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Facing a fossil energy crisis, voters in this oil-producing state have some decisions to make.
When you think of climate change, you think of Alaska whether you realize it or not.
With its pipelines, polar bears, and dramatic, calving glaciers, the state has contributed an outsized amount of stock footage to global warming montages over the years. Combined with a nearly unbroken record of backing Republican presidential candidates and an increasingly young and diverse voting-age population, there’s a popular impression — among outsiders, anyway — of the state as a front line in the battle between continued fossil fuel dependence and a clean-energy future.
Somewhat ironically, Alaskans themselves don’t typically view things that way. Though no fewer than four utility board elections and the Anchorage mayoral race this spring will help to shape the energy future of the Railbelt, the electrical grid that runs from Fairbanks through Anchorage and out to the Kenai Peninsula and serves 70% of the state’s population, locals are debating the stakes in terms of cost.
“Literally nobody who is pitching renewables [on the campaign trail] is pitching them as a solution to climate change,” Nathaniel Herz, an independent Anchorage-based reporter who covers energy, environment, and government issues in the state for his newsletter Northern Journal, told me. Rather, the selling point is that wind, solar, and tidal power could be the way out of an urgent gas shortage.
The energy crisis touched off in earnest last May when the region’s largest natural gas producer, Hilcorp, informed the four Railbelt utilities that it doesn’t have access to enough deliverable gas in Cook Inlet to guarantee new contracts going forward. Though a gas shortage in the aging basin was a long time coming, the urgency of the situation still came as a shock; the Railbelt utilities get about 80% of their energy from natural gas. Demand could outpace supply as soon as 2027, the state has warned.
Billy J. Roberts, NREL, for DOE
Homer Electric Association was the first utility to face the consequences, with a contract that expired this year. As a stopgap, it signed a one-year contract with Enstar, the local private gas utility that gets 90% of its supply from Hilcorp (and also supplies gas for heating homes and businesses) at a higher price. The rest of the Railbelt co-ops’ contracts are set to expire by 2028.
Proposed solutions to the crisis range from new drilling in Cook Inlet — which is risky, expensive, and laden with permitting hurdles, making it unappealing to investors — to building an 800-mile, $43 billion pipeline from the oil-rich North Slope. More realistically, the Railbelt seems headed toward importing liquified natural gas from British Columbia, at least in the short term.
That option is “really unpalatable to many Alaskans,” Satchel Pondolfino, the lower Kenai Peninsula organizer for Cook Inletkeeper, a Homer-based environmental non-profit, told me. “We’re an energy state: It’s inconceivable for a lot of people that we have to bring in fuel from other places.”
It’s also expensive. Importing LNG could result in 50% higher costs for the utilities. That, in turn, would mean up to a 15% hike in consumers’ already-steep utility bills, and likely “even more than that for heating bills,” as Herz has reported — no small thing in a place where it is dark and cold for half the year. One independent analysis Herz cites found that the 80% renewable portfolio standard proposed by the state’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy would save $6.7 billion in fuel costs over the next 35 years compared to an estimated $3.2 billion investment in the projects. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s latest assessment likewise found that a large clean-energy build-out would be “more affordable than relying on imported natural gas.”
Critically, then, the spring elections in Alaska will help decide both what the long-term solution will be and how quickly it should be implemented. The Anchorage mayoral runoff set for this coming Tuesday — a choice between incumbent Dave Bronson, a self-described “center-right kind of guy” who favors new Cook Inlet drilling, and Suzanne LaFrance, a Lead Locally-endorsed climate candidate pushing for a renewable mix — is perhaps the marquee race, albeit one with a more limited say over the future energy mix.
“Utilities have control over specifically where they get their energy from, and the legislature has a lot of control over how we tax different energy producers,” Jenny-Marie Stryker, the political director at The Alaska Center, the state’s largest conservation advocacy organization, told me. But while there is not “one turnkey thing that we’re looking for the mayor to do,” Stryker added, it’s instead the “many, many steps” LaFrance has promised to follow in the city’s climate action plan that would mark an improvement over Bronson. (LaFrance’s campaign did not respond to Heatmap’s request for comment.)
Bronson, who was elected during the pandemic when Alaskans were bristling against perceived government overreach, ignored his predecessor’s climate action plan and established the Southcentral Mayors’ Energy Coalition to address the Railbelt energy crisis — a move Stryker told me was a “pretty big waste of time,” since it’s something the 11-mayor group has “no control over.” Bronson defended his decision to me in an emailed statement, arguing that any climate action plan is by necessity secondary to addressing Southcentral Alaska’s immediate energy concerns.
“It is easy to say, ‘Let’s build a massive solar plant, let’s invest in tidal energy, let’s investigate geothermal,’” he wrote. “However, there are grid transmission upgrades that need to be made” before that can be a reality. Additionally, while the assumption is that building out new renewables is “easy,” the “permitting process alone can take 2-3 years, and in some cases, 5-6 years,” he stressed. (New LNG import terminals, meanwhile, might not be online until 2030.)
Herz, the reporter, told me earlier that renewable project developers “would be looking at capital expenditures that were 80% to 90% higher than they would be to develop utility-scale renewable projects in the Lower 48.” In an oil state, there is also an “inherent skepticism about some of the renewable technology and economic viability that you might not find elsewhere in the United States because there aren’t really big utility-scale projects that have been built here.” The ones that are on the board — including a possible and intriguing tidal energy project — fall more firmly into the purview of the local co-ops.
The utility board elections, then, have a more immediate hand in shaping the Railbelt’s future energy mix. Two of those elections have already taken place: for the board of the Matanushka Electric Association, where both climate candidates lost (albeit one by just 41 of 3,246 votes), and for the Homer Electric Association, where a climate candidate was re-elected and a challenger lost, maintaining the board’s ideological status quo. Chugach Electric Association, which represents Anchorage and is the largest provider in the state, will go next, with voting ongoing and ending May 17. That board is currently held by a pro-renewable majority that has advanced utility-scale wind and solar projects, with pro-gas challengers vying to take back control.
Finally, Fairbanks’ Golden Valley Electric Association ballots are due June 4, with Gary Newman, a pro-renewable Democrat, attempting to hold off Harmony Tomaszewski, who helped block a local climate action plan last year. Fairbanks has been hit especially hard by the energy crisis, burning coal and diesel to compensate for LNG shortfalls and polluting its air. A rate hike of about $29 more per month for households has also brought unusually high levels of public interest to the co-op election.
While “on paper” the current GVEA board is “pretty conservative,” Eleanor Gagnon, the energy justice organizer with the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, told me, its annual meeting in April featured a lot of talk about diversifying its energy portfolio — a conversation that would have been shocking even a few years ago. “They really seem to have come to the realization that more renewables are necessary because of these rate hikes, and because the rate hikes are due to the instability of natural gas sources,” she said.
I’ve spoken with organizers before about how policies with positive climate benefits are often economic issues at heart — ones that sometimes override environmental motivations — and that seems especially true in Alaska. “The urgency of Cook Inlet gas not meeting our demands by 2027 — folks are throwing climate out the window,” Pondolfino, the Cook Inletkeeper organizer, said. “They’re like, ‘We just need energy security and we need to be able to afford it.’”
The math shows that having a diversified renewable mix would be better economically than importing expensive LNG. That doesn’t mean it will be an easy transition, or a quick one, but it gives activists and advocates a clear goal to keep working toward on every ballot.
“Most people in the Lower 48 do not have any way to voice their opinion about the direction their utility should move in, or to vote for representatives,” Pondolfino said. “It is a privilege to vote in elections that have a really direct impact on people’s lives and their ability to afford to live here.”
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Want to understand what’s happening to electric cars? Look at the Golden State.
As California goes, so goes the American car scene. This sentiment has long been true, given that the Golden State is the country’s biggest automotive market and its emissions rules have helped to drag the car industry toward more efficient vehicles.
It is doubly true in the EV era, since California is where electric vehicles first went big and where electric adoption far outpaces the rest of the nation. A look at the car sales data from the first half of 2024 shows us a few things about what the electric car market is and where it’s headed.
Electric cars went mainstream in a hurry here, growing from 5.8% of California car sales in 2020 to 21.5% in 2023. Then the graph flattens out: For the first half of this year, EVs made up 21.4% of new registrations. That would seem to support the gloomy narrative of a supposed EV sales slump. The truth, as it tends to be, is more complicated.
Look at the numbers broken down by quarters, rather than years, and the chart looks a little different. EV sales reached a peak in the third quarter of 2023, dipped a bit, and then jumped back up in April to June 2024 to the second-best quarter ever. That’s a blip, not a crisis, as EVs appear poised for slow growth but growth nonetheless.
Consider the context for a moment: California reached a place where 1 in 5 new cars sold are electric even with the EV affordability problem. That trend wasn’t going to continue unabated up to 30, 40, or 50% of auto sales without the industry putting out vehicles that can compete on cost with a $25,000 Honda Civic or a $30,000 Toyota RAV4. In its summary of the numbers, the California New Car Dealers Association blames inflation and rising monthly car payments for suppressing all vehicle sales at the moment, EVs included. Money matters will decide where things go from here.
The flipside of this year’s EV doomerism is the notion that drivers are turning to hybrids instead. The numbers bear out that sentiment for the moment in California. Traditional hybrid vehicles (excluding plug-in hybrids) more than doubled their market share from 6.1% in 2020 to 13.2% in the first half of 2024. Not too surprising, considering their wide availability and how appealing they are for California drivers who buy some of the nation’s most expensive gasoline.
Plug-in hybrids accounted for 3.4% of sales in the first half of this year, not far from the number they posted back in 2021. That might sound odd, given automakers’ rumblings about turning to these vehicles instead of true EVs, but a new wave of PHEVs is still in development. For now, the difficult calculus remains: Plug-in hybrids are a great choice for a lot of drivers, but they are significantly more expensive than combustion cars for not much electric range, and PHEVs can be hard to come by.
Take all these electrified powertrains together, however, and the picture is clear. Compared to 2018, when gas- and diesel-burners made up 88.4% of auto sales, that number is down to 62% for the first half of this year. Combustion-only is sinking fast, a trend that will spread from the West Coast to the rest of the nation.
My eyes don’t deceive me. Since the start of 2024, it has felt like Rivian’s trucks and especially SUVs are all over Los Angeles, driven by the kind of people who used to own Range Rovers. It turns out RJ Scaringe’s company is the fastest-growing car brand of any kind in California, with sales up nearly 77% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
Now, that number is deceiving. It’s easy to grow by big percentages at the beginning, and Rivian’s sales numbers are relatively small: It moved just shy of 7,000 vehicles through June, which pales in comparison to the 100,000 Teslas and 150,000 Toyotas registered in California during the same period. But Rivian’s early success in California suggests the brand is finding traction and that it might pick off plenty of drivers from Tesla's bread-winning Model Y once the more reasonably priced R2 and R3 arrive.
After all, the story of the supposed EV slump is actually the story of Tesla squandering its huge halftime lead. Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, Rivian, BMW, and Hyundai/Kia EV sales are up this year, but Tesla’s slump wipes out much of their gains.
The Model Y and Model 3 remain California’s best-selling EVs by far, with the second-place Model 3 selling three times the volume of the third-place finisher, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5. Yet Tesla sales in California are down 17% from the first half of 2023, and its market share dropped from 64.6% to 53.4%. Its only new model, the Cybertruck, sold 3,048 in the first half of this year. Californians bought nearly a thousand more Chevy Bolts — and GM isn’t even building that car right now.
Current conditions: More than 300,000 people in Louisiana are without power after Hurricane Francine • Hungarian lawmakers met in a dried riverbed yesterday to draw attention to the country’s extreme drought • An Arctic blast could bring snow to parts of the U.K.
More than 60 scientists have co-authored a new study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, warning that human activity is damaging the natural systems that support life on Earth. Almost all of these support systems – including the climate, soil nutrient cycles, and freshwater – have been pushed into danger zones as humans strive for ever more economic growth. Thus, the researchers say, the health of the planet and its people are at risk, and the poor are the most vulnerable. The study concludes “fundamental system-wide transformations are needed” to address overconsumption, overhaul economic systems, improve technologies, and transform governance.
The Lancet
Carmaker Stellantis announced yesterday it is pouring more than $400 million into three facilities in Michigan to ramp up electric vehicle production and boost the company’s “multi-energy strategy.” The Sterling Heights Assembly Plant will be Stellantis’ first U.S. facility to build a fully electric vehicle, the Ram 1500 REV. The Warren Truck Assembly Plant will be “retooled” to produce the upcoming electric Jeep Wagoneer. And the Dundee Engine Plant will be upgraded for parts production for the company’s STLA Frame architecture. As The Associated Pressexplained, Stellantis “is taking a step toward meeting some commitments that it agreed to in a new contract ratified last fall by the United Auto Workers union after a bitter six-week strike.” The company is aiming for 50% of its passenger car and light-duty truck sales in the U.S. to be electric by 2030.
Police arrested a 34-year-old man suspected of starting a wildfire in California that has now burned more than 36,000 acres and is less than 20% contained. The Line fire is one of several large blazes burning in the state and threatening thousands of structures. Last month another man was charged with arson on suspicion of igniting the Park fire, which consumed 430,000 acres in Northern California. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, arson officially accounts for only about 10% of fires handled by Cal Fire. But when there are thousands of fires across the state during a given season, that’s not an inconsequential number. And a warmer world has made extreme fire conditions more common, as have decades of misbegotten fire suppression policies in the Western United States. As a result, arson fires in rural areas are more likely to burn out of control than they would have been half a century ago, Lange wrote. Experts warn that California’s fire season, fueled by “weather whiplash,” is only just ramping up and is likely to intensify with the arrival of the Santa Ana winds.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to finish the paving of a controversial road through the Amazon rainforest. The BR-319 highway would connect some major cities and improve cargo movement, which has been disrupted by record-low water levels in the Amazon River due to drought. But its construction could also hasten deforestation, including in old growth forests. “Without the forest, there is no water, it’s interconnected,” said Suely Araújo, a public policy coordinator. “The paving of the middle section of BR-319, without ensuring environmental governance and the presence of the government in the region, will lead to historic deforestation, as pointed out by many specialists and by Brazil’s federal environmental agency in the licensing process.” Lula made the pledge during a visit to assess the damage from massive fires in the rainforest, which his Environment Minister Marina Silva blamed on extreme drought caused by climate change.
A new survey of more than 1,000 EV owners in California has some interesting insights into what these drivers want from a charging station. It found they were 37% more likely to choose a charger with additional amenities like restrooms and convenience stores. “This symbiotic relationship between businesses and EV chargers may benefit both EV chargers and local businesses,” said Alan Jenn, assistant professor at the Electric Vehicle group of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
Next 10
Also, California’s EV drivers really don’t want to wait to charge up, and are willing to pay almost a dollar more per 100 miles of charge if there’s no wait time at the charger. With every minute of extra wait time, a driver’s willingness to use a charger falls by 6%. The survey was conducted by the non-profit Next 10 and the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
“If Harris is now bragging about her administration’s support for fossil fuels, if she is casting the Inflation Reduction Act as a law that helped fracking, that means climate activists have much more work to do to persuade the public on what they believe. The Democratic Party’s candidate will not do that persuasion for them.” –Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on Kamala Harris’ energy playbook.
The rapid increase in demand for artificial intelligence is creating a seemingly vexing national dilemma: How can we meet the vast energy demands of a breakthrough industry without compromising our energy goals?
If that challenge sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The U.S. has a long history of rising to the electricity demands of innovative new industries. Our energy needs grew far more quickly in the four decades following World War II than what we are facing today. More recently, we have squared off against the energy requirements of new clean technologies that require significant energy to produce — most notably hydrogen.
Courtesy of Rhodium Group
The lesson we have learned time and again is that it is possible to scale technological innovation in a way that also scales energy innovation. Rather than accepting a zero-sum trade-off between innovation and our clean energy goals, we should focus on policies that leverage the growth of AI to scale the growth of clean energy.
At the core of this approach is the concept of additionality: Companies operating massive data centers — often referred to as “hyperscalers” — as well as utilities should have incentives to bring online new, additional clean energy to power new computing needs. That way, we leverage demand in one sector to scale up another. We drive innovation in key sectors that are critical to our nation’s competitiveness, we reward market leaders who are already moving in this direction with a stable, long-term regulatory framework for growth, and we stay on track to meet our nation’s climate commitments.
All of this is possible, but only if we take bold action now.
AI technologies have the potential to significantly boost America’s economic productivity and enhance our national security. AI also has the potential to accelerate the energy transition itself, from optimizing the electricity grid, to improving weather forecasting, to accelerating the discovery of chemicals and material breakthroughs that reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Powering AI, however, is itself incredibly energy intensive. Projections suggest that data centers could consume 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030, up from 4% today. Without a national policy response, this surge in energy demand risks increasing our long-term reliance on fossil fuels. By some estimates, around 20 gigawatts of additional natural gas generating capacity will come online by 2030, and coal plant retirements are already being delayed.
Avoiding this outcome will require creative focus on additionality. Hydrogen represents a particularly relevant case study here. It, too, is energy-intensive to produce — a single kilogram of hydrogen requires double the average household’s electricity consumption. And while hydrogen holds great promise to decarbonize parts of our economy, hydrogen is not per se good for our clean energy goals. Indeed, today’s fossil fuel-driven methods of hydrogen production generate more emissions than the entire aviation sector. While we can make zero-emissions hydrogen by using clean electricity to split hydrogen from water, the source of that electricity matters a lot. Similar to data centers, if the power for hydrogen production comes from the existing electricity grid, then ramping up electrolytic production of hydrogen could significantly increase emissions by growing overall energy demand without cleaning the energy mix.
This challenge led to the development of an “additionality” framework for hydrogen. The Inflation Reduction Act offers generous subsidies to hydrogen producers, but to qualify, they must match their electricity consumption with additional (read: newly built) clean energy generation close enough to them that they can actually use it.
This approach, which is being refined in proposed guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department, is designed to make sure that hydrogen’s energy demand becomes a catalyst for investment in new clean electricity generation and decarbonization technologies. Industry leaders are already responding, stating their readiness to build over 50 gigawatts of clean electrolyzer projects because of the long term certainty this framework provides.
While the scale and technology requirements are different, meeting AI’s energy needs presents a similar challenge. Powering data centers from the existing electricity grid mix means that more demand will create more emissions; even when data centers are drawing on clean electricity, if that energy is being diverted from existing sources rather than coming from new, additional clean electricity supply, the result is the same. Amazon’s recent $650 million investment in a data center campus next to an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania illustrates the challenge: While diverting those clean electrons from Pennsylvania homes and businesses to the data center reduces Amazon’s reported emissions, by increasing demand on the grid without building additional clean capacity, it creates a need for new capacity in the region that will likely be met by fossil fuels (while also shifting up to $140 million of additional costs per year onto local customers).
Neither hyperscalers nor utilities should be expected to resolve this complex tension on their own. As with hydrogen, it is in our national interest to find a path forward.
What we need, then, is a national solution to make sure that as we expand our AI capabilities, we bring online new clean energy, as well, strengthening our competitive position in both industries and forestalling the economic and ecological consequences of higher electricity prices and higher carbon emissions.
In short, we should adopt a National AI Additionality Framework.
Under this framework, for any significant data center project, companies would need to show how they are securing new, additional clean power from a zero-emissions generation source. They could do this either by building new “behind-the-meter” clean energy to power their operations directly, or by partnering with a utility to pay a specified rate to secure new grid-connected clean energy coming online.
If companies are unwilling or unable to secure dedicated additional clean energy capacity, they would pay a fee into a clean deployment fund at the Department of Energy that would go toward high-value investments to expand clean electricity capacity. These could range from research and deployment incentives for so-called “clean firm” electricity generation technologies like nuclear and geothermal, to investments in transmission capacity in highly congested areas, to expanding manufacturing capacity for supply-constrained electrical grid equipment like transformers, to cleaning up rural electric cooperatives that serve areas attractive to data centers. Given the variance in grid and transmission issues, the fund would explicitly approach its investment with a regional lens.
Several states operate similar systems: Under Massachusetts’ Renewable Portfolio Standard, utilities are required to provide a certain percentage of electricity they serve from clean energy facilities or pay an “alternative compliance payment” for every megawatt-hour they are short of their obligation. Dollars collected from these payments go toward the development and expansion of clean energy projects and infrastructure in the state. Facing increasing capacity constraints on the PJM grid, Pennsylvania legislators are now exploring a state Baseload Energy Development Fund to provide low-interest grants and loans for new electricity generation facilities.
A national additionality framework should not only challenge the industry to scale innovation in a way that scales clean technology, it must also clear pathways to build clean energy at scale. We should establish a dedicated fast-track approval process to move these clean energy projects through federal, state, and local permitting and siting on an accelerated basis. This will help companies already investing in additional clean energy to move faster and more effectively – and make it more difficult for anyone to hide behind the excuse that building new clean energy capacity is too hard or too slow. Likewise, under this framework, utilities that stand in the way of progress should be held accountable and incentivized to adopt innovative new technologies and business models that enable them to move at historic speed.
For hyperscalers committed to net-zero goals, this national approach provides both an opportunity and a level playing field — an opportunity to deliver on those commitments in a genuine way, and a reliable long-term framework that will reward their investments to make that happen. This approach would also build public trust in corporate climate accountability and diminish the risk that those building data centers in the U.S. stand accused of greenwashing or shifting the cost of development onto ratepayers and communities. The policy clarity of an additionality requirement can also encourage cutting edge artificial intelligence technology to be built here in the United States. Moreover, it is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.
The good news is that many industry players are already moving in this direction. A new agreement between Google and a Nevada utility, for example, would allow Google to pay a higher rate for 24/7 clean electricity from a new geothermal project. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy announced its intent to explore a new clean tariff to support carbon-free energy generation for large customers like Google and Microsoft.
A national framework that builds on this progress is critical, though it will not be easy; it will require quick Congressional action, executive leadership, and new models of state and local partnership. But we have a unique opportunity to build a strange bedfellow coalition to get it done – across big tech, climate tech, environmentalists, permitting reform advocates, and those invested in America’s national security and technology leadership. Together, this framework can turn a vexing trade-off into an opportunity. We can ensure that the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in building an industry of the future actually accelerates the energy transition, all while strengthening the U.S.’s position in innovating cutting- edge AI and clean energy technology.