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Power Forward Communities wants you to have a heat pump.
Getting fossil fuels out of your home is really hard. You have to find a contractor, ideally one who supports electrification and doesn’t ask why you won’t just stick with natural gas. You have to coordinate between multiple trades — electricians, plumbers, HVAC professionals — as well as lenders and utilities and permitting authorities, most of whom don’t talk to each other. You have to navigate a confusing array of finance options and incentives. You might be left feeling defeated, unable to afford the high up-front costs and unable to secure low-cost loans. And if you’re a renter, all you can do is dream.
These are not easy problems to solve. But a new initiative called Power Forward Communities has a pioneering plan to simplify the process all over the country — and it just got $2 billion to get started.
The money is part of the $20 billion the Biden administration awarded on Thursday via the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program approved as part of the Inflation Reduction Act to provide low-cost financing options for consumers, communities, and businesses to transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change.
Power Forward Communities is made up of five core partner organizations — Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Habitat for Humanity, and United Way Worldwide — who will work with communities, government agencies, unions, and housing developers to decarbonize hundreds of thousands of homes and apartments between now and 2031. The coalition has committed to invest at least 75% of the financing in projects in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
That all starts with a four point plan.
First, reduce friction by creating online tools and providing community-level assistance to help homeowners navigate the decarbonization process. Rewiring America is already part of the way there with its “personal electrification planner,” which provides a rough estimate of the upfront cost, annual bill savings, and expected emissions reductions for any given project. Soon, the group will pair that with another, first-of-its-kind tool: a dataset of every electrification incentive in the country. Eventually you’ll be able to plug in your address and income and get a list of all of the programs available to help you pay for your project.
Second, invest in workforce development and create a “contractor marketplace” where building owners can go to find vetted partners for their project.
Third, create new low-cost financial products to help bridge the gap between existing incentives and project costs. Notably, Power Forward plans to allocate more than half of its loans to projects in multifamily buildings, as these buildings tend to serve renters with lower incomes, and decarbonizing them is much more capital-intensive.
The details of the finance aspect of the program are subject to change, but the group’s application for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund proposes an energy efficiency loan for apartment building owners who want to make minor upgrades, which would offer an average of $30,000 per building with a 10- to 20-year term and 1% to 3% interest rate. As part of this program, Power Forward would also work with the building owner to make a plan to fully decarbonize the building down the line, and issue grants to fund the planning process. A proposed “net-zero rehab permanent loan,” meanwhile, would provide financing for full retrofits at an average of $120,000 per building.
Meanwhile, the finance options for single-family homes could be tied to predetermined “packages” of decarbonization measures that homeowners can choose from. This brings me to the fourth, and what I see as the most interesting and innovative part of the plan: the aggregation of demand.
Part of why electrification is so difficult and expensive is that it’s a bespoke process. Some buildings might need insulation, others might need electrical upgrades. Some might require new ductwork for central heat pumps, while others might be better off installing mini-split heat pumps in every zone of the house. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
“How do we unlock economies of scale and create an offering that could serve as many households at once?,” Nicole Staple, the head of market partnerships at Rewiring America, posed rhetorically to me in February. “That has historically been incredibly challenging given there's so much customization to heat pump design.”
But there are buildings with similar needs. If there were a way to identify them and then group the jobs together, you could start to solve a surprising number of other challenges. “That's where I think you unlock a lot of speed in [electrifying] full communities,” said Staple.
The most obvious benefit would be lowering the cost of equipment by buying in bulk. You could give suppliers better visibility into demand so they could stock up accordingly. You could help contractors plan ahead and space out jobs so that they have guaranteed work during the shoulder seasons. You could create new markets for union labor, which have historically been shut out from residential work due to the small size of the contracts and high customer acquisition costs. You could pool loans to diversify risk. You could design more effective policies to wind down the natural gas system.
The standardized packages Power Forward plans to offer will enable the group to “pre-define pricing and financial product offers, streamline underwriting and installation, and reduce financing costs,” according to its funding application. It estimates that by aggregating demand, it can reduce the remaining costs of electrification after incentives by as much as 50%.
The application also said the group has obtained letters of commitment from supply chain participants, including Home Depot and Mitsubishi, to lower equipment costs. In return, the coalition will reserve an initial $125 million over the first three years of the program as an insurance pool to guarantee $1 billion in sales volume for select partners.
To unlock all this magical potential, Rewiring America has been working on a large-scale data model to identify homes with similar characteristics, which will in turn help it figure out where there is opportunity to bundle projects in different parts of the country.
The group has also been gathering information and testing out assumptions on what will ultimately lower the costs of equipment and installation in a series of pilot projects, starting with one in the rural, mostly Black community of DeSoto, Georgia, where “107 households survive on a median income of $20,375, grapple with repeated house fires linked to propane gas usage, and strain to pay utility bills,” according to Power Forward’s application.
When I spoke to Staple a couple of months ago, she told me that about 75 households in DeSoto had expressed interest in the program thus far. Each participant would get at least one piece of equipment — a heat pump space heating system or a water heater, for example — fully subsidized. They would also be eligible for electrical upgrades or weatherization improvements as needed.
“Many of the households have not had cooling. Some have had their HVAC systems broken for literally decades,” Staple told me. “There's lots of dimensions of that community that we think help us understand how carefully we need to manage electrification projects, considering the ways that these communities have been failed.”
Power Forward had initially requested $9.5 billion to implement its plans, so it will have to go back to the drawing board over the next few months to map out what it can achieve with the $2 billion it was given. What could it have accomplished with that additional $7.5 billion?
“Our mission is to create hundreds of DeSotos, and ultimately decarbonize housing across the nation,” the coalition’s application says.
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A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.
On America’s new crude record, coal costs, and Hungary’s SMR deal
Current conditions: Coastal storms are pushing water levels on New England’s shores two feet above normal levels • Japan just set a new temperature record of more than 106 degrees Fahrenheit • A cold front is settling over South Africa, bringing gale-forces to KwaZulu-Natal on the east coast.
The Department of Energy issued a report on Tuesday calling into question the global consensus on climate change and concluding that global warming poses less economic risk than previously believed. “The rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries is a story worth celebrating. Yet we are told — relentlessly — that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity.” But scientists whose work appeared in the 151-page report decried an analysis they said “fundamentally misrepresents” their research. I rounded up some comments they’ve made over the past couple of days:
A pumpjack in the Permian Basin.Joe Raedle / Getty Images
U.S. crude oil production surged to a record 13.49 million barrels per day in May, despite concerns about oversupply driving prices down to four-year lows, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The milestone represents a win for President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly urged the industry to “drill, baby, drill,” even as rival producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries increased output to maintain market share, making profits difficult to turn in the U.S.
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The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has rescinded its designated areas for offshore wind development in federal waters. The move de-designated more than 3.5 million acres off the continental shelf in the Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight, California, Oregon, the Central Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico for potential wind development.
The agency said it was acting in accordance with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s order this week to weed out any policies that give preferential treatment to wind and solar. While the de-designation will not affect existing leases, the decision makes permanent the temporary pause on offshore wind leases Trump issued via an executive order on his first day in office in January.
In May, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order directing the utility Consumers Energy to keep Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant operating for another 90 days, through August 20, to meet surging electricity demand on the Midwest’s grid. In a public filing as part of its quarterly earnings announced Thursday, Consumers Energy named the price of complying with the administration's order so far: $29 million. And that’s just the cost of operating the plant through June 30. The company said it plans to recoup the cost from ratepayers. The filing did not indicate what the total cost would be for the full three-month period.
Even before Trump returned to office, coal plant retirements were slowing. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year, “Coal and gas were being retired so steadily over the past 20 years not just because plants were aging, but also because power use was essentially flat from the early 2000s through, essentially, yesterday. This meant that older plants — especially dirty coal plants — became uneconomic to run, especially as natural gas prices began to fall.” Coal plant retirements dropped last year to their lowest level since 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration, though at least as of February they were projected to increase this year again by 65%.
Of all the small modular reactors competing for a shot in the West’s ballyhooed nuclear renaissance, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt model is among the most promising. Ontario’s public utility just broke ground on what could be the world’s first BWRX-300s. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to build the second set. And Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Poland are all considering buying their own. Add Hungary to that list. Piggybacking off the Polish project, Hungary on Wednesday signed a letter of intent with Poland’s Synthos Green Energy to back construction of up to 10 BWRX-300 reactors, the U.S. Embassy in Hungary announced. “This is American engineering at its best — the kind of trusted technology that reflects the strength, reliability, and excellence of the American industrial base,” Chargé d’Affaires Robert Palladino said in a speech at the signing event.
The move comes as the U.S. looks to broaden its grip on Europe’s nuclear sector. Westinghouse, the legendary American nuclear developer behind the only two new reactors built from scratch in a generation in the U.S., is building Poland’s first atomic power station. Earlier this week, Slovakia skipped its competitive bidding process and picked Westinghouse to construct its next nuclear plant. But after struggling to build its own reactors at home, the U.S. has to prove it can deliver on the deals.
“Wind farms: Loud, ugly, harmful to nature. Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up out of the ocean like a middle finger to CO2,” Samuel L. Jackson says in a new minute-long TV commercial from Swedish wind giant Vattenfall advertising seaweed snacks from aquatic crops grown on the artificial reefs around the behemoth turbine foundations. It may be one of the most defiant, if expletive-laden, defenses made yet of the industry the Trump administration is bent on drowning.