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Current conditions: Rush hour commutes in the Midwest could be snarled by snow today • The whole of England and Wales is under a weather warning for heavy rain and floods • February temperatures in parts of the Atlantic Ocean are nearing highs normally seen in July.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Solar and battery storage expected to set records in 2024 for new electricity generating capacity
The vast majority – 81% – of new utility-scale electricity generating capacity expected to come online this year will be in the form of solar and battery storage, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The agency’s latest Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory shows projects with 62.8 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity are in the pipeline, a 55% increase over the 40.4 GW added last year. More than half of that will be solar, and about a quarter will be battery storage. “We expect U.S. battery storage capacity to nearly double in 2024,” the report said. Electrek also noted that “2024 will see the least new natural gas capacity added in 25 years.”
The Republican-controlled House voted yesterday to pass a bill reversing President Biden’s pause on approvals of liquified natural gas (LNG) exports. The vote was 224-200, with nine democrats voting in favor. While the bill is unlikely to get the green light in the Senate, its passage “could embolden House Republicans to include language easing the pause in future government funding legislation,” Bloombergsaid. This particular bill would end the Department of Energy’s (DoE) power to approve exports, handing it instead to the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Biden paused approval of new export terminals recently until the DoE can study their environmental impact, earning praise from activists who claim LNG may be worse for the climate than coal, but scorn from many Republicans who say the move compromises energy security.
3. Major climate investor group loses key asset managers
The world’s largest group aimed at leveraging investor power to pressure corporations to prioritize climate change lost some of its biggest members this week. JPMorgan Asset Management and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) said yesterday they are leaving the Climate Action 100+ (CA100) group, and BlackRock Inc. said it will no longer be affiliated. CA100 partners with more than 700 investors – which collectively manage about $70 trillion in assets – to pressure oil giants, shipping firms, airlines, and other big companies “that are critical to the net-zero emissions transition.” It initially focused on encouraging companies to make climate disclosures but recently decided to go further and start pushing them to actively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. It seems this was a step too far. The departures remove nearly $14 trillion in assets from the climate group, and follow intense political pressure from Republicans targeting ESG investing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more defections,” Lance Dial, a Boston-based partner at law firm K&L Gates LLP, toldBloomberg.
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4. New York state pension fund divests from fossil fuel firms
In more news from the financial world, America’s third-largest state pension fund is scaling back its investment in some oil and gas companies. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, which holds about $260 billion in assets, will divest about $27 million from seven firms including Exxon Mobil Corp. following a review of the companies’ preparedness to shift to a low-carbon economy. The move is “a compromise measure” between the fund and environmentalists who want to see full divestment, Reuterssaid. “The decision could deal another blow to Exxon’s reputation,” reportedInside Climate News, but the fund will still maintain $500 million worth of Exxon shares.
5. U.N. might create expert group to study solar geoengineering
Switzerland wants the United Nations to create a group of experts dedicated to studying solar geoengineering, according toClimate Home News. The panel would “examine risks and opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM) techniques, which are “hypothetical technologies that could, in theory, counteract temperature rise by reflecting more sunlight away from the Earth’s surface,” as Carbon Briefexplained. Reactions from scientists are mixed, with some suggesting more research is warranted, but others concerned about “the risks of opening a Pandora’s box.” Governments will vote on the proposal next week.
THE KICKER
The Royal Family’s first-ever electric vehicle, King Charles III’s 2018 Jaguar I-Pace, is
up for auction and could go for up to $88,000. The king once called the car “silent but deadly.”
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As leaves begin to turn from green to autumn hues of amber, gold, and brown, New England is preparing for an expensive winter.
While most of the country heats their homes with natural gas or electricity, about 5 million households — overwhelmingly located in the Northeast — use oil. Like diesel and gasoline (both of which have set pricerecords recently) home heating oil is distilled from crude oil, which is currently trading at prices not seen since the early months of the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
Benchmark oil prices are over $100 for the first time since the spring as the Iran War grinds forward with no end in sight. Houthi attacks on Saudi oil tankers and infrastructure in and around the Red Sea and continued Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries have put added pressure on U.S. facilities to supply the world with gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel, raising prices domestically. Russia’s own fuel imports reached a record 172,000 metric tons in August, according to an analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, mostly from South Korea and India, putting further strain on the global market (the country was once the largest exporter of refined products).
The effects have trickled downstream to the distillate market, as well. Diesel prices surged past $6 per gallon on Friday, while retail home heating oil prices in Maine, one of the Northeastern states most dependent on oil to heat homes, are around $5.39, their highest since April. Making matters worse, stocks of distillate fuel oil, which includes heating oil, are at their lowest level for this time of year since the Energy Information Administration started keeping records. The EIA released a new forecast this week projecting that “global production of distillate fuel will remain below last year’s levels in the coming months, contributing to low U.S. diesel inventories and high diesel prices.”
For Mainers and others across New England, that adds up to a hard winter to come.
“As the most heating oil reliant state in the country, Mainers are uniquely impacted by rising and volatile oil prices,” Acting Commissioner of the Maine Department of Energy Resources Celina Cunningham told me in an emailed statement. About half of the state’s residents “still rely on oil as their primary heating fuel,” she told me, even as outgoing Governor Janet Mills has encouraged heat pump adoption. “The cost of heating oil is already more than 60% higher than it was at this time last year,” Cunningham added, “putting added pressure on Maine households as we head into the winter heating season.”
Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told me that the total cost of heating a home exclusively on oil will jump from $1,740 to $2,297 this winter. “Families using heating oil will get hit twice — first from gasoline, and then heating oil,” he said.
The price of home heating oil has long been a hot button issue in New England politics, and this year’s slate of Congressional races is no exception. Matt Dunlap, the state auditor and Democratic nominee in Maine’s Trump-voting 2nd Congressional District, told reporters earlier this week while standing in front of a heating oil delivery truck that “right now, families across this district are sitting at their kitchen tables signing their heating oil contracts for the winter and staring at numbers they simply cannot afford.” In keeping with Trump’s recent admonition to pretend he’s on the ballot, Dunlap used the occasion to criticize the president’s foreign policy. The Iran War, Dunlap said, “is not an abstract foreign policy debate. That’s the reason your heating bill this winter could be hundreds of dollars higher than it was last year.”
Susan Collins, the Republican senator running for re-election in Maine, regularly highlights her role in bringing in funding from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program for Mainers, even as staff in charge of administering the program were laid off early in the Trump administration.
To the extent New Englanders can expect any relief, it likely won’t come from the supply dynamics of heating oil — the EIA has upped its price forecast for both this year and 2027. They may, however, simply need less. Thanks to what could be an historically strong El Niño, New England may be in for a warmer (albeit wetter) winter than usual.
This week’s conversation is a quick catch-up with our friends at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. I hopped on the phone with the center’s deputy director Romany Webb to chat about recent updates they published to anti-renewables opposition analysis. I wanted to dig into their research beyond the toplines — what should people care about in the coming election? How have data centers come up in their research? Or the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act?
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s start with the updates. Walk me through what’s new in your research.
So, we published two-year reports that detail renewable energy opposition across the United States; one is our report we’ve published since 2021 and it’s a new edition, and the other is an update of a report we published a few years ago on false claims about renewable energy where we highlight the misinformed used against projects.
This year’s local opposition report found local opposition continues to be widespread and really endemic. There’s been opposition to renewable energy development in every state across the country and we’re seeing it still have a real impact on whether projects get built. But there are small glimmers of hope. We identified 70 new state and local restrictions, which was a decline from previous years — that’s notable.
In select states where there have been a lot of these local restrictions, we’ve seen a drop off, like in Michigan after they enacted their state siting law. These are encouraging signs, and obviously it’s still early days, but it shows some of these state reforms are having a positive impact.
How is data center opposition coming up in your research?
Our reports do not track opposition to data center development. But we do certainly hear anecdotally that debates over data center development are spilling over into debates over renewable energy and battery storage. Often, local communities express concern that these new projects are just being built to power data centers — in some cases when there’s no connection at all, really. But I don’t have data on that link.
You said the law Michigan enacted might be working. Do you know if these laws limiting local opposition actually help with fighting renewable energy opponents, or are they engendering their own backlashes that undermine their effectiveness?
I think it’s too early to say the impacts they’ll have over the medium to long term. In the near term, many of the laws have been successful in accelerating the permitting of renewable energy projects or making it easier for them to be approved. Recent data out of New York shows that many of the projects that have gone through the new siting process are being approved — they’re still fairly long but they’re consistent which is good for development. In other places we’ve seen efforts to limit local government’s ability to adopt restrictions on renewable energy development, like Illinois and Michigan.
Those laws are relatively new, but the data we have shows that drop-off. It suggests the intended effect. But we need more time to know how effective they are and some of those laws have been getting quite a bit of pushback. There’s been a myriad of bills enacted in state legislatures across the country that would roll back those recent reforms or impose new restrictions on renewable development.
How much does the coming midterm election matter for the future of opposition to renewable energy?
I do think the next election will have important implications on whether we continue to see the ever-growing number of state level restrictions adopted or if we see a shift there.
Even if we see a shift in the composition of legislatures, I do think we’ll continue to see community opposition in many places to these projects. We shouldn’t ignore that developing a solar or wind project does have impacts on the local community and so developers really need to take steps to mitigate and manage those impacts.
If they don’t they’ll face the opposition, and even if they are they may face it because of misinformation around these projects.
My last question is, to what extent did the repeal of the IRA impact the ability for local opposition to kill projects in the crib?
I can’t say that definitively. I certainly don’t have the data that would support that sort of claim. And we don’t track that, specifically.
But often, groups that are opposed to renewable energy development will express concerns about the costs of projects or emphasize projects may not be viable without government subsidies. So the rollback of tax credits under the IRA plays into that argument. Of course when you look at the data, renewable energy projects are cheaper and the argument doesn’t hold muster.
But it’s an argument we regularly see pushed by opposition groups. That is how we have seen the IRA repeal affect this.
1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – A major utility sued the biggest newspaper in Arkansas over reporting on a data center energy deal. It’s a crucial case to follow.
The lawsuit Entergy filed last week against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette centers on whether the newspaper was legally able to publish about an Entergy deal with Google around payments for a large solar farm to power a data center. It claims the information reported was a trade secret accidentally released by the state public services commission.
In a statement to a local ABC station, the utility claimed Google’s “electricity contract may be confidential to newspapers,” and that the publication also erroneously reported on the solar farm financing. Entergy is seeking a temporary restraining order blocking the publication from reporting any more information in its possession that would qualify as theirs or Google’s trade secrets, and claims they believe more information is in the publication’s possession that may be reported in the future, according to federal court filings.
So far, the utility has been unable to win the stoppage and U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky rejected their request on Wednesday. The case is proceeding and I will be checking in regularly for you on this one.
Why is this case so important? This is easily the most aggressive communications response to public reporting on a previously-unknown deal related to a data center. At a time when non-disclosure agreements are a profound liability for the sector, I am surprised to see a utility go as far as a federal court challenge.
2. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania – Speaking of hardcore legal strategies, have you ever heard of a data center developer asking every local official to recuse themselves?
This week, town leaders in the town of Archbald rejected a legal request from a developer for quite literally every deciding voice to withdraw from considering their project. Instead, the developer Cornell Realty Management asked for an independent hearing examiner to oversee their project permitting application because the officials’ previous statements against development apparently could qualify as improper bias. They didn’t bite. Now the town has roughly 45 days to decide on the project.
The overcrowded data center destination of Archbald is ground zero for the Keystone State data center backlash and has been highlighted numerous times in national media as a flashpoint in AI hyperscale development. Gov. Josh Shapiro visited the town in May as part of trotting out his then-voluntary standards for the sector. Since May, Shapiro’s sought to make those rules essentially a requirement for state permits, at least for now.
I drove through Archbald a few weeks ago. The collection of data centers around you while winding its northern Pennsylvania foothills are impossible to ignore, as well as the sprawling sections of deforestation along a highway that crosses underneath power line after power line. I can understand why some residents there might be irritated by even more of this coming to town.
3. Loudon County, Virginia – Data Center Alley is giving us our first real glimpse of what data center legislating could look like if Democrats control at least one chamber of Congress.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam represents all of Loudon County, making him probably the most important elected member of Congress on the data center front. On Thursday, he introduced a slate of four bills targeting public concerns about data centers, including two separate bills requiring the Energy Department and National Institutes of Standards and Technology to craft best practices for the sector, respectively. One of the bills would make states create unique electricity price rules for data centers compelling them to pay more, known as “large load tariffs,” and the remaining proposal would require a national strategy related to defense issues and data centers.
Subramanyam is a first-term congressman with little experience in the federal legislature to bolster any claims he’ll get these bills into law. But this is a huge issue for him and a lot of this seems to have legs with key Democrats. The bill going after DOE is cosponsored by Reps. Mike Levin, Mike Quigley, and Veronica Escobar, and his proposal to create a large-load tariff dovetails with a similar idea floated by Sen. Martin Heinrich. It all feels like kismet, and would represent a soft touch compared to any kind of land use restriction.
I don’t think Democrats will pass any major legislation should they retake the chamber. But time and time again, when local residents aggrieved at large-scale development can’t get what they want from county or state leaders, they turn to their members of Congress to act. It’s happened with Republicans and renewables, and now it’s happening with Democrats and data centers.
4. Lane County, Oregon – The second largest city in Oregon is now turning down data centers, just as the governor starts saying no to anything on state land.
This week we learned the city of Eugene rejected a request for a former semiconductor plant to be for a data center, claiming its zoning code for IT projects doesn’t include them at all. The old former plant to me is representative of the industrial techlash; it used to be a major employer locally until it was closed around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, and now it won’t be used for where investment in heavy industry is going today.
Eugene’s denial demonstrates just how toxic data centers have become in Oregon when they once were courted as a form of economic development. Lane County itself scores above a 70 risk for both renewables and data centers in the Heatmap Pro database, which is primarily a reflection of how much protected acreage and large landowners are located in the large, bucolic, and forested county in western Oregon.
On Tuesday, around the same time Eugene’s rejection was made public, Gov. Tina Kotek north of Lane County announced a pause on all state right-of-way and land use permit issuances for data centers. Kotek said the move focused on state land, which is technically true, and it’s a far cry from a statewide moratorium, which the governor claims state law doesn’t allow her to create on her own. However, she’s calling it a moratorium in the press.
