You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On ocean-based CO2, Grizzly 399, and the 45X tax credit.
Current conditions:Tropical Storm Trami brought widespread flooding to the Philippines, killing at least 24 people • The Southwestern U.S. is experiencing a heatwave, with temperatures as high as 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal • The three NASA astronauts stuck at the International Space Station due to inclement weather are finally on their way home.
The Swiss direct air capture company Climeworks has found a new, deep-pocketed partner in Morgan Stanley. The financial services company will pay an undisclosed amount to Climeworks to suck 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air and store the greenhouse gas underground on its behalf. This is the second largest deal Climeworks has secured to date, following an 80,000-ton sale to Boston Consulting Group, and the company says the purchase will help accelerate progress on its first project in the United States, a direct air capture hub in Louisiana called Project Cypress.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is rounding out its already extensive carbon removal portfolio with its first major investment in ocean-based technology. The tech giant agreed to buy up to 350,000 tons of CO2 removal from a startup called Ebb Carbon over the next 10 years, slightly more than its deal with the direct air capture company Heirloom.
Ebb uses electricity to separate seawater into acidic and basic streams, then returns the basic stream back to the ocean, where it reacts with carbon in the water and promotes faster CO2 absorption from the air. The company must achieve and verify an initial 1,300 tons of CO2 removal before Microsoft commits to buying the remainder. The company has a small pilot project up and running at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, and is working with federal scientists and the University of Washington to measure and model the results.
The Treasury Department issued final rules this morning for the Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, also known as 45X. The program is the backbone of the Inflation Reduction Act, offering incentives for domestic manufacturing of the components of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, subsidizing every step of the supply chain for these technologies. During a call with reporters on Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said the tax credit has already driven more than $126 billion in private sector clean energy manufacturing investments.
The biggest change introduced in the final rule that the administration highlighted was allowing critical mineral extraction — separately and in addition to mineral processing — to qualify for a 10% tax credit. “The U.S. has major deposits of critical minerals like lithium and palladium. Extracting and processing them here in America, as opposed to relying on China, Russia, and other countries with weak worker and environmental protection, is an economic and national security priority for us,” Adeyemo said.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Engineers at GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the Vineyard Wind offshore turbine blade that crashed into the ocean this summer, have been poring over ultrasound images of its other blades and conducting physical inspections with drones to figure out whether the fiasco was a one-off or a more widespread issue. During an earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Scott Strazik revealed that the company did, in fact, find a similar “manufacturing deviation” in “a very small proportion, low single-digit proportion” of the blades. The company now intends to “remove some blades from the Vineyard Wind farm while strengthening other blades as needed,” according to an update from Vineyard Wind.
The 600 megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa could be the next shuttered nuclear plant to come back from the dead. The plant’s owner, NextEra, is evaluating a restart, CEO John Ketchum told investors on an earnings call yesterday. “It goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, data-center customers in particular, in that site,” Ketchum said. “We’re in a period of substantial power demand.”
Grizzly 399, the world-renowned, 400-pound bear that roamed Grand Teton National Park for nearly 30 years, died tragically on Tuesday after being hit by a Subaru on the highway. She leaves behind more than a dozen offspring, including a cub born just last year that fans have nicknamed “Spirit.”
Jonathan Steele/Getty Images
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
An age-old tension, resolved.
For as long as I’ve been an energy reporter, I’ve been asked a scoffing question by moderates and conservatives: If Democrats really cared about climate change, shouldn’t they embrace nuclear power?
It’s a fair question. Nuclear energy, after all, can produce vast amounts of electricity without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It already generates more zero-carbon electricity in America than wind turbines and solar panels do combined; unlike renewables, it can provide power all day and night, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The countries that have seen the largest year-over-year drops in carbon pollution — e.g. France — have generally done so by building a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
It’s also a factual question. For years, even as Democrats railed against fossil fuels, they dilly-dallied on nuclear issues. The party’s leaders in statehouses and legislative chambers around the country worked to shut down aging nuclear reactors or approved nuclear-skeptical regulators. President Barack Obama cheered next-generation nuclear in speeches, but appointed extremely nuclear-skeptical regulators to oversee the industry. (One of his first appointees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, has called for a global ban on nuclear energy since leaving the government.)
Even though nuclear reactors produced most of America’s zero-carbon electricity, they remained the, well, glowing-blue-haired step-child of America’s grid: Democrats regularly railed against fossil fuels, and they felt comfortable paying lip service to far-off atomic technologies, but they did not lavish nuclear with the unqualified support that they gave renewables. Instead, they let the nuclear industry slip into senescence. This mild toleration was punctuated by moments of extreme cognitive dissonance, such as when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021 without lining up new zero-carbon generation to replace it — leading the state’s carbon emissions to soar.
Of course, Democrats didn’t have to do much to kill nuclear: At the same time, the market was doing a perfectly good job of it. As cheap natural gas flooded the American energy system in the 2010s, more and more nuclear plants became too expensive to run. From 2012 to 2022, 12 nuclear reactors shut down in the U.S., taking nearly 10,000 megawatts of low-carbon generation offline.
That was the status quo as recently as 2020 or even 2022. And it has remained the status quo in energy commentary. “What role, if any, does [Vice President Kamala Harris] see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans?” askedThe New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last month, in a column titled “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” At the vice presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee JD Vance even alluded to the argument amid a broader paean to fossil fuels. “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production,” Vance said. “We haven't built a nuclear facility — I think one — in the past 40 years.”
In fact, Vance is wrong: The United States recently turned on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first newly built reactors in America in 30 years. But this idea — Why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors? Why don’t Democrats do more to help nuclear? — has been a throughline of energy punditry since well before Vance was a best-selling author.
So I want to intervene in this conversation and note that the answer has now changed. Democrats are a pro-nuclear party now — not uniformly, but then again, neither are Republicans. Over the past several years, Democratic lawmakers and officials have adopted a slate of aggressively pro-nuclear policies and characterized the technology as pro-climate. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has called for America to build a new wave of conventional nuclear reactors — going much further than Obama ever did. Sometimes working with Republicans — but sometimes working alone, too — Democrats have pushed billions of dollars of support toward conventional nuclear reactors and the nascent advanced nuclear industry.
It’s worth stepping back here and going over what has actually changed.
For the past 10 years at least, both parties have been credibly committed to building up the advanced nuclear industry — the theoretical next generation of nuclear reactors that will be smaller, cleaner, and safer than the behemoths built during the Cold War. During the Trump administration, Congress passed a bipartisan bill meant to push along the advanced nuclear industry. It also passed the Energy Act of 2020, which authorized a demonstration program for advanced nuclear reactors.
The Biden administration has continued this support. The bipartisan infrastructure law created a $6 billion program that would pay existing nuclear power plants to stay open. At least $1.1 billion of that money will go to keeping Diablo Canyon, California’s only operating nuclear facility and its largest power plant, from shutting down; it was originally slated to close in 2025.
Earlier this year, Biden also extended a key program that indemnifies the nuclear industry for the cost of nuclear accidents and disasters above $16.1 billion.
But perhaps the most important nuclear law passed in the past five years is the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate package. For the first time ever, that law embraced the idea of “technology neutrality,” which means that electricity generated by nuclear reactors is now on the same footing as power from wind turbines or solar panels. If a method of electricity generation emits almost no carbon, then the government subsidizes it under the IRA.
The law is already helping restart nuclear reactors that have recently closed such as the Palisades reactor in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The utility giant NextEra is also exploring plans to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which closed in 2020. If those go through, then it will be able to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funding, as well.
Lawmakers from both parties have continued to back advanced nuclear research and deployment. Under Biden, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, containing a hodgepodge of policies meant to help the advanced nuclear industry. Among other changes, it instructs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move faster when approving new reactor designs, and it changes that agency’s mission statement to more affirmatively support nuclear development.
Biden administration officials haven’t just backed that legislation, they’ve also asserted that it will “help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” as Michael Goff, who leads the Energy Department’s nuclear office, bragged in a statement.
The irony is that nuclear plants are now doing well enough that Congress has clawed back some of the money from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The industry, seemingly, doesn’t need it any more, and no additional nuclear reactors have been scheduled to shut down. In 2024, Congress stripped up to $3.7 billion to pay for a program to produce a type of high-assay used in next-generation nuclear reactors.
Democrats have begun to brag about their nuclear policymaking efforts on the campaign trail, as well. In her speech on economic policy earlier this month, Kamala Harris included “advanced nuclear” in a list of technologies that her administration would support.
“We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing,” she said, “so the next generation of breakthroughs — from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear — are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.”
The party’s Senate candidates have become even more positive about nuclear energy. Candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, and Texas have all backed nuclear power, as the reporter Alexander Kaufman at Huffpost has shown.
This transformation has happened even though the big big environmental groups that have historically set the party’s energy priorities have not changed their mind on nuclear. Although many green groups have scaled back or defunded their anti-nuclear activism, their rhetoric remains staunchly anti-nuclear. The Sierra Club calls nuclear power a “uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and states on its website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”
The party’s approach to nuclear hasn’t informed all its policy yet. The Biden administration’s nominations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been criticized by pro-nuclear advocates for continuing the status quo or for not knowing enough about the advanced nuclear industry.
But Democrats are, by any measure, much more pro-nuclear now than they were 10 years ago — and much more pro-nuclear than they were a decade before that. (It’s often forgotten now that President Bill Clinton’s would-be climate policy, the BTU tax, also would have levied a fee on nuclear reactors.) Republicans also remain fairly pro-nuclear: Donald Trump has promised to approve “hundreds of new power plants,” including “new reactors,” during his presidency.
What remains unclear is whether both parties can persist in this new pro-nuclear formation. Nuclear energy is popular with a majority of the public, but only just; 56% of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants, according to the Pew Research Center. And there are signs, if you squint, of a potential coming era of GOP skepticism of nuclear power — part of the party’s broader turn against science and high-trust institutions.
Signs like: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been added to Trump’s transition team, believes that nuclear power is unsafe and uneconomical. Even Trump himself, in conversation with Elon Musk, has worried about “nuclear warming” — it’s not clear what he was talking about, but it might be nuclear war — and said that nuclear has a “branding problem.” Even if Trump continues to support the idea of building “new reactors,” his potentially illegal plan to claw back the Inflation Reduction Act’s unspent funding may lead to pandemonium in the sector. If the nuclear industry is now planning on receiving IRA subsidies, then ending those subsidies — especially in a messy or chaotic way — could spell disaster.
There are identity-driven reasons for Republicans to turn on nuclear, too: The nuclear energy industry is more unionized than any other energy source, and it requires a highly institutionalized and educated workforce. (Yet not all the trends augur a realignment: Nuclear power remains much more popular with men than women.)
For now, though, both parties — including Democrats — support building new nuclear power plants. The economics are good for once, too. The question now is how long that will hold.
To do it right, you’re going to need a building science pro.
When Zara Bode, a musician from Brooklyn, New York, first walked into the old seven-bedroom Victorian in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, it just felt right. Her husband, also a traveling musician, had grown up nearby. “You walk in this house and you’re like, oh, there’s a good vibe,” she told me. Since the 1890s, when it was built, it had been a community health center and a food co-op, before being lovingly restored by the older woman who sold it to Bode and her husband in January of 2020. Bode hoped to make it their forever home, a place for friends and family to gather.
Within a month of moving in, she and her husband both lost their incomes in the pandemic. Then they made a brutal discovery: the house was ruinously expensive to heat.
They spent all their time huddled in the kitchen with their two young children in front of the wood burning cookstove and kept the thermostat at 65. Even so, they were running through a full tank of oil every nine days. Each delivery cost more than $1,000, adding up to twice their mortgage every month. They had to ask for government emergency assistance.
Bode started asking around to other families, who told her about a state-funded program that gives out 0% weatherization loans with deferred repayment to low-income families. She got quotes from two different reputable companies, each of which proposed using polyurethane spray foam insulation in the large basement. The buzz in the community was that spray foam is a miracle product — so incredibly insulating that it would cut their heating oil needs down by two-thirds or or more. But Bode was protective of the old Victorian. “I knew it was lucky for us to get this house in the first place. We don’t have the money to make mistakes,” she says.
Without any outside expert to turn to, desperate for relief, and grateful for Vermont’s robust social safety net, she went for it.
She would come to regret it.
To hit its climate goals, the U.S. is going to have to upgrade its old housing stock. Residential energy use accounts for about 20% of U.S. carbon emissions, and the lion’s share of that energy is used to heat and cool homes. At the same time, low-income families are struggling more than ever to shoulder the financial burden of doing that. In 2023, the number of American families needing assistance jumped by 1.3 million to over 6 million.
The Inflation Reduction Act is aiming to tackle these twin crises, with a tax credit covering 30% of the cost of insulation and air-sealing materials, up to $1,200 annually per household. So far only New York has an active IRA-funded home rebate program, but more states have applied to start handing out funds to homeowners over the next year, which should also help shield Americans from the health effects of extreme temperatures.
The problem is, insulating an old home is a delicate and complex process. Improper installation can lead to mold, dry rot in your home’s framing and roof, and poor indoor air quality that can make you sick.
“It’s potentially a huge problem,” Francis Offerman, a.k.a. Bud, an industrial hygienist who does indoor air quality testing for homeowners (and lawyers) who suspect a house or apartment is making its inhabitants ill, told me. “Especially if your mindset is, we’re going to just spray foam the home, and that’s it.”
Bode reached out to me last year after she read my viral story for VT Digger, which raised the alarm about the risks of spray foam insulation in particular. (Though experts say any insulation done badly can cause problems.) She and her family had vacated their Victorian for a few days in early 2021 while the basement was spray foam insulated. When they moved back in, Bode was struck by the bad paint smell. That eventually went away, and oil deliveries dropped from every nine days to every three weeks.
But then she realized the basement, which used to be bone dry, was now damp all the time. She bought two industrial dehumidifiers that run constantly, and still the smell of mildew wafts up through the floorboards. Bode has allergies to mold and mildew and worries the bad air quality could affect her kids, who also have allergies and asthma. She’s had to move all her furniture and art out of the basement lest it get damaged.
When she saw my article, she felt a mix of emotions. On the one hand, after having her concerns dismissed by the insulation company, she finally felt validated. “That was the first time that I had heard about air exchangers and other things I can’t afford,” Bode told me about reading my article. But she wondered, “Did I ruin a house that’s been standing strong for 140 years?”
The kind of person that could have advised Bode on how to safely insulate her historic home would be someone trained in building science — that is, someone educated in the physics of buildings, who can identify moisture issues and air leaks, recommend appropriate materials and HVAC solutions, and give you a step-by-step plan for implementing them so your home stays healthy and whole.
Unfortunately, many insulation companies, architects, and contractors have either never heard of or are actively hostile to these concepts, which they see as expensive, unnecessary, overly complicated, and (in the case of many spray foam contractors) an impediment to making the sale.
“In the grand scheme of things, building science is a relatively new field,” Eric Werling, who recently retired after 30 years of directing the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program to run his own consulting business, told me. “People have studied structural engineering for thousands of years. But air-tightening buildings is a relatively new phenomenon.”
Up until the 1970s, people in the U.S. didn’t think much about insulation. Then the energy crisis struck, and oil shortages caused prices to skyrocket. President Jimmy Carter told Americans to put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat. Letting all that expensive energy flow outside suddenly seemed like a waste of money.
The Department of Energy launched its Weatherization Assistance Program in 1976 for low-income families and created efficiency standards for commercial buildings that relied on the new, synthetic materials that had emerged after WWII. The problem was, as homes and commercial buildings were sealed, a lot of people got sick. The most high profile cases were cancer from chronic radon exposure or quiet but shocking deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning. But there also emerged the autoimmune-adjacent condition called Sick Building Syndrome, a constellation of symptoms related to breathing in VOCs from furniture, carpeting, pesticides, and cleaning products circulating inside a tight building.
“The Department of Energy… screwed it up a lot at the very beginning,” Joe Lstiburek, a longtime building science consultant, told me. But the DOE started training its weatherization crews, establishing standards for proper insulation, and providing additional funding for safety measures, including mechanical ventilation. “America became a world leader at figuring out how not to rot houses and how not to kill people,” Lstiburek said.
Today, indoor air quality in the workplace has dramatically improved. Aspects of building science have been codified in residential homes as well, with some states requiring that new builds with a tight air seal include mechanical ventilation. But nobody I talked to could point to similar requirements for an existing home that has been retrofitted with insulation. And when I asked Lstiburek if low-income renters and homeowners have access to building science information and advice, he said, “No, they do not.”
According to Werling, there are still probably fewer than a thousand building science experts, and many are eyeing retirement. “Their teachings have impacted thousands –– probably hundreds of thousands –– of people in the construction industry.” He points to New York and Wisconsin as two states that have had robust contractor training programs for the longest. But he admits that’s still a small percentage of the millions of people involved in construction in the U.S.
“There are just too many companies with people who don’t know enough about the issues regarding moisture doing whatever they want and leaving the homeowner with the bill,” Chris West, a Vermont-based certified consultant and trainer for Passive House, a design standard for ultra-low-energy-consumption homes, told me. “Often these companies have some kind of caveat in their contract that makes the owner responsible for any future issues.”
To make things worse, our homes are more delicate today. New building construction has largely switched from rot- and mold-resistant materials such as hardwood and plaster to cheaper manufactured mold-prone materials like plywood and drywall.
“Green” or “eco” home programs that advise homeowners focus solely on energy efficiency, and tightened energy codes are requiring ever more robust insulation without taking into account existing moisture problems (such as a wet basement or unventilated bathroom), which are not rare. NIOSH estimates about half of all homes have some sort of moisture or mold issue. Residential contractors, architects, and developers, meanwhile, are largely free to ignore building science concepts and go about their business doing things the way they’ve always been done. And there doesn’t seem to be a good plan in place to upskill contractors for this next weatherization push or protect consumers from shoddy workmanship.
“There isn’t an educational track that’s indoor air quality in universities or colleges,” Offerman told me. “I’m 71 now. I’m gonna retire eventually, and where are the replacements?”
I’ve talked to several homeowners who have been burned by bad insulation jobs, and every one expressed dismay that contractors aren’t required to at least share the potential risks or downsides of getting your home weatherized. For example, homeowners may have to install mechanical ventilation at an extra cost of a few thousand dollars, and spray foam, as opposed to traditional batting insulation, is permanent and all but impossible to remediate or take out.
This information is largely hidden from consumers, even savvy ones like me. I was pitched spray foam by an energy auditor for my own old farmhouse, and I had to go out and interview a half dozen experts for an article and pay $1,000 to West to drive two hours down to audit our house (again) and come up with an alternative plan I was comfortable with.
Werling doesn’t want homeowners to be scared away from weatherizing their homes. “In the vast majority of cases, homeowners are better off when they insulate and air-seal their homes,” he said, “but it’s important to be aware that the house is a complicated system of parts. Hire the right contractor to help avoid potentially costly problems down the road.” He points to the Home Improvement Expert section of the Building America Solution Center from the U.S. Department of Energy, which has detailed checklists you can go over with your contractor to ensure the work is done properly. West suggests homeowners find a certified consultant at Passive House Institute US.
The building science experts I spoke to suggested things like an educational program for consumers so they know to ask about ventilation, third party inspections before and after weatherization projects with the results entered into the public record, pre-sale energy audits, and mandatory building science training for contractors and their crews. Offerman said weatherization programs should hold installers accountable for insulating and ventilating according to the latest building science standards as a condition of receiving funds.
The question is how many homeowners like Zara will have their homes and health damaged before the situation is addressed. “It’s not that we don’t know that this is happening,” Listiburek says. “It’s that it’s not painful enough yet.”
Keep an eye on the public utilities commission races in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana.
On November 5, voters in a handful of states will cast their ballots not just for their next president and state and local lawmakers, but also for the members of an obscure body with outsized influence on the country’s energy mix.
It’s called a public utilities commission. Every state has one, usually composed of three to five officials who regulate the private companies that deliver water, power, gas, and other services to residents and businesses. Their job is to secure reliable energy at affordable rates, which means these power players also preside over how quickly utilities adopt clean energy and adapt to extreme weather, and how much companies can raise customers’ rates to do so. In most of the U.S., utility commissioners are appointed by the governor or legislature. But 10 states leave filling these roles up to the electorate.
Utility commissions are famous for being ignored by the public — until there’s a rate increase. But if the U.S. is to have any chance of cutting emissions in line with its global commitments, ensuring fossil fuel communities aren’t left behind, or improving our resilience to increasing heat waves, fires, and floods, these gatekeepers have to be paid more attention — and held accountable.
Charles Hua, the founder of a new nonprofit called Powerlines that aims to raise awareness about the importance of these regulators, told me his group has found that over the last decade, about one in 10 voters in states with utility commission elections skipped that part of the ballot. “In many of these elections where the margins are only a couple percent, the one in 10 that sit out are deciding the election,” he said.
Apathy or ignorance about utility commissions isn’t unique to states where commissioners are elected, but it’s not helped by the fact that many of these states are deeply red, and the races aren’t much of a competition. This year, although seats are opening up in eight states, many of them are unlikely to see a change from the status quo.
In Alabama and Nebraska, three current commissioners are running for re-election unopposed. There’s a clear frontrunner among the three candidates vying for one open seat in Oklahoma: a former Republican state lawmaker named Brian Bingman, who is endorsed by the governor and has raised nearly $450,000, much of which was donated by energy PACs and oil and gas company executives, according to state filings. He’s up against a lesser-known Libertarian candidate who, as of the last reporting period, had raised less than $2,000, and a 90-year-old Democrat who has raised zero dollars and already run for and lost commission races three times.
Whoever is elected to open seats in North and South Dakota will have a say in approving the permits for a contentious carbon dioxide pipeline — a project that has drawn opposition from both sides of the aisle and could have raised the stakes for the elections — but environmental advocates in those states told me they expected incumbent candidates to win.
But there are three races that are being closely watched by climate and clean energy advocates. In Louisiana, a swing voter on the commission is stepping down, throwing into question recent momentum against business-as-usual operations in the gas-heavy state. In Arizona and Montana, the current commissions have been skeptical of, if not outright hostile to supporting the development of the two states’ big untapped solar and wind resources. In each state, however, momentum is building behind candidates who could change that paradigm.
“If you can unlock Montana's renewable energy potential, you can help the western part of the country decarbonize,” Anne Hedges, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the Montana Environmental Information Center told me. “This is a really important race.”
Here’s what’s at stake.
During the two years since the last election for the Arizona Corporation Commission, the confusing name of the body in Arizona that regulates utilities, its four-to-one Republican majority has been on a tear dismantling what little clean energy policy there was in the state. In February, the group voted to scrap the state’s meager Renewable Energy Standard, which was enacted in 2006 and required utilities to get 15% of their energy from renewables by 2025, as well as energy efficiency standards. According to Autumn Johnson, executive director of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, the commission has been more resistant to renewable energy than the utilities. She told me that in a recent proceeding to plan for the closure of the Four Corners coal plant in 2031, the commission tried to prevent the state’s biggest utility from considering renewables paired with batteries as part of the replacement mix.
Solar development has been obstructed at every level. The commission quashed efforts to create a market for community solar, small-scale photovoltaic installations that offer low-income customers and renters access to low-cost clean energy. It adopted a community solar policy that “had so many poison pills in it that it made it impossible for a market to actually form,” said Johnson. “We should for sure have a community solar market. I think it's kind of crazy we wouldn't do that in the sunniest state in the country.” It also gummed up the economics of rooftop solar by decreasing the amount homeowners get paid for exporting solar to the grid and burdening them with fixed fees. Johnson said the market is down 40%, and that “a whole bunch of companies are going bankrupt” because of the commission’s policies.
Whoever lands on the commission come January will have a big opportunity to change course. The renewable energy and efficiency standards have not yet been fully repealed, and will see another vote early next year. Johnson said the new commission will vote on rules for virtual power plants, which could help get more distributed solar and batteries on the grid. As in many states, Arizona utilities are anticipating large load growth in the coming years and proposing a lot of new natural gas power plant development to meet it — but the commission has a chance to get them to consider alternatives.
The race is competitive, with three Democrats, two Green party candidates, and three Republicans, including one incumbent, running to fill three seats. During a recent debate, the main split between the two major political parties was over support for renewables. Five of them took public funding for their campaigns through the state’s Clean Elections fund, so they're nearly all working with the same amount of capital, which means there is little to help signal who's likely to come out on top. The AFL-CIO has endorsed the three Democrats in the race, but Arizona has one of the lowest union densities in the country. The state Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, has endorsed the Republicans running, and one of them, Rachel Waldman, has been endorsed by three current commissioners.
Voters can choose three candidates, and the three with the most votes will be elected.
Montana also has three seats opening up on its five-member Public Service Commission, but the elections there are divided by district, and all eyes are on one of the races in particular. Elena Evans, a geologist who works as the environmental health manager for Missoula County, is running as an Independent to unseat Jennifer Fielder, a Republican incumbent running for her second term. Evans has raised nearly $100,000 since she registered to run in April, while Fielder has raised less than $10,000 since January.
The headline issue in the race is affordability. Last year, the commission approved a 28% rate increase for Northwestern Energy, the biggest utility in the state. Molly Bell, political director for Montana Conservation Voters, told me regulators have been “asleep at the wheel.” She said the commission has been “rubber stamping rate increases, not asking questions about [our utilities’] resource plans, and really not holding our energy companies accountable to making plans for the future.”
Environmental advocates are also worried about Northwestern’s recent decision to acquire a larger stake in the Colstrip power plant, a coal-fired facility built in the 1970s and 80s. Northwestern called the plant “a dependable bridge to a cleaner energy future,” but it will require nearly $200 million in retrofits to comply with new federal air pollution regulations, a cost that Northwestern is now trying to recoup from ratepayers with a new 26% rate increase.
Hedges, of the Montana Energy Information Center, told me the rate increases aren’t just hurting customers — major manufacturers like REC Silicon are leaving the state due to rising energy costs. She wants the commission to force Northwestern to invest in building out the transmission system so that more wind energy can get onto the grid. “We have a ton of wind energy, we have developers who are just clamoring to access that, but they can't because we don't have the transmission system,” she said. “Northwestern has no desire to build out that transmission system because that means competition for them. That’s why our rates are so high.”
Elena Evans isn’t campaigning on a platform of cutting down on fossil fuels or expanding renewables; she’s mainly telling voters she wants to bring costs down and increase transparency. But in interviews, she’s talked about the importance of ensuring utilities are prepared for climate impacts, criticized the sitting commission for being anti-technology, and expressed an interest in solutions such as reconductoring transmission lines to increase their capacity and installing batteries to make the grid more resilient against outages.
The commission is currently fully Republican, and switching out just one of those seats will not bring change overnight. But Stephanie Chase, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, said that having even one person to ask different questions and bring new information to the public record can be meaningful. “Even if they don't have the votes, they still have a platform and ability to raise issues, which I think is really important in states where climate hasn't been at the forefront.”
Louisiana’s recent history proves the value of dissenting voices, even if they don’t have decisive influence. The state’s historically utility-friendly commission saw a big shakeup two years ago when Davante Lewis, a young progressive candidate, dethroned a Democratic incumbent who had held his district’s seat for nearly two decades. Close to 80% of Louisiana’s electricity comes from natural gas, and Lewis campaigned on transitioning the state to renewables, in addition to hardening the grid against storms and lowering fees for customers. He has already made a few small inroads on clean energy, such as advancing an energy efficiency program that had been held up in negotiations with the utilities for more than a decade. The commission also recently approved the biggest expansion of renewable energy in state history.
But Lewis is one of two Democrats on the commission, and has been helped by a swing voter — a moderate Republican named Craig Greene — who’s stepping down this year.
Three candidates are vying for Greene’s spot, but one — State Senator Jean Paul Coussan — has a clear fundraising advantage. The big question around the election seems to be less about who will win, and more about what Coussan would do on the commission. In interviews with local media outlets, he has said he wants to ensure the state can keep pace with demand growth while keeping rates down. He’s expressed openness about renewables but also emphasized the importance of the state’s “abundant supply of natural gas.”
The clean energy advocates I spoke to weren’t sure what to make of him. “You just can’t tell based on what Coussan’s saying now,” Daniel Tait, who researches Southern utilities for the Energy and Policy Institute, a consumer watchdog, told me. He said that of the two Republicans running, Coussan seemed more willing to talk about clean energy and find common ground. But it’s unclear how he will compare to the outgoing commissioner.
Hua, of PowerLines, emphasized that whatever happens, it will have ripple effects through the region. “What Louisiana does is an indicator, in some ways, of what the rest of the Southeast can do,” he told me. “And the Southeast is a particularly important region because that's where we're seeing all this load growth, this gas build out, energy burden and environmental injustice challenges. What the Southeast does will make or break what the U.S. does in terms of the clean energy transition.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misstated the percentage of voters who skip utility commission elections. It also misidentified the party of the incumbent whom Davante Lewis defeated. Both mistakes have been fixed. We regret the errors.