer, creating uncertainty in the market. New technology may require more space, different controls and significant staff training. Federal policy remains unclear about what parts of a district energy system would qualify for tax incentives, he said.
Graff ticks off many challenges in decarbonizing Cordia’s Minneapolis operations. Geothermal works well on campuses and in low-slung neighborhoods where the problem of sending steam to the 50th floor of a skyscraper does not exist, Graff said.
There’s not a simple clean power source like natural gas that has the energy density to create and push steam through a network, he said. To illustrate the point during a tour of Cordia’s downtown plant, he pointed to a pipe with a modest circumference and said the natural gas flowing through it provided the heating for much of the system.
Electrification may be a goal of heating and cooling, but offsetting it with clean power is daunting. Cordia would have to install heat pumps capable of drawing more than 400 megawatts from a clean energy source, which would be no small feat, Graff said.
Hydrogen sounds promising but has no track record yet for supplying an entire downtown district energy system, Graff said. Biomass has potential, too, but sourcing enough it to service a sprawling district energy system reliably remains difficult.
Battery storage, microgrids and other technologies could all play a role, but each brings issues ranging from cost to a lack of testing in a district energy environment, at least at the size of the downtown Minneapolis system.
“We have the economy of Minneapolis in our hands, and regional economics depend on downtown Minneapolis,” Graff said “We need a reliable infrastructure that people can count on that can be delivered economically, and it’s our responsibility to do that.”
When you see an “all natural” label on a snack, you might be tempted to think it’s a healthy choice. But there’s no way around the facts: organic potato chips just aren’t as good for you as a carrot.
A similar marketing strategy is popping up in the fossil fuel industry. As the world wakes up to natural gas’ emissions impact, some producers are adopting a “certified” or “responsible” label to convince customers they’re a climate-friendly choice. But according to a new report, it’s all a “scam.”
Gas producers have started working with third-party contractors they say will evaluate their gas extraction processes for leaks and “certify” those with a lower methane emissions. As industries increasingly seek out clean energy, gas producers hope this label will make them more desirable.
But as the report from climate groups Oil Change International and Earthworks details, gas certification isn’t yet regulated, and its monitoring systems often miss methane leaks. Dakota Raynes, an author on the study, summed up its findings to Inside Climate News: “Certified gas is a greenwashing scam.”
A third-party gas certifier disputed the report’s findings. But Democratic U.S. senators recently came to the same conclusion, calling gas certification a “dangerous greenwashing scheme” in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on the industry claims.
“The reality is that gas certification schemes allow the oil and gas industry to justify the continued expansion of methane gas use and undermine efforts towards a just transition to renewables,” the senators said.
⚛️ Seeking a magic bullet: Large tech companies are betting on atomic fusion and other unproven energy technologies to power AI data centers, which critics say are already increasing reliance on fossil fuels. (Washington Post)
⚖️ A just transition? Residents of a former Pennsylvania coal community say the federal government has forgotten about them as they struggle to replace lost jobs and tax income, highlighting President Biden’s need to convince similar communities they won’t be left behind. (Washington Post)
🥃 Distilling decarbonization: A growing number of U.S. food and beverage manufacturers are using heat pumps to decarbonize the process heat they need to distill liquor and make other products. (Canary Media)
☀️ Perfect places: Researchers map millions of acres of abandoned U.S. farmland that could potentially be reused for renewable energy projects. (Journal Sentinel)
⛈️ Keeping solar panels safe: Hailstorms will likely become more common as the climate changes, but researchers say monitoring technologies and protective equipment can protect solar panels from hail damage. (Inside Climate News)
🛢️ Playing the reverse card: In New Mexico, oil and gas giants partnered with environmentalists and politicians to develop an abandoned well cleanup bill, but turned against the final product and claimed it would “destroy” the state. (ProPublica)
📉 We’re lagging on clean energy support: The world’s largest ever climate survey finds 54% of Americans want a quick transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, among the smallest majorities among counties polled. (The Guardian)
📄 Making it happen: Advocates say the 18-year permitting saga for the SunZia transmission line in the Southwest is a success story illustrating the challenges of building large-scale clean energy infrastructure. (Heatmap)
COAL: A former Pennsylvania coal community says the federal government has forgotten about them as they struggle to replace lost jobs and tax income, highlighting President Biden’s need to convince similar communities that they won’t be left behind in a clean energy transition. (Washington Post)
SOLAR:
GRID:
TRANSIT: New York’s governor dodges questions about replacement funding for New York City’s transit agency in light of her indefinite delay of Manhattan’s congestion tolls; a reporter is booted from her event after asking about her plan. (New York Focus)
POLICY: Easthampton, Massachusetts, releases a draft climate action plan that includes electrifying buildings and increasing low-emissions transit options. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)
WORKFORCE: As Massachusetts looks to achieve climate goals that will require over 30,000 new workers, five high schools use state grants to create renewable energy career pathway programs in the renewable energy field. (WBUR)
GAS: A fuel provider opens a renewable natural gas station in Carney’s Point, New Jersey, to fuel up heavy-duty trucks and vehicles traveling between Philadelphia, Delaware and the New Jersey Turnpike. (news release)
COMMENTARY: Maryland’s public advocate writes that ratepayers in the state are left paying higher rates because of three Exelon utilities’ “aggressive and highly profitable capital spending.’ (Baltimore Sun)
Editor’s note: Maryland’s Montgomery County is using an automated permitting system to hasten rooftop solar installations. An item in yesterday’s digest misstated the location.
EMISSIONS: Amid ongoing consideration of Duke Energy’s plan to meet North Carolina’s carbon emission goals, the state consumer advocate criticizes the utility for failing to leverage a federal loan program to save ratepayers hundreds of millions and build more clean energy. (Energy News Network)
ALSO:
OVERSIGHT: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to take up a case challenging the statewide election of Georgia’s energy regulators, essentially clearing the way for elections to resume in 2025. (Associated Press)
GRID:
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR: A Virginia county planning board recommends against approving a solar farm on 2,000 acres. (WCYB)
COAL: Alabama residents complain that a mining company and public officials are ignoring their concerns about a growing underground coal mine with a lengthy list of safety violations that culminated in a fatal explosion in March. (Inside Climate News)
WIND:
ELECTRIFICATION: The mayor of Miami-Dade County, Florida, announces Miami will be the first major cruise port on the Eastern Seaboard to implement shore power, which allows cruise ships to cut their engines and plug into landside electrical power. (Miami’s Community News)
OVERSIGHT: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announces the expansion of a website to give the public more information about pending permits at six agencies, including the state’s energy and environmental regulation departments. (Virginia Mercury)
COMMENTARY:
CLEAN ENERGY: Renewable energy developers in Ohio are pessimistic about accessing Inflation Reduction Act tax credits as they attempt to overcome fossil fuel-backed groups’ misinformation and burdensome state regulations. (Floodlight)
ALSO:
SOLAR:
WIND: Two central Wisconsin towns are being sued for overly strict wind energy rules that challengers say are more restrictive than state regulations. (WPR)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Michigan school districts report initial technological challenges with electric school buses, though supporters say a pilot program is gathering key usage data. (MLive)
CARBON CAPTURE: The developer of a large carbon capture project at a North Dakota coal plant delays a final decision on construction as costs increase and regulatory concerns grow. (E&E News, subscription)
PIPELINES:
OIL & GAS: Unregulated gas certification programs that aim to help the fossil fuel industry label natural gas as a clean fuel are a “greenwashing scam,” according to a new report from environmental groups. (Inside Climate News)
UTILITIES: A federal administrative law judge rules that a North Dakota electric cooperative should return $471 million to customers for costs that shouldn’t have been included in rates for a non-utility coal gasification plant. (KFGO)
BIOFUELS: Environmental groups want the federal government to require large biofuel plants to install air pollution monitoring devices and tighten the enforcement of air pollution permits. (MLive)
HYDROELECTRIC: A southern Minnesota hydroelectric dam is in “imminent failure condition” as high river levels caused water to breach the side of the facility and wash away a nearby substation. (MPR News)
OIL & GAS: A report by climate advocates dismisses third-party certification of “low-emission” gas facilities as greenwashing that does little to actually lower methane emissions, though certifiers dispute its findings. (Inside Climate News)
CLEAN ENERGY:
COAL: Residents of a former Pennsylvania coal community say the federal government has forgotten about them as they struggle to replace lost jobs and tax income, highlighting President Biden’s need to convince similar communities they won’t be left behind. (Washington Post)
POLITICS:
GRID:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A mapping tool finds electric vehicle charging deserts persist even in strong EV markets, including Los Angeles. (Axios)
EMISSIONS: North Carolina’s state consumer advocate criticizes Duke Energy for failing to leverage a federal loan program to save ratepayers hundreds of millions and build more clean energy. (Energy News Network)
GEOTHERMAL: Southern California Edison signs on to purchase 320 MW of power from an enhanced geothermal energy facility under development in Utah, boosting the nascent technology. (KTXL)
HYDROPOWER: Yakama Nation leaders criticize federal regulators for failing to consult with them on a proposed pumped hydropower storage project in Washington state after the tribe refused to reveal ceremonial and religious knowledge. (High Country News)
COMMENTARY: An editor celebrates Congress’ passage of a nuclear funding bill, saying it lays a roadmap for bipartisan climate action. (Washington Post)
GEOTHERMAL: Southern California Edison signs on to purchase 320 MW of power from an enhanced geothermal energy facility under development in Utah, boosting the nascent technology. (KTXL)
OIL & GAS:
CLIMATE: A Colorado judge clears the way for a local governments’ lawsuit looking to hold oil and gas companies accountable for climate change-related damages. (CPR)
HYDROPOWER: Yakama Nation leaders criticize federal regulators for failing to consult with them on a proposed pumped hydropower storage project in Washington state after the tribe refused to reveal ceremonial and religious knowledge. (High Country News)
SOLAR:
WIND: Wyoming regulators prepare to consider legal snags that have delayed development of a proposed 504 MW wind facility in the southern part of the state. (Cowboy State Daily)
STORAGE: An Arizona utility brings two battery energy storage systems online with a combined 340 MW capacity. (news release)
AVIATION: California regulators propose requiring jet fuel suppliers to offset their product’s greenhouse gas pollution by paying for emissions-reduction projects. (E&E News, subscription)
GRID:
NUCLEAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A mapping tool finds electric vehicle charging deserts persist even in strong EV markets, including Los Angeles. (Axios)
COAL: Advocates push back against the proposed sale of Canada coal mines blamed for contaminating Montana waters, saying it could affect remediation efforts. (Montana Free Press)
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