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As soon as Friday, the Biden administration could announce who will advance to the next phase of its “clean hydrogen hubs” program, a $7 billion experiment to find out whether and to what extent hydrogen can become a competitive replacement for fossil fuels.
The eventual hubs could touch every corner of the country, but the Department of Energy, which is administering the program, and the applicants themselves, have kept the proposed plans mostly confidential. Each one could include a dozen or more individual projects, but little has been disclosed about what the proposed projects are, where they will be, or what the public process will look like around their development. The awards could help clarify the direction of a massive government program that, right now, contains more questions than answers.
Earlier this week, sources familiar with the Department of Energy’s plans told Bloomberg that Biden is expected to announce the initial winners on Friday when he visits Pennsylvania. On Thursday morning, Reuters reported on a tip that one of the grants would go to the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub, a partnership between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, while another would go to the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, led by West Virginia, but involving partners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky as well.
Per the bipartisan infrastructure law, which created the program, the DOE must support the development of at least four hydrogen hubs. Collectively, they have to contain projects that test the use of hydrogen in transportation, power generation, residential and commercial heating, and industry. There also have to be projects that demonstrate different ways to make hydrogen, including using renewable electricity, nuclear energy, and natural gas with carbon capture.
Biden’s announcement will just be the start of a process that will play out over the next five to 10 years. The funding will be rolled out over the course of four phases, and the initial batch of winning proposals will not necessarily all continue to receive support beyond the first phase. Each hub will receive a relatively small grant to conduct planning and analysis over the course of the next 12 to 18 months to ensure their “concept is technologically and financially viable, with input from relevant local stakeholders.” (The DOE’s funding announcement estimated initial grants of $20 million, although Reuters reported the Pennsylvania hub will receive $750 million.) After that point, each will be subjected to a “go/no-go review” to determine whether it can advance to the next phase.
“I think it's important to emphasize that what DOE is announcing is an invitation to negotiate potential funding awards,” Jill Tauber, the vice president of climate and energy at Earthjustice, told me. “So this is not an announcement of final decisions and awards. There are still approvals to be secured.”
Hydrogen is incredibly divisive. Most experts who study decarbonization agree that it holds a lot of promise as a climate solution. It can be burned to provide heat or power to any number of processes, similar to natural gas, without releasing any carbon emissions. But it requires a lot of energy to make hydrogen in the first place, and no one knows yet exactly which applications will make sense.
Climate advocates are wary of two big risks. One is that the process of making hydrogen, whether from electricity or natural gas, could emit so much carbon that it ultimately will be worse for the climate. The other is that even if the production is clean, the hydrogen could be wasted on something like residential heating, which already has more efficient solutions available, rather than reserved for processes that are truly hard to decarbonize.
That’s why the biggest questions for the hydrogen hubs are not just where they will be, but which energy sources they will use and which end-uses they will focus on.
“Hydrogen certainly has the potential to be a clean energy solution that delivers benefits, including economic benefits,” said Tauber. “But it can also drag us deeper into the climate crisis and hurt communities. So both things are on the table right now.” These concerns have already made national news in relation to a high-stakes battle over the rules for the clean hydrogen tax credit, a subsidy that was created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The term “hubs” might bring to mind a few city blocks of bustling activity, but the hydrogen hubs are shaping up to be far more expansive. Many of the applicants are unlikely alliances between multiple state governments, companies, and universities across wide swathes of the country. For example, a potential hub in the Northeast could involve more than a dozen projects stretched across seven states.
Nearly 80 such groups submitted initial concept papers for hubs to the Department of Energy when it first opened up the application process. Of those, the DOE encouraged 33 groups to file full applications, which were due in April, and the agency will be selecting six to 10 for the first phase of the awards.
Just one of the applicants, a partnership between Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming called the Western Interstate Hydrogen Hub, released its initial concept paper to the public, though with a number of redactions. While the hubs will all be different and designed to the specific circumstances of their region, the document is still helpful for demonstrating what kinds of projects are under consideration.
The document lists eight specific projects. Several are hydrogen production facilities — some would use electricity to make the fuel, others would use gas. A company called Libertad Power would buy hydrogen for a network of hydrogen fueling stations for long-haul trucks that it is planning to build between Texas and California. Xcel Energy, the dominant utility in Colorado, wants to blend hydrogen into the natural gas that it burns in its power plants and delivers to residential and commercial customers. There’s also a 275,000-acre farm on Navajo Nation that would run its tractors and other equipment on hydrogen fuel. Companies would construct pipelines and design trucking routes to transport hydrogen around the region.
In addition to getting more detailed information about the different components of the proposals, advocates like Tauber want DOE to more clearly spell out how it will engage with affected communities as the program progresses. “None of that is clear right now, and hopefully we'll see some of that clarity in the announcement,” she said.
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Utilities are bending over backward to convince even their own investors that ratepayers won’t be on the hook for the cost of AI.
Utilities want you to know how little data centers will cost anyone.
With electricity prices rising faster than inflation and public backlash against data centers brewing, developers and the utilities that serve them are trying to convince the public that increasing numbers of gargantuan new projects won’t lead to higher bills. Case in point is the latest project from OpenAI’s Stargate, a $7-plus-billion, more-than-1-gigawatt data center due to be built outside Detroit.
The project was announced Thursday by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who focused heavily on the projected economic benefits of the projects while attempting to head off criticism that it would lead to higher costs. In the first sentence of her press release, she said that the project will “create more than 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 jobs on site and 1,500 more across the county.” Also, it “will be one of the most advanced AI infrastructure facilities in the U.S., especially when it comes to its efficient use of land, water, and power.” Oh, and it “will not require any additional power generation to operate.”
The utility set to power the project, DTE Energy, released its quarterly earnings Thursday, as well, which described a 1.4-gigawatt project it had already executed. In a presentation for analysts and investors, DTE said that the new data center would pay for “required storage through a 15-year energy storage contract,” and that it would “support affordability for existing customers as excess capacity is sold.”
On a call with analysts, DTE Energy chief executive Joi Harris further asserted that the project has “meaningful affordability benefits to our existing customers.” As the data center ramps up, she explained, it can use existing excess capacity on the grid. By the time it reaches full strength, it will enjoy the benefits of “nearly $2 billion of incremental energy storage investments and additional tolling agreements to support this data center load.”
Who will pay for energy storage and tolling agreements? A DTE spokesperson, Jill Wilmot, clarified in an email that “DTE will meet the 1.4 gigawatts of demand from the data center with existing capacity,” and that “new energy storage will be built — and paid for by the customer” — that is, Stargate — “to help augment times of peak demand, ensuring continued reliability for all customers.”
Data centers help spread out the fixed costs of the grid more widely, Wilmot went on. “Data center development in DTE’s electric service territory will not increase customer rates,” she said, adding that “DTE is ensuring the data center will absorb all new costs required to serve them — in this case, battery storage. Our customers will not pay.”
That said, Wilmot did not answer a question about whether there would be any network or transmission upgrades necessary. She told me that she expected DTE would make a filing for the project with Michigan regulators later Friday.
Consumer advocates were skeptical of the utility’s claims. “When you are talking about new demand as massive as what would be created by this data center, we can’t afford to just take DTE at its word that other customers won’t be affected,” Amy Bandyk, the executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, told me in an email. She called for Michigan regulators “to require DTE and the data center customer to agree on a tariff specific to that customer that includes robust protections against cost-shifting and provisions that any incremental costs will be solely covered by this new customer.”
More utilities and data center developers are trying to explicitly head off claims that data centers are driving up electricity rates. In another recent data center announcement for a multi-billion-dollar project in West Memphis, Arkansas, Google and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission said that “Google will be covering the full energy costs for the West Memphis facility and will be ramping up new solar energy and battery storage resources for the facility.”
Drew Marsh, the chief executive of Entergy, the utility serving the project, confirmed on an earnings call earlier this week that Google “will protect energy affordability for existing customers by covering the full cost of powering the data center in West Memphis.” He also said that in Mississippi, where Amazon has announced a $16 billion project, “customer rates would be 16% lower than they otherwise would have been due to these large customers.”
So why are utilities — which, after all, get paid by ratepayers for the investments they make in their systems — telling their investors about all the money they’re not charging ratepayers?
In short, utilities and developers know they’re on political thin ice, and they don’t want to kill the golden goose of data center development by stoking a populist backlash to rising electricity prices that could result in either government-mandated slashing of their investment plans, caps on the rates they can charge, or both.
“Looking ahead, we anticipate the central issue will be how utilities protect residential customers from costs associated with large-load customers, or else face potential consequences from regulators,” Mizuho analyst Anthony Crowdell said in a note to clients earlier this week. “Data centers, and their associated load, have the potential” to “cause political push-back.”
This is already happening across the country. The frontrunner in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, for example, has promised to freeze electricity rates, which have seen a sharp runup in recent years. Indiana Governor Mike Braun, a Republican, said in a recent statement that “we can’t take it anymore,” in reference to rate hikes. Indiana has also rejected a number of proposed data centers rejections, as I covered earlier this year.
This means that utilities will have to carefully about how and to whom they allocate costs arising from data center development and operation.
“Allocation of cost will be pivotal as the current ’pocketbook issues driving a lot of the U.S. political debate could create some challenging regulatory outcomes should data centers put pressure on customer bills,” Crowdell wrote.
But what’s said in an announcement to the media or to investors may not always reflect the reality of utility cost allocation, Harvard Law School professor Ari Peskoe told me.
“Don’t trust a utility press release or comment from a CEO of a monopoly that says Hey, these rates are good for you,” he told me.
Peskoe told me to pay close attention to the regulatory fillings utilities make for their data center projects, not just what they tell the press or investors. “Are the utilities themselves actually making these claims as strongly as their CEOs are making them in investor calls? And then once we do have a regulatory process about it, are they being transparent in that regulatory process? Are they hiding a lot of details behind the confidentiality claims so that only the participants in that proceeding actually get to see the details?”
Peskoe also pointed to other costs that might be incurred in the course of data center development that get socialized across the rate base but aren’t necessarily directly tied to any one development, like the transmission and network upgrades, that have contributed to large price increases in the PJM Interconnection territory.
“What you’re looking for is a firm contract that ensures the data center is going to be paying for every penny that the utility is incurring to provide service, so that it’s paying for all the new infrastructure that’s serving it,” Peskoe said. Without that, all you have is a press release.
The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.