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How 2023 marked a renewed push for public power.
Voters in Maine were confronted with an unusual decision when they went to the polls this November. Question three on the ballot asked Mainers if they wanted to eliminate the two private utilities that delivered electricity to 97% of the state. A new, nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power would take over the service, and it would be overseen by a publicly-elected board.
Though the proposal may sound radical, it’s not unheard of. Since the dawn of the electric grid, communities have periodically decided to municipalize their utilities. The city of Sacramento, California, took over PG&E’s local electric distribution franchise in 1946. Winter Park, Florida, took over electric service from a company called Progress Energy in 2005. But a takeover at the state level has only been attempted by Nebraska, where the entire state’s electric service went public in the 1940s and has remained that way ever since.
Unlike in Nebraska, the campaign in Maine failed. Seventy percent of voters said “no” to question three. But the ballot measure wasn’t a one-off. This year marked a renewed push for public power that’s growing around the country in light of the challenges of tackling climate change.
Investor-owned utilities have used their vast financial resources and political influence to delay and block the transition off of fossil fuels, in ways large and small, for decades. Activists, tired of trying to work within that system, are turning their attention to what they see as the more systemic root cause — the perverse incentives created by having utilities that need to turn a profit.
Americans often refer to their electricity or gas providers as “public utilities.” But only about 15% of the population is served by a government-owned, customer-owned, or member-owned electric utility. The other 85% are beholden to private companies that were granted monopolies to sell electricity decades ago.
What started as a smattering of independent campaigns to change that ratio started to coalesce into a nationally coordinated movement this year. A few weeks before the vote on the ballot measure, some 70 delegates from about 40 grassroots climate groups from around the country convened for a workshop at the Press Hotel in Portland, Maine. For three days, they exchanged notes and strategies for how to get public power on the agenda in their own cities and states, and reform public utilities in places that already had them. By the end, they had cemented a more energized, organized coalition.
The guiding theory behind the push for public power is that public utilities don’t need to generate returns for shareholders, theoretically enabling them to make investments guided by other priorities, like reducing emissions — and charge customers less in the process.
“We’ve seen time and time again that the market is not going to correct this,” Greg Woodring, a workshop participant from Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me. “Public power gives us the ability to choose where our energy is coming from, the ability to directly make that change without having to ask or plead or beg or incentivize a corporate entity that, at the end of the day, is only making a decision based on what’s going to make the most profit possible.”
But public power is divisive in the larger climate movement. While not necessarily ideologically opposed, critics are concerned about wasting time and money. Private utilities don’t go without a fight, and communities can get bogged down in legal battles for years. The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously tried to wrest control over its electric service from the utility Xcel for a decade, and gave up.
In Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation, a prominent environmental group, warned that the cost of a transition to public power was too uncertain, that it could mire the state in litigation, and that having a publicly-elected board could subject critical energy decisions to “partisan political maneuvering.” Instead, the group made a case for strengthening laws and regulations. However, it also conceded that if the utilities don’t meet metrics of affordability and sustainability they should face stiffer fines, or even lose their ability to operate in the state.
Defenders of investor-owned utilities argue that they have advantages over nonprofits when it comes to building the clean grid of the future. “The investor-owned business model enables companies to raise and deploy massive amounts of capital in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and their purchasing power helps to minimize costs to customers,” said Sarah Durdaller, a spokesperson for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for private electric utilities. She told me that the organization’s members’ “commitment to delivering resilient clean energy to our customers has never been stronger, and our focus on affordability has never been more important.”
The Maine campaign was not the first time a shift to publicly-owned utilities has been pitched as a climate strategy. One of the main motivations for Boulder’s effort, which started in 2010, was Xcel’s unwillingness to help the city meet its climate goals. But the increased momentum behind public power in 2023 signaled a new direction for climate activism more broadly, which had seemed to stagnate after the rise and fall of the youth-led Sunrise Movement and the election of Joe Biden.
“This is a site where we can practice democracy,” Isaac Sevier, one of the workshop organizers, told me. “I think that’s something that energizes people, it gives them more hope, it gives them something to be a part of and fight for and struggle for in a time when so many people are turning away.”
The workshop in Maine was convened by a handful of national organizations, including the Climate and Community Project, a progressive think tank, Lead Locally, a group that works to elect progressive candidates, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission.
The DSA has been a major force behind the recent surge in interest in public power. At the start of this year, it kicked off a new campaign called “Building for Power” focused on trying to strengthen public institutions at the local level. In addition to public power, DSA is advocating for green public housing and transit, and improved public spaces.
“We want to rebuild, and in some cases, build anew, public sector capacity,” Matt Haugen, one of the organizers of the workshop, told me. “Through decades of neoliberalism, the public sector has been hollowed out in the U.S., and we’re seeing in all these areas that it’s clear the private sector just cannot meet these human needs.”
Many of the participants at the workshop were DSA members, but there were also local organizers affiliated with national environmental organizations, like 350 and the Sierra Club, and others from smaller, grassroots groups. There was a freshman in college, a seasoned activist in his 80s, and many ages represented in between. While almost everyone there was from a left-leaning city, they hailed from every corner of the country, including California, Montana, Michigan, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
Some, like Woodring of Ann Arbor, were from cities that were already in the early stages of considering a public power takeover. His group had convinced the city council to complete a feasibility study on municipalization. Others, like Marta Meengs, from Missoula, Montana, were trying to figure out how to win smaller battles, like the right to have community-owned solar farms. Others wanted to reform existing public power agencies, like Amy Kelly from Tennessee, where the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority runs the grid — but is investing heavily in natural gas, and offers few avenues for civic engagement.
One such group had already seen some success. The New York chapter of the DSA passed the Build Public Renewables Act earlier this year after four years of campaigning. The law directs the New York Power Authority, an existing state-owned power provider, to shut down all of its fossil fuel plants by the end of 2031, and expands its mandate to include building renewable energy projects. Most residential customers in New York are actually served by private utilities, but proponents saw the law as a way to get more clean energy built, faster, and with high labor and equity standards.
The Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law signed by President Biden last year, is one reason the tides turned for the New York campaign. It enabled government agencies and nonprofits to take advantage of tax credits for renewable energy projects for the first time, improving the economics of public power.
“It really opens up a huge amount of additional space for public power to be a part of the answer,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me.
Though few of the participants had ever met or even heard of each others’ campaigns, the stories that led them to advocate for public power shared a number of common themes: Worsening power outages due to extreme weather. Alarm over the insufficient pace of emission reductions. Outrageously high bills. But perhaps most of all, frustration with constantly coming up against utilities wielding money and influence to fight clean energy.
Woodring, of Ann Arbor, cited a 2022 analysis that found that more than 90% of sitting legislators in Michigan at the time took money from groups and individuals affiliated with DTE, the biggest utility in the state. The company was also tied to more than $200,000 in donations to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who’s responsible for appointing the state’s utility regulators. As a result, according to the workshop participants from Michigan, the company has been able to restrict the growth of residential solar, which would eat into its profits.
Mikal Goodman, a 23-year-old city councilmember from Pontiac, Michigan, told me his interest in public power stemmed from DTE’s high rates and failure to invest in modernizing its transmission system. Some of its poles and wires dated back to before World War II, he said. Last winter, storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of households in southeast Michigan, leaving some families in the dark for over a week. But the day after one especially bad storm in February that left 450,000 people without power, DTE’s CEO Gerardo Norcia bragged to Wall Street analysts about the company’s “strong financial results” due to budget cuts and delayed maintenance.
In Pontiac, Goodman said, outages are life-threatening. He described the city as a donut hole — a poor, majority minority community surrounded by much wealthier, whiter towns. Most Pontiac residents don’t have the resources to run backup generators, replace rotting food, or flee to hotels if they need to, like many of their well-off neighbors, he said.
The idea that energy is a human right, and should not be treated as a commodity, came up repeatedly at the workshop. Many of the participants were drawn to public power by the desire to see an energy transition that benefits everyone, not just those who can afford clean energy.
Sevier, who has done a lot of work related to decarbonizing buildings, was frustrated that other advocates in the field were ignoring the growing energy affordability crisis. One in six households are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, and gas and electric utilities are increasingly disconnecting customers that are in arrears. A January report from Bailout Watch, a nonprofit watchdog of fossil fuel companies, estimated that the 12 utilities that perpetrated the vast majority of shutoffs between 2020 and the fall of 2022 could have forgiven the debt with just 1% of their spending on shareholder dividends.
“If we require that everything in your life become electric, but at the same time, we don’t transform a system that guarantees that everyone actually can have electricity,” Sevier told me, “then I ask, who are we building this ‘electrify everything’ system for?”
Other advocates questioned a system where the public is often forced to pay for a company’s mistakes, but which the public has no say over. Travis Gibrael, an organizer with a group called Reclaim Our Power in northern California, which is working on a public takeover of PG&E, described the hypocrisy of the state’s relationship with the company. Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration helped the company emerge from bankruptcy after it was found responsible for wildfires that destroyed whole towns and killed more than 100 people. Now the company is raising rates by 13% to pay for wildfire prevention measures like burying power lines.
“They burn down the state, they kill a bunch of people. And yet all of those liabilities are just put on us, including the people who lost family members,” Gibrael told me. “It’s like, we’re already paying for the cost of the system and all the crises that are coming from it. So for us to just own it, because we’re already paying for it, makes sense.”
Reclaim Our Power has allies in the city government of San Francisco, which is in the early stages of trying to purchase the local electric grid from PG&E.
In some ways, Maine seemed to be an ideal testing ground for such sweeping reforms. Central Maine Power and Versant, the two private electric companies in Maine that would have been ousted, are consistently rated the worst for customer satisfaction in the Northeast. CMP has faced multiple investigations and fines over its billing system, customer service, and delays connecting new solar projects to the grid. Mainers additionally hate the company due to a controversial power line it is building to deliver hydropower from Canada into the U.S.
Advocates also appealed to nationalist views by highlighting the fact that both companies have “foreign owners,” and that they are funneling ratepayer dollars out of the country rather than back into Maine’s communities. (CMP is owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company. Versant is owned by Enmax, a Canadian company owned by the city of Calgary.)
Public power advocates attributed their loss largely to the nearly $40 million the incumbent utilities spent fighting the campaign. “They outspent us 37 to one,” Lucy Hochschartner, the deputy campaign manager for Pine Tree Power, told me. “We were persuading people one by one, as they were getting absolutely inundated by messaging on the television, in their mailbox, on the radio, over digital.”
But she also said the campaign was successful in that it got a lot more people talking about the issue — it made national headlines for weeks — which could make it easier for future campaigns.
Reflecting on the loss, John Qua, a campaign manager at Lead Locally, told me it showed that running a ballot initiative is probably one of the most difficult ways to win public power. Another path is to try and win an electoral majority to enact legislation. “While it takes longer, you can cement a stronger, usually progressive majority in support,” he said.
Workshop attendees were clear-eyed about the fact that public ownership would not, in itself, be a silver bullet. They were quick to acknowledge the shortcomings of many existing public institutions, and that a publicly-owned utility will only be as strong as public participation in elections and decision making — a tall order when so few people today even understand the basics about where their energy comes from. Grace Brown, a researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who studies public power movements, said it’s a much harder proposition in the U.S. than in Europe, where people are used to relying on the government for services, and socialism isn’t such a dirty word.
“That’s not just about winning votes, it’s about changing the mindset of this whole country,” she told me. “It’s trying to change these huge ideological ideas of how this country understands what the state should be and what the government should do.”
Public power isn’t the only idea out there for breaking the inertia and corporate capture of the energy system. This year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed laws that will prevent utilities from charging ratepayers for their lobbying efforts. Several states are experimenting with new, performance-based regulations, whereby utilities’ compensation is tied to specific goals, including emission reductions.
There’s also evidence that the existing channels for democratic engagement with the energy system aren’t totally broken. California and Michigan both recently made big strides on the climate and equity issues that public power advocates care about. This summer, the Golden State passed a law requiring utilities to design progressive rates tied to customers’ incomes. Michigan passed a law requiring utilities to use 100% clean energy by 2040.
The revitalized push for public power is about more than clean energy. To proponents, it’s about shaping this new, green energy system in a way that benefits a wider public. Whether or not they see more victories, the questions they are raising about who decides when and how we transition to this hypothetical clean energy future are already infiltrating the wider climate discussion. And as past public power movements, like the one in Boulder, have shown, even when the campaigns fail, the threat they pose to utilities is usually enough to get the companies to change their approach.
If there’s one thing I took away from the workshop, it’s that the movement is just getting started. Expect to see more high-profile campaigns — perhaps in San Francisco or Ann Arbor — in the coming years.
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It took a lot of scrutiny and a lot of patience, but the city council is finally making progress against natural gas infrastructure.
Susan Albright, a city councilor in Newton, Massachusetts, was reviewing the latest batch of requests from the local gas utility in early July when one submission caught her off guard. The company, National Grid, regularly asks the city for permission to tear up stretches of road in order to replace aging gas mains and service lines. But this time, the utility wanted to install a new 46-foot pipeline leading to Newton Crossing, a mixed-use housing development that’s currently under construction.
“I thought, Oh my god,” Albright told me. “Here we are trying to get rid of pipe, and here’s some new pipe that they’re asking for.”
Such “grant of location” requests used to be a rubber stamp exercise for the Public Facilities Committee, of which Albright is the chair. But more recently, they’ve become contentious. Activists have started showing up to public meetings to question the necessity of pipeline work. Could the pipes be repaired instead of replaced? Or even better, retired? Could the houses served by them be electrified?
To get ahead of public outcry about a brand new pipe, Albright sprung into action. She pulled up plans the housing developer had filed with the city and learned that the apartments were intended to be all-electric. The developer had requested a gas connection solely to serve commercial businesses on the ground level. Albright found a contact for the project and picked up the phone.
“Is there any possibility that you could go electric for your commercial?” she recalled asking, explaining the connection between natural gas and climate change, and the city’s goal of weaning off gas. “At first he was very reluctant,” she told me. “But then he called me back and said that he’s willing to try it.” His ability to do so will depend on whether the electric utility can supply enough power. Nonetheless, Albright had successfully pushed a vote on the request to a later date. “We will review that grant of location at our meeting on July 28, and hopefully he will withdraw it, but we don’t know,” she said.
The city committed to transitioning away from natural gas by 2050 as part of its Climate Action Plan, enacted in 2019. Although residents have started to electrify their homes, the city hasn’t been able to slow down investment into the gas system. The story of Newton Crossing illustrates a strategy that has finally begun to move the needle. Councilors and activists have begun doggedly scrutinizing each of National Grid’s requests in hopes of finding alternatives that avoid investing more ratepayer money into a gas system that is — or should be — on a path toward obsolescence.
Progress has not been linear, and almost all of these attempts have so far failed. But the city does seem to have gotten the company’s attention. Earlier, in June, National Grid came to Newton with a different kind of request — an invitation to embark on a collaboration together with the local electric utility, Eversource, to proactively plan the city’s transition away from gas, and in doing so, begin to create a model for the company, the state, and possibly the country.
“I’m so excited to be here today because this is the first of its kind,” Bill Foley, National Grid’s director of strategy and transformation told the Public Facilities Committee while presenting the proposal. “We’ve never sat down with Eversource, National Grid, and another community to talk about how we’re going to broadly electrify a community.”
The subterranean network of natural gas pipes that runs under Massachusetts is old and leaky, with some sections dating back to the late 19th century. Utilities in the Commonwealth have always been required to address dangerous leaks, but in 2014, the state passed a law incentivizing more proactive measures to replace or repair leak-prone pipes. It was a matter of public safety as well as environmental protection — the methane that seeps out can kill tree roots in addition to being a powerful greenhouse gas.
The law created the Gas System Enhancement Program, or GSEP. Each fall, companies would file annual plans to the Department of Public Utilities outlining all the pipeline repair and replacement projects they aimed to complete in the coming year. In return, they’d get quicker approvals from regulators and be able to recover the costs more quickly from ratepayers.
In the years since, utilities have spent billions of dollars replacing thousands of miles of pipelines. Simultaneously, the state has fleshed out its plans to tackle climate change, making it clear that electrifying buildings would be a key component. As a result, the tide of public opinion about the pipeline program shifted. Replacing aging pipes may actually be worse for the climate, many activists now believe, since it means putting major investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure, thereby increasing inertia in the energy system and possibly delaying the transition to carbon-free solutions.
Former mechanical engineer Peter Barrer is one of those activists. Barrer lives in Newton, and has become an expert on the local gas network and the state’s pipeline policies. Using public data filed with state regulators, he calculated that out of the $18 million National Grid spent to address aging pipes under the GSEP program in Newton in 2023, only about $200,000 went to repairs, with the rest going to replacements. (National Grid later disputed the number, reporting that it spent $3 million on repairs that year.)
Barrer is concerned that the GSEP gives the company cover to spend excessively on pipeline replacements, which earn them larger profits than repairs. Other analysts have reached similar conclusions. Last year, the energy research consultancy the Brattle Group submitted testimony to state regulators on behalf of the Massachusetts attorney general’s office arguing that utilities are increasingly using GSEP to make everyday capital improvements. The level of spending “goes far beyond remediating immediate risks to safety caused by gas leaks,” the consultants wrote.
Barrer’s research on GSEP led him to a potential point of leverage with National Grid. When the utility wants to dig up a street, it has to submit a Grant of Location request to Newton’s Public Facilities Committee, which is then subject to a public hearing.
Newton is a progressive city that has long been at the forefront of climate action in the state. It’s one of 10 communities granted permission by the state to ban gas hookups in new buildings. (The Newton Crossing development got its permits before the policy went into effect.) The city council has also passed an ordinance requiring the largest existing buildings to reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050.
While the Public Facilities Committee doesn’t have the power to deny National Grid’s Grant of Location requests, Albright, the city councilor, told me, the meetings do present an opportunity to engage with the utility. Members and the public can ask questions and delay approvals. Barrer and other activists began using the requests as an opportunity to highlight the paradox of the city approving new gas infrastructure.
One particularly contentious fight began last October over a replacement on Garland Road, a street known for hosting a “Sustainable Street Tour,” during which residents spoke about their experiences greening their homes with solar, insulation, EVs, and heat pumps. “Bells kind of rang in my mind,” Barrer told me. “Here’s a great place to fight National Grid.”
The gas company argued that the Garland Road pipeline, 600 feet of cast iron from the 1920s, was simply too high-risk. “National Grid cannot agree to delay replacement long enough to determine if the Garland Rd customers that still use their gas service for one or more uses are willing to have their gas service disconnected,” Amy Smith, the director of the company’s New England Gas Business Unit, wrote in an email to Albright in January. “In addition, even if all customers on Garland Rd agree to have their gas service cut off, we do not currently have a mechanism to fund the costs of full electrification of each home.” The Committee signed off on the project.
But activists continued to challenge it. A resident of Garland Road, Jon Slote, surveyed his neighbors and found that all were either neutral or supportive of electrification. He also put together a cost comparison and found that the capital cost of electrifying the homes was 18% to 41% lower than that of replacing the pipeline.
National Grid didn’t budge. One of the reasons the block couldn’t be electrified, Smith explained to Barrer in emails that I reviewed, was that this segment of pipe “plays a critical role in providing pressure support for approximately 120 homes in the area. Maintaining minimum pressure is vital for both safety and reliability.”
Barrer told me he’s skeptical that replacing the pipe is the only solution, but acknowledged that the issue is real.
Perhaps Barrer’s biggest grievance, though, is that National Grid frequently makes requests that are not in its regulator-approved plans. Nearly 60% of the money the company spent in 2023 and was able to recover through the expedited GSEP process went to such projects, he found. A related issue: GSEP plans often don’t disclose the full extent of each project. “This is important for municipal planning,” Barrer told me. If the public can’t see in advance which areas the company is planning to work on, he said, “there’s no opportunity for the city to investigate. Maybe there’s streets on there that we can get support for electrification.”
He described the fight over gas pipelines in Newton as “a David and Goliath situation.” Activists want the opportunity to get ahead of these projects and figure out alternatives, he said, but aren’t given enough notice or details. “They have all the cards. They have a monopoly on gas, and they also have a monopoly on information.” He wants the state legislature to help them put up a fairer fight by passing two new bills that would require the utilities to disclose more information, sooner.
Albright, meanwhile, told me she thinks National Grid has acted in good faith. “The people that I’ve been working with, I trust that they’re trying to do the best for the company and for us as customers. I mean, they don’t want these pipes to explode.”
For about a year, Albright said, she has been having conversations with Smith of National Grid about what the city could do to start getting off gas. At the end of 2024, Smith came back with an offer — National Grid would work with Newton on an electrification pilot project. The company has since provided the city with a list of streets to consider for the pilot — mostly dead ends on the outskirts of the gas system, areas where taking out a stretch of pipe won’t affect other customers downstream.
Meanwhile, a lot has changed at the state level. Late last year and continuing into this spring, lawmakers and regulators enacted new policies to reform GSEP and better align it with the Commonwealth’s clean energy plans. That meant focusing on the highest risk pipes, prioritizing repairs instead of replacements, lowering the cap on spending for companies, and enabling them to spend some of the money on alternatives to pipelines, including electrification projects.
Perhaps these changes help explain what led National Grid to approach Newton earlier this summer with its proposal to collaborate. At the Public Facilities Committee’s June 18 meeting, representatives from National Grid and Eversource spent nearly three hours explaining their “integrated energy planning” effort, figuring out how to transition from gas to electricity while containing costs and ensuring reliable service. Now they wanted the chance to begin testing it out in a community.
“The technical stuff is easy,” Foley of National Grid told the Committee. “When it comes to knocking on a door and saying, Hey, how do we get you to electrify? That’s the challenging part. That’s what we’re going to learn.”
The Committee, the mayor, and city staff welcomed the idea. Even Barrer is optimistic. “I think it is unprecedented,” he told me, “and it could be very, very useful.” But he’s also skeptical. Will the company actually share the information advocates like him are looking for to analyze alternatives? And will it work quickly?
“From my perspective, every year that the plan doesn’t turn into action is another half a billion dollars of ratepayer money the National Grid gets to invest.” But, he added, “I’m hopeful. Let’s see what actually develops.”
On Fervo’s megadeal tease, steel’s coal gamble, and Norway’s CO2 milestone
Current conditions: Manila is facing severe flooding amid days of monsoon rains • Of the seven Marshall Islands that the U.S. Drought Monitor tracks, two are currently suffering extreme drought, and another three are under severe drought conditions • Wildfires are blazing in Oregon, where the Cram Fire has already scorched nearly 100,000 acres just 50 miles south of Portland.
OpenAI CEO Sam AltmanKevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Six months after the top executives of OpenAI and Softbank stood shoulder to shoulder at the White House to announce a $500 billion joint venture to build out the infrastructure for artificial intelligence across the United States, the so-called Stargate project has yet to complete a deal for a single data center. The companies promised in January to “immediately” invest $100 billion. But in a sign of the dialed-back ambitions, the project is now targeting the more modest goal of constructing one small data center by the end of this year, likely in Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That’s bad news for the power companies that have lavished in the projected demand from data centers. Crusoe Energy, a developer of gas- and renewable-powered data centers, boasted earlier this year that it was “pouring concrete at three in the morning” to build out its portions of the Stargate project at “ludicrous speed,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported in March. Over the course of just one month this spring, Morgan Stanley ratcheted up its estimates for capital expenditures in cloud computing this year by a whopping $29 billion, to $392 billion, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in May. Perhaps that’s another AI hallucination.
Fervo Energy’s breakthrough in harnessing fracking technology to tap into the Earth’s molten heat in far more places than ever before effectively launched the next-generation geothermal industry in the U.S. Now the Houston-headquartered startup is poised to vault “enhanced” geothermal power into a gigawatt-scale electricity source.
In a Monday post on LinkedIn, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer teased a “multi-GW development deal” currently in the works. He promised “more to come on this soon.” He did not respond to my inquiry Monday night. The company already has a deal for a 500-megawatt project called Cape Station in Utah, for which it netted a $206 million investment last month. But a project several times that size would put next-generation geothermal in the big leagues with nuclear power as a potential source of large-scale, baseload power.
Shares of Cleveland-Cliffs soared nearly 13% on Monday afternoon after the steelmaker said President Donald Trump’s tariffs had boosted demand. The company’s second-quarter earnings bested estimates, thanks to cost cutting and record steel shipments. CEO Lourenco Goncalves even suggested the company could sell parts of itself in the wake of Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s megadeal to take over American rival U.S. Steel. He confirmed “active conversations” to sell non-core assets but said “everything else is possible.”
On the call, Goncalves also suggested the administration’s embrace of coal had improved market conditions for the company. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, the chief executive confirmed that Cleveland-Cliffs would abandon its landmark green steel project because the hydrogen it needed was not available widely enough. Instead, Goncalves said, the company would revamp the project “in a way that we preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke.”
The chief executive of the largest natural gas company in the U.S. is urging Congress to overhaul energy permitting or risk losing the AI race to China. In an interview with the Financial Times, EQT CEO Toby Rice said, “The threat of not getting infrastructure built has only gotten larger — not only from bad actors getting rich by selling energy that could be replaced with American energy — it’s also the threat of China winning the AI race.” Specifically, he called on lawmakers to end what’s called “judicial review,” a period of six years during which opponents of a project can challenge the federal permits in court.
The U.S. has come to the cusp of easing federal permitting for years. After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats tried to ease permitting rules but faced opposition from progressives and conservationists who deemed any relaxing of regulations that could benefit fossil fuels a nonstarter. Democrats tried to revive the issue last year, but Republicans walked away from the negotiations once the election turned in the GOP’s favor. With the One Big Beautiful Bill revoking many of Democrats’ energy priorities, it’s unclear how much leverage Republicans have to restart talks ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The world’s first carbon shipping terminal designed to permanently store captured CO2 that would have otherwise gone into the atmosphere just took its first shipment, The Washington Post reported. Located on an island on the edge of the North Sea, Norway’s Northern Lights facility accepted 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory. The plant — funded by the government in Oslo and fossil fuel companies — could serve as Europe’s primary carbon dump, and as a model for Asian countries looking to establish their own storage facilities.
China’s exports of clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles shaved 1% of the global emissions outside China last year, a new Carbon Brief analysis found.
The CEO of Cleveland Cliffs is just the latest U.S. voice to affirm the dirtiest fossil fuel’s unexpectedly bright future.
While the story of coal demand has been largely about rapid industrialization in Asia — especially India and China — the United States under President Trump has been working hard to make itself a main character.
Case in point is in Middletown, Ohio, where a one-time clean steel project may be refashioned as a standard-bearer for an industry-driven U.S. coal revival. The company behind the project, Cleveland-Cliffs, won a Biden-era award of up to $500 million to develop and deploy hydrogen-based technology for iron and steel production. CEO Laurenco Goncalves began casting doubt on that project as long ago as September, when he told Politico that he was struggling to find buyers willing to pay more for low-carbon materials, and that he wasn’t sure the project “even makes sense with the grants.” Earlier this year, he told investors that the company was working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
During an earnings call Monday morning, Goncalves said the company had scrapped the project not because of the DOE, but rather because it was unable to get sufficient hydrogen for use as fuel.
“The very first thing: It’s clear by now that we will not have availability of hydrogen. So there is no point in pursuing something that we know for sure that’s not going to happen,” Goncalves said. “We informed the DOE that we would not be pursuing that project.”
Instead, the company has had “a very good conversation” with the DOE “on revamping that project in a way that we preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke,” Goncalves said. (Where have we heard that kind of language before?) “We are vertically integrated, and we use American iron ore and American coal and American natural gas as feedstock, all produced right here in the United States of America, employing American workers,” he added.
The evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.
The IEA largely chalked up the results to the world’s energy needs, writing that “the power sector has been the main driver of coal demand growth, with electricity generation from coal set to reach an all-time high of 10 700 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024.”
More recent analyses confirm that power demand, especially in Asia, could prop up global coal demand possibly for decades.
“Coal-fired power could be a bigger part of the energy mix for longer than expected, scuppering efforts to meet climate change goals,” a pair of Wood Mackenzie analysts, David Brown and Anthony Knutson, wrote in a report last week, echoing the IEA’s findings. China alone is responsible for almost three-quarters of global coal consumption, according to Wood Mackenzie. “New realities for energy markets in recent years have become more, not less, supportive of coal-fired power,” Brown and Knutson write.
The analysts put peak global coal demand a year earlier than the IEA, at 2026. But they also noted that “coal demand has consistently proven more resilient than expected.”
It’s possible that these fast-growing Asian nations could, for reasons of energy security or economy, decide to keep younger coal plants active for decades while extending the life of older plants to keep costs down. In this scenario, much of the world largely transitions away from using coal for power generation, but thanks to persistent Asian demand, global coal demand peaks as late as 2030. That could mean an extra 2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a base case scenario.
The U.S. federal government, meanwhile, has taken on a role as both a coal-friendly analyst and an active promoter of every facet of the industry.
A couple of weeks ago, a Department of Energy report declared that “absent intervention, it is impossible” for the U.S. to power the growth of the artificial intelligence industry “while maintaining a reliable power grid and keeping energy costs low for our citizens.” That energy-poor status quo, the DOE argued, was due in part to scheduled retirements of coal-fired generation.
The DOE has been doing its part to keep that generation online, using its emergency authorities to keep some coal plants open. It has joined President Trump in becoming a kind of all-purpose pitch man for the industry. Over the weekend, the Department’s X account posted an image of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with a shovel, copied and pasted in front of an open-pit mine, with the words “MINE, BABY, MINE.”
On the supply side, congressional Republicans tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a tax credit specifically for domestic metallurgical coal production, which could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Some of the largest end users of U.S.-mined metallurgical coal are outside the U.S., including the countries driving worldwide coal demand. India imported over 3 million tons of U.S. metallurgical coal in the first three months of 2025, with China just under a million, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
The tie-up between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel authorized in June, meanwhile, grants a “golden share” of the American company to the U.S. government, in part to ensure increased investment and capacity. That deal also explicitly provides for at least $1 billion of investment into U.S. Steel’s existing blast furnace operation, Mon Valley Works, in Western Pennsylvania. The investments “ensure Mon Valley Works operates for decades to come,” the company said in an announcement.
That means more coal: Mon Valley Works is the “largest coke manufacturing facility in the United States,” according to U.S. Steel, producing 4.3 million tons of the coal product both for its own operations and for sale to other steelmakers.
In an interview with Japanese media, Nippon Steel’s chief executive Eiji Hashimoto said that the newly expanded company will likely build a new steel mill in the U.S., as part of its goal to catch up in steel production with its Chinese rival China Baowu Steel Group Corp, while also using more of its existing capacity to increase production, hoping to eventually more than double its output by the middle of next decade.
(For what it’s worth, Japan is also a major importer of metallurgical coal from the United States, taking in just over a million tons in the first three months of 2025.)
While the future of coal will be determined in Asia, the U.S. steel industry is happy to work with the Trump administration and the coal industry to keep things burning.
“They see the value in blast furnaces just as we at Cleveland Cliffs do,” Cleveland-Cliffs’ Goncalves said of the U.S. industry’s new Japanese partners.