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A firestorm over stoves couldn't stop these states from reining in gas.
One of the biggest climate stories of the year — the first, and perhaps only, to go viral — didn’t so much draw attention to the warming planet as it did to the dangers of using fossil fuels.
During the second week of January, Bloomberg reported that a federal safety agency would “consider a ban on gas stoves amid health fears.” Though the headline was somewhat misleading — the commission was investigating the risks of cooking with gas, but a ban was not immediately forthcoming — the article invited swift backlash.
The next day, the Wall Street Journal editorial board published an op-ed warning readers that “Biden is coming for your gas stove.” Conservative politicians expressed their undying loyalty to the appliance. “If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!,” Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman from Texas, posted on Twitter. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida designed aprons bearing an illustration of a gas stove that said “Don’t Tread on Florida.” Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia also piled on, tweeting, “I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.” House Republicans eventually passed a bill called the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act.
Meanwhile, everyday Americans were trying to make sense of the news that their gas stoves could be harming them. Every major media outlet ran stories on the risks of cooking with gas and how to minimize them. “How bad is it actually?,” friends started asking me over drinks.
It’s not good. Burning natural gas releases nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that contributes to respiratory illnesses like asthma. Concentrations from cooking can often exceed government standards for outdoor air quality. Proper ventilation with a range hood can reduce your exposure. But it won’t do anything about the effects gas has on the climate.
About 13% of U.S. emissions come from the fuels burned in buildings. Stoves may be a small part of that, but officials in some of the most climate-forward cities and states have been grappling with reducing the use of all fossil fuel-burning appliances in buildings for a number of years now. In February, the Building Decarbonization Coalition reported that 98 municipalities and four states — California, Washington, Maryland, and Colorado — had adopted policies promoting a switch to electric appliances. When the gas stove hysteria erupted, one in five Americans was already living under laws that encouraged or required landlords and developers to eschew gas.
A lot has happened in the months since, and not every state is swimming in the same direction on the issue. But in 2023, policymakers took big leaps toward a future without gas in buildings in three key ways:
There’s no blueprint for how to decommission thousands of miles of gas pipelines and retrofit millions of homes with electric appliances in a systematic, let alone equitable way. As a start, policymakers have generally followed the Law of Holes, as in, the first step is to stop digging — or in this case, stop growing demand for gas.
In 2019, the city of Berkeley, California, led the way, passing the first ordinance in the country to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings, and dozens of other cities followed. This year, New York became the first state to enact such a policy. The law requires all new buildings that are smaller than seven stories to be fully electric beginning in 2026, and applies to taller buildings in 2029.
“I think it’s huge that a state is doing it, not only because New York is a big-impact state,” Sarah Fox, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University School of Law, told CNN at the time. It’s no longer “fringe cities passing these policies,” she said. “This is becoming a mainstream policy that a state like New York is taking on.”
However, this year also saw a continuation of Republican-led states taking the opposite tack. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho joined a list of 24 states that have passed laws prohibiting municipalities from setting these kinds of restrictions on gas in buildings. By my estimation, using 2022 population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, that means two in five Americans live in states with such preemption laws.
Berkeley’s gas ban was also struck down by a federal appeals court, and the city is now fighting for a rehearing. That decision led to some uncertainty, but no loss of momentum. In Washington, where regulators created a de facto ban on gas in new construction through the building code last year, officials recently amended the code to safeguard it against legal challenges.
Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year maintaining, replacing, and building new pipes — funds they expect to recover from ratepayers over the course of decades.
This year, in a few states with strong emission reduction laws that imply heating will have to be electrified in the next few decades, regulators started to scrutinize these investments more. In Illinois, for example, the Commerce Commission ordered People’s Gas, which serves the Chicago area, to pause its pipe replacement program, rejecting the company’s request to hike rates to fund it.
“This program was deeply flawed,” Abe Scarr, state director of the Public Interest Research Group in Illinois, told me. It was supposed to address the real problem of risky iron pipes, but it had been mismanaged and over-budget for years, he said. At the current rate, the company won’t be done until 2049, “right around the time that a lot of us think we should be stopping to use the gas system.”
The commission ordered an investigation into the program. It also initiated a new “Future of Gas” proceeding for all utilities in the state to determine how to align the sector with Illinois’ clean energy goals. “As the State embarks on a journey toward a 100 percent clean energy economy, the gas system’s operations will not continue to exist in its current form,” said Illinois Commerce Commission Chairman Doug Scott in a press release.
Meanwhile, regulators in Massachusetts were wrapping up their own “Future of Gas” proceeding that had kicked off in 2020. In early December, the state’s Department of Public Utilities issued a final order declaring, among many other things, that it will no longer allow companies to recover costs for gas infrastructure without showing that alternatives, like helping customers electrify, were considered. Regulators also rejected the utilities’ preferred path to reducing emissions — switching to lower-carbon fuels like renewable natural gas and hydrogen — as not yet proven. Unless and until the evidence changes, any money the companies spend investigating these solutions will have to be covered by shareholders, not ratepayers.
Also this year, Massachusetts began testing one potentially more systematic pathway to transition off gas. Eversource, a utility there, broke ground on a first-of-its-kind project to switch an entire neighborhood to “networked geothermal,” a form of electric heating that draws on the steady temperature of the ground beneath the earth’s surface to heat and cool buildings.
In many states, it’s standard practice for utilities to bake the cost of political activities like lobbying, advertising, and trade association memberships into customers’ gas and electric rates. These activities often amount to efforts to slow down the clean energy transition — for example, an investigation published this year found that the American Gas Association has fought to stifle warnings about the risks of gas stoves for decades.
“[Utilities] are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy,” David Pomerantz, executive director of the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year.
But now Maine, Colorado, and Connecticut, have all outlawed the practice; if utilities in those states want to spend money on lobbying or trade groups, they’ll have to pay for it out of their own profits. Massachusetts regulators took a similar step, banning gas companies from charging customers for any marketing related to the promotion of natural gas.
I asked Mike Henchen, a principal at the clean energy think tank RMI who follows gas utility regulation around the country, what the next wave of action on the issue might look like.
He said he expects progress to continue next year, with states rolling out rebates for heat pumps with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. Some, like New Jersey and Maryland may follow the playbooks written by first movers like New York and Massachusetts, and those leading states could continue to break new ground. One of the next fronts, he said, is removing the gas industry’s “obligation to serve,” a rule written into most state laws that gives customers the right to demand gas service. That means that even if there’s a strong economic argument to electrify a city block rather than replace a risky pipeline, one resident’s refusal could sink the whole project.
On the bright side, some utilities are starting to talk more openly about needing to reduce the amount of natural gas they sell to customers, Henchen told me. But midway through sharing this thought, he stopped to laugh. “I laugh, because it seems like it should be more obvious that that is the case.”
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”