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November 13, 2024

NV Energy Proposes ‘Strategic Network’ of EV Chargers

Visitors to Sand Harbor State Park at Lake Tahoe and Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas would be able to recharge their electric vehicles at the iconic destinations as part of a transportation electrification plan proposed by NV Energy.

The $100 million plan also includes EV chargers at Nevada ski resorts, casinos, sports complexes and convention centers. NV Energy filed the plan this month with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN).

The plan would bring about 1,822 EV chargers to 120 sites throughout Nevada. Some of the sites are geared toward tourists while others are aimed at underserved communities.

In addition to providing infrastructure for cars, the plan would add charging for electric bikes, boats, and transit-agency and school buses.

The three-year plan would begin on Jan. 1, 2022. PUCN has scheduled a prehearing conference on Oct. 6.

The proposal, called the Economic Recovery Transportation Electrification Plan, is a requirement of Senate Bill 448 from the state legislature’s 2021 session. The plan’s objectives are to accelerate transportation electrification while creating new jobs and boosting the state’s economy.

“The required programs remove barriers to electric vehicle adoption, increase access to chargers in historically underserved communities and develop a network of electric vehicle infrastructure across Nevada’s tourism and outdoor recreation economy,” NV Energy said in its proposal.

The plan builds on NV Energy’s existing transportation electrification incentive programs, the utility said. It also lays the groundwork for a longer-range transportation electrification plan from NV Energy that is due by Sept. 1, 2022, another mandate of SB448.

Five-pronged Proposal

NV Energy describes its plan as a “strategic network of public charging.” As required by SB448, the plan includes five components:

  • interstate corridor charging depot program;
  • urban charging depot program;
  • public agency EV charging program;
  • transit, school bus and transportation electrification custom program; and
  • outdoor recreation and tourism program.

EV charging at Red Rock Canyon and Sand Harbor are included in the $20 million outdoor recreation and tourism program.

At Sand Harbor, the plan envisions 20 level-2 chargers for cars, 10 bike chargers and two DC fast chargers for boats at a nearby Incline Village pier.

Plans for Red Rock Canyon include 10 level-2 chargers, two DC fast chargers and 10 bike chargers. A solar canopy plus battery storage are also being considered for the Red Rock site.

The plan proposes EV charging at a range of other tourism or recreation sites, such as Heavenly, Mt. Rose, Diamond Peak, and Lee Canyon ski areas; Allegiant Stadium and Cashman field in Las Vegas and Greater Nevada Field in Reno; casino-resorts in Las Vegas and Reno; and the Reno-Sparks and Las Vegas convention centers.

Interstate Charging

Another program geared toward tourism is the interstate corridor charging depot program, which would add EV charging stations along interstates 15 and 80 as well as U.S. 95. Motorists use those highways to get to tourist destinations.

The $9.4 million proposal includes five sites, each with two level-2 chargers and six DC fast chargers. Site owners could volunteer to participate, or NV Energy will recruit sites. The site owner would decide whether NV Energy or a third party would own the infrastructure.

For a third-party project, the owner would receive an incentive to cover three-quarters of the project costs, up to $1.2 million per site. An operation incentive of $7,500 per year for five years would also be provided.

The interstate charging program would augment the Nevada Electric Highway program launched in 2015 through the Governor’s Office of Energy in partnership with NV Energy.

While some of NV Energy’s proposed programs focus on tourism, the emphasis of the urban charging depot program would be underserved communities and residents of multi-family housing. The $26 million program would also increase access to EV charging for workers, transportation-network drivers, tourists and the general public.

The program would add an estimated 18 charging sites with a total of 180 charging ports in the Reno and Las Vegas areas.

The plan includes smaller, neighborhood charging sites at locations such as grocery stores and gas stations. Larger charging sites would be built at shopping malls, office parks and downtown locations. Some of the sites would include charging for electric bikes.

Vehicle-to-Grid Pilot

Another proposed program is the transit, school bus and transportation electrification custom program.

The $18 million program would include $6 million in grants to transit agencies for electric bus charging infrastructure. NV Energy would convene a working group to identify high-priority projects.

Another piece of the program is a $10 million pilot project that would provide school districts with electric bus charging infrastructure, complete with vehicle-to-grid capability. The idea is to see whether the electric school buses could send energy to the grid during high-demand periods or serve as a backup power supply for the schools.

NV Energy is envisioning about three school sites for the pilot program.

The final piece of NV Energy’s proposal is a public agency vehicle charging program, which would add EV charging at community centers, colleges and universities, and state agency offices. The $17 million proposal includes about 39 sites with a total of 448 charging ports.

Candidate public agency sites are the Grant Sawyer State Office Building in Las Vegas and the Capitol Complex in Carson City.

Colleges and universities identified for potential participation in the program include University of Nevada’s Reno and Las Vegas campuses, Nevada State College, College of Southern Nevada, Truckee Meadows Community College, Great Basin College, and Western Nevada College.

NEPOOL Reliability Committee Briefs: Sept. 21, 2021

Tariff Change Sought for Order 1000 ‘Lessons Learned’

ISO-NE’s first competitive transmission solicitation under Order 1000 last year ultimately resulted in incumbent utilities National Grid and Eversource Energy’s proposal winning. The RTO launched a “lessons learned” process following that solicitation through its Planning Advisory Committee to discuss potential improvements.

One of those improvements, according to a presentation from ISO-NE Director of Transmission Planning Brent Oberlin at the NEPOOL Reliability Committee meeting on Tuesday, is modifying the tariff to address the possibility of single or multiple qualified transmission project sponsors (QTPS) developing the complete solution and that more than one selected qualified transmission project sponsor agreement (SQTPSA) may be required.

Corresponding changes are also needed to the tariff so they “appropriately reflect competitively developed transmission projects into the Forward Capacity Market (FCM) network model.”

As part of the tariff changes, which are also being reviewed by the Transmission Committee, ISO-NE proposes to allow for a subset of needs identified in the RFP to be solved by a QTPS and for QTPSes to submit joint proposals, which could result in multiple sponsors developing the complete solution, requiring multiple SQTPSAs.

Oberlin said that if combined proposals solve the needs identified in the RFP, each selected QTPS would need to sign a separate SQTPSA and have their portion of the project added to the Regional System Plan project list.

The RC will vote on the tariff revisions at its Oct. 19 meeting, with Participants Committee action scheduled for its Nov. 4 gathering. ISO-NE will file tariff changes with FERC before the end of the year.

RC Recommends Support for Tie Benefits and ICR

The RC voted to recommend that the PC support ISO-NE’s proposed Forward Capacity Auction 16 tie benefits and installed capacity requirement (ICR) and related values for the 2025-2026 capacity commitment period. (See “ISO-NE’s Proposed ICR Shows Decrease for FCA 16,” NEPOOL Reliability Committee Briefs: Sept. 1, 2021.)

The RTO put forward an ICR of 32,568 MW for FCA 16, a 1,585-MW decrease from FCA 15. The ICR is the minimum system capacity needed according to Northeast Power Coordinating Council reliability criteria.

ISO-NE’s annual calculations also account for operators’ ability to purchase energy from neighboring balancing authority areas during a capacity deficiency. The RC voted to recommend Hydro-Québec interconnection capability credits (HQICCs) of 923 MW — up from 883 MW last year — which resulted in a net ICR of 31,645 MW, a 4.9% decrease from FCA 15.

FCA 16 will have the same zones as FCA 15: Northern New England as export-constrained with Maine nested inside, and Southeast New England as import-constrained.

The PC will take up the matter at its Oct. 7 meeting, ahead of a FERC filing by Nov. 9.

2022 Load Forecast Cycle Kicks off

The RC received a preview from the RTO’s Victoria Rojo of the plan for the upcoming Load Forecast Committee cycle, which will develop the long-term energy and demand forecasts that ISO-NE will publish in the 2022 Capacity, Energy, Loads and Transmission (CELT) report.

Planned work for the load forecast includes:

  • making improvements to the transportation electrification forecast include additional vehicles classes: light-duty fleet vehicles, medium-duty delivery trucks, school buses and transit buses;
  • investigating refining weather sensitivity of energy and demand for light-duty passenger vehicles;
  • reviewing winter model performance and explore changes to input variables to boost performance, with a discussion on any modeling changes at either the LFC’s December or February 2022 meetings; and
  • consider including more recent weather through 2020, which the LFC will discuss at its November or December meetings.

The final energy and demand forecasts will be published by ISO-NE next year in the 2022 CELT report.

NYC Works on ‘Integrative’ Environmental Justice

New York City officials are working to integrate environmental justice (EJ) considerations into all aspects of the city’s decision-making and planning to lessen the disproportionate impacts of policy on low-income communities and communities of color.

Low-income individuals and people of color typically face the highest energy burden, paying the greatest share of their income for their energy needs, but they also have a disproportionate pollution burden, said Commissioner Rory Christian of the state’s Public Service Commission during an Integrative Environmental Justice webinar hosted by Building Energy Exchange on Wednesday.

The federal infrastructure plan will hopefully make massive investments in equitable energy throughout the country, and New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) mandates that 40% of all state clean energy investments take place in disadvantaged communities, Christian said.

“All of these combined will have a transformative impact on people of color and low-income homes, but the important thing is we must do it right,” Christian said. The question is “how to deploy what will likely be a massive influx of funds in the most effective way to drive the most powerful results.”

The pandemic has exacerbated the situation, and the state projects that many people will face eviction for unpaid rent, and those same people being “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars behind in energy bills, from electricity to natural gas water and other utilities,” he said.

One of the mandates put forward by the governor of New York is setting a cap on the energy burden at 6% of income for all New Yorkers going forward, “so to achieve that goal we’re going to need not just to invest in energy efficiency, but in good practices, effective energy management policies and behaviors and a slew of other things,” Christian said.

Cumulative Burdens

Environmental justice communities also face cumulative burdens, with one community perhaps hosting “an ultra-polluting peaker plant,” as well as a waste treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, a bus depot and a waste transfer station, said Jasmine Graham, energy justice policy manager for WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

“All of those disproportionate pollution burdens on the exterior do impact the quality internally as well,” Graham said. “Within EJ communities, buildings are older, less efficient and more likely to have issues like lead, mold and asbestos that contribute to negative health impacts.”

A decade of advocacy at the grassroots level led to passage of laws in New York City, including Local Law 60 and Local Law 64, which mandate broad public involvement in the preparation of an Environmental Justice for All Report, said Adriana Espinoza, senior EJ advisor for the Mayor’s Office of Climate Policy.

In the report “we’re also going to be looking internally at our own agencies and own programs to determine the extent of the city’s contribution to environmental justice and how our programs are helping to advance environmental justice, or maybe, conversely, contributing to environmental justice concerns,” Espinoza said.

One example of “baking environmental justice considerations into city programs” is the New York City Accelerator, “a free tool in our toolkit where we can help reach our goals of carbon neutrality by 2050,” Espinoza said.

The Accelerator offers free technical guidance to boost energy performance, increase energy efficiencies, control costs and meet local law compliance.

“We bake environmental justice into that program first and foremost with targeted outreach, making sure that we are showing up to neighborhoods that are most impacted by climate change and can benefit the most from energy efficiency upgrades,” Espinoza said. “So, within the New York City Accelerator program is a concerted effort to reach neighborhoods in upper Manhattan and central Brooklyn, specifically.”

It’s also important when thinking about energy efficiency improvements to try at the same time to address other issues that tenants face, said Casey Weston, environmental policy analyst for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

It could be beneficial, according to Weston, to address mold or lead exposure while improving a building envelop, or incorporate health benefits into the cost benefit analysis for incentives.

“Thinking about reductions in emergency department visits, for example, and including those benefits, those are cost savings to all the taxpayers, and more importantly benefits to people who should not be exposed to these pollutants in the first place,” Weston said.

LSEs, Southern Regulators Pan MISO Resource Assessment

Load-serving entities and southern regulators are decrying MISO’s efforts to create its first long-term regional resource assessment report for release at year’s end.

The grid operator plans to perform a regional resource adequacy assessment to identify areas in its footprint that will be short on supply. Some member utility representatives and MISO South state public service commission staff argue that the assessment will be misused in state regulatory dockets to denigrate utilities’ resource plans.  

The assessment will differ from the RTO’s and the Organization of MISO States’ annual resource adequacy survey, which relies on LSE responses. It will also be distinct from the grid operator’s evaluations conducted before its annual capacity auction. While those estimates only look five years and one year in advance, respectively, the new assessment will examine the footprint’s resource retirements and additions five to 20 years in advance.

MISO says the new assessment will be purely informational and refreshed annually for its members. The RTO will tap Applied Energy Group, which will scour utilities’ retirement announcements, renewable additions and sustainability goals for more information.

“The world around us is changing a whole lot. As the fleet evolves, ongoing comprehensive analysis is needed to detail risks and inform MISO and stakeholders,” staff engineer Aditya Jayam Prabhakar said during a special workshop Monday.

Jayam Prabhakar said this year’s assessment will focus on the new resources on the horizon and when they’ll be built. He said MISO will examine how an evolving resource mix could increase resource-adequacy risks and how the system’s needs might change. Jayam Prabhakar said the assessment wouldn’t be used to justify the grid operator’s transmission planning.

But Mississippi Public Service Commission consultant Bill Booth said that identifying system needs through the report is at odds with a purely informational aim. He noted that MISO cannot dictate that resources be built.

“So, what is it going to do? Make recommendations?” Booth asked of the assessment.  

Jayam Prabhakar said the report will merely inform members and regulators about what the RTO sees coming.

WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante said he worried that the study would be cited in arguments before state commissions against utilities’ integrated resource plans.

“You may inadvertently box in load-serving entities,” he said. “People are going to use this report to their advantage, to the extent that they see an advantage.”

Fresh Energy’s Allen Gleckner said Plante’s argument didn’t make sense. “To argue against transparency of information so it serves your interests at the commissions is baffling. If you have a good plan in front of your commission, this study should support your planning,” he said.

Plante said LSEs must juggle confidential purchase agreements and fluid and confidential planning beyond a five-year horizon. He also said WEC has found that MISO’s vision of the future resource mix clashes with its own.

“You cannot hold the whole system hostage by saying, ‘Well your plan doesn’t agree with my plan, but I’m not going to tell you how,” argued the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Sam Gomberg. He said it’s impossible for an intervenor to misuse a well-researched and informational report in state commissions’ dockets.

Gleckner said he found LSEs’ five-year plans as being confidential “odd.”

“Frankly, that’s the kind of behavior by LSEs that makes planning so hard,” he said.

Jayam Prabhakar said MISO will simply extrapolate its members’ plans and update them annually. “There’s [nothing] extra being added in this assessment,” he said.  

Consumers Energy’s Kevin Van Oirschot said it’s a “fallacy” that the study would be purely informational.

“I would say just stop pretending that somebody is not going to use this for something,” he told MISO staff.

He also said he worried the study would be based on “inaccurate or incomplete” information and would put utilities in a position of continually defending themselves against the report.

America’s Power Michelle Bloodworth said it’s important for MISO to give its members a view of the resource mix beyond a five-year timeline.

The Organization of MISO States Executive Director Marcus Hawkins agreed and said OMS and MISO were able to iron out snags within the early days of their joint resource adequacy survey. He said it has since become a useful snapshot of the RTO’s near-term supply.

Mississippi PSC staffer David Carr asked that MISO clarify the appropriate use of the study ahead of time.

MISO currently estimates it will have about 30% renewable penetration by 2028. By 2040, it expects the Midwest region to achieve 54% renewable energy generation and a 40% carbon reduction from 2021 levels. MISO South is expected to have 36% renewable energy generation and a 55% carbon reduction by 2040.

MISO engineer Hilary Brown said the grid operator was able to secure about a third of its projected resource expansion through members’ integrated resource plans. She said not all MISO utilities are under obligations to produce IRPs and their absence doesn’t mean members aren’t actively planning their future resource fleets.   

The year-end assessment will coincide with MISO’s Markets of the Future report, which will outline changes necessary to manage a vastly different future generation fleet. (See MISO Begins Pondering Future Market Changes.)

Economists Hope Improved Data Will Strengthen Climate Policy

More granular data and improved computing power are allowing economists to refine their climate change predictions — and, they hope, influence policy.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” University of Chicago economist Michael Greenstone said Monday during a Climate Week NYC panel discussion hosted by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “We’re at the dawn of what I think is a new era.”

Until recently, research on climate damages was “too idiosyncratic,” said Greenstone, the director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. Integrated assessment models lacked transparency, and few studies were replicated to confirm initial findings, he said.

The new tools should eliminate “blind spots” on subjects such as climate-driven migration.

‘Politically Acceptable and Cost Effective’

Maureen Cropper, professor of economics at the University of Maryland at College Park, said better data can help with the challenge of designing policies that are both “politically acceptable and cost effective.”

“There’s been a huge, a huge literature evaluating the Clean Air Act after the fact to look at its cost effectiveness. And I think this needs to be done to find the policies and their opportunities [to address climate change]. And I also think there are opportunities to understand the impacts of overlapping climate policies,” said Cropper, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future and the former chair of the EPA Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Economics Advisory Committee. “This is an important research agenda.”

Clockwise from top left: Al McGartland, U.S. EPA; Maureen Cropper, University of Maryland at College Park; Michael Greenstone, University of Chicago; and Richard Revesz, Institute for Policy Integrity | Institute for Policy Integrity

Previous data and computing limitations prevented scientists from determining how climate change would affect different parts of the globe differently, Greenstone said. “The most disaggregated [data] was to divide the world into 16 regions. That has the unfortunate flavor of saying that climate change is going to be the same in Miami as it is in Minneapolis … and that, I think, led to statements like, ‘Global GDP will decline by 4% by the end of the century, on average.’ The problem is nobody lives at the global average,” he said.

Hot days don’t kill people in Houston because the region has adapted with air conditioning, he noted. But heat waves in the Pacific Northwest this summer killed more than 100 people and sent thousands to emergency rooms because those areas are not prepared.

Providing more granular information “allows communities to know what they should do to adapt. What you should do in Miami is very different than probably what you should do in Seattle, Wash.,” he said. “And then the kind of X factor — which I can’t prove, but I think is true — is by communicating to people what climate change will be where they live, my view is that that might unlock some of the political resistance about doing something about climate change.”

Social Cost of Carbon

One product of the improvements should be the Biden administration’s revision to the social cost of carbon (SCC).

Cropper expects the number to be much higher than the interim price set in February at $51/ton, saying the calculations underlying the price ignored research done since 2010. “If you look at the integrated assessment, models that are underlying the current estimates and [the] climate science part of those models, you have the peak impact of emitting a ton of CO2 on mean global temperature occurring in about 60 years. And recent climate science suggests this is going to occur is something like 20 years from now.”

Lowering the discount rate to 2% from the current 3%, as some have recommended, would increase the price from $51 to $125, she said.

Greenstone was co-leader of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases during the Obama administration, an experience he called “the most gratifying … and the hardest thing I’ve ever done professionally.”

“A ton has changed since 2009,” the year President Barack Obama took office. “And we’ve got a way better understanding of climate projection,” said Greenstone, who also expects a higher price.

“In 2009, and 2010 I think, there was a judgment that it was too challenging administratively to account for uncertainty. And so effectively, the uncertainty was valued at zero. And yet, we know … people buy insurance to protect your house against fires; car insurance; all kinds of insurance. We know that people just like us are willing to pay to get rid of [uncertainty]. … That should be an adder that goes on top of” the carbon price.

“I hadn’t appreciated this as an academic, but the different [federal] agencies are there to fulfill the mission of their agency; they’re not necessarily there to fulfill the broad societal goal. And so you had some agencies that effectively thought that the social cost of carbon should be infinite. And you had some who effectively thought that it should be zero,” he said. “So finding common ground, that was a big challenge.”

Greenstone recalled “a very, very nasty fight about the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter distribution, which basically says how much warming you’ll get for a doubling of CO2.”

“We had made a decision about that. And then a very important person in the government tried to relitigate that,” he said. “Everyone was dug in … and finally, the only way we were able to resolve it — this was in the midst of the Great Recession, and the economy was losing several hundred thousand jobs a month — was to say, ‘OK, would you like to ask the president [for] an Oval Office meeting about the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter distribution?’ And there was total silence. And then we were able to move forward.”

Al McGartland, chief economist for EPA and director of the National Center for Environmental Economics, said the new SCC could have an impact on FERC’s decision-making. “The great power of the social cost of greenhouse gases or carbon is it provides a way to create a level playing field for decisions,” he said. “In building out transmission, we’re only thinking about the economic benefits in terms of electricity rates, and not accounting for the benefits that could be provided by bringing low-carbon energy sources to more parts of the country. And were the social cost of carbon to be used in that decision-making process, I expect there would be greater construction of transmission lines than we currently see.”

NYU’s Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, who moderated the session, said he would like to see RTOs petition FERC to include a carbon adder in their generation dispatch algorithms. “That would be essentially the equivalent of a carbon tax on the wholesale electricity market … which would be a very attractive policy,” he said.

A ‘Rock in the Shoe’

Greenstone said it is essential that researchers publicize their findings beyond academic journals to become “like a rock in the shoe of policymaking [that] just can’t be ignored.”

He also said the U.S. should mandate that companies disclose their carbon footprints with the kind of rigor and standardization used in the financial reporting of publicly traded companies.

“That proved to be really important in giving people confidence in financial markets and allowing for financial markets to operate more efficiently,” he said. “I see a lot of desire by public companies and organizations who would like to begin to voluntarily do something about their carbon footprint, and the [absence of] credible numbers on what everyone’s emissions are … a self-inflicted wound.

Mandatory reporting on greenhouse gases “would help build the foundation of markets for people to voluntarily reduce their emissions, which are currently very, very immature and lead to ineffective solutions.”

Hawaii PUC Calls for Mediation in West Maui Solar Dispute

The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission last week instructed Maui Electric Company (MECO) and other parties to explore mediation over the disputed Kahana Solar Project proposed for West Maui.

The other parties include Kahana Solar, the West Maui Preservation Association (WMPA) and the Hawaii Division of Consumer Advocacy (CA).

MECO and Kahana Solar, a subsidiary of the Canada-based Innergex, have been working together to develop the 20 MW solar project coupled with a four-hour, 60-MWh battery energy storage system. The WMPA has contested the project, raising community-interest concerns.

The dispute escalated through exchanges in PUC dockets among the four organizations, prompting the PUC to hold two evidentiary hearings that ended with the parties agreeing only to discuss the possibility of mediation outside the hearings.

The dispute stems from WMPA’s concerns about project’s future impacts on West Maui and a perceived lack of input from the community.

“From the beginning, MECO has treated this project as a foregone conclusion without attending to the community members’ critical questions,” Ryan Hurley, an attorney representing the WMPA, said Friday. “These include whether or how the agricultural lands will be restored to service to West Maui communities at the end of the project’s life; why more native plants cannot be used as ground cover; and why it is so unthinkable that an independent entity composed of West Maui community members would be more effective at managing community benefits than a Canadian-based developer who plans on contracting out both the construction and operations of its project.”

Brian Hiyane, managing counsel at MECO parent company Hawaiian Electric, disagreed, saying the utility had met the burden of proof that its power purchase agreement with Kahana solar is prudent and in the public interest.

“As shown, the proposed Kahana Solar Project will result in a substantial reduction in fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” Hiyane said. “The project will also reduce the need for fuel imports, reduce fuel supply reliability risks, increase the state’s energy independence, provide substantial assistance to Maui Electric in meeting the state’s renewable portfolio standard, and provide customers with greater system reliability and flexibility.”

Julia Verbrugge, attorney for the CA, said, “We are not convinced that the burden has been sustained at this point … This must be done in a formal manner, and not at the expense of those communities.”

Verbrugge wondered why Kahana Solar opposed including a third-party administrator during last week’s hearings after the WMPA noted that using such a mediator would “go a long way” toward getting the group to agree to the project.

“Sometimes it helps to have a neutral third party, such as a mediator, involved to help as part of a collaborative process,” she said.

Verbrugge also lamented that “we haven’t even gotten to the second bifurcated part of this docket: the interconnection phase.”

Douglas Codiga, attorney for Kahana Solar, argued that the project’s value is indeed a foregone conclusion, saying, “The project stands ready to deliver a multitude of critically important benefits, [both] economic and environmental.” He said the project would power approximately 11,600 homes, lower electricity bills, protect against oil price volatility, and reduce GHGs.

“The record firmly establishes that the application and PPA should be approved at this time … The record overwhelmingly supports the approval of the application,” Codiga said.

Pointing to the openness to dialogue during last week’s hearings, PUC Chair James Griffin ordered the parties to consider mediation amongst themselves.

The PUC instructed the parties to report back on Sept. 23 on any progress on that request. If the parties do enter mediation, they will have until Oct. 15 to conclude deliberations. The commission noted that it will “not be involved in any mediation efforts” and that the parties must deliberate on their own.

Gov. Baker Creates Commission on Clean Heat in Massachusetts

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed an executive order on Monday establishing a governing body to focus on incentivizing residential and commercial building owners to convert to renewable electric heat.

The Commission on Clean Heat will bring together 22 experts and stakeholders in affordable housing, energy efficient building design, heating system technology, healthcare and real estate to advise the administration on strategies and policies to reduce emissions from heating fuels, according to the governor’s office.

“Massachusetts has ambitious climate goals, and we will need to pursue innovative solutions to reduce emissions from our heating fuels, keep costs low, and deliver lasting benefits to our communities,” Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito said in a statement. The commission will “reflect a diversity of expertise that will be crucial in developing the forward-thinking policies we need to achieve our nation-leading emissions reduction targets.”

Legislation proposed in the state earlier this year sets an ambitious target for the state to retrofit and electrify one million homes by 2030, or roughly 100,000 homes per year. The Building Justice with Jobs Act (H.3365) calls for an oversight commission to retrofit buildings and track emissions from the building sector in the state. (See: New Mass. Bill Targets 1M Home Retrofits.)

Filed by Rep. Maria Robinson and Sen. Marc Pacheco, the bill was largely the work of the Massachusetts Green New Deal Coalition of community, environmental and labor leaders, of which the nonprofit 350 Mass is a member.

Cabell Eames, the legislative manager of the Better Future Project under 350 Mass, told NetZero Insider she is apprehensive of the Baker administration’s approach to climate policy.

A top-down approach can leave people behind, and many “don’t have the means to retrofit their homes,” Eames said.

“We have to make this very simple for folks,” Eames added. “If people need to be [temporarily] displaced because of asbestos or mold found during the retrofit process, they should be displaced equitably.”

The executive order also creates a task force to support the work of the commission, made up of members of the executive branch, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and the Executive Office of Housing and Urban Development.

Eames argued there should be a task force that is community-based that serves an oversight role on the decision-making at the executive level.

A community-based approach “starts slower, but once you get the input you can really see it take off,” Eames said of home retrofits.

The Commission on Clean Heat is the first of its kind in the nation, according to state officials, and it is intended to provide specific plans to push the decarbonization of buildings on a larger scale.

Vermont is considering a Clean Heat Standard to reduce emissions from heating and hot water in buildings as part of its pending climate action plan. (See: VT Climate Council Puts Clean Heat Standard on the Table.) And New York is drafting a Carbon Neutral Buildings Roadmap to set targets for reducing emissions in buildings across the state.

Heating and cooling infrastructure in homes and commercial buildings are the second largest source of emissions in Massachusetts after transportation, according to state data.

Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Kathleen Theoharides will serve as chair of the new commission and will recommend the commission members for Baker’s approval. By November 2022, the group must submit a set of policy recommendations to the administration that will reduce the use of heating fuels and slash building emissions.

Hydrogen, Funding, Deployment Feature at ZEB Conference

DENVER, Colo. — Adequate funding, deployment challenges and hydrogen-versus-battery electric were hot topics last week at the 2021 International Zero Emission Bus Conference, hosted by the Center for Transportation and the Environment.

The event presented more than 75 speakers to more than 1,000 attendees.

Thursday’s panelists described how each of their organizations has started to transition to zero-emission buses, an effort that has met with overwhelmingly positive response across their industries.

“I think there’s a theme here. Everybody seems to like them,” Ian Redhead, deputy director at Kansas City Airport, said.

Though this has been the case, there continue to be barriers to ZEB adoption, especially when considering funding. While grant programs are available, it can be difficult to qualify and obtain funding through these avenues, Redhead said.

Erik Bigelow, senior engineering consultant for CTE, addressed the particularly challenging task of funding the transition to ZEBs in education.

“Everybody wants kids riding clean electric school buses, but education funding is always a challenge,” he said.

But even with initial funding challenges, it is still worth it for organizations to make the transition, Redhead said.

“When we did our homework, we made a really compelling case about why the electric buses were the way to go long-term. … The technology is not cheap … but long-term when you do the cost-benefit analysis, it definitely warrants the investment,” he said.

Moderator Dan Raudebaugh, executive director at CTE, said the transition will have to move at a much faster pace to reach decarbonization goals. Mass deployment of electric buses will be necessary in the near-term to significantly reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector, he said.

“We’ve been deploying buses at four, five, six at a time, and to make the next step we’re going to have to start deploying buses at 15, 20, 25 at a time,” Raudebaugh said.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell or Battery Electric?

A question a company must ask before transitioning to electric buses is what kind of technology it needs. While hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric buses are both more efficient and environmentally friendly, they can serve different purposes based on the function of an organization.

Salvador Llamas, chief operating officer at AC Transit said, “Battery electric or fuel cell. Which one’s better? That’s like me trying to pick my favorite child. They’re both the same. They’re both electric drive buses. One is a sprinter; one is a marathon runner. One combs her hair different than the other. This is exactly why AC transit created the Zero Emission Transit Bus Technology Analysis to really get deep into the weeds on the data, the performance metrics, the cost and start to really guide us as an agency whether the technologies that are available are going to be able to meet and fulfill the duty cycles that we commit to our communities.”

AC Transit General Manager Mike Hursh said cost is the biggest barrier to hydrogen.

“If we can’t get hydrogen down below $5/kilogram it’s just not going to compete,” he said. “Once we have market saturation of hydrogen and the price is there, it’s going to be a very on-par competitor to the other zero-emission technologies out there.”

Facilitating the Transition

The panelists agreed that sharing information and industry cooperation would help spark more adoption of ZEBs.

“We can influence the economies of scale when we purchase our equipment together. We can also share best practices [and] lessons learned so we can avoid pitfalls that cost us money,” Llamas said.

Redhead said more investment and research will be key to not only transitioning to electric buses, but to an electric economy.

“The more that people are investing in the technology, the better it is for all of us. We’re talking about buses and so forth, but buses [are] a jumping off [point] to other things, and as long as people start realizing that there are other industries … that are also looking at electric technologies … then we will have more and more options to be able to supply what we want.”

Two Transmission Projects Selected to Bring Low-carbon Power to NYC

New York has selected two transmission line projects to help decarbonize power in New York City, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday during the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC.

The state, she said, chose the Clean Path New York project and the Champlain Hudson Power Express project from among seven submitted to the Clean Energy Standard Tier 4 solicitation issued in January.

“New York’s communities are repeatedly facing serious consequences as a result of the devastation caused by the global climate crisis, and the stakes have never been higher as we deal with the economic and environmental destruction these extreme weather events leave behind,” Hochul said.

The Champlain Hudson line, developed by Transmission Developers Inc. and Hydro-Québec, is an underground and underwater transmission line that would run 339 miles between the Canada-U.S. border and New York City.

“This is a transformative moment for New York City’s fight against climate change,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

The project’s opponents are concerned about the developers’ plan for the line to cut through the Hudson River. The cable would be laid along 200 miles in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River with a machine that uses high-powered water jets to blast away sediment to create a 7-foot-deep trench.

That process, according to the environmental organization Riverkeeper, could churn up legacy contaminants such as polychlorinated biphenyl, which were once used as dielectric and coolant fluids in machines and dumped into the Hudson by General Electric.

“I’m dismayed that New York state found a way to avoid caring for … the river when there are other solutions,” John Lipscomb, Riverkeeper’s patrol boat captain, told NetZero Insider.

New York is “checking the green box without looking at the details, and the details are important,” Lipscomb said. 

Riverkeeper plans to meet with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) next week about the final approval of the line.

Once finalized, NYSERDA will submit the negotiated contracts for the awarded projects to the Public Service Commission for consideration and approval. If the Tier 4 contracts are approved, NYSERDA payments will begin when the line has all required permits and local approvals, is constructed and delivers power to New York City.

Routing and environmental work is underway on the 174-mile Clean Path line, according to a statement from the developers, Forward Power, a joint venture of Invenergy and EnergyRe, and the New York Power Authority. The project route runs from Delaware County, in New York’s Southern Tier economic development region, through the Mid-Hudson region to New York City. A majority of the transmission line will be built on existing rights of ways already used by roads and transmission lines, the developers said.

The proposed Clean Path route, according to the developers’ application, also requires burying the line in the Hudson River.

Full operations are expected to begin in 2025 for Champlain Hudson and 2027 for Clean Path.

Electric Delivery Trucks Coming with or Without Congress

Electrification of U.S. trucking is going to happen whether or not Congress finds a way to help fund and expedite the transition as part of the Biden administration’s effort to address climate change.

While congressional Democrats struggle to keep moderates on board a $3.5 trillion, 10-year budget plan as a companion to the $1 trillion infrastructure bill decarbonizing the U.S. economy, at least one company among the nation’s trucking fleets is preparing to ditch diesel for electrons.

FedEx (NYSE:FDX) is expecting to receive the first order of EV600 electric delivery vans from General Motors’ (NYSE:GM) BrightDrop subsidiary in December, Russell Musgrove, managing director of global vehicles for FedEx Express, said in a recent webinar sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and produced by The Hill.

Those trucks, all headed to California where the company has recently completed the installation of 1,000 charging stations, are just the beginning, he said.

FedEx has been interested in electrification for more than a decade — ahead of the developments in technology and manufacturing that has finally made the switch possible — and is eager to switch, Musgrove said. “We’re at the point where we’re ready to scale. The good news is we’re the perfect type of fleet to be able to do that home delivery last mile.”

The company’s goal is to make 50% of local deliveries with electric vehicles by 2025 and 100% by 2030. It is planning to run a fully electric trucking fleet — not just local pickup and deliveries — by 2040. And it expects to have a wide choice of electric trucks to choose from.

“All of the [truck manufacturers] have made the commitment. They’ve finally accepted the reality that electricity is going to disrupt their industry, and that they’re going to invest literally billions of dollars into development of these new products,” Musgrove said.

This has happened globally as well. For example, FedEx is buying electric trucks from a Chinese maker for its delivery fleets there, where government policies have pushed the industry toward electrification.

With congressional negotiations dragging on and no consistent federal policy to support electrification, FedEx has another concern: the strength of the thousands of local electrical distribution systems it will need to use.

IKEA, which is not a delivery service, has worked with electric rental truck services to enable smaller delivery companies to run electric trucks in New York City.

“We’re providing a rental fleet that contractors can have access to on a very short-term basis, a day or week rental, without having to get in involved in a long term financial entanglement,” said Steven Moelk, IKEA’s project implementation manager of zero-emission delivery initiatives.

IKEA plans to “light up” its stores to enable fleet charging, he said, “with the hope that eventually our service providers themselves will get on board.”

Looking ahead, Moelk said he thinks truck makers are poised to begin offering a wide choice of electric trucks.

“I’m very optimistic to see our large domestic automobile manufacturers get into the electric truck market, whether its BrightDrop or the Ford E-Transit [or] a lot of other smaller [original equipment manufacturers], some of whom we’ve partnered with already. I think the technology is good, and we’re moving forward,” he said.

The transition could be accelerated by policy changes at the federal level, said Jimmy O’Dea, deputy director of trucks at CALSTART, an organization of more than 250 companies that lobbies for clean transportation technologies and policies.

There are currently no federal rebates for companies that buy electric trucks even though there have been consumer rebates for hybrids and EVs for some time, O’Dea said. He said that is one of the topics under discussion in the budget reconciliation process.

“There are proposals for electric truck incentives at the federal level, which would be a huge win for this industry to get off the ground,” he said.

Musgrove said the “endgame” from the trucking fleet perspective is “to get the total cost of ownership [of an electric truck, including fuel and maintenance] to be equal to diesel equivalent or gas equivalent.”

“It’s just a very efficient fuel,” he said of electricity. “It’s been around for 100 years. And now it’s back at the forefront … based on changes in battery technologies. It’s a hard sell, but in reality, it’s the right decision for fleets to make from a financial perspective, with a huge benefit.”