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South Dakotans successfully fought back against a law that would have made it easier to permit and build.
South Dakota voters have rejected a ballot measure that would have eased the permitting process for a highly contentious carbon dioxide pipeline. The planned $8 billion project, developed by Summit Carbon Solutions, would carry CO2 captured from ethanol plants to sequestration wells in neighboring North Dakota. But if the company had been banking on legislative relief for its siting challenges, it will have to figure out a new plan to move forward.
Referred Law 21, as the measure was called, was a citizen-led veto referendum on a bill that passed the South Dakota legislature and was signed by the governor in March. The bill would have preempted all local land use regulations and ordinances related to the siting of carbon dioxide pipelines and other transmission infrastructure, including power lines. Full authority to permit these projects would have been handed to the state’s utility commission, an elected three-member body that regulates utilities.
Summit Carbon Solutions is trying to build what would be the largest pipeline designed to carry carbon dioxide in the United States. From a climate perspective, putting debates on land use and local control aside, the calculus of the project is complicated.
Ethanol refineries are ripe for carbon capture — they emit a very pure stream of CO2 that is technologically easy to capture, and it’s better that it be buried underground than dumped in the atmosphere. But the long term prospects for ethanol in a low-carbon future are murky at best, and investing $8 billion in carbon capture and pipeline infrastructure could help justify its continued use over other, potentially better solutions. Though it’s clear electric cars will eventually crowd out ethanol from the passenger vehicle fuel market, some advocate for the industry to pivot to aviation fuel.
The pipeline faces opposition throughout the Midwest from a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including landowners in the pipeline’s path, environmental groups like the Sierra Club that oppose carbon capture in general, and Republican legislators who question the project’s merits on the grounds that climate change is merely a “hypothesis.” Though CO2 pipelines generally have a good track record for safety, a high-profile rupture in Mississippi in 2020, which sent 45 people to the hospital, has also amplified concerns.
At least five municipalities in South Dakota have passed rules governing the siting of the pipeline, Chase Jensen, a senior organizer for the environmental nonprofit Dakota Rural Action told me on a call last week. For example, Minnehaha County, the home of Sioux Falls, adopted setback rules last year that require pipelines to be laid 330 feet away from residential areas, businesses, and churches. An ordinance in Lincoln County requires 1,855 feet, and prohibits construction on sites of historical or archeological significance.
“Everybody who's going to make a buck from the future energy transition is licking their chops at this,” Jensen said of Referred Law 21, which would have preempted these ordinances. “It's a lot easier to just make campaign donations to three public utility commissioners than the 300-plus county commissioners across the state.”
The bill signed into law in March was painted as a compromise. Though it weakened local control, it gave counties the ability to charge pipeline companies a tax of $1 per linear foot of pipe installed. It also included a so-called “Landowner Bill of Rights” that enshrined certain protections like ensuring the pipeline’s developer is liable for damages caused by the project, and designating a minimum depth at which the pipeline must be buried.
But Jensen and others who opposed argued it didn’t offer landowners anything new — some of its provisions are already afforded by South Dakota law, and others had already been negotiated with Summit Carbon Solutions. Jensen pointed out that the utility commission already has the ability to override local ordinances if it finds them to be overly restrictive.
Now, with control over pipeline siting back squarely in the hands of local authorities, the future of the Summit project in South Dakota is unclear. The utility commission already rejected the company’s initial application for construction permits last year; Summit has since altered its route and reapplied.
Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia Law School, told me it was difficult to take away a clear message from the fight, in part because CO2 pipelines have strange politics. Coalitions for and against them don’t break down over party lines or traditional groups like environmentalists versus fossil fuel companies. Some climate advocates, as well as experts in the U.S. Department of Energy, say we’ll need to build many thousands of miles of new carbon pipelines in order to help us sequester carbon captured from industrial facilities and from the atmosphere.
The specific arguments over the Summit project may not apply to projects proposed elsewhere, Lockman told me, but its fate could still have ripple effects. “Any kind of high profile failure might make investors a little bit more leery to participate in this kind of project,” he said.
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We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.
In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”
The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
The Trump administration is hoping to kill the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, according to a Reuters report citing two anonymous sources within the Trump transition team.
That aspiration isn’t totally unexpected — President-elect Donald Trump flirted with ending the EV tax credit throughout the campaign. But it’s nonetheless our first post-election sense of how the Trump administration plans to pursue the Republican tax package that is expected to be the centerpiece of its legislating agenda.
If the EV tax credit is repealed, it would deal a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and other legacy automakers have invested billions of dollars to build EV factories and battery plants in order to prepare for an electric future. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automaking industry’s trade group, has privately lobbied lawmakers to keep all of the Biden administration’s subsidies for EV production.
GM and Ford aren’t doing this just for the climate. They’re trying to compete with European and East Asian automakers that are transitioning to EVs — and will continue to transition, regardless of policy changes within the United States. BYD, the Chinese company that exclusively makes EVs, is on track this year to sell more cars globally than Ford. That’s the entire Ford line-up, not just EVs. China has reached its commanding position in the EV industry partly by offering EV consumers and companies more than $200 billion in subsidies, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The rollback would also be a setback for Tesla and Rivian, the two highest-profile American EV-only companies. Yet according to the same Reuters report, Tesla supports the plan to repeal the tax credit. Elon Musk has asserted in interviews that because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance. (As the country’s No. 1 EV seller, Tesla has also likely benefited from EV tax credits — in their current and pre-Biden forms — more than any other company.) Repeal is part of Musk’s hypothesized plan to turn Tesla into a de facto monopoly, controlling the entire American EV industry.
Rivian shares have fallen 11% today, while Tesla’s are down just 5%. Ford and GM are trading flat.
The new GOP majorities in Congress hope to extend their 2017 package of tax cuts, which mostly benefit wealthy Americans. One way to pay for those tax cuts could be to repeal the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. The news today, then, is mostly a sign that the battle lines are being drawn in the auto industry: Much of the auto industry wants to keep the full slate of EV subsidies. Tesla wants to take them down.