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That’s not an exaggeration, at least by one calculation.
In late March, the board that oversees New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority cast a final vote to implement congestion pricing. If the plan survives some last-ditch lawsuits, drivers will soon have to cough up $15 to travel into Lower Manhattan during rush hours. The MTA will get billions every year to make capital improvements, the air will be markedly cleaner, the streets notably less congested, and a proposal that was first pitched by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg 17 years ago will have finally been realized.
“I often wonder what our system would have been like if we passed it back in 2008,” MTA board member Haeda Mihaltses, a veteran of the Bloomberg administration, mused just before she cast her vote in favor.
The price of nearly two decades of procrastination over doing something to alleviate the most densely-populated, traffic-snarled place in North America is, indeed, unfathomably high. There’s the billions of dollars of mass transit infrastructure we missed out on, the billions spent on health care from breathing in dirty air.
And then there’s the most precious resource of all. According to one calculation from transport economist and congestion pricing advocate Charles Komanoff, the plan the MTA adopted last month will save drivers, bus passengers, and subway riders a combined 225,000 hours every single day. Here’s a fun thought experiment: If New York had adopted this plan back in 2008, we could have saved ourselves a combined 1,314,000,000 hours, or 150,000 years.
How could implementing something so obviously necessary and routine — anyone who has paid to camp in a National Park or drive on the New Jersey Turnpike understands the concept — take so long? What does it say about how we govern? And what can we learn from it?
“I think it is fair to say that whatever roadblock congestion pricing could have hit, it hit,” Rachael Fauss, a policy director and MTA researcher for the good government group Reinvent Albany, told me. “It was the worst case scenario of timelines if you were to project out: What are the things that could delay this?”
Some of the delays were deliberate: It’s hard enough for lawmakers to summon the courage to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, so charging drivers money for something that used to be “free,” to fund a transit agency that often conjures delayed trains and decades-long boondoggles in the public’s imagination, was always going to require a fortitude that is in chronically short supply in Albany. When then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed to pass congestion pricing in 2019, he and his fellow lawmakers wrote into the actual bill that the tolling scheme couldn’t be announced for a year and a half — until after the 2020 election. The same politicians who were supposedly brave enough to vote congestion pricing into law didn’t want anything to do with putting that law into practice.
Then there were the bureaucratic delays. The COVID pandemic, of course, redirected much of the government and forced the MTA into survival mode as subway ridership dropped 90%; suddenly the agency’s most important work was to coordinate lifesaving bailouts from the federal and state governments. Then the Trump administration slow-walked the answer to a key question: Because the congestion pricing plan involved placing tolls on roads built with federal funding, the state needed a sign-off from the federal Department of Transportation. But was congestion pricing the kind of massive infrastructure project that, under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, required an exhaustive Environmental Impact Statement? Could it pass NEPA review with a less thorough Environmental Assessment? Or, given that nothing was actually being built up or torn down, could it be exempt from these reviews altogether?
Two years after the congestion pricing law passed, and months after the plan was supposed to go into effect in early 2021, the newly installed Biden administration finally asked for the middle option, an Environmental Assessment, which the MTA initially said could be done in a matter of months. In actuality, that timeline stretched to 16 months and produced a 4,000-page behemoth that some experts noted was more comprehensive than the average EIS.
Seemingly nothing escaped the MTA’s scrutiny — it even looked at how congestion pricing would affect traffic in the Philadelphia suburbs (not all that much). The results were not exactly shocking: Tolling vehicles entering Lower Manhattan below 60th Street would result in up to 20% fewer vehicles in the Central Business District, improving air quality while also generating $1 billion in revenue for public transit, which could then be used to secure up to $15 billion in bonds. After more than 50 public meetings and 25,000 written comments (60% in favor of the plan), the Biden administration produced a “finding of no significant impact,” meaning that congestion pricing wouldn’t negatively affect the economy, the environment, or the roads.
There was at least one notable benefit that came from doing such a comprehensive, time-intensive review: The MTA found that congestion pricing could cause an increase in truck traffic to the South Bronx for drivers looking to toll shop, which in turn prompted the agency to allocate $200 million to alleviate pollution in some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, which have shamefully high asthma rates that mostly affect Black and Latine New Yorkers. “Is it congestion pricing’s job to remedy those problems? Maybe not,” Fauss, of Reinvent Albany, said. “But is it a really important way to correct some past wrongs? Yeah, absolutely.”
The MTA’s thoroughness may help protect it from the bad faith lawsuits that have been filed to try and shut down the license plate readers before they go live on June 15. But we’re in the midst of a climate crisis. Why should a 54-year-old law designed to prevent overeager developers from doing things like demolishing neighborhoods to build highways discourage cities and states from enacting dynamic, flexible solutions to cut pollution created by those highways — and fund public transit at the same time? And why should a review of a plan that requires no concrete, no demolition — no actual infrastructure — take three years?
The biggest hurdle congestion pricing had to overcome might have been psychological. Let’s call it "car brain": Even though 85% of commuters who travel into the Central Business District take mass transit, for years, lawmakers and congestion pricing opponents have argued (and in the case of the current New York City Mayor Eric Adams, still argue) that charging people to drive into Lower Manhattan was a kind of attack on the middle class. In a city where valuable street real estate has been converted into free parking, congestion pricing was portrayed as profaning the sacred rights of "regular" New Yorkers — never mind the fact that just 2% of New York’s working poor will end up paying the tolls. Driving your car wherever you please, it turns out, is quite expensive.
“Elected officials are facing the world from the front seat of a car, whether they’re driving or being driven,” Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director at Riders Alliance, one of the most forceful proponents of congestion pricing, told me. Pearlstein added that “bureaucrats who drive to work” probably contributed to the Biden administration’s slow-walking of the approval process, or so he suspects. “They were very cautious about doing something that alters not just, you know, air patterns, or patterns of inequity, but actual commutes,” Pearlstein said.
As a reporter who has covered congestion pricing for nearly a decade, I have learned never to underestimate the power of “car brain” on public policy. As a New Yorker who lives steps from the entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side, who watches mothers push strollers through oceans of hot, heavy steel boxes belching poisonous gasses driven by people on a hair trigger, and who has seen our leaders pretend that this is New York, that we are too exceptional to change, I cannot help but go about my day, doing my best to tune out the incessant honking, feeling like the dog engulfed in flames: “This is fine.”
That it took transportation advocates, regional planners, and forward-looking politicians nearly 20 years to enact congestion pricing in New York City — the U.S. municipality perhaps most amenable to it because of its housing density and excellent mass transit system — reveals the daunting task of weaning Americans off the automobile. More than three-quarters of us drive our own personal cars to our jobs.
“The only thing that’s going to change the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans drive to work is not permitting reforms to programs like congestion pricing. It’s permitting reforms to allow dense housing development in metropolitan areas across the country,” Pearlstein said.
“It’s a little bit like a Marxian analysis,” he mused. The crisis must come to a head in order to overthrow the status quo. “In order to adopt congestion pricing, you first have to exacerbate congestion significantly by condensing your built environment.”
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Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A conversation with Enchanted Rock’s Joel Yu.
This week’s chat was with Joel Yu, senior vice president for policy and external affairs at the data center micro-grid services company Enchanted Rock. Now, Enchanted Rock does work I usually don’t elevate in The Fight – gas-power tracking – but I wanted to talk to him about how conflicts over renewable energy are affecting his business, too. You see, when you talk to solar or wind developers about the potential downsides in this difficult economic environment, they’re willing to be candid … but only to a certain extent. As I expected, someone like Yu who is separated enough from the heartburn that is the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda was able to give me a sober truth: Land use and conflicts over siting are going to advantage fossil fuels in at least some cases.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Help me understand where, from your perspective, the generation for new data centers is going to come from. I know there are gas turbine shortages, but also that solar and wind are dealing with headwinds in the United States given cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are a lot of stories out there about certain technologies coming out to the forefront to solve the problem, whether it’s gas generation or something else. But the scale and the scope of this stuff … I don’t think there is a silver bullet where it’s all going to come from one place.
The Energy Department put out a request for information looking for ways to get to 3 gigawatts quickly, but I don’t think there is any way to do that quickly in the United States. It’s going to take work from generation developers, batteries, thermal generation, emerging storage technologies, and transmission. Reality is, whether it is supply chain issues or technology readiness or the grid’s readiness to accept that load generation profile, none of it is ready. We need investment and innovation on all fronts.
How do conflicts over siting play into solving the data center power problem? Like, how much of the generation that we need for data center development is being held back by those fights?
I do have an intuitive sense that the local siting and permitting concerns around data centers are expanding in scope from the normal noise and water considerations to include impacts to energy affordability and reliability, as well as the selection of certain generation technologies. We’ve seen diesel generation, for example, come into the spotlight. It’s had to do with data center permitting in certain jurisdictions, in places like Maryland and Minnesota. Folks are realizing that a data center comes with a big power plant – their diesel generation. When other power sources fall short, they’ll rely on their diesel more frequently, so folks are raising red flags there. Then, with respect to gas turbines or large cycle units, there’s concerns about viewsheds, noise and cooling requirements, on top of water usage.
How many data center projects are getting their generation on-site versus through the grid today?
Very few are using on-site generation today. There’s a lot of talk about it and interest, but in order to serve our traditional cloud services data center or AI-type loads, they’re looking for really high availability rates. That’s really costly and really difficult to do if you’re off the grid and being serviced by on-site generation.
In the context of policy discussions, co-location has primarily meant baseload resources on sites that are serving the data centers 24/7 – the big stories behind Three Mile Island and the Susquehanna nuclear plant. But to be fair, most data centers operational today have on-site generation. That’s their diesel backup, what backstops the grid reliability.
I think where you’re seeing innovation is modular gas storage technologies and battery storage technologies that try to come in and take the space of the diesel generation that is the standard today, increasing the capability of data centers in terms of on-site power relative to status quo. Renewable power for data centers at scale – talking about hundreds of megawatts at a time – I think land is constraining.
If a data center is looking to scale up and play a balancing act of competing capacity versus land for energy production, the competing capacity is extremely valuable. They’re going to prioritize that first and pack as much as they can into whatever land they have to develop. Data centers trying to procure zero-carbon energy are primarily focused on getting that energy over wires. Grid connection, transmission service for large-scale renewables that can match the scale of natural gas, there’s still very strong demand to stay connected to the grid for reliability and sustainability.
Have you seen the state of conflict around renewable energy development impact data center development?
Not necessarily. There is an opportunity for data center development to coincide with renewable project development from a siting perspective, if they’re going to be co-located or near to each other in remote areas. For some of these multi-gigawatt data centers, the reason they’re out in the middle of nowhere is a combination of favorable permitting and siting conditions for thousands of acres of data center building, substations and transmission –
Sorry, but even for projects not siting generation, if megawatts – if not gigawatts – are held up from coming to the grid over local conflicts, do you think that’s going to impact data center development at all? The affordability conversions? The environmental ones?
Oh yeah, I think so. In the big picture, the concern is if you can integrate large loads reliably and affordably. Governors, state lawmakers are thinking about this, and it’s bubbling up to the federal level. You need a broad set of resources on the grid to provide that adequacy. To the extent you hold up any grid resources, renewable or otherwise, you’re going to be staring down some serious challenges in serving the load. Virginia’s a good example, where local groups have held up large-scale renewable projects in the state, and Dominion’s trying to build a gas peaker plant that’s being debated, too. But in the meantime, it is Data Center Alley, and there are gigawatts of data centers that continue to want to get in and get online as quickly as possible. But the resources to serve that load are not coming online in time.
The push toward co-location probably does favor thermal generation and battery storage technologies over straight renewable energy resources. But a battery can’t cover 24/7 use cases for a data center, and neither will our unit. We’re positioned to be a bridge resource for 24/7 use for a few years until they can get more power to the market, and then we can be a flexible backup resource – not a replacement for the large-scale and transmission-connected baseload power resources, like solar and wind. Texas has benefited from huge deployments of solar and wind. That has trickled down to lower electricity costs. Those resources can’t do it alone, and there’s thermal to balance the system, but you need it all to meet the load growth.