Massachusetts environmental advocates hope a provision in the state’s new climate law could be a final blow to a proposed expansion of private jet facilities at a suburban airport.
Opponents say adding 500,000 square feet of hangar space at Hanscom Field, a general aviation airport that serves private and corporate aircraft in a town 20 miles outside of Boston, will inevitably mean more flights — mostly private jet travel to luxury locations — which will increase climate pollution with minimal public benefit.
“This is an industry that is highly polluting and yet serves only a very narrow slice of the public,” said Alex Chatfield, a local social worker and an activist fighting the project.
The expansion plans have been in the works since 2021, but progress slowed in June after state regulators rejected the planners’ first environmental impact report. Since then, state lawmakers passed a new law requiring state agencies and boards, including the state port authority, to consider the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in their decisions.
The measure does not directly prohibit the Massachusetts Port Authority from proceeding with projects such as the Hanscom plan, but it does leave the agency vulnerable to legal action should it forge ahead without being able to show it weighed the likely greenhouse gas emissions against the benefits of the plan.
Much-needed hangars
The expansion plan started with Massport, which oversees operations at Hanscom as well as Boston’s Logan International Airport and Worcester Regional Airport. In 2021, the agency released a request for proposals to develop “much-needed hangars” at the airport, said Massport spokesperson Jennifer Mehigan. A plan submitted by North Airfield Ventures and Runway Realty Ventures won the bid.
The proposed facilities would be built on 47 acres of land, some of which is already owned by the developers and some of which would be leased to them by Massport. The project comprises 17 new hangars, the rehabilitation of a historic Navy hangar on the site, and fuel storage facilities.
Planners argue the development would be environmentally beneficial, because the structures would be designed for net-zero energy use and built to LEED Gold standards, and buildings and equipment would be electrified whenever possible. They also claim the additional capacity would help cut down on emissions from so-called “ferry flights,” in which a plane hangared elsewhere flies to Hanscom to pick up passengers and then returns to its home airport at the end of the trip.
Opponents, however, argue that more hangars will inevitably mean more flights. These flights, they say, are likely to be private jet travel to luxury locations, generating emissions for the benefit of just a privileged few. One report, by Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, found that 31,600 private flights departed Hanscom during an 18-month period in 2022 and 2023, and that roughly half of those were bound for high-end vacation destinations like the Bahamas, Palm Beach, and Nantucket.
“It’s very well known that private jets are the most polluting form of transportation per passenger ever devised,” Chatfield said. “It is on a scale that is really hard to imagine.”
State environmental regulators are also skeptical. The state response to the developers’ first environmental impact report, referred to the “fanciful nature of the proponents’ ‘ferry flight theory,’” pointing to a study that found only 132 ferry flights actually occurred at Hanscom rather than the 3,500 developers claimed. Regulators also suggested new hangars at Hanscom were unlikely to attract planes to relocate, and therefore would not reduce what ferry flights do occur.
The developers can resubmit their environmental impact report, addressing the state’s concerns. One of the founders of North Airfield Ventures said the company declines to comment on its plans at this time.
Factoring in climate impacts
In the months since the state’s order was released, legislators created another obstacle for the project.
As Massachusetts attempts to reach its goal of net-zero carbon emissions, an ongoing mundane-yet-important challenge has been the fact that some crucial state agencies and boards have lacked the authority to factor climate impacts in their decisions. These bodies were founded well before the climate crisis became such a pressing public policy question, and thus their rules never required or authorized them to consider greenhouse gas emissions or other climate impacts in their decision-making.
In recent years, attempts have been made to integrate climate change mitigation into more statewide policies and processes. A climate law enacted in 2021 requires the administration to set greenhouse gas reduction goals to be realized by the state’s three-year energy efficiency plans, which were initially intended only to reduce the cost and quantity of electricity, gas, and oil used. The same bill instructed public utilities regulators to consider greenhouse gas impact as part of their decisions.
“The department up to that point had just focused on reliability and affordability,” said state Sen. Michael Barrett, chair of the legislature’s committee on telecommunications, utilities, and energy, and one of the main authors of both the 2021 and 2024 climate bills. “I have wanted to reorient state agencies that don’t seem to have gotten the memo about climate change being an existential crisis.”
The latest bill included more such provisions, authorizing the Board of Building Regulations and Standards to give preference to building materials that boost emissions reductions, and requiring Massport to consider the greenhouse gas impacts of its decisions.
“I hope that Massport appreciates that what is done today on climate is inadequate, and I hope it also appreciates that the policies have changed,” said Barrett. “I don’t pretend to be able to predict particular outcomes on particular projects, but I do know that Massport needs to take this seriously.”
A trailblazing regional greenhouse gas partnership on the East Coast is considering possible changes or expansion that would allow it to keep building on its success — and the stakes grew higher last month with the reelection of Donald Trump.
The 11-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, established in 2005, is the country’s first regional cap-and-invest system for reducing carbon emissions from power generation. Since 2021, administrators have been conducting a program review, analyzing its performance since the last review in 2017 and weighing potential adjustments to make sure it continues to deliver benefits to member states.
The role of such programs is more crucial as Trump’s pledges to roll back federal climate action leaves it up to cities, states, and the private sector to maintain the country’s momentum on clean energy over the next four years. In RGGI, as the regional initiative is known, states have a potential model for scaling their impact through collaboration.
“RGGI has not only been an effective climate policy, it’s been an extraordinary example of how states can work together on common goals,” said Daniel Sosland, president of climate and energy nonprofit Acadia Center. “It is a major vehicle for climate policy now in the states, more than it might have seemed before the election.”
How RGGI works
RGGI sets a cap for total power plant carbon emissions among member states. Individual generators must then buy allowances from the state, up to the total cap, for each ton of carbon dioxide they produce in a year. The cap lowers over time, forcing power plants to either reduce emissions or pay more to buy allowances from a shrinking pool.
States then reinvest the proceeds from these auctions into programs that further reduce emissions and help energy customers, including energy efficiency initiatives, direct bill assistance, and renewable energy projects. Since 2008, RGGI has generated $8.3 billion for participating states, and carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in the nine states that have consistently participated fell by about half between 2008 and 2021, a considerably faster rate than the rest of the country.
“It has really thrived and been really effective across multiple administrations,” said Jackson Morris, state power sector director with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “RGGI is a winning model. It’s not theoretical — we’ve got numbers.”
Currently, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont are part of the program. Virginia joined RGGI in 2021, but in 2023 Gov. Glenn Youngkin repealed the state’s participation, a move immediately challenged in court; a judge ruled last month that the governor lacked the authority to withdraw the state from initiative, though a spokesman for the governor has declared the state’s intention to appeal.
There is widespread agreement that RGGI will endure despite likely federal hostility to climate measures. There was no attempt to take direct action against it during Trump’s first term, nor has there been any concerted industry opposition, said Conservation Law Foundation president Bradley Campbell, who was involved in the founding of RGGI when he was commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Supporters also note that the program has historically had broad bipartisan support: Participating states have been led through the years by both Republican and Democratic governors and legislatures.
Politics has had some influence over the years, though only at the margins. New Jersey, a founding member of RGGI, left in 2011 when Chris Christie was governor, but returned in 2020 following an executive order from his successor. Pennsylvania joined in 2022 through an executive order from the governor, but its participation is now being challenged in court.
Still, RGGI’s foundations are solid and will remain so, experts said.
“The basic infrastructure has weathered the political winds over the decades,” Campbell said.
Looking forward
Nonetheless, RGGI will need to make some carefully thought-out program design decisions during its current review to make an impact in the face of falling federal support for decarbonization.
One question under consideration is whether to maintain the existing trajectory for the overall emissions cap for the program — a reduction of 30% between 2020 and 2030, then holding steady thereafter — or to continue lowering the limit after 2030.
The RGGI states are also contemplating a possible change to the compliance schedule that would require power generators to acquire allowances worth 100% of their carbon emissions each year, and certify compliance annually. The current system calls for certification every three years, and only mandates allowances equivalent to half of carbon emissions for the first two years of each period.
The program is looking for ways to appeal to potential new participant states that have less aggressive decarbonization goals than current member states without watering down the program’s overall impact on decarbonization, said Acadia Center policy analyst Paola Tamayo. Acadia suggested possible program mechanisms such as giving proportionately more allowances to states with more stringent emissions targets to incentivize tighter limits.
“At this point it is critical for states to maintain a high level of ambition when it comes to programs like RGGI,” Tamayo said. “There are different mechanisms that they can implement to accommodate other states.”
The program review is expected to yield a model rule some time over the winter, though updates may be made into the spring as the RGGI states receive and consider feedback on how to accommodate potential new participants.
States will also need to maintain and strengthen their own climate policies to magnify the impact of RGGI, Campbell said. He pointed to Massachusetts, where Gov. Maura Healey needs to show “bolder leadership,” he said, and Maine and Vermont, where the Conservation Law Foundation has filed lawsuits in an attempt to compel the states to meet their own carbon reduction deadlines.
“It’s especially important that the states that have strong emissions reduction mandates speed up the implementation of their climate laws,” he said. “State leadership on these issues is going to be more important than ever.”
Blue-state attorneys general let none of this go without a fight — filing dozens of lawsuits and taking other actions on all manner of Trump administration moves, not just those connected to the environment, energy and climate. Connecticut was in the thick of it, especially on climate issues related to air quality and the emissions known to contribute to global warming and climate change.
But the second Trump administration could prove even more challenging for the attorneys general. It arrives with previous experience and a team potentially less prone to the mistakes that often caused failures in court in the first go-round. Trump will also have majorities in both chambers of Congress to bolster his agenda.
There are also the very specific policy and action recommendations in Project 2025, the conservative governing plan developed by the Heritage Foundation with assistance from many officials connected to Trump’s first term. After facing serious blowback to the plan during the campaign, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it, though his campaign website contained some of the same ideas.
There is also a super-majority conservative U.S. Supreme Court that has already flexed its muscles. It has issued a number of rulings that have effectively closed off avenues for challenges. The Chevron decision in June and the court’s use of the so-called major questions doctrine both generally now restrict what agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department can do without specific direction from Congress.
“It’s hard to overstate how profound this change is,” Tong said. “It essentially overturns the whole apple cart of regulatory infrastructure in this country.”
“I think we’re expecting a fight on everything. And that regulatory process — in changes in rulemaking — is going to grind to a very slow crawl and in some cases, to a halt. And that was the point of the people that initiated this.”
The Supreme Court rulings were destined to cause difficulties for Connecticut and other states regardless of whether Trump or Harris won. Tong said he and his blue-state brethren had been planning for both contingencies, though he wouldn’t say what the strategies will be.
“We’ve been preparing for the prospect of the Trump presidency for a long time now, and we are very closely coordinated and aligned,” he said. “We are ready.”
Roger Reynolds, senior legal director with the advocacy group Save the Sound called the Supreme Court rulings hugely concerning. “We’re in a really critical place right now. They have a clear anti-regulatory agenda,” he said. “It’s about putting their hands on the scales on the side of the regulated industries.”
Connecticut’s Democratic senate leaders, President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, sent a letter last week to Gov. Ned Lamont urging him to prepare to combat Trump administration actions that could hurt the state and the region. The request follows California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to hold a special legislative session to ensure there is enough money to take legal action against the Trump administration when necessary. Meanwhile, the governors of Colorado and Illinois are forming a blue state governors’ coalition to oppose Trump administration efforts.
The Biden administration has methodically reinstated many of Trump’s first administration rollbacks and fortified them with both regulatory-enhanced programs and funding, such as in the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure act.
Trump’s own campaign statements and promises as presented in his platform, Agenda 47, as well as Project 2025, could initiate another round of climate change, energy and environmental whiplash.
According to published reports, two of the first administration’s more effective members, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, both former fossil fuel industry lobbyists, are back at work in the transition and could be in line for positions in the new administration.
Within a week of the election Trump named former Long Island Republican congressman Lee Zeldin to run the EPA. He has limited environmental expertise but is a Trump loyalist. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel proponent, was nominated to head the Interior Department and to lead a new National Energy Council. And a fracking company executive, Chris Wright, was named to lead the Energy Department and sit on that council. Wright has said there is no climate crisis.
A close review of the nearly 900-page Project 2025 shows that it targets climate change, as well as energy and environmental programs and regulations. The project seeks to cripple the EPA, curtail if not eliminate funding and subsidies for clean and renewable energy programs — including for electric vehicles — as well as eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. And it would eliminate any focus on environmental justice.
It seeks to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is popular enough among Republicans whose states and districts have benefitted that 18 members of the House Republican Caucus sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson asking that it not be repealed.
Project 2025 also derides the idea of addressing climate change as a policy goal and seeks to remove even the mention of it broadly throughout government.
It contains pointed political statements such as this: “Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”
And it makes a number of specific recommendations to remove climate change as a consideration, such as with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: “End the focus on climate change and green subsidies;” and for the Energy Department: “Eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”
Project 2025would privatize the National Weather Service and dramatically reduce the percentage of funding provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery from disasters like the historic flooding Connecticut, and other states, have experienced due to climate change.
The impacts of any of these would likely be felt down to state and local levels.
Connecticut’s biggest worries
If the Trump administration implements the environmental recommendations of Project 2025, Connecticut as well as other states face the possibility that unspent federal funds for climate and energy projects could be clawed back, costing jobs and the economic development around them.
Among 11 bullet points a conservative administration should pursue in energy policy: “Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.”
There is also the potential that the funding Connecticut and nearly all states have grown to rely on for large energy and electric grid projects could disappear. Project 2025 calls for eliminating and defunding the Grid Deployment Office.
Connecticut and the entire New England grid has been counting on offshore wind development to bolster its energy capabilities in the face of expanding power needs for economic development around data centers and other large businesses, as well as for electrification needs for motor vehicle charging and heat pump conversions.
Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes steered clear of any hand-wringing when asked what she expects from a second Trump administration. She did, however, note that roughly a quarter of DEEP’s budget for both programs and personnel comes from a variety of different federal grants across a number of different federal agencies, EPA being the big one.
“There are a lot of different scenarios that people are contemplating with the new Congress and with the new administration, but it’s early to say what may happen,” she said. “We’re assessing options under different scenarios, but it’s too early to tell what the impacts will be.”
She ticked off a laundry list of programs that recently received federal money and noted the need to get the funds distributed and implemented. “We’re staying in touch with our neighboring states and with project developers to help understand how we can be nimble in the face of any changes that may come.”
And she said DEEP will be collaborating with the state Attorney General’s office and will follow its lead on any steps that need to be taken to protect Connecticut’s mission and interests.
One likely impact for Connecticut is that Trump’s policies will further prolong the now 50-year battle for clean air.
The state continues to face pollution and ozone levels that have long kept it from meeting federal air quality standards. The entire state does not meet 2015 standards and the southern part doesn’t even meet more lenient ones from 2008. That’s even as still tighter standards were issued in February.
The heat of this summer has once again resulted in a large number of bad air days — 23. The result over time has been persistently high asthma rates in the state, especially among vulnerable populations.
A principal cause is pollution and greenhouse gases that blow in from Midwest power plants running on fossil fuels of oil, gas and coal. Connecticut has long contended the situation violates the Good Neighbor provision of the Clean Air Act designed to keep upwind states from polluting downwind ones.
After four years fighting the first Trump administration’s efforts to loosen regulations on both greenhouse gas and standard pollutant emissions, Tong’s office has remained active the last four years, battling red-state attorneys general attempting to thwart the Biden administration’s tighter Good Neighbor regulations. In June, the Supreme Court stayed those regulations and sent them back to the lower courts.
“It’s not great,” Tong said, when asked whether the case is now stuck. “That doesn’t mean I’m gonna fight any less hard than I have. It doesn’t mean that we are any less focused on it. No one’s giving up, and no one’s saying darn it, because we have Lee Zeldin and a six-three conservative court that we should just move on to other things. It’s clean air; it’s foundational and fundamental to public health, so we’re just gonna keep at it. It’s not optional.”
Reynolds at Save the Sound is equally gloomy, saying the current litigation scenario puts everything several years out — again. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily going to go forward, but it certainly means it’s not going to be implemented anytime in the near future,” he said. “It’s absolutely a fair assessment that we’re not going to see clean air in Connecticut anytime soon.”
And the axis on environmental and climate regulation is likely to flip again as the Trump administration is expected to replace the Biden rules with their own less restrictive ones. The rulemaking process takes time and is likely to set off a whole new wave of court challenges, delaying things even more.
This session, the Supreme Court is taking up a challenge to the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act that requires in-depth environmental reviews for federal projects. A recent federal appeals court ruling curtailed how those reviews can be structured.
There are also hints in Project 2025 that the second Trump administration might try to overturn the so-called Endangerment Finding, which allowed greenhouse gases to be regulated — specifically as part of motor vehicle, power plant and industrial emissions.
All of these could further limit the tools attorneys general and others have for challenging environmental laws and regulations the new administration may want to overturn from the Biden era and before, or may seek to put in place.
Reynolds points out that states still have a lot of power — to approve power plants and review pipelines, among other things. And he notes that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts specifically allow citizen suits if the federal government isn’t complying with those laws. He said that’s been Save the Sound’s bread and butter in upholding environmental regulations.
“That’s why, since the ‘70s, through all the administrations we’ve had, many of which have put a bull’s eye on environmental regulations, we’ve continued to have progress,” he said. “Our strategy is going to continue to be to enforce these incredibly powerful acts, and fight rollbacks and do what we can to get funding for these initiatives, and to get states and municipalities to take the lead.”
Reynolds isn’t the only one talking about states and municipalities taking the lead.
Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation and a former EPA regional administrator, said simply opposing Trump as state and local officials did during the first administration will not be enough this time, based on what Project 2025 espouses and what Trump has already said, because both clearly cater to the fossil fuel industry.
“What we’ll be pushing for is for states to fill in any gaps that are created by Trump’s attacks on federal agencies and the rollback of some standards,” he said. “A major concern in New England is the climate investments that Biden was able to secure in Congress. Those are enormously important to accelerating New England’s energy transition.”
But if the Trump administration embraces Project 2025’s threat to cut funding to clean energy and other climate-targeted programs, tax incentives and entire programs and offices — across all government, not just environment and energy areas — will states have the money to take the lead?
“States may have to come up with additional funding for the energy transition if the federal government goes into full retreat,” Campbell said.
Focus on the states
“Not going to happen this year,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex and co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. “The state budgets before Trump won are already out of balance.”
He noted that many state employees — including at DEEP — are paid in whole or part with federal funds. “If you lose 10% of state employees because their funding is cut directly by federal budget changes,” he said. “I don’t know how we make that up, right? I just think it’s going to be a stressful, difficult time.”
Needleman said he still plans to hold a series of meetings before the legislative session begins to formulate policies and initiatives.
“I do not believe that anyone can fight a battle with only a strong defense. I think we need a combination of a sensible offense and a thoughtful defense about the damage that they can do, because we are going to have a target on our back,” he said.
His co-chair, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, said he and Needleman are already trying to figure out whether to resurrect some of the major energy, environmental and climate legislation that failed in the last two sessions. The presumption at that time was that the federal government would be at least neutral, if not supportive broadly of climate change initiatives.
“This may further chill our willingness to take on big things,” he said. “I would never throw up my hands and walk away. But coming into the session I was already feeling frustrated, constrained, finding it difficult to do the things that I think we really need to do, which are of bigger consequence, like a lot of this necessary investment in infrastructure.
“Now you layer in on top of it, either federal preemption of any regulatory framework we might choose, or certainly a cessation or diminishment of funding for the things that we’ve counted on the feds for in the past. It’s very hard to figure, what do we do first?”
Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich and ranking member on the committee, said his goal is to make the best policy he can in alignment with his goals of low cost, reliable and environmentally responsible energy.
“Whether there’s a Democratic presidential administration or a Republican one, and there is going to be both in the next 20 years, and policy at the federal level — you make the best of it,” he said. “I haven’t seen, really in any substantial way, that federal policy has helped us meet those goals in Connecticut over the last decade or so.
“The goal is to make policy on a state level. You can’t count on federal policies. We need things to be sustainable on their own. Subsidies will not solve our woes.”
Steinberg offers some ideas for getting money if federal funding decreases or disappears. He suggests collaborations with the business community or investors.He said it might be worth considering something like taxing data center developers to cover the energy burden they bring. Such a tax could be reduced or eliminated if the company installs solar, geothermal, or some other energy reduction mechanism. “Anything to mitigate their energy burden by like a third or 50% before they can escape this tax,” he said.
The point, Steinberg said, is to figure out ways to get things done. It could be opting for low cost solutions in the near term or working with the Green Bank on private funding sources.
“I think that there are things that we must explore doing, even if it’s going to be harder,” he said.
Others said the transition to clean energy in New England is well underway which will help survive another round of Donald Trump.
“There is so much momentum behind clean energy technologies in particular,” said Julie McNamara, deputy policy director climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s two things at once. There will continue to be progress and there will not be as much progress as there could or must have been.
“Certain things will slow or stop because we’re approaching the parts of the clean energy transition where it gets hard. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and so we’re starting to need to take those next further steps, the kind of things where It takes real, intentional work to couple policy with economics and a vision for the future.”
But Steinberg warned against the impulse to just wait Trump out. “It is not only not an answer; it would be irresponsible, in my view.”
He said everyone will need to be creative. “But the one thing we cannot lose is our resolve,” he said. “We just need to keep doing it, because we don’t have a choice.”
After the reelection of former President Donald Trump, clean energy advocates across the country are preparing for a White House that will no doubt pursue aggressive rollbacks of climate policies and further expand fossil-fuel production.
Now more than ever, states will need to step up and pursue climate efforts on their own to “ensure continued progress toward clean energy,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of the advocacy group Climate Cabinet.
Few states are as important as New York, which is large, Democrat-controlled — and already committed to ambitious clean energy goals. In 2019, the state passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which pledged to reach 70 percent renewable energy by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.
“New York State can continue to lead without federal support or federal oversight,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice. “We’ll continue our progress regardless, and that will happen in every state no matter what.”
But so far, the Empire State is falling behind on its climate goals. Across a slew of initiatives under New York’s 2019 climate law, regulators are missing key rulemaking deadlines. According to a July report from the state, New York will likely miss its landmark clean energy target for 2030. Right now, it’s on track to get just 53 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by that date, far short of 70 percent.
The report mostly blamed external economic factors, including supply-chain disruptions and high interest rates that led to a spate of major renewable project cancellations. Another issue is skyrocketing energy demand, largely driven by new data centers for crypto mining and AI, as well as microchip manufacturing facilities and the rise in electric vehicles and appliances.
Environmental advocates argue that faltering political will contributes just as much, if not more, to the state’s lackluster progress. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has expressed ambivalence over meeting looming clean energy targets.
“The costs have gone up so much I now have to say, ‘What is the cost on the typical New York family?’” Hochul said in a recent TV interview. “The goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of these decisions.”
Missing the 2030 deadline would jeopardize many of the state’s other climate goals, including achieving 100 percent zero-emissions energy by 2040 and shuttering “peaker” fossil-gas plants that disproportionately spew toxic pollutants into low-income communities and communities of color, in addition to emitting large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide.
But missing these goals is far from inevitable. From raising energy procurement targets to leaning on public power agencies, climate and legal experts say that there’s still plenty of ways New York can make good on its clean energy pledge.
“We’re not ready to say we can’t meet the 2030 goal,” said DeRoche. “Of course, there are obstacles, but the messaging and the approach from the state should be, ‘This is a statutory obligation, and we will do everything in our power to meet it.’”
How New York could get back on track
On some level, New York’s struggles come down to a straightforward problem: The state doesn’t have enough existing or upcoming renewable energy projects to meet its goals.
About 30 percent of the state’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources, mostly from upstate hydropower plants built many decades ago.
One bright spot is that New York has already outpaced its 6-gigawatt goal for rooftop and community solar — but its targets for utility-scale solar, wind, and battery storage projects, which make up the bulk of its clean energy plan, remain well off-track.
To help solve this, DeRoche and her team at Earthjustice argue in public comments to state energy regulators that New York should vastly increase its renewable energy procurement targets, which set guidelines for how much clean power the state should purchase from private developers. State agencies have determined that they would need to purchase about 14,000 gigawatt hours each year for the next three years to meet the 2030 deadline, yet have recommended procuring only 5,600 gigawatt hours per year.
“The Draft Review provides no basis for setting the target so low,” her team wrote, arguing that state agencies should reevaluate how feasible it would be to procure a higher volume.
New clean energy construction should be prioritized in downstate New York, DeRoche adds, a region that houses most of the state’s population yet relies heavily on fossil fuels compared with the largely hydro- and nuclear-powered upstate areas. The state will also need to address transmission and interconnection backlogs that make it harder to connect new power generation to the grid. Earlier this year, lawmakers passed the RAPID Act to expedite that process for clean energy projects and transmission lines.
Some activists argue that the state itself should take a leading role to develop more clean energy.
Last year, an amendment to the state budget granted the New York Power Authority the ability to build, own, and operate renewable energy projects for the first time. Organizers at the grassroots coalition Public Power New York say that government leaders have yet to capitalize on the change, commonly referred to as the Build Public Renewables Act. In October, NYPA released its first strategic plan for developing renewable energy projects, proposing the installation of 3.5 gigawatts of new clean energy in the next several years.
“This is only the first tranche of NYPA renewables projects,” the report said, with potentially “further projects for consideration.”
Andrea Johnson, an organizer with the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, a member group of Public Power New York, called that number “measly.” Public Power New York is rallying for the authority to commit to 15 gigawatts of new clean power by 2030, an amount based on research commissioned by the group.
Expanding clean power at a faster rate would fulfill NYPA’s responsibilities under last year’s expanded authority, which calls on it to build projects when the state falls short on its climate mandates, Johnson said. “When the private sector fails — and the private sector is failing — the state needs to step in and actually fill the gap.”
Leveraging NYPA can also allow New York to meet its climate goals at a lower cost, Johnson said. As a nonprofit, public institution, NYPA can access more favorable financing. It also owns and builds transmission lines, allowing it to plan for both energy generation and distribution at the same time, she said. NYPA is also required to provide utility bill credits to low- and moderate-income households for any clean energy produced from its projects.
Beyond building more clean energy, the state should also take steps to ease growing power demand, including strengthening building efficiency standards and accelerating the installation of heat pumps, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
That includes addressing the rapid growth of crypto mining and AI electricity use and its effects on residents, said DeRoche. State officials noted that those rising energy demands have made it far more difficult to reach clean energy targets. But agencies have policy tools available to understand and reduce unabated growth — and they should start with making sure that discounted electricity rates for cryptocurrency and AI companies aren’t being subsidized by residents, DeRoche said.
Offshore wind’s uncertain future
Any effort to accelerate New York’s adoption of clean energy will need to grapple with challenges in the offshore wind sector, a cornerstone of the state’s strategy that is likely to face even more setbacks under the incoming Trump administration.
New York aims to install 9 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2035, but in the past four years, inflation, high interest rates, and supply-chain issues led developers to pull out of contracts in the state.
That challenging economic environment is now improving, however, according to Atin Jain, an offshore wind analyst at the energy consulting firm BloombergNEF. As inflation has started to ease and interest rates have begun to come down, “We have probably passed the worst of it,” Jain said. State officials have been quick to respond to the industry’s economic pressures, he added, expediting auctions to renegotiate previous agreements and adding language in contracts to allow for inflation adjustments.
Two new projects, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1, with 924 and 810 megawatts of capacity, respectively, are currently moving forward in New York. The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm went live in March off the coast of Long Island.
But Trump’s reelection casts a new uncertainty over the industry. Trump has vowed to stop offshore wind development “on day one” and to “terminate” the Inflation Reduction Act. If those declarations end up translating to real policy, then offshore wind, which relies heavily on federal tax credits and requires federal approval and permits to build and operate, could suffer — in New York and beyond.
Still, New York has enshrined a legal mandate to decarbonize its economy — meaning no matter the headwinds, the state has an obligation to follow through, DeRoche said.
“We hear from the governor that the CLCPA is the nation’s leading climate law,” said DeRoche. “Well, it’s only the nation’s leading climate law if we’re implementing it.”
A Massachusetts university is developing technology that aims to use lasers to drastically cut emissions and energy use from Maine’s paper and pulp industry.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently received a $2.75 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to help ready the industrial drying technology for commercial use.
“We are all excited about this — this is potentially a groundbreaking technology,” said Jamal Yagoobi, founding director of the institute’s Center for Advanced Research in Drying.
In Maine, the paper and pulp business generates about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, roughly half of the state’s industrial emissions. Much of these emissions come from the process of drying mashed, pressed, and rolled wood pulp to yield paper products. The emissions come mainly from three major operations across the state; three additional facilities contribute smaller amounts.
These plants’ emissions will need to be addressed if Maine is to reach its goal of going carbon neutral by 2045. Furthermore, each of these plants is located in an area with an above-average population of low-income residents, according to data assembled by Industrious Labs, an environmental organization focused on the impact of industry. And two are located in areas with a higher-than-average risk of cancer from air toxins, suggesting a correlation between their operations and the incidence of cancer in the area.
At the same, the paper and pulp industry remains economically important to Maine, said Matt Cannon, state conservation and energy director for the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club.
“It’s got real union jobs — the paper industry is still very important to our community,” he said.
Worcester Polytechnic’s drying research center has been working on ways to dry paper, pulp, and other materials using the concentrated energy found in lasers. The lasers Yagoobi’s team is using are not the lasers of the public imagination, like a red beam zapping at alien enemies. Though the lasers are quite strong — they can melt metal, Yagoobi says — they are dispersed over a larger area, spreading out the energy to evenly and gently dry the target material.
Testing on food products has shown that the technology can work. Now, researchers need to learn more about how the laser energy affects different materials to make sure the product quality is not compromised during the drying process.
“For paper, it’s important to make sure the tensile strength is not degrading,” Yagoobi said. “For food products, you want to make sure the color and sensory qualities do not degrade.”
Therefore, before the system is ready for a commercial pilot, the team has to gather a lot more data about how much laser energy is incident on different parts of the surface and how deeply the energy penetrates different materials. Once gathered, this data will be used to determine what system sizes and operating conditions are best for different materials, and to design laser modules for each intended use.
Once these details are worked out, the laser technology can be installed in new commercial-scale drying equipment or existing systems. “This particular technology will be easy to retrofit,” Yagoobi said.
Industrial sources were responsible for about 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2023, about 28% of the country’s overall emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Heating processes, often powered by natural gas or other fossil fuels, are responsible for about half of those emissions, said Evan Gillespie, one of the co-founders of Industrious Labs. Many industrial drying processes require high temperatures that have traditionally been hard to reach without fossil fuels, giving the sector a reputation as hard to decarbonize, Gillespie said.
“The key challenge here is: How do you remove natural gas as a heating source inside industrial facilities?” said Richard Hart, industry director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “The scale of what is happening in industry is enormous, and the potential for change is very powerful.”
To make the new technology effective, industry leaders and policymakers will need to commit to reinvesting in old facilities, Gillespie noted. And doing so will be well worth it by strengthening an economically important industry, keeping jobs in place, and creating important environmental benefits, he added.
“There’s often this old story of tensions between climate and jobs,” Gillespie said. “But what we’re trying to do is modernize these facilities and stabilize them so they’ll be around for decades to come.”
As a state committee studies ways to wean Rhode Island off of natural gas, several of its members want the group’s final report to dismiss one potential pathway as wholly unrealistic.
Switching to renewable natural gas or other alternative fuels appears to be neither a feasible nor a financially viable solution at this time, say multiple stakeholders who have commented on a draft outline of a report a consulting group prepared for Rhode Island regulators.
RNG is derived from biomass or other renewable resources. It is a biogas, captured from the decomposition of organic matter, such as animal manure or food waste.
Many gas utilities around the country are pushing for RNG as part of the solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. But Michael Walsh, a partner at Groundwork Data, a clean energy consultancy that worked with the Conservation Law Foundation and the Sierra Club in the committee process, told the Energy News Network that “we don’t see a lot of viability with the RNG pathway,” both because of limited availability and because it is much more expensive then fossil fuel gas to produce.
While RNG is interchangeable with conventional natural gas, “realism about the availability and cost of alternative fuels for the gas system is necessary” for the planning process, wrote Nicholas Vaz, Rhode Island special assistant attorney general, in his comments on the draft.
Vaz cited a 2019 study prepared for the American Gas Foundation that looked at RNG production potential by 2040, based on the availability of source materials and utilization. Based on those findings, Vaz concluded that the amount of RNG available by 2050 would only allow for about 17% of Rhode Island households to remain connected to the gas system.
Currently, more than half of Rhode Island homes receive natural gas service.
The state Public Utilities Commission established the stakeholder committee as part of its “Future of Gas” docket, an investigation of the future of the regulated gas distribution business in Rhode Island. That docket was opened in 2022 in response to the passage of the state’s Act on Climate, which mandates a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2030, 80% by 2040, and net-zero by 2050.
The natural gas system operated by Rhode Island Energy accounts for almost 40% of statewide emissions. So the PUC, which regulates the utility, is in the tricky position of having to craft a plan for getting commercial and residential customers off natural gas, finding a way to pay for it, and ensuring that consumers aren’t harmed in the process. Regulators will use the committee’s report to help inform the strategy it lays out.
The neighboring state of Massachusetts is a little farther along in that process; its state Department of Public Utilities issued an order last December outlining a strategy for getting the state off natural gas.
While utilities there initially pushed for a plan that was heavily reliant on RNG, regulators ultimately rejected that approach, citing concerns about availability, cost and whether such alternative fuels will actually lead to a reduction in emissions.
To some extent, Massachusetts’ work to date helped inform the committee process in Rhode Island, Walsh said.
“We had a lot of Massachusetts folks in the room to share lessons learned,” he said. “We at least got through some of the questions faster.”
Ben Butterworth, director of climate, energy and equity analysis for the nonprofit Acadia Center, told ENN his organization would like to see Rhode Island prioritize much of what is in the Massachusetts strategy: a focus on electrification and energy efficiency, disincentivizing further expansion of the gas system, and pilot programs focused on the strategic decommissioning of the gas system.
The PUC must also consider how to fund the transition, Butterworth noted. Vermont and Massachusetts are pursuing a clean heat standard as a funding mechanism for climate goals, while New York is pursuing a cap-and-invest approach.
“Finding that mechanism is critical, and the report should include at least those options,” Butterworth said.
At the same time, the report should include a discussion of possible mechanisms to protect low-income ratepayers from “the inevitable initially increased costs of electrification,” urged Jennifer Wood, executive director of the Rhode Island Center for Justice, in her comments on the draft.
These might include capping the amount a household pays for electricity as a percentage of their income; rate reforms; and assistance programs to defray the costs of installing electric heat pumps.
“Low-income utility customers living in rented homes that are least well equipped for energy efficiency are already most harmed by the social effects of climate change,” Wood wrote. “The only way to ensure that they will not be doubly harmed by unsustainably higher utility bills during the transition…is to decouple income-eligible consumers’ energy costs from the near-term impacts of necessary, but initially more costly, electrification.”
The committee is expected to issue a final report with its findings and recommendations to the PUC by the end of the year.
Nearly a year after Massachusetts regulators laid out a vision for the state’s evolution from natural gas distribution to clean energy use, lawmakers are coalescing around legislation that would start converting principles into policy.
The wide-ranging climate bill includes several provisions that would allow utilities to explore alternatives to gas and empower regulators to place more limits on the expansion and continuation of natural gas infrastructure, changes that supporters say are critical to a successful transition away from fossil fuels.
“This bill is a major first step in empowering [regulators] to do something rather than just rubber stamping the utilities’ plans,” said Lisa Cunningham, co-founder of ZeroCarbonMA.
Natural gas is currently the primary heating source for half the homes in Massachusetts, a number that needs to drop if the state is going to meet its ambitious climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, advocates and state leaders say. In 2020, the state department of public utilities opened an investigation into the role natural gas utilities would play in the transition to cleaner energy. In December 2023, the department issued a lengthy order concluding that the state must move “beyond gas” and outlining a broad framework for making the shift.
Lawmakers attempted to start turning these general ideas into binding law earlier this year, but the legislative session closed at the end of July before the Senate and House reconciled the differences between their versions of a climate bill. Legislators returned to work this fall and hammered out an agreement, and the Senate passed the resulting bill last month. The House speaker has said the body will vote when it returns to formal session later this year. The bill is generally expected to pass and be signed into law.
“A lot of people were skeptical we’d get a bill at all, but I’m happy with where this bill ended up,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate nonprofit Acadia Center. “It shows a step toward that needed urgency.”
At the heart of the bill’s energy transition provisions is a change to the definition of a natural gas utility that allows the companies to also provide geothermal power. Networked geothermal — systems that draw heat from the earth and deliver it to a group of buildings — is widely seen as a promising alternative to natural gas, and both National Grid and Eversource have pilot projects in the works. However, current law prevents the utilities from pursuing such projects without specific authorization from regulators. The climate bill would remove this barrier, making it easier for gas companies to explore new approaches to business.
“The gas utilities deeply need a new business model that can help them step into the future,” said Audrey Schulman, founder of climate solutions incubator HEETlabs. “That allows them to potentially evolve.”
This definition change supports other provisions aimed at slowing the expansion of natural gas use in the state. The bill would end the requirement that natural gas utilities provide service to any customer in their service area who requests it, with few exceptions. Under the new law, utilities could decline these requests when other alternatives are available.
The bill would also allow regulators to consider the impact of emissions when deciding whether to approve requests to expand natural gas service into new communities. In 2023, the state approved a request to bring gas service to the central Massachusetts town of Douglas. Regulators at the time noted that the decision works against the state’s goal of phasing out natural gas, but said the law gave them no choice but to approve the plan. Provisions in the climate bill would untie regulators’ hands in such cases in the future.
“The [Department of Public Utilities] can consider the public interest, including climate, it doesn’t have to say yes to more gas service,” said Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy at the Environmental League of Massachusetts. And the inclusion of geothermal in gas utilities’ definition means “now there’s also something else to offer the customers.”
Another major element of the bill would reform the state’s Gas System Enhancement Plans program, which encourages utilities to repair or replace pipes in the state’s aging and leak-prone natural gas distribution system. Clean energy advocates have often argued that these plans are problematic, investing billions of ratepayer dollars into shoring up a system that is increasingly obsolete. The climate bill would allow utilities to choose to retire segments of pipe rather than fixing them.
“For the first time ever they are able to look at a pipe and say, ‘You know what, this is not worth the cost,’” Murray said. “We don’t want ratepayers shouldering the burden for a lot of stuff that’s not going to be useful in five to 10 years.”
Environmental advocates praised the bill’s gas provisions, and are already focusing on what more there is to be done. Several would have liked to see a more aggressive phasing out of Gas System Enhancement Plans, with a specific end date. Others champion an expansion of a pilot program that allows cities and towns to ban fossil fuel use in new construction and major renovations.
“There is no reason why communities that want to enact this via home rule petition should be restricted from enacting the will of their constituents,” Cunningham said.
In the meantime, advocates are ready to see the climate bill turning into reality.
“There’s a lot of good stuff in there that will do a lot of good for the commonwealth,” Boyd Rabin says.
The one thing Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem to agree on is that the road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, the nation’s most populous swing state.
October polls show an even split in the Keystone State, and its 19 Electoral College votes could well decide the election. Not a week went by in September without one or more visits from each campaign. And Pennsylvania is where Harris and Trump met face-to-face for their first and only debate, during which both candidates vied to convince Americans that they can deliver more prosperity. Harris wants to grow the economy in part by continuing the clean energy manufacturing policies enacted by the Biden administration; Trump wants to roll them back.
Given the immense electoral stakes, I decided to visit the state to see if the idea of a clean energy future is resonating with Pennsylvanians and how that transition is starting to materialize in a place where coal, oil, and gas have reigned supreme since the 1800s.
Pennsylvania’s coal abundance jump-started the transition away from burning wood as a primary energy source. Coal later made the state the steelmaking capital of America and powered the nation for decades. Meanwhile, oil production surged beginning in 1859, when Edwin Drake tapped the country’s first oil well at Titusville, and the state led U.S. oil production through the end of that century.
More recently, when engineers commercialized fracking in the 2000s, the Marcellus Shale, which stretches under Pennsylvania, quickly became the biggest shale-gas-producing region in the nation.
Now, though, Pennsylvania is at a crossroads: The resources that fueled Pennsylvania’s past growth are plateauing or petering out.
“Coal employment has gone off a cliff,” said Seth Blumsack, who runs the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. “You had an influx of natural gas jobs — that growth has largely leveled off, as Pennsylvania hit this kind of steady state of gas production.”
This isn’t the first time Pennsylvania’s core economic drivers have waned. Factories and steel mills took a beating in the 1970s and 1980s, as foreign producers competed in earnest with America’s industrial machine. Plants that sustained whole towns closed down, with nothing to replace them. The ironworks Andrew Carnegie built in 1875 still operates on the bank of the Monongahela River, but owner U.S. Steel is desperately trying to unload it to Japan’s Nippon Steel.
These conditions have created new opportunities for the clean energy transition to take hold. Political leaders like Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and business owners are embracing low-carbon industry as an economic development strategy for the energy-rich state.
Shapiro has pushed to strengthen the state’s outdated clean energy standard for power production, and he signed a bill this summer to establish ground rules for developing carbon-sequestration projects. His administration recently won $400 million in federal funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“the second-largest federal grant in Pennsylvania’s history,” a spokesperson for the governor pointed out). Pennsylvania will disburse that money in competitive grants to industrial entities proportional to their ambitions at carbon reduction; the Shapiro administration wants the ensuing projects to slash statewide industrial emissions 10 percent by 2050.
Given the state’s long history of oil and gas, hydrogen production is sure to loom large. In the lower-carbon future, clean hydrogen could become the next key energy commodity. Last year, Biden’s Department of Energy awarded seven proposed hydrogen hubs around the country roughly $1 billion each. Pennsylvania, as Shapiro regularly points out, was the only state to win funding for two: The Philadelphia-based hub is slated to produce hydrogen with nuclear power and renewables, while the Pittsburgh-based hub will focus on turning fossil gas into hydrogen and stowing the ensuing emissions underground.
But Pennsylvania’s industrial decarbonization is just getting started.
“You’re not seeing the finished product, but so many things are falling into place,” said John Carlson, who oversees state policy engagement in the region for Clean Air Task Force, a climate-solutions think tank.
Clean energy manufacturing, though, is already beginning to put Pennsylvanians to work. A few entrepreneurs have retooled historic Pittsburgh-area factories to turn iron and zinc into batteries that store power from the sun and wind. Steelworkers forge the backbone that holds phalanxes of solar panels, bolstering America’s fastest-growing source of electricity.
Pennsylvania has fallen behind other states in building clean power plants, but renewables developers are getting more ambitious. In Clearfield County, northeast of Pittsburgh, developer Swift Current Energy is building the biggest solar plant in the commonwealth on 2,700 acres of reclaimed mine land.
“There’s this huge industrial knowledge base in Pennsylvania,” Blumsack said, “and people who want to work, and so how do you harness that?”
From coal and gas to hydrogen
The Marcellus Shale arcs from southwest to northeast Pennsylvania, undergirding the state physically and economically.
Other states talk of phasing out fossil fuel extraction to tackle their planet-warming emissions. In Pennsylvania, Shapiro, working with split control of the legislature in Harrisburg, speaks pragmatically of harnessing the state’s mineral wealth for the goal of decarbonization. In her Pennsylvania debate appearance, Vice President Harris renounced her earlier opposition to fracking: “Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking.” Such is the gravitational pull of the Marcellus.
But talking about pumping fossil fuels while decarbonizing is much easier than doing it. So I ventured through the corduroy-like ridges of the Appalachian foothills to a place where people are working to make it happen: Penn State, formed as an agricultural school in 1855 and now home to nearly 50,000 students in a bucolic town aptly named State College.
Sanjay Srinivasan greeted me outside the beige concrete structure that houses the Energy Institute, where the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences conducts research to unlock lower-carbon opportunities for the state.
I did a double take as we approached the building — the sign on the exterior wall said “Coal Utilization Laboratory,” a relic of the not-so-distant past. In the lobby, we passed displays of actual coal in all its dark glory: an uninterrupted column of bituminous stretching to the ceiling, a pyramidal sampler of anthracite designated by colloquial gradations like Egg, Chestnut, Pea, and the fine little pebbles of No. 3 Buckwheat.
“We are interested in doing anything that we can to help communities in the Pennsylvania Appalachian region transition to the new energy economy,” Srinivasan told me.
Penn State’s Coal Utilization Laboratory has transformed into a research hub for ways to repurpose the state’s fossil fuel resources into lower-carbon energy. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The institute approaches that task by looking for existing energy infrastructure it can repurpose. That means researching ways to extract critical minerals from the region’s mining waste ponds and fly ash piles, or tap hot briny water in abandoned mines as a heat source for buildings. And, thanks to the billion-dollar hub grant from the DOE, western Pennsylvania could turn its fossil fuels into hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles and industry.
“In this part of the world, the formations can be used for storing hydrogen. But better still, can we use the shale gas for producing hydrogen and then develop a closed-loop process where you don’t emit anything into the atmosphere?” Srinivasan posited.
Almost all hydrogen made today comes from blasting methane with steam at high pressure, which yields hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide. The machines that do this, called steam methane reformers, historically just vent the CO2 into the atmosphere. U.S. hydrogen production is highly concentrated in the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor, where refineries use the gas in their production process.
The Appalachian hub is planning to fund efforts, like the KeyState project in Clinton County, to make hydrogen this old-fashioned way but then inject the CO2 stream underground for geological storage. The DOE concluded negotiations with this hub in July, kicking off the active planning phase, which could last for three years.
The Gulf Coast has successfully sequestered carbon that oil companies pumped underground to push out more oil. In Pennsylvania, operators and researchers have yet to prove this is commercially feasible. The plan, Srinivasan told me, is to drill down 8,000 to 10,000 feet, through the Marcellus Shale, through the Geneseo Shale, to the Oriskany Sandstone. The shale formations above would act as a cap on the carbon dioxide. The National Science Foundation recently funded Penn State to study the Appalachian Basin’s carbon-sequestration potential.
Many climate advocates doubt that hydrogen production from fossil fuels will ever be particularly clean. That said, hydrogen producers elsewhere have proved that they can achieve high rates of carbon capture at steam methane reformers, noted Sam Bailey, industrial decarbonization manager at Clean Air Task Force. Pennsylvania operators would also need to secure low-carbon electricity to run their operations, and buy methane from a supply chain that isn’t leaky.
“Some producers in the region have some of the lowest leak rates, but those obviously have to be verifiable and transparent,” Bailey said.
The mid-Atlantic hydrogen hub, centered around Philadelphia, would focus on electrolysis powered by offshore wind and nuclear power. The Shapiro administration expects both hubs to create 41,000 jobs, though the DOE estimates the hubs will take eight to 12 years to fully materialize.
There might be other pathways for turning fossil gas into clean hydrogen. Down the hallway, Srinivasan’s colleague showed me a tabletop device that performs what’s called thermocatalytic decomposition: The machine essentially cooks methane at low temperatures until it lets out pure hydrogen and inert, solid carbon. That would be much simpler than catching and injecting gaseous carbon deep underground.
This machine at Penn State breaks down methane under low heat to yield hydrogen and solid carbons. If the emerging technology gains traction, it could process gas leaking out of old mines. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The tabletop version I saw is still “frontier technology,” Srinivasan cautioned, made possible by recent advances in catalyst efficiency. But it could be a good fit for smaller installations to catch methane leaking out of Pennsylvania’s many abandoned coal mines. Modular decomposers could convert those decentralized streams of intensely planet-warming gas into harmless carbon solids that can be used as industrial feedstocks.
Pittsburgh steel goes solar
The town of Leetsdale hugs the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh, surrounded by sprawling industrial complexes and freight lines. During World War II, Bethlehem Steel fashioned barges and landing craft there. Historians describe that war as a clash of steel that the U.S. won because its factories cranked out more tanks, planes, and ships than its opponents.
Most of those factories are long gone, but JM Steel, an affiliate of the century-old company Jennmar, took over a site in Leetsdale one year ago and reopened it with a new mission: bending steel to the will of the burgeoning solar industry. Its preliminary success shows how federal clean energy policy is breathing new life into Pennsylvania’s legacy industries — exactly what the hydrogen hubs are supposed to do.
When I rolled up to the riverside lot, the factory looked like it was fortified for some kind of invasion. Thirty-foot steel tubes had been trussed up by the dozen and stacked to form an impenetrable barricade taller than a person.
Pittsburgh native Chris Bartley led me through the steely labyrinth, explaining that these pipes were torque tubes ready to ship. His employer, Nextracker, uses the tubes to mount huge numbers of solar panels that can change their angle throughout the day.
Early in the solar revolution, developers installed panels in fixed positions, at what seemed like the most advantageous angle. Silicon Valley startup Nextracker revolutionized the market by attaching panels to trackers that follow the sun’s arc, and pivot away from dangers like hail or high wind. This innovation enhanced solar power output and made Nextracker one of cleantech’s clearest commercial successes: It went public in 2023 and now trades with a market cap over $5 billion. To supply its booming business, Nextracker enlists specialists like JM Steel to sculpt metal to its specifications.
Chris Bartley stands before stacks of Pittsburgh-made torque tubes, which his company Nextracker sells to large-scale solar projects so the panels can track the sun. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
In a little meeting room off the factory floor, Negley Rodgers, who oversees plant operations for family-owned JM Steel, told me the plant ships an average of six truckloads of torque tubes per day — 350,000 torque tubes since last October. They go straight to solar plants in the region, where the tons of steel translate to megawatts of cheap, clean power rushing onto the grid.
We donned hard hats, earplugs, and orange scratch-resistant sleeves for my exposed forearms, then walked into the cavernous factory. First we saw the “master coils” of rolled-up flat steel that the company buys from domestic producers like Nucor and SDI. The coils don’t look overwhelmingly large, but are so heavy that flatbed trucks can carry only one at a time, Rodgers noted. The high-ceilinged factory has a built-in crane capable of lifting 40 tons to maneuver the coils into position.
Workers feed these coils into machines that use heat and immense force to roll the flat material into thick round pipes. Another station drills the holes that will attach the solar panels. JM adjusts the drilling arrangement for each project — some use bigger panels, some smaller, but the company can accommodate them all on the same production line.
Before Covid-19, Nextracker relied on a more typical globalized supply chain. Then CEO Dan Shugar decided to localize tracker production to where his customers operated around the world: Solar plants would get trackers made nearby, so nothing got stuck in port overseas. A couple of years later, the IRA sweetened the deal with meaningful financial incentives to produce solar-power components domestically.
The Inflation Reduction Act created an 87-cent-per-kilogram tax credit for torque tube manufacturing. Additionally, solar developers can access an extra 10 percent tax credit for their power plants by hitting a critical mass of domestic components, per an IRS rubric. Trackers include torque tubes, rails, controllers, and motors, Bartley explained; sourcing all those components in the U.S. unlocks a bonus, which nets 24.7 percent coverage for the overall solar project.
JM Steel uses heat and force to turn coils of flat, rolled steel into torque tubes capable of holding up solar panels in inclement weather. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The exact level of domestic content varies by project, based on what a developer is looking for. A U.S.-made tracker creates flexibility for how the company sources other components while still meeting the IRS cutoff.
Conventional corporate wisdom long held that offshoring production to China cut costs and improved profits. Sourcing a 100 percent domestic tracker still adds a premium, Bartley said, but it’s already possible to make most of the system here without driving up cost.
“Looking at our cost of a tracker fully delivered to a job site, we’re seeing really competitive costs and pricing [while] making a significant part of the tracker domestically,” he said. “As time goes on, we’re expecting any sort of premium like that to go down, because we’re expanding capacity of these other components, like our electronic components.”
Part of that favorable comparison to foreign imports has to do with the inescapable heft of this product: “They’re not shipping nuts and bolts that they can pack into a tight box on a ship,” said Rodgers. “They’re shipping these large, 30-foot-long, five-inch diameter tubes that take up a massive amount of volume on a ship.”
Steel companies have opened 20 factory sites across the U.S. that exclusively produce torque tubes for Nextracker; the factories wouldn’t exist without the demand from the booming solar market. JM ships from Pittsburgh to places like Indiana, Illinois, and Tennessee, but business in Pennsylvania has been picking up, as evidenced by the blockbuster Mineral Basin Solar project. That one will put 400 megawatts on reclaimed mining land northeast of Pittsburgh. The power and its clean energy credits will actually flow to New York, but millions of dollars of lease payments and tax revenues will stay in the county.
For JM Steel, the imperative to decarbonize has given new urgency to the skills and products that Pittsburgh long excelled at. At the same time, U.S. Steel is trying to unload its flagship Pittsburgh steel plant to a Japanese company, arguing that it’s the only way to remain commercially viable. I asked Rodgers if that deal signaled the end of an era for American steelmakers.
“I can’t comment on that,” he said, referring to U.S. Steel’s position. “Just — manufacturing is still viable, and it’s still happening in the United States.”
Indeed, the growing pressure on big steel buyers to source lower-carbon or “green” steel could give U.S. companies an edge on overseas competition. The U.S. already uses a high proportion of electric arc furnaces to melt scrap metal into new products; those can run on clean electricity to further curb their carbon footprint. The industry is also exploring ways to decarbonize the carbon-intensive conversion of iron ores to metallic iron, by using clean hydrogen instead of coal. Pennsylvania doesn’t have any of those facilities operating yet — the world’s first large-scale commercial plant of this kind is under construction in Sweden. But the hubs aim to bring clean hydrogen supply to greater Pittsburgh, and the DOE has funded steel companies to build initial facilities to use it.
For now, JM Steel’s plant serves Nextracker’s needs with some 53 employees — a welcome addition, but not close to the scale of employment at the site in bygone decades. For clean energy buyers or green steel customers to make a mark on the regional economy, they’ll need to put many more people to work.
Reopening factories for battery breakthroughs
Solar panels planted on Pittsburgh steel clean up the grid during sunny hours. But as solar generation provides ever more electricity, new energy storage technologies will be needed to turn cheap renewables into round-the-clock power.
Federal policymakers hope to bring battery manufacturing back to the U.S. after China pulled far ahead in its capacity to make lithium-ion batteries. It’s extremely difficult to catch up to competitors who are already producing at tremendous scale — the recent financial struggles at Europe’s Northvolt attest to that. Pittsburgh, though, has become a hub for fabricating novel battery technologies that aren’t made anywhere else in the world, a risky strategy with the potential for a big payoff.
Habitually cash-strapped startup Eos makes zinc-based batteries at the junction of Turtle Creek and the Monongahela. For decades, Westinghouse built electrical generators on the site that powered the Hoover Dam and other icons of modern America. Nikola Tesla once toiled there, as did more than 20,000 workers in the plant’s heyday. But Westinghouse shuttered the Turtle Creek plant in 1988, gutting the economy of the surrounding Mon Valley.
Now Eos employs 300 people to manufacture energy storage in 150,000 square feet of the old Westinghouse complex. If the unconventional product takes off, Eos could expand and further boost the local economy — but that’s a big if.
The Westinghouse facility in Turtle Creek used to employ 20,000 people to make electrical generating equipment. It closed in the 1980s, but has recently opened up to growing businesses like Eos. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Eos has toiled, since 2008, to commercialize a new type of battery that could beat lithium-ion on fire safety and cost for longer-duration energy storage. Lithium-ion batteries almost always win customers looking to deliver stored power for four hours, and increasingly five or six. Beyond that, lithium-ion gets prohibitively expensive. Eos markets its batteries as capable of delivering power for three to 12 hours, which runs the gamut from the incumbent technology’s sweet spot to a storage duration that few customers have ever purchased.
That’s a tough market to break into, and Eos survived its first decade with little commercial traction to show for it. In 2019, the board brought in a new management team, a crew of GE veterans, led by CEO Joe Mastrangelo. He stopped outsourcing fabrication to contractors in China and localized production in Pittsburgh.
I met Mastrangelo in a conference room above the factory. He wore thick-framed glasses and a company hoodie, lime-green logo on forest green. The outfit reminded me of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D), who famously bucked tradition and wore hoodies in the halls of power. Mastrangelo pointed out that Fetterman lived a mile down the street in Braddock, where he used to be mayor, in a house overlooking the U.S. Steel plant.
Reshoring the supply chain surely saved Eos during Covid-19, Mastrangelo explained. If production had frozen for a couple of years when China closed its factories, “we would have been done.” Eos also avoided under-discussed costs of offshoring, like lengthy, expensive flights to China to check on manufacturing progress. Eos built the factory with its own money — a rare feat in the incentive-happy cleantech factory boom — but found itself ready to capitalize on the domestic manufacturing incentives created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Downstairs, I saw the fully automated line that Eos installed in June, capable of producing 1.2 gigawatt-hours per year. The machinery sat inside a wire-fenced perimeter. A succession of robots picked up gray plastic boxes, stocked them with Eos’ proprietary electrodes, then injected them with a liquid electrolyte in two carefully calibrated gushes, to prevent it from foaming and spilling.
Eos installed a fully automated line this summer to mass-produce its unusual zinc batteries. Inside the perimeter, only machines operate — unless they need a little human assistance. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Eos employees patrolled the perimeter, many of them wearing the same green-on-green hoodie as their CEO. Their job was to keep the machines running: When a robot got confused, or the operating controls hit a glitch, alarms sounded and the technicians hurried over. This happened throughout my tour; as I’d seen in other cleantech factories, “full automation” is more aspirational than descriptive.
The bustling factory embodies the theory that Pennsylvania’s abandoned factories can spring to life to serve the material needs of the clean energy revolution. Pennsylvania’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but Eos’ average wage is above $20, Mastrangelo said. Employees get a 3 percent direct contribution to their 401(k), and regular grants of company stock (Eos went public in 2020 via a special-purpose acquisition company). “We also view this as a massive opportunity for everybody to get wealth creation,” Mastrangelo said.
But startups are unsteady vessels for economic growth, and Eos’ finances are more unstable than most.
Last year, Eos spent $169 million to make $16.4 million in revenue. It’s normal for a startup to lose money while ramping up commercial production. But Eos’ public listing failed to net enough money to fully fund the buildout, so it has repeatedly beseeched investors for more infusions (like $100 million from Koch in 2021). This summer, Nasdaq nearly booted Eos for trading below $1 a share for too long.
Mastrangelo escaped that ignominy by closing a $325 million commitment from a domestic supply chain–focused fund at private equity firm Cerberus, on June 24, in the form of a loan with stock warrants (and surely one or two strings attached). Since then, Eos’ share price soared all the way past $3.
With this private-equity lifeline in hand, Mastrangelo has faith that demand for his unusual batteries will pick up. Eos is commissioning a 35-megawatt-hour storage system serving a microgrid on a Native American reservation in Northern California, funded by a California Energy Commission grant for long-duration storage. That customer already signed up for an expansion to 60 megawatt-hours. Eos also delivered a 10-megawatt/4-megawatt-hour standalone system in Texas for Pittsburgh-based developer IEP. These are small potatoes compared with lithium-ion battery projects, but substantial for the ragtag category of erstwhile lithium alternatives.
Once the gray, boxy battery cells are produced, workers install them in containers to ship to customers. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
“The one thing we’ve always told everybody is, the market needs a product like ours,” Mastrangelo said. “We continue to do things that haven’t been done before, and we just have to keep executing on our plan, and eventually the market will reward performance.”
An even more unusual battery is being fabricated about 36 miles west of downtown Pittsburgh. This one, designed by Form Energy, uses iron as a cheap storage material and promises to deliver clean power for up to 100 hours, far beyond what lithium-ion batteries can handle affordably. Unlike Eos, Form had no trouble lining up venture capital investment and hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars to fund its buildout; in fact, the company just closed another $405 million equity investment on October 9.
Form took barely a year to transform the slag-studded field of an abandoned steel mill into a gleaming new factory. Its white outer wall rises like a curtain to reveal a transparent entranceway, highlighted in the company’s trademark orange. Inside, an airy vestibule lined with greenery and an exhibit on the town’s industrial history gives way to the 550,000-square-foot production zone.
“We wanted it to be an inviting place,” CEO Mateo Jaramillo told me from a glass room on the mezzanine level, suspended above the factory floor. “It should feel like innovation. It should feel like something new. It should feel like a safe, clean place to work.”
Form developed its technology at labs near Berkeley and MIT, then expanded to a facility in the tiny town of Eighty Four, outside Pittsburgh. The company doubled down on the region for its full-fledged factory, and landed several hundred million dollars in state incentives from West Virginia to locate in that state, in the former steel town of Weirton. Pittsburgh is the closest big city to Weirton, and many of the workers commute from Pennsylvania. The success of this factory, like JM Steel or Eos, speaks to Appalachia’s ability to seize the clean energy era for its economic revival.
Form CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo inspects a finished iron-air battery cell at his company’s newly built factory west of Pittsburgh. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Form chose a factory site rich in symbolic resonance: The startup is claiming a spot in the industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley, creating jobs where the legacy industries seem capable only of shedding them (steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was clinging on next door, but idled that operation in April; the company hopes to reopen the site to make electrical transformers starting in 2026). Form even uses iron, the same material that, with coal, fueled the region’s steel boom.
These layers of narrative meaning play swimmingly at ribbon cuttings, but I was curious what they offer once the tax incentives are secured. Jaramillo acknowledged that “grand poetry” isn’t what makes batteries.
“On the day-to-day, we don’t think a lot about the precise industrial legacy — we’ve got a job to do, so we go do the job,” Jaramillo said. “That’s probably the most direct legacy, is people who are really oriented on taking care of the job.”
Form has seen “huge demand” for open positions, and Jaramillo reported no problems finding the quality and number of workers needed. The company promised the state of West Virginia that salaries will average at least $63,000 per year — well above minimum wage, and substantial in a region with low costs of living.
So far, Form runs a single shift per day, for 10 or 12 hours. Some 300 people work at the factory, but that should grow to 750 in a few years, Jaramillo said. The plan is to quintuple capacity from 2025 to 2026, and quadruple it again from 2026 to 2027, at which point the factory will make 500 megawatts per year; for the long-duration format, that translates to 50,000 megawatt-hours.
The Pittsburgh metro area scores quite high for its capability to manufacture a range of clean energy technologies, per economic development analysis by climate think tank RMI.
Eos and Form were the first major battery makers to turn that potential into real jobs. Neither technology has been deployed on the grid in sufficient scale to ensure its longevity as a climate solution; that work lies ahead of them. But they demonstrate that it’s possible for the decarbonization mission to reanimate long-abandoned factories and put Pennsylvania’s workers back on the line.
Over two centuries, Pennsylvania’s energy resources brought clear gains in jobs and wealth. The nascent industrial decarbonization transition needs many more years of dedicated federal and local support before it can credibly substitute for the legacy energy economy. That’s not a convenient timetable for Democrats trying to make the case now for a Harris administration, and yet the outcome of the election will have an enormous impact on whether that support continues.
More than seven years after New Hampshire regulators first approved the idea of using community solar to create savings for low-income households, electric bill discounts are finally on the horizon for the first batch of participants.
“There has been this rhetoric that we want solar to benefit low-income people, but whenever we try to propose programs that will make that happen, they’ve been immensely slow to roll out,” said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Energy New Hampshire. “But despite being frustrated, I am really glad this is finally happening.”
The state energy department is reviewing seven proposals for community solar arrays that will allocate a portion of the credits they receive for sending power onto the grid to low-income households in the form of credits on their monthly bills. The projects selected will work with the utilities to identify customers receiving discounted rates, who will be automatically enrolled in the program.
Community solar is widely considered an important strategy for extending the benefits of renewable energy to people unable to take advantage of rooftop solar. Nationally, some two-thirds of households can’t install solar panels, generally because they don’t own their home, don’t have a suitable roof, or can’t afford the cost of the array, said Kate Daniel, Northeast regional director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access. Those obstacles are particularly challenging for low-income households, which are more likely to rent, need costly roof repairs, or lack the cash or credit scores needed to pay for panels, she added.
Community solar, on the other hand, allows these households to buy renewable energy, supporting climate action and saving money. Recent research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that community solar users have, on average, 23% lower incomes than rooftop solar adopters and are six times more likely to live in multifamily homes, suggesting community solar helps increase adoption of solar among these populations.
Why New Hampshire is important
Many states — including New Hampshire’s northeastern neighbors like Massachusetts and New York — have created programs to encourage the development of community solar projects that provide financial benefits to low-income households. But New Hampshire is falling behind: A recent report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratories, a federally funded research center, identifies New Hampshire as the state with the smallest share of its solar production going to disadvantaged households.
“We really have to ask ourselves why that is,” Evans-Brown said.
The first mandate for utilities to develop a program using community solar to benefit low-income households came as part of the order establishing the state’s current net metering system in 2017. Before a program could get off the ground, the state legislature passed a 2019 bill boosting the net metering rate for community solar projects serving low-income households, and the state suspended the earlier requirement until 2021, declaring it could be redundant given the new bill.
In 2021, the state asked for — and received — an additional suspension until July 2022, arguing that it had only finalized the eligibility rules for the net metering adder in September 2020, and therefore the utilities should not have to develop their own programs until the adder had a full two years to potentially spark development.
Then, in July 2022, the legislature passed a bill requiring the creation of a new community solar program including projects totalling up to six megawatts of capacity each year, each providing at least 25% of the credits it generates to low- or moderate-income customers. Customers will be automatically enrolled, but given ten days to opt out.
This program opened for proposals in December 2023, with a deadline of February 29, 2024. The state is now reviewing the seven proposals it received. If the applications total more than the six-megawatt cap, priority will be given to projects proposing greater benefits for low-income households.
“We are hammering out some of the final details with the utilities before we make the official designations,” said Joshua Elliott, director of policy and programs for the New Hampshire energy department. “Once we get the details of the processes finalized, we expect this process to move far more quickly in the future.”
‘To be determined’
There are elements of the program to like, advocates said.
Traditionally, it has been difficult for solar developers to cost-effectively find and recruit low-income customers for community solar. New Hampshire’s strategy of working with utilities to automatically enroll households that have already been identified streamlines the process. The state’s plan to review the program each year is also a strength, said Kirt Mayland, a visiting professor at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Uncertainties remain, however. Enrolling customers from the utilities’ electric assistance programs may be more efficient for developers, but it runs the risk of missing a lot of low-income households that are eligible for the discounted rate but not signed up. To reach the largest possible number of potential subscribers, a program should also accept households enrolled in other means-tested programs, like Medicaid or SNAP, or even simply allow customers to self-attest their qualifying income.
“The evidence on states with self-attestation has found there is very little fraud — it really does get over the barriers,” said Daniel, who is not very familiar with the New Hampshire program but has worked extensively with community solar in best practices.
The small size of the program could mean small savings for each participating household, Mayland said.
“There’s a concern about how much money is actually getting placed on the low-income customer’s bill — sometimes it doesn’t blow you away,” he said. “It’s to be determined whether it’s an effective program to help out the low-income community in New Hampshire.”
After a scorching summer that saw electricity bills soar, experts told lawmakers Wednesday that they should eschew costly utility mandates, invest in technology like carbon capture, and avoid shutting down power plants before replacement power sources are up and running.
Wednesday’s hearing of the Assembly’s utilities committee was called to address complaints from South Jersey residents about dramatic electric bill spikes, and it came in the midst of New Jersey’s push for broader electrification that could push power demand yet higher.
Jason Stanek, executive director of government services for PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for New Jersey and 12 other states, said New Jersey should not advance policies that shut down power sources unless they have replacements that are operating.
The state’s last two coal-fired power plants closed in 2022, and wind projects meant to boost its generation capacity have faced cost and other hurdles.
“To minimize rate impacts, we would respectfully request avoiding any policies that are designed to push resources off the system before we have an equal and equivalent amount of replacement resources,” Stanek said.
Swings in energy supply and demand can put pressure on rates, especially when supply falls as demand rises.
Stanek noted electricity prices at its annual July capacity auction surged nearly nine times higher than the previous year. Utilities procure electricity through the auction and sell it to ratepayers at cost but can generate a profit from transmission, among other things.
Rate Counsel Brian Lipman said the higher auction prices would add between $12 and $15 to customers’ monthly electricity bills beginning in June.
Improvements to energy efficiency had helped tamp down on demand for more electricity generation in recent decades, though that trend has since reversed, Board of Public Utilities President Christine Guhl-Sadovy told the committee.
Growing electrification, increased uptake in electric vehicles and their charges, and surging demand for data centers spurred by a boom in artificial intelligence are set to push New Jersey’s energy needs up significantly, said Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo (D-Mercer), the committee’s chairman.
“If you have a quick charging station, they use 100 amps. That’s the amount of power that’s in a small residential house,” said DeAngelo, an electrician by trade. “As we’re moving New Jersey across and increasing our bandwidth and the need for data — be mindful as AI is coming into the picture and becoming more prominent — one data center that they’re talking about building is going to need 800 (megawatts).”
That data center alone would consume nearly a quarter of the electricity produced by three nuclear power plants in South Jersey that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, accounted for 43.5% of the state’s energy generation in 2022. Combined, the plants produce 3,457 megawatts of electricity.
Some suggested New Jersey’s ambitious renewable energy goals, which call for the state to draw 100% of its power from renewable sources by 2035, wouldn’t help the state meet electricity demand in the short run.
“We need to be moving towards that clean energy future, but we also need to be investing in some of the technologies of where we are today. There are technologies that can help out the use of natural gas, like carbon capture,” said Rich Henning, president and CEO of the New Jersey Utility Association.
Others suggested regulatory changes would push power prices down.
Lipman, the rate counsel, said changes to federal rules that would include more electric capacity in PJM auctions would push down rates, and he urged an end to legislative mandates that forced utilities to invest in infrastructure or raise other costs passed along to ratepayers, like a $300 million annual subsidy to the state’s nuclear plants that is due to lapse on June 1.
In New Jersey, most utilities can earn 9.6 cents for every dollar invested in addition to recouping their expenses. Those costs are typically borne by ratepayers.
“We’re forcing them to invest, and they’re not doing that for free. They’re coming back and they’re seeking their money,” Lipman said, adding new oversight of transmission could also control costs.
Environmental advocates are hailing a decision by Massachusetts regulators that will give more than 1.3 million households access to lower winter electricity prices if they use a heat pump in their home.
Public utilities regulators on Monday ordered National Grid, the state’s second-largest electric company, to develop a lower, seasonal rate for houses with heat pumps. The decision comes three months after the state approved a similar rate plan by Unitil, an electric utility that serves 108,500 Massachusetts households.
“They hit the nail on the head here,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate and energy nonprofit Acadia Center.
Heat pumps are a major element of Massachusetts’ strategy for going carbon neutral by 2050. However, high electricity prices and historically low natural gas prices make switching to a heat pump financially difficult for many people. Unitil’s pricing plan is an attempt to bridge that affordability gap and make heat pumps more accessible, said spokesman Alec O’Meara.
National Grid had proposed a technology-neutral “electrification rate” that would have offered a discounted rate to high-volume electric consumers, whether the power demand was coming from an efficient heat pump, inefficient electric resistance heat, or even a pool heater. Environmental activists, advocates for low-income households, a solar industry group, the state energy department, and the state attorney general all filed comments objecting to this approach and pushing for a heat pump-specific rate like Unitil’s.
“The proposal that National Grid had filed wasn’t going to do anything to ensure that customers who opted into their electrification rate were actually participating in our decarbonization efforts,” said Priya Gandbhir, a senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, one of the groups that pushed for a heat pump specific rate.
In their order, regulators sided with the objectors. They concluded that National Grid’s proposal did not meet the state’s legal mandates to consider the impact of rate design changes on greenhouse gas emissions and energy efficiency, as opposed to Unitil’s approach, which removes a barrier to lower emissions and greater efficiency.
“The heat pump rate will reduce kilowatt hour electricity rates for these customers during winter when heat pumps replace fossil fuel heating equipment, furthering the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Alanna Kelly, spokesperson for the state department of public utilities.
The order also encouraged National Grid to create the rate quickly so it could be in effect before the coming winter heating season.
Residents with heat pumps in four Massachusetts towns will soon pay hundreds of dollars less for their electricity over the winter, thanks to a new pricing approach advocates hope will become a model for utilities across the state.
State regulators in June approved a plan by utility Unitil to lower the distribution portion of the electric rate from November to April for customers who use heat pumps, the first time this pricing structure will be used in the state. It’s a shift the company hopes will make it more financially feasible for residents of its service area to choose the higher-efficiency, lower-emissions heat source.
“We asked, is there a way we can structure the rates that would be fair and help customers adopt a heat pump?” said Unitil spokesman Alec O‘Meara. “We recognize that energy affordability is very important to our customers.”
A balancing act
Electric heat pumps are a major part of Massachusetts’ strategy for reaching its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Today, nearly 80% of homes in the state use natural gas, oil, or another fossil fuel for space heating. Looking to upend that ratio, the state has set a target of having heat pumps in 500,000 homes by 2030.
One of the major obstacles to this goal is cost. To address part of this barrier, Massachusetts offers rebates of up to $16,000 for income-qualified homeowners and $10,000 for higher-income residents for heat pump equipment.
The cost of powering these systems though, can be its own problem. Natural gas prices have been trending precipitously downward for the past two years and Massachusetts has long had some of the highest electricity prices in the country. This disparity can be particularly stark in the winter, when consumers using natural gas for heating get priority, requiring the grid to lean more heavily on dirtier, more expensive oil- and coal-fueled power plants, said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate and energy nonprofit Acadia Center.
So switching from natural gas to an electric heat source — even a more efficient one like a heat pump — doesn’t always mean savings for a consumer, especially those with lower incomes.
“Electric rates are disproportionately higher than gas rates in the region,” Murray said.
Unitil’s new winter pricing structure is an attempt to rebalance that equation. In New England, electric load on the grid is generally much lower in the winter, when people turn off their air conditioners and switch over to gas or oil heating. That means that the grid, built to accommodate summer’s peak demand, has plenty of capacity for the added load of new heat pumps coming online — no new infrastructure needs to be built to handle this demand (for now, at least).
“The marginal cost of adding demand is lower,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which supports heat pump-specific rates.
Unitil, which provides electricity to 108,500 households, decided to let customers share in that lower marginal cost. The company estimates customers will save about six cents per kilowatt-hour, which would work out to a monthly savings of more than $100 for a home using about 2,000 kilowatt-hours per month. The new rate should go into effect in early 2025, O’Meara said.
Statewide solutions?
As Unitil is preparing to deploy its heat pump rate, environmental advocates and other stakeholders are pushing for adoption of this strategy beyond Unitil’s relatively limited territory.
Public utilities regulators are in the middle of considering a rate case filed by National Grid, which serves some 1.3 million customers in Massachusetts. National Grid has proposed what it calls a technology-neutral “electrification rate,” which would provide discounts to certain high-volume energy users, which would include heat pump users.
However, several advocates for low-income households and clean energy — including Acadia Center, Conservation Law Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Low-Income Energy Affordability Network — as well as the state energy department and Attorney General Andrea Campbell argue that this approach is inadequate. They’ve submitted comments urging regulators to require National Grid to offer a heat pump rate similar to Unitil’s plan, but modified to work within National Grid’s pricing model.
“Every intervenor in the docket who commented on the electrification proposal in any capacity was negative on it,” Murray said. “And the [department of public utilities] in its questioning seemed fairly skeptical as well.”
National Grid declined to comment on the pending rate case.
The electrification rate, opponents argue, would lower costs not just for households with heat pumps, but also for those with inefficient electric resistance heating and even heated pools, effectively running counter to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“The ‘electrification’ proposal would apply to all electricity consumption, whether or not consistent with the Commonwealth’s climate policy of reducing greenhouse gases,” said Jerrold Oppenheim, a lawyer for the Low-Income Weatherization and Fuel Assistance Program Network and the Low-Income Energy Affordability Network.
It would also do nothing to encourage heat pump adoption among low- and moderate-income households, they say: Some 48% of low-income customers interested in switching to a heat pump would actually see bill increases of up to 33%, according to a brief filed by Oppenheim for the network.
Beyond the National Grid rate case, other stakeholders are also pushing for seasonal heat pump rates. The state has convened an Interagency Rates Working Group to study and make recommendations on the challenges of changing how electric rates are designed to encourage electrification of home heating and adoption of electric vehicles. In August the group released an analysis that found seasonal rates created significant savings for homes with heat pumps.
“They came to the same conclusion, that this is the right approach,” Kresowik said.
Eventually, the introduction of advanced metering technology will simplify the process of applying lower rates to desired uses, like heat pumps and electric vehicles. But the full deployment of these systems is still several years in the future, and action to ease adoption of heat pumps must be taken much sooner, advocates argue.
In the meantime, many have expressed some optimism that regulators will require National Grid to make its electrification proposal more responsive to the state’s climate and equity priorities.
“I would be surprised if the electrification pricing proposal exists as is in the final [regulatory] order,” Murray said.
Solar customers and clean energy advocates are waiting to see if New Hampshire will continue its system for compensating customers who share excess power on the grid.
State regulators at a recent hearing seemed unconvinced about the policy’s benefits, despite support from utilities, customers, and hundreds of residents who submitted public comments on a proposed extension.
“This commission is highly skeptical of anything involving energy efficiency or clean energy, and focused almost solely on cost,” said Nick Krakoff, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation in New Hampshire.
These compensation plans, generally referred to as net metering, are widely considered one of the most effective policies for encouraging more solar adoption. Recently, however, several states have changed or considered changing their programs, as utilities object that the policies are too costly and some politicians and policymakers push for more purely market-based approaches.
New Hampshire’s net metering rules haven’t been modified since they were established in 2017. The state’s public utilities commission opened a case to consider the question of whether and how to adjust the rules in September 2022. A year into the proceedings, the state’s major electric utilities — Eversource, Liberty Utilities, and Unitil — came out in support of continuing the existing system of net metering, despite the tendency of utilities nationwide to consistently push for lower net metering rates. The move was a welcome surprise for environmental advocates.
“If you don’t have a compensation rate that’s high enough, you’re not going to have customers that are going to want to invest in solar panels or other renewable energy,” Krakoff said.
Striking an agreement
In early August, a diverse coalition including the utilities, the Conservation Law Foundation, Clean Energy New Hampshire, Granite State Hydropower Association, Standard Power of America, and Walmart reached a settlement agreement about the future of the policy.
The agreement calls for the state to keep the current net metering structure in place for two years; at the end of two years, utilities would propose time-of-use rates for net metering, so the compensation rate more closely matches the real-time value of the power being sent into the grid. Also, any projects that join the net metering program during those two years will receive the same compensation for 20 years before transitioning into whatever new system is created by then (currently the compensation ends in 2040).
An influx of public comments has also reflected wide support for the tenets of the agreement. Nearly 450 comments were submitted since the beginning of the year, more than Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, has ever seen in a public utilities case, he said. The vast majority urge the commission to maintain the current net metering system.
Peterborough resident Brian Stiefel was among those who filed comments. He and his wife installed 37 solar panels on their home in 2021, at a cost of $51,000. Though the solar doesn’t fully cover their electric bills, it provides $2,000 to $3,000 in savings per year, in large part due to net metering.
“A big part of the decision to do this was the fact that the state would approve us for net metering,” Stiefel said in an interview. “If that’s going to change it could have a significant financial impact on everybody who has panels and is set up with net metering.”
An uncertain path forward
However, clean energy advocates say they have seen some signs in recent months that the commission might not be paying much attention to the benefits the system creates, while seeking out evidence that net metering creates a cost burden for consumers who aren’t part of the program.
“The concern is that the chair is looking for a cost shift and is going to do whatever it takes to find one,” Evans-Brown said.
Last spring, the commissioner requested a series of records in the case, several focused on gathering information about other states’ net metering programs — information that did not seem relevant to the decisions needed in New Hampshire, Evans-Brown said. The commission also requested, in a different docket, information about stranded cost recovery, which it then placed into the record on the net metering case as well, a move energy advocates interpreted as an attempt to focus on costs to the exclusion of benefits.
Then, in hearings on August 20 and 22, the commissioners asked questions that seemed focused on finding costs being passed on to consumers, even though there is simply no such evidence on the record, Krakoff said.
Advocates’ concerns are magnified by the commission’s history: In 2021, the commission drastically reduced funding for the state’s energy efficiency rebate and incentives. Though the utilities, consumer advocates, and environmental groups had come to an agreement to raise funding for the programs, the commission claimed that the program would burden consumers and that the state should focus on promoting market-based energy efficiency services.
Current commission chair Daniel Goldner was one of the commissioners who signed the energy efficiency decision. During his confirmation hearing earlier that year, Goldner expressed skepticism about climate science, and advocates raised concerns about his lack of experience in the energy field.
“They expressed strong skepticism of energy efficiency and actually gutted the program,” Krakoff said, comparing that case to the present-day net metering proceedings. “It’s very concerning.”
Now advocates, homeowners, and other stakeholders can only wait to see what the commission decides and when they decide it. An order could come by the end of the year, said Evans-Brown, or the commissioners could decide to push the matter well into the new year — there are no deadlines set on the process.
Should the commission in some way reject the settlement, there is still hope the legislature would take action to protect net metering. As part of the proceeding, state Sens. Kevin Avard, Howard Pearl, and David Watters submitted a letter explaining their belief that reducing net metering compensation would be against the goals of the legislature.
“It is the intent of the legislature to preserve a viable net metering program in the state of New Hampshire, and we will take action to do so if necessary,” they wrote.
Resolving the question through legislative action, however, would leave the matter open and undecided for even longer, making it harder to encourage solar development in the state, advocates noted.
“We were expecting this to be a challenging docket when this was first announced,” Evans-Brown said. “It’s frustrating, but not surprising.”
A year and a half since Massachusetts introduced an optional new building code aimed at lowering fossil fuel use, climate activists are heartened by how quickly cities and towns are adopting the new guidelines.
The new code, known as the specialized stretch code, became law in 2023. Since then, 45 municipalities representing about 30% of the state’s population have voted to adopt its guidelines. The code is already active in 33 of these communities and scheduled to take effect over the next year in another 12.
“That is just an astounding statistic to me,” said climate advocate Lisa Cunningham, one of the founders of decarbonization nonprofit ZeroCarbonMA. “The rollout has been, quite frankly, amazing.”
Massachusetts has long been a leader in using opt-in building codes to push for decarbonization of the built environment. In 2009, the state introduced the country’s first stretch code, an alternative version of the building code that includes more stringent energy efficiency requirements. Municipalities must vote to adopt the stretch code, and the vast majority have done so: As of June, just 8.5% of residents lived in the 50 towns and cities without a stretch code.
The specialized stretch code takes this approach a step farther. The goal is to create a code that will help achieve target emissions reductions from 2025 to 2050, when the state aims to be carbon-neutral. In 2021, the legislature called on the state to create an additional opt-in code that would get close to requiring net-zero carbon emissions from new construction.
“We want to work towards decarbonizing those buildings, right from the start, as we look to a future in 2050 while we are net-zero in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Elizabeth Mahony, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.
At the same time, electrified, energy-efficient homes will mean lower energy costs for residents over time, more comfortable and healthier indoor air, and more stable indoor temperatures when power outages occur, she said.
The construction industry, meanwhile, has concerns about the measure’s impact on upfront costs.
Getting to net-zero buildings
The resulting code doesn’t require buildings to achieve net-zero emissions right away, but attempts to ensure any new construction will be ready to go carbon-neutral before 2050.
There are a few pathways for compliance. A newly built home can use fossil fuels for space heating, water heating, cooking, or drying or be built fully electrified. If the new home uses any fossil fuels, however, it must be built to a higher energy efficiency standard, be wired to ready the house for future electrification, and include solar panels onsite where feasible. In all cases, homes must be wired for at least one electric vehicle charging station.
Larger, multifamily buildings must be built to Passive House standards, a certification that requires the dramatic reduction of energy use as compared to similar buildings of the same size and type. Single-family homes can also choose to pursue Passive House certification.
Decarbonization advocates are pleased with the rollout so far. The state’s major cities, including Boston, Worcester, and Cambridge, were all quick to adopt the code. In most municipalities the vote to adopt the specialized code has been near-unanimous, said Cunningham.
And more communities are considering the specialized code.
“We’re talking to a lot of communities that are contemplating it for their town meetings this fall,” Mahony said. “We know there is a growing sense out there of wanting to do this.”
The key to convincing cities and towns that the code is a good idea is for municipal governments to understand and frame the code as a consumer protection measure, rather than an added burden, Cunningham said. The requirements of the specialized code along with state and federal incentives can save on construction costs upfront, and will ensure buildings cost less to operate during their lifetime, offering significant benefits to residents, she said.
“At the point of construction this is an incremental expense – it’s barely even a blip,” she said. “Then it directly reduces your future electricity bills.”
A troublesome transition?
Many in the construction industry, however, disagree with Cunningham’s take. Emerson Clauss III, a director with the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, has found the equipment needed to reach the high standards in the code is more expensive than its authors counted on, and supply chain issues are causing even higher prices.
“It’s had quite a rough start to it,” Clauss said. “It’s adding considerable cost to new housing.”
He also worries that the high cost of electricity now — Massachusetts electricity prices are the third highest in the country — spells near-term financial trouble for homeowners that feel forced to go all-electric.
“The idea that it’s going to cost less 20 years from now — what does that do for people who need to get into a house now?” he asked.
Furthermore, the creation of a new optional code, he said, adds another variable for builders already jumping between the basic code and the previous stretch code, as well as learning the new rules in ten communities banning fossil fuels as part of a state pilot program. Even municipal building directors aren’t able to keep up, Clauss said, recalling a confused call with a suburban building inspector who needed 20 minutes to confirm it was OK to install a natural gas line in a new home.
In Cambridge, one of the first cities to adopt the specialized code, Assistant Commissioner of Inspectional Services Jacob Lazzara noted there was some confusion at the outset, but time and proactive communication from the city helped ease the transition. The city has held trainings, created materials to hand out to builders and design professionals, and fine-tuned internal communications to make sure the staff is all well informed.
“There was a little bit of shock for everyone at first, but I think we’re in a good place right now,” Lazzara said.
A pending youth climate lawsuit in Maine represents the latest iteration of legal strategies aimed at holding states accountable for emissions-cutting targets.
The case is one of a growing number responding to lagging progress on state climate laws that, in many cases, have now been on the books for years. What makes the Maine case unique is its targeted approach — focused on electric vehicle policy as a way to push the state forward on climate action.
The case, filed earlier this year by the nonprofits Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Sierra Club and Maine Youth Action, argues that the Maine Department and Board of Environmental Protection have fallen short on their legal duty to pass rules that will help achieve Maine’s required emissions reductions.
“There are countless solutions for tackling these various sources of climate-warming pollution,” said CLF senior attorney Emily Green, who is based in Portland, Maine. “But you need something more to make sure that it’s all enough, that it all adds up, and that’s where enforceable standards come in.”
The Maine Attorney General’s office declined to comment, but has moved to dismiss the case. A ruling on next steps is now pending.
Advocates focus on EV rulemaking
The case focuses on a 2019 state law that requires Maine to lower its greenhouse gas emissions 45% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
Statutes like this are “where the rubber meets the road,” said Columbia Law School professor Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “The regulations are the teeth, the specifics on who needs to do what.”
Such rules translate emissions goals into practical requirements for state executive agencies, processing legislative directive “into what polluters are required to do on a day-to-day basis,” said Jennifer Rushlow, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Maine’s climate law said the state “shall adopt rules to ensure compliance” with the emissions targets, requiring those rules to prioritize reductions “by sectors that are the most significant sources.”
Transportation contributes more than half of Maine’s emissions, and Maine’s climate plan prioritized electric vehicle adoption as a result. But the state is a long way off from its EV targets. It has about 12,300 EVs on the road now, with climate plan goals of 41,000 by next year and 219,000 by 2030.
The CLF suit takes regulators to task for repeatedly failing to adopt California’s latest electric car and truck standards, which some states use as a more stringent alternative to federal rules.
Maine has used California’s Advanced Clean Cars I rule for years, but voted earlier this year against adopting Advanced Clean Cars II, which would have required increasing EV sales in the state over the next several years. It’s also chosen twice not to consider adopting the Advanced Clean Trucks rule.
CLF notes that the state’s climate law requires the adoption of rules that are “consistent with the climate action plan,” first released in 2020. A roadmap for meeting the plan’s transportation goals strongly recommended adopting Clean Cars II, calling it “the most important regulatory driver in the electrification of Maine’s light-duty vehicles in the next two decades.”
State says harms are uncertain
In its motion to dismiss the CLF case, the state argues that Maine’s climate law does not require regulators to adopt all climate plan recommendations, or particular ones, as rules.
The state has approved a handful of other rules under the climate law. Two focus on tracking emissions, and two others look at what Green called “narrow slices of the building sector,” the state’s second-largest emissions sector. These rules target hydrofluorocarbons and energy efficiency in appliances.
In their motion, attorneys for the state quote a Maine Supreme Court decision from a separate environmental case earlier this year to argue that it is “simply ‘too uncertain’ … whether future harms will occur that will ‘directly and continuously impact’ any of Plaintiffs’ members.”
CLF’s response lists a range of climate-linked harms that specific members of the plaintiff groups say they’ve already experienced, from increasing tick-borne illness and other health impacts to crop and flood damage.
“Climate change is here. Mainers are feeling the effects from a warming Gulf, from climate-driven storms,” Green said, adding that state lawmakers have repeatedly made similar statements in recent years. “Each day that passes with further inaction is a day wasted.”
The state also argues that the “shifting sands” of state and federal climate policies that could affect Maine’s targets create too much uncertainty around harms from a current lack of transportation rules.
In general, Gerrard said, such factors don’t negate the need for rulemaking. “We are way behind in reducing emissions, and so the fact that other things are happening isn’t going to solve the problem.”
Green said that while Maine has made strides on expanding EV charging infrastructure, for example, “the actual standards are necessary to give that transition the push it needs.”
“Binding rules can basically act as a backstop,” she said. “They can ensure the accountability that the investment and the rebates and the education and outreach, on their own, can’t do.”
Narrower lawsuits get results
The suit’s transportation focus is notable, experts said. “I would say the energy sector is targeted more frequently, and especially the fossil fuel sector,” Gerrard said. Other climate-adjacent transportation cases have focused on vehicle emissions standards, biofuel mandates or highway projects, he said.
Rushlow sees the Maine case as a blend of a 2016 suit, also from CLF, which found that Massachusetts wasn’t fulfilling its 2008 emissions-cutting law, and a suit against the Hawaii Department of Transportation, where a recent settlement will require the decarbonization of Hawaii’s transportation sector by 2045.
Rushlow worked with CLF on the Massachusetts case, but is not involved in the Maine suit and reviewed it after being asked to comment for this story. She said the Maine case lays out why having regulations on transportation emissions is “not just a wish” of the state climate council, but a legal requirement.
“The lawsuits that get really broad can get kind of lost to politics,” said Rushlow. “These lawsuits that are more narrow and focused on the language of particular state laws, I think, can stand a good chance.”
She said there are also more “hooks” to do this at the state level than federally. Gerrard agreed that it’s easier to bring cases under specific statutes than “a constitutional provision or a common law doctrine.”
Both the Hawaii case and the landmark Held v. Montana, which is now on appeal before that state’s Supreme Court, successfully took a state constitutional approach, using their legally given rights to a clean and healthful environment to push for climate progress.
Victories of public opinion
Practical legal results aren’t the only positive impact these cases can have, Rushlow said: “There’s also outcomes in the zeitgeist and public opinion.” Though Juliana v. United States failed in court, she said, it “really drew a lot of attention to the future harm we’re causing our youth — and the current harm.”
But she sees increasing potential for success among a greater share of climate lawsuits just in the past few years, as plaintiffs learn more about how courts are likely to receive different approaches.
“It feels to me like progress is being made,” she said. “But the courts are never the first place you want to go when you’re looking for rapid, systemic change. They’re slow, they’re backward-looking, they’re conservative. And so it’s a challenging forum for the kind of change we need, and yet necessary.”
In Maine, climate groups initially tried a regulatory petition to push for the passage of Clean Cars II.
“When it became entirely evident that that was not going to happen, our hand was sort of forced,” Green said.
As Maine considers building a new toll highway to improve commutes in and out of Portland, a state climate working group is drafting strategies to reduce driving in the state.
State officials say the two efforts are not inherently at odds, but experts and advocates caution that continued highway expansion could reverse climate progress by encouraging more people to drive.
The parallel discussions in Maine raise a question that few states have yet grappled with: can governments keep expanding car infrastructure without putting climate goals out of reach?
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Maine and many other states. Electric vehicle adoption is growing, but not fast enough to solve the problem on its own, which is why an updated state climate plan is expected to include a new emphasis on public transit, walking, biking, and other alternatives to passenger vehicles.
Zak Accuardi, the director for mobility choices at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the best way for states to invest in their road systems in the era of climate change is to not build new roads, but maintain and upgrade existing ones to accommodate more climate-friendly uses.
“The states who are taking transportation decarbonization really seriously are really focused on reducing driving, reducing traffic,” Accuardi said, pointing to Minnesota and Colorado as examples. “Strategies that help support more people in making the choice to walk, bike or take transit — those policies are a really important complement to … accelerating the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles.”
Slow progress on EV goals
Electric vehicles have been Maine’s primary focus to date in planning to cut back on transportation emissions. Goals in the state’s original 2020 climate plan included getting 41,000 light-duty EVs on the road in Maine by next year and 219,000 by 2030. The state is far behind on these targets. The climate council’s latest status report said there were just over 12,300 EVs or plug-in hybrid vehicles in Maine as of 2023.
A 2021 state clean transportation roadmap for these goals recommended, among other things, the adoption of California’s Advanced Clean Cars II and Advanced Clean Trucks rules, which would require an increasing proportion of EV sales in the coming years.
The original climate plan also aimed to cut Maine’s vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which measures how much people are driving overall, by 20% by 2030. The plan said getting there would require more transit funding, denser development to improve transit access, and broadband growth to enable remote work, but included little detail on these issues. It did not include the words “active transportation” at all.
That appears poised to change in the state’s next four-year climate plan, due out in December. Recommendations from the state climate council’s transportation working group have drawn praise from advocacy groups like the Bicycle Coalition of Maine.
New detail on non-car strategies
The group’s ideas include creating new state programs to support electric bike adoption, including in disadvantaged communities; paving 15 to 20 miles of shoulders on rural roads per year to improve safe access for cyclists and pedestrians; and, depending on federal funds, building at least 10 miles of off-road trails in priority areas by 2030.
The group also recommended the state “develop targets related to increased use of transit, active transportation, and shared commuting that are consistent with Maine’s statutory emissions reduction goals.”
In unveiling the recommendations, working group co-chair and Maine Department of Transportation chief engineer Joyce Taylor noted community benefits from road safety upgrades to accommodate these goals.
“I think this also gets at housing and land use,” she said. “If you can get people to want to live in that community, that village, I think we could all say that it’s more economically vibrant when people are able to walk and bike in their village and feel like they can get around and it’s safe.”
The Gorham Connector project would offer a new, tolled bypass around local roads as an alternative to upgrading those existing routes, an option that’s also been studied. State officials say the new road would smooth the flow of local traffic, including public transit.
Towns aim to marry transit, housing, climate
Towns like Kittery, in southern Maine, have tried to focus on a more inclusive array of transportation strategies in their local work to cut emissions from passenger vehicles.
Kittery town manager Kendra Amaral is a member of the climate council’s transportation group. She couldn’t comment on the state’s approach to the Gorham Connector, which is outside her region. But she said her town’s climate action plan, adopted this past May, “threads together” public transit, housing growth and emissions reductions.
Stakeholders who worked on the plan, she said, strongly recommended ensuring that housing is in walkable or transit-accessible places.
Amaral said the town has invested in new bus routes, commuter shuttles and road improvements to promote traffic calming and create safer bike and pedestrian access, as well as in EV growth. And she said Kittery was a model for parts of a new state law that enables denser housing development.
“We can’t expect people to reduce (emissions) resulting from transportation without giving them options,” she said. But, she added, “there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution” for every community. “I believe we have to avoid the ‘all or nothing’ trap and work towards (the priorities) that get the best results for each community,” she said.
‘Devil is in the details’
The Maine Turnpike Authority acknowledges the proposed Gorham Connector project in the Portland area would increase driving. But paired with improvements to transit and land-use patterns, they say the proposed limited-access toll road would decrease emissions overall — though research and other cases cast doubt on this possibility.
“It’s possible for a project like this to be designed in a way that does produce favorable environmental outcomes,” Accuardi said, but “the devil is really in the details.”
For example, he said the new road’s tolls should be responsive to traffic patterns in order to effectively reduce demand. If they’re too low, he said, the road will become jammed with the kind of gridlock it aimed to avert. But set the tolls too high, and the road won’t get used enough.
He said it’s true that this kind of new access road can lead to denser housing development in the surrounding area — but the road will need to be tolled carefully to account for that increased demand.
And the proceeds from those tolls, he said, should ideally go toward new clean transportation alternatives — such as funding additional transit service or safe walking and biking infrastructure around the new toll road, helping to finance subsidized affordable housing in transit-served areas, or allocating revenues to surrounding towns that make “supportive land-use changes” to lean into transit and decrease driving.
Maine has indicated that it expects to use tolls from the Gorham Connector primarily, or at least in part, to pay for the road itself and avoid passing costs to other taxpayers.
But Accuardi said alternative strategies should see more investment than road expansions in the coming years if states like Maine want to aggressively cut emissions.
He said on average, across the country, states spend a quarter of their federal transportation funding on “expanding roads or adding new highway capacity.”
“That’s more money than states tend to spend on public transit infrastructure, and that really needs to be flipped,” he said. “We need to see states really … ramping down their investments in new highway capacity. Because, again, we know it doesn’t work.”
Massachusetts has awarded $53 million — and announced plans for additional funding — to allow affordable housing operators to execute energy efficiency retrofits that are expected to reduce carbon emissions, cut energy bills, and create healthier, more comfortable homes for residents.
The state in late July announced the second round of awards in the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program, allocating $26.1 million to five organizations to improve insulation, tighten building envelopes, and switch to heat pump heating and cooling systems. These grants come seven months after an initial round of $27.4 million was awarded to seven affordable housing operators statewide.
“This has been a really critical funding stream for moving forward critical energy projects at some of our family public housing sites,” said Joel Wool, deputy administrator for sustainability and capital transformation at the Boston Housing Authority, which received grants in both rounds.
Along with the most recent round of awards, the state also announced it would invest another $40 million into the program in anticipation of giving out another set of grants in the fall.
The program was designed to address two major policy goals: decarbonization and addressing the state’s affordable housing crisis.
Massachusetts has set the ambitious goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Buildings — which contribute 35% of the state’s carbon emissions — are a particularly important sector to target for decarbonization. This means finding ways to retrofit the state’s existing housing stock, much of which is drafty, heated by fossil fuels, and decades — or even centuries — old.
At the same time, Massachusetts is experiencing an acute housing crisis. State officials estimate at least 200,000 new homes are needed to accommodate demand by 2030. Finding an affordable home is even more challenging for lower-income residents faced with soaring rents and home prices — and often, high energy bills.
“We have such a housing crisis in Massachusetts that we want to do anything we can to create more housing, but also to make the housing we have now a better place to live,” said state Energy Department Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony. “These are investments in our infrastructure.”
Nonprofit Worcester Common Ground received an $820,000 grant in the latest round that it will use to complete deep energy retrofits on four buildings that were last updated some 30 years ago. The money will allow the renovations to include air sealing, more energy-efficient windows, and extra insulation. The grant will also allow the buildings to go fully electric, including with air source heat pumps that will provide lower-cost, more comfortable heating and cooling.
“Even though it’s a higher upfront cost, the hope is that maybe it reduces expenses going forward,” said Timothy Gilbert, project manager for Worcester Common Ground. “It might sound a little cheesy but we really do care about the well-being of the folks who live in our houses.”
In most cases, the grant money is being combined with other funding to allow more complete — and even downright ambitious — upgrades. In Worcester, other funding sources will pay for rooftop solar panels that will make the newly energy-efficient buildings even more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The Boston Housing Authority is using its latest $5.8 million award as part of a larger project that aims to completely decarbonize the Franklin Fields housing development in the Dorchester neighborhood by combining energy efficiency upgrades and Boston’s first networked geothermal system.
In the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, the Madison Park Development Corporation is receiving $13.5 million from the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program to do work at its 331-unit Orchard Gardens development. But it is also seeking out other sources to meet the $20 million expected cost of the planned sustainability upgrades.
“It’s a big property and the heart of one of Boston’s oldest, most diverse, most underserved neighborhoods,” said Oren Richkin, senior project manager for the organization. “This grant money is pivotal for this project.”
Supporters of the program are expecting it to strengthen the state’s ability to respond to climate change in the future as well. Switching affordable housing units from fossil fuel heating to heat pump heating and cooling will allow residents to stay comfortable and safe in their own homes during increasingly hot summers, Wool said.
The funding could also help nudge the ideas of deep energy retrofits and electrification more into the mainstream, Mahony said.
“We are essentially socializing these programs — the more we do it, the more people will get used to the ideas,” she said.
As the recipients of the first round of grants begin their projects, the state is starting to learn how to operate the program more effectively. The state has already, for example, started providing some technical assistance to organizations interested in applying for future rounds of funding. Continued conversations with building owners and nonprofits will be essential to creating an even stronger program moving forward, Mahony said.
“We’re setting ourselves up for success in the future,” she said.
Climate and clean transportation advocates are calling into question a claim by Maine officials that a new toll road proposed outside Portland will reduce carbon emissions by alleviating gridlock.
It’s a common argument made in favor of highway expansions nationwide, said Benito Pérez, the policy director of the nonprofit Transportation for America. But it relies on a narrow view of data that, in context, tends to show these projects are more likely to increase planet-warming emissions, he said.
“They’re looking at it from one dimension,” said Pérez, a former transportation planner and engineer. “This is a multi-dimensional issue when it comes to emissions reduction, and it’s not going to work.”
Maine’s proposed Gorham Connector project has met stiff public opposition in its rollout over recent months. The toll road aims to offer a more direct route from Portland’s growing suburbs into the city, bypassing local roads that officials say weren’t designed to accommodate increasing commuter traffic.
The project has been contemplated since the late 1980s. Its latest iteration builds on a 2012 study that recommended three main ways to improve connectivity between Portland and points west: new approaches to land use and development, expanded bus and passenger rail access, and various road upgrades and expansions, including the new four-lane, roughly five-mile bypass the state is now proposing.
The Maine Turnpike Authority took more than three hours of comments at its first public input session on the project in March. On July 18, the MTA said it would delay further public meetings on the project and extend its permitting timeline due to a “high level of public interest and concern.”
In response to questions for this story, MTA spokesperson Erin Courtney emphasized the importance of a multi-pronged approach in achieving the Gorham Connector’s projected climate benefits.
“Coupled with targeted land use and transit initiatives, we aim to create a more efficient and sustainable transportation system that addresses both congestion and environmental impacts,” she said.
Benefits are ‘negligible at best’
The emissions impact of smoother traffic on the proposed toll road has been one of the MTA’s core arguments in favor of the project. The agency says on the the website for the Connector that it “will ease traffic flow, decreasing the number of idling vehicles, conserving fuel, and reducing exhaust pollutants in alignment with Maine’s Climate Action Plan.”
But even in isolation, this emissions benefit is typically “negligible at best,” said Pérez. Despite ongoing improvements in vehicles’ fuel efficiencies and even electrification, he said, studies show that more use of expanded roads tends to outweigh this benefit.
Pérez pointed to examples in the Washington, D.C. area, Salt Lake City and elsewhere where highway expansions that aimed to reduce gridlock instead led to more traffic and further need for expansions years later — a paradox known as “induced demand.”
A 2015 paper from the University of California-Davis explains this phenomenon: “Adding capacity decreases travel time, in effect lowering the ‘price’ of driving; and when prices go down, the quantity of driving goes up,” author Susan Handy wrote. New roads, for instance, can encourage more low-density development, which in turn fills those roads with additional drivers. This counteracts the value of highway expansions in alleviating congestion, Handy said, and at least partly offsets the emissions reductions that come along with it.
Courtney, with the MTA, said “the Gorham Connector’s design and goals suggest a different outcome,” arguing that the project is unique as a limited-access highway without many intersections or entrances.
“By enhancing traffic efficiency and reducing congestion on local roads, it can offer a balanced approach that considers both transportation needs and environmental impacts,” she said.
Portland resident Myles Smith, a steering committee member with Mainers for Smart Transportation, a volunteer group opposing the Gorham Connector, isn’t convinced.
“It’s part of a pattern of showing only the rosiest possible scenarios of how, theoretically, on paper, with a lot of other assumptions going perfectly, it might reduce climate emissions,” he said. “It assumes a lot of other things that they have no control over at the Turnpike Authority, like land-use planning and public transportation.”
New measures of climate impacts
The 2012 study backing the bypass proposal found that implementing a bevy of suggested road improvements and expansions, including the Connector, would decrease local vehicle hours traveled, or VHT — an analog for congestion, measuring how much time people spend in their cars, Pérez said — by about 10% versus 2035 projections.
It also said the area’s vehicle miles traveled, or VMT — which measures how much people are driving overall — would increase relative to 2035 projections if the bypass was built, but would decrease in scenarios where only existing roads were improved, or where public transit was the focus.
“This is why we propose a ‘three-legged stool’ approach,” Courtney said — one that also emphasizes dense development and increased public transit access, so that VMT increases might be offset by other benefits.
VMT is an increasingly common way to measure the climate benefits of transportation projects, Pérez said. Minnesota and Colorado have adopted new requirements toward goals for reducing their overall VMT, mandating that proposed road expansions either contribute to this decrease, or fund climate mitigation projects otherwise.
But advocates said VMT and VHT alone are not enough to measure the overall climate impacts of a project like the Gorham Connector. A more comprehensive analysis, they said, would include the environmental impacts of construction and would account in more detail for the role of the non-road improvements that the MTA is also calling for.
A need for coordinated solutions
The 2012 study, in its final recommendations, said all three strategies — changes to roads, transit and development patterns — would need to “work together to provide the desired results” for improving connectivity and reducing traffic impacts in the Portland area. For example, more dense development and less congestion will make new transit approaches more viable, Courtney said.
The Turnpike Authority has little direct control over those kinds of reforms, but says on its website that it expects “other regional studies” in those areas to be part of the Gorham Connector planning process.
“The Gorham Connector project, combined with additional initiatives being considered by the MTA and Maine (Department of Transportation) — such as additional park-and-ride facilities, electric vehicle charging stations, and enhanced transit opportunities — will collectively contribute to reduced greenhouse gas emissions compared to a ‘do nothing’ scenario,” Courtney said.
Smith said these other efforts are moving more slowly and with less state support than the Connector has received, putting these parallel solutions out of step with each other.
Maine is facing a lawsuit from youth climate activists over regulators’ decision earlier this year not to adopt California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which would have ramped up requirements for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle sales through model year 2032.
The state is still a long way off from the EV goals set in its 2020 climate action plan, which also aims to reduce light-duty vehicle miles traveled 10% by next year and 20% by 2030.
It’s an example of slow progress toward more holistic approaches to transportation and climate planning, which, Pérez said, must extend to technical details like the traffic models that underlie projects like the Gorham Connector in order to succeed.
“Those models need to think about what they’re measuring — what matters most,” he said. “The mindset is, ‘we’re designing for vehicles,’ and that’s what they’re measuring for, not measuring for the movement of people.”
Massachusetts officials, advocates, and businesses are hoping proposed changes to the state’s solar incentive program will help reinvigorate a flagging market and give more disadvantaged residents access to the benefits of renewable energy.
“The program has been pretty set in stone since it first launched,” said Katie Moffitt, project development manager for solar investment firm Sunwealth. “I am very excited about making the program more responsive to the needs of the solar industry and allowing us to adapt with the times.”
The state’s energy department earlier this month unveiled an extensive set of proposed adjustments to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target, or SMART, program, the first major overhaul since the program launched in 2018. The suggested changes include strategies to ensure subsidy rates keep up with the solar market, incentives to encourage more installation of solar on buildings and previously developed land, and plans to make solar power more accessible to low- and moderate-income residents.
The state is accepting feedback on the proposal until August 2, and expects to file final draft regulations in the fall.
The proposal comes at a moment when the state has seen significant declines in new solar power coming online. In 2021, Massachusetts saw more than 600 megawatts of new solar installed, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association; in 2022 and 2023, less than 400 megawatts were installed each year. Yet the state’s climate plan calls for at least 27 gigawatts of solar to meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050.
“We know, based on historical deployment rates, that we’re falling behind those goals,” said Samantha Meserve, director of the state’s renewable and alternative energy division. “We need to spur more development.”
Adaptable rates
Much of the slowdown in solar development is due to a mismatch between market conditions and state incentive rates, said those in the industry. SMART works by providing a fixed rate for every kilowatt-hour of power generated by a solar installation, with increased rates (called “adders”) available to projects that advance certain policy goals, like serving low-income populations. The set rates were intended to help encourage development with financial support and also create stability and predictability for developers.
The base rates were set when the program launched in 2018, and were designed to decline as more installations were built. The idea was that the solar market would gain steam and prices would continue falling, making state support less necessary over time.
However, the market did not cooperate with this vision: Supply chain problems made equipment more expensive, inflation increased costs for materials and labor, and rising electricity rates canceled out much — and sometimes all — of the financial benefit the SMART payments provided.
“That model theoretically would have worked fine in a noninflationary environment, but worked very poorly in the inflationary period,” said Isaac Baker, co-CEO of solar developer Resonant Energy.
The proposal tackles this problem by instituting an annual system for setting rates. Each year, the state will undertake an analysis of the current market conditions and progress toward state solar targets, and use this information to determine the program’s rates and capacity for the following year. Developers will provide real cost details to ensure the accuracy of the process.
“We achieved a lot of certainty in the last program, but we now need certainty with flexibility,” Meserve said. “We know we’re losing momentum to get to some of our goals because of that certainty.”
The proposal’s approach to deciding how much capacity to support each year, however, has some in the industry a bit wary. For the first two years, the capacity for projects larger than 25 kilowatts would be set at 300 megawatts; in subsequent years, the annual analysis would determine the capacity.
This limit does not help encourage more development, said Lindsay Bourgoine, vice president for policy for the Solar Energy Business Association of New England. And the starting point of 300 megawatts a year does not come close to supporting the state’s goal of hitting 10 gigawatts of solar power by 2030, she said.
“We remain pretty concerned about the use of caps,” Bourgoine said.
Getting siting right
Additional changes to the program aim to encourage more solar installations on buildings, parking lots, and other already-developed land.
“We’re making it more attractive to site projects in the built environment,” Meserve said.
A 2023 study found the state has highly suitable sites for 54 gigawatts of rooftop and canopy solar potential. At the same time, some environmental groups have been raising concerns about large solar installations disturbing important wildlife habitats and forests that can pull carbon from the air.
“We can’t be doing that with state money,” said Michelle Manion, vice president of policy and advocacy for Mass Audubon.
However, the economics of building large, ground-mounted arrays on previously undeveloped land have generally been more favorable. The new SMART proposal lays out several ideas to rebalance that equation. The proposal would lift the cap on subsidizing developments smaller than 25 kilowatts, a category that includes most residential projects and many installations for nonprofits, houses of worship, and small businesses.
The proposal also increases adders connected to projects in the built environment. The adder for building-mounted projects would go from 2 cents to an estimated 3 cents, and the adder for building over a landfill would increase from 4 cents to 6 cents.
Canopy-mounted systems would see both an increased adder — from 6 cents to 8 cents per kWh of energy produced — and a new definition. Whereas the current program awards a canopy adder only to projects over parking lots, pedestrian walkways, and canals, the revamped program would widen the criteria to include any array mounted on a structure high enough to maintain the function of the area beneath. This change opens the door for canopy projects shading everything from junkyards and gas stations to compost piles and picnic areas.
“You’ll start to see a lot more interesting and creative applications like that,” said Ben Underwood, Baker’s co-CEO at Resonant Energy.
A new adder, likely starting out at 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, would also be created for raised racking on rooftops: mounting systems that raise solar panels up high enough that other equipment such as climate control systems can still operate and be accessed beneath them. This addition has the potential to unlock enormous amounts of roof space for development, Underwood said. On some of Resonant’s smaller projects, it could even triple the size of projects that could fit on a roof, he said.
While the changes incentivize solar in the built environment, they also attempt to narrow the criteria for building in previously undeveloped greenfields to make sure only “cream of the crop” sites are developed, Meserve said. While the existing program decides whether land can be developed by looking at the entire parcel, the updated iteration would look more closely at the footprint of a proposed array to make sure it is not disturbing the most valuable green spaces and habitats.
The proposal also calls for an increased “subtractor” — a reduction in the base SMART rate — for greenfield developments. The rate would go down 6 cents plus an additional 0.4 cents per acre of land affected, a significant increase from the current subtractor which tops out at 0.1 cents. Developers can earn back the 6 cents through a community engagement adder by proving they’ve worked with the community to mitigate the impacts the project will have, an element Meserve said will help the state focus on only the best developments.
Bourgoine, however, said many solar installers are worried that the hefty subtractor will slow down solar development too much at a time when the state needs to be accelerating its move to renewable energy.
“There are situations where the subtractor could cause damage where it doesn’t need to,” she said.
Sharing the benefits
New strategies could also make the benefits of solar energy more accessible to low-income households, which have so far made up only a very small fraction of the consumers using SMART-subsidized power.
The proposal would expand the list of facilities that qualify for low-income adders to include deed-restricted affordable condominiums, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and other affordable housing buildings not covered by the current definition.
The new plan would also broaden the definition of a low-income customer. Under current guidelines, a low-income customer is someone who receives a discounted rate from the electric utility or who lives in a designated low-income area. The new definition would also include consumers enrolled in other needs-based programs to qualify as low-income, and those who self-attest that they fall under the set income caps.
“This will make participating in low-income solar a much more accessible option,” Moffitt said.
Furthermore, community solar developments will now be required to enroll a minimum of 40% low-income customers to receive the community solar adder of 7 cents. Though community solar is fairly widespread in Massachusetts, customers have generally been those with higher incomes and credit scores. The current program includes an adder for low-income community solar, but it is not often used because of the obstacles of locating customers — obstacles the new definitions would lower significantly.
“This new program will lead to there being a massive shift in value coming from stand-alone community solar,” Baker said. “A huge amount of that value is going to be directed to low-income tenants and ratepayers throughout the commonwealth, which is a really positive step.”
A recently signed New Hampshire law makes significant changes to the operations of the state’s Renewable Energy Fund, directing money to help towns and cities develop municipal solar projects and ending a residential solar rebate program that was generally viewed as deeply flawed.
“The previously existing program had sort of run its course,” said Joshua Elliott, director of policy and programs in the state energy department.
The Renewable Energy Fund, created in 2007, is a pool of money the state uses to support renewable and thermal energy initiatives through grants and rebates. It is funded by annual compliance payments made by electric service providers that failed to buy the legally mandated proportion of their power from renewable sources in the previous year.
The sum the fund collects can vary widely from year to year, ranging from as low as $1.3 million in 2009 to $19.1 million in 2011. More recently, revenue has hovered around $7 million.
This money is then allocated across several programs including those supporting solar hot water heating, low-and-moderate income community solar, and wood pellet boilers and furnaces for residential, commercial, and industrial customers.
Advancing municipal solar
The new funding for municipal solar projects represents the next step for an approach just getting underway in the state.
Installing solar power can allow a municipality to both cut carbon emissions and realize significant savings on their energy bills. These savings can be used to cut property taxes or to provide additional support or services for residents. Until recently, however, there was little state or federal support for municipal solar. At the same time, getting a municipality to agree to the upfront costs has always been challenging.
“There’s a variety of competing factors for property tax revenue,” Elliott said. “It can be hard to get a warrant article passed to invest the money to purchase a solar array for town buildings.”
The state began tackling the problem this year with the Municipal Solar Grant Program, which is using a $1.6 million federal grant, part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to help cities and towns install solar arrays on municipal property. Lower-income communities that intend to retain complete ownership of their solar system will be eligible for grants up to $200,000; municipalities that don’t meet these criteria can request grants up to $120,000.
Though the program is just getting started — the application period is open until August 1 — the opportunity has already sparked wide interest from municipal governments. Community liaisons for the nonprofit Clean Energy New Hampshire have identified roughly 50 cities and towns likely to apply for a share of the limited funding.
“There’s been a huge response,” said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire. “That shows this is a good space to be spending the money in.”
The new legislation calls for funding to be allocated to a new municipal solar program this year, with the sum likely to be announced in late August or early September. Then, before the money can be offered to cities and towns, the state will have to design a new system. The new incentive will be inspired and informed by the program now launching, Elliott said.
“We’re certainly going to take feedback, have stakeholder sessions,” he said. “And that will help refine what this program looks like.”
Replacing residential incentives
The bill also terminates the state’s rebate program for residential solar and wind installations, an incentive that was widely thought to be ineffective.
The program offered rebates of up to $1,000 to a limited number of households each year. In fiscal 2023, rebates totalling about $424,000 were issued.
The program used a lottery system to determine what order rebate applications would be processed in each year; applicants closer to the end of the list might not end up receiving any rebate if the funds ran out before they made it to the top of the list. That uncertainty meant the program was doing little to spur additional solar development, Evans-Brown said.
“It’s almost by definition not getting projects done: If you can’t know for sure if you’re getting rebate, it’s not factoring it into the purchasing decision,” he said. “When we asked residential solar installers if the rebate was helpful they said no.”
The program also accepted applications from any household with a solar array installed after 2012 that has not yet received a rebate, diminishing its impact on new solar development even further.
“You’re not actually helping to develop the solar market at that point,” Elliott said.
Though the recent law eliminates this rebate, lawmakers were clear during hearings on the bill that they want to see a replacement residential incentive developed. No plans are yet in the works for such a program, and it is unclear what the timeline would be for designing a new incentive from scratch, Elliott said. Furthermore, the law does not require a new program be enacted.
Elliott, however, has every intention of making sure a replacement program comes to be, he said.
“I made a commitment in public saying, ‘Yes, we are going to do this,’” he said, “and I certainly feel beholden to that.”
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