Milwaukee's Hoan Bridge looking out toward Lake Michigan. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

Kayakers on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior coastline rely on data collected by buoys operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to determine if conditions are safe enough for a weekend paddle or if the swells and wind could spell danger on a lake famous for wrecking much larger watercraft. 

Surfers in Sheboygan use buoys on Lake Michigan to figure out if the city is living up to its name as the “Malibu of the Midwest” on a given day. Anglers on the shores and on the ice all over the lakes rely on the buoy data to track fish populations.

Freighters sailing from Duluth, Minnesota and Superior use NOAA data to track weather patterns and ice coverage. 

Wisconsin’s maritime economy provides nearly 50,000 jobs and nearly $3 billion to the state’s gross domestic product, according to a 2024 NOAA report, but in the first month of the administration of President Donald Trump, the agency is being threatened. 

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, UW-Madison’s Sea Grant and UW Extension’s National Estuarine Research Reserve use funds through NOAA grant programs to study the state’s two Great Lakes. 

Faculty at universities across the state receive NOAA money to study weather forecasting, severe droughts and precipitation on the Pacific Ocean. NOAA helps the state Department of Administration manage more than 1,000 miles of coastline and funds local efforts to control erosion and prevent flooding. A previous NOAA project worked with the state’s Native American tribes to study manoomin, also known as wild rice, to help maintain the plant that is sacred to the tribes and plays an important ecological role. 

All of that research could be at risk if cuts are made at NOAA. 

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — named for an internet meme of a shiba inu (a breed of Japanese hunting dog) first made popular more than a decade ago — has set its sights on NOAA. In early February, staffers with DOGE entered NOAA’s offices seeking access to its IT system, the Guardian reported. A week later, the outlet reported that scientists at the agency would need to gain approval from a Trump appointee before communicating with foreign nationals. The agency has been asked to identify climate change-related grant projects.

To run the agency, Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs as NOAA administrator. Jacobs was cited for misconduct after he and other officials put pressure on NOAA scientists to alter forecasts about 2019’s Hurricane Dorian in a scandal that became known as “Sharpiegate.” Trump has also nominated Taylor Jordan as the assistant Secretary of Commerce overseeing NOAA. Jordan previously worked as a lobbyist for private weather forecasting agencies that would benefit from the dismantling of NOAA — which runs the National Weather Service. 

A suggested Trump administration plan for NOAA was laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint. The plan calls for NOAA to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” because it has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” 

Sara Hudson, the city of Ashland’s director of parks and recreation, says the community is dependent on Lake Superior year round and funding from NOAA helps the city manage its coastline. She says the city has about $1.2 million in grant funding that could be affected by cuts at NOAA. The city’s total 2024-25 budget is about $2.4 million. 

“With the funding that Ashland has, we really don’t have a lot of access to be able to do coastal resiliency or coastal management projects,” she says. “So we rely on grants to be able to do extra.” Among the affected projects, she says, could be  coastal resiliency projects that help maintain public access to a waterfront trail along Lake Superior, projects to help improve water quality including the Bay City Creek project and work on invasive species and promoting native species within public lands.

Even if Trump and Musk are trying to erase climate change research from NOAA’s mandate, the effect of a warming climate could have dire consequences for Ashland’s lake-based economy, according to Hudson. Hundreds of businesses on Lake Superior can’t survive if the tourism season ends in the fall. 

“For a community that relies on winter and every year sees less winter, economically it could be devastating,” Hudson says. “We need to have tourism 12 months out of the year. And if our winters go away, that really, that’s going to be a pivot to us. But our winter … that’s the only way our businesses can stay alive here.” 

The Great Lakes provide drinking water for about 40 million people across the United States and Canada. Organizations like the National Estuarine Research Reserve are funded by NOAA to help make sure that water is healthy. 

“We’re doing things like tracking algae blooms and changes in water quality that are really important for tourism and fishing and drinking water,” Deanna Erickson, the research reserve’s director, says. “On Lake Superior we’re working in rural communities on flood emergencies and emergency management and coastal erosion; 70% of the reserve’s operational funding comes through NOAA, and that’s matched with state funds. So in Superior, Wisconsin, that’s, you know, a pretty big economic impact here we have about a million dollars in funding for our operations.”

Eric Peace, vice president of the Ohio-based Lake Carriers Association, says that cuts to NOAA could have drastic effects on Great Lakes shipping because the data collected by the agency is crucial to navigating the lakes safely.

“On Lake Michigan, those buoys are critical to navigation safety, because what they do is provide real time data on wind, waves, current water temperatures, etc,” he says. “And our captains use those extensively to avoid storms and to find places to transit and leave.” 

Further north on Lake Superior, real-time reports on water conditions are crucial because of how dangerous the lake can get.

“I was stationed on a buoy tender in Alaska, and I’d take the 30-footers that you get up there over the 10-footers you get on Lake Superior, because they’re so close together here,” says Peace, who spent more than 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. “They’re all wind-driven, and they’re dangerous. Couple that with icing and everything else, you have a recipe for disaster.”

The DOGE mandate for NOAA scientists to stop communicating with foreign nationals could have a significant impact on Great Lakes shipping because the agency coordinates with the Coast Guard and a Canadian agency to track ice conditions on the Great Lakes. 

“That is one area that would be detrimental,” Peace says. “We wouldn’t have that ice forecasting from the Canadians. We would have to assume control of that completely for our own sake.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin recently introduced a bipartisan bill with a group of senators from seven other Great Lakes states to increase funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The initiative involves 12 federal agencies, including NOAA, to keep the lakes clean. In a statement, Baldwin said she’d work to fight against any efforts that would harm Wisconsin’s Great Lakes. 

“Republicans are slashing support for our veterans, cancer research, and now, they are coming after resources that keep our Great Lakes clean and open for business — all to find room in the budget to give their billionaire friends a tax break,” she said. “Wisconsin communities, farmers, and businesses rely on our Great Lakes, and I’ll stand up to any efforts that will hurt them and their way of life.”

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A new contract between Kalamazoo, Michigan, and utility Consumers Energy signals a change in direction for the city’s clean energy strategy as it seeks to become carbon neutral by 2040. 

Solar was seen as a pillar of the city’s plans when it declared a climate emergency in 2019 and set a goal of zeroing out carbon emissions by 2040. After spending years exploring its options, though, the Michigan city is tempering a vision for rooftop solar in favor of large, more distant solar projects built and owned by the utility. It’s not alone either, with Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Muskegon and other cities taking a similar approach.

“Folks want to see solar panels on parking lots and buildings, but there’s no way as a city we can accomplish our net-zero buildings just putting solar panels on a roof,” said Justin Gish, Kalamazoo’s sustainability planner. “Working with the utility seemed to make the most sense.” 

Initially there was skepticism, Gish said — “environmentalists tend to not trust utilities and large corporate entities” — but the math just didn’t work out for going it alone with rooftop solar.

The city’s largest power user, the wastewater treatment station, has a pumping house with a roof of only 225 square feet. Kalamazoo’s largest city-owned roof, at the public service station, is 26,000 square feet. Spending an estimated $750,000 to cover that with solar would only provide 14% of the power that building uses annually — a financial “non-starter,” he said.

So the city decided to partner with Consumers Energy, joining a solar subscription program wherein Kalamazoo will tell Consumers how much solar energy it wants, starting in 2028, and the utility will use funds from its subscription fee to construct new solar farms, like a 250 MW project Consumers is building in Muskegon. 

Under the 20-year contract, Kalamazoo will pay a set rate of 15.8 cents per kWh — 6.4 cents more than what it currently pays — for 43 million kWh of solar power per year. If electricity market rates rise, the city will save money, and Kalamazoo receives Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to help meet its energy goals. 

The subscription is expected to eliminate about 80% of Kalamazoo’s emissions from electricity, Gish said. The electricity used to power streetlights and traffic signals couldn’t be covered since it is not metered. As the city acquires more electric vehicles — it currently has two — electricity demand may increase, but city leaders hope to offset any increases by improving energy efficiency of city buildings.  

Consumers Energy spokesperson Matt Johnson said the company relies “in part” on funds from customers specifically to build solar, and considers it a better deal for cities than building it themselves, “which would be more costly for them, and they have to do their own maintenance.”  

“We can do it in a more cost-effective way, we maintain it, they’re helping us fund it and do it in the right way, and those benefits get passed on to arguably everybody,” Johnson said. 

Grand Rapids, Michigan, joined the subscription program at the same time as Kalamazoo. Corporate customers including 7-Eleven, Walmart and General Motors are part of the same Consumers Energy solar subscription program, as is the state of Michigan.

Costs and benefits

“There’s a growing movement of cities trying to figure out solar — ‘Yes we want to do this, it could save us money over time, but the cost is prohibitive,’” said John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. 

Until the Inflation Reduction Act, cities couldn’t directly access federal tax credits. The direct-pay incentives under the IRA have simplified financing, Farrell said, but cities still face other financial and logistical barriers, such as whether they have sufficient rooftop space.  

Advocates acknowledge deals with utilities may be the most practical way for budget-strapped cities to move the needle on clean energy, but they emphasize that cities should also strive to develop their own solar, and question whether utilities should charge more for clean power that is increasingly a cheaper option than fossil fuels.

“Our position is rooftop and distributed generation is best — it’s best for the customers, in this case the cities; it’s best for the grid, because you’re putting those resources directly on the grid where it’s needed most; and it’s best for the planet because it can deploy a lot faster,” said John Delurey, Midwest deputy director of the advocacy group Vote Solar. “I believe customers in general and perhaps cities in particular should exhaust all resources and opportunities for distributed generation before they start to explore utility-scale resources. It’s the lowest hanging fruit and very likely to provide the most bang for their buck.”

Utility-scale solar is more cost-effective per kilowatt, but Delurey notes that when a public building is large enough for solar, “you are putting that generation directly on load, you’re consuming onsite. Anything that is concurrent consumption or paired with a battery, you are getting the full retail value of that energy. That is a feature you can’t really beat no matter how good the contract is with some utility-scale projects that are farther away.”

Delurey also noted that Michigan law mandates all energy be from clean sources by 2040; and 50% by 2030. That means Consumers needs to be building or buying renewable power, whether or not customers pay extra for it. 

“So there are diminishing returns [to a subscription deal] at that point,” Delurey said. “You better be getting a price benefit, because the power on their grid would be clean anyways.” 

“Some folks are asking ‘Why do anything now? Just wait until Consumers cleans up the grid,’” Gish acknowledged. “But our purchase shows we have skin in the game.” 

A complement to rooftop

In 2009, Milwaukee adopted a goal of powering 25% of city operations — excluding waterworks — with solar by 2025. The city’s Climate and Equity Plan adopted in 2023 also enshrined that goal. 

For a decade, Milwaukee has been battling We Energies over the city’s plan to install rooftop solar on City Hall and other buildings through a third-party owner, Eagle Point Solar. The city sought the arrangement — common in many states — to tap federal tax incentives that a nonprofit public entity couldn’t reap. But We Energies argued that third party ownership would mean Eagle Point would be acting as a utility and infringing on We Energies’ territory. A lawsuit over Milwaukee’s plans with Eagle Point is still pending.

In 2018, We Energies launched a pilot solar program in Milwaukee known by critics as “rent a roof,” in which the utility leased rooftop space for its own solar arrays. Advocates and Milwaukee officials opposed the program, arguing that it encouraged the utility to suppress the private market or publicly-owned solar. In 2023, the state Public Service Commission denied the utility’s request to expand the program.

Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board opposed the rent-a-roof arrangement since it passed costs they viewed as unfair on to ratepayers. But Wisconsin CUB executive director Tom Content said the city’s current partnership with We Energies is different, since it is just the city, not ratepayers, footing the cost for solar that helps the city meet its goals.

Milwaukee is paying about $84,000 extra per year for We Energies to build solar farms on a city landfill near the airport and outside the city limits in the town of Caledonia. The deal includes a requirement that We Energies hire underemployed or unemployed Milwaukee residents.

The Caledonia project is nearly complete, and will provide over 11 million kWh of energy annually, “enough to make 57 municipal police stations, fire stations, and health clinics 100% renewable electricity,” said Milwaukee Environmental Collaboration Office director Erick Shambarger. 

The landfill project is slated to break ground in 2025. The two arrays will total 11 MW and provide enough power for 83 city buildings, including City Hall – where Milwaukee had hoped to do the rooftop array with Eagle Point. 

Meanwhile Milwaukee is building its own rooftop solar on the Martin Luther King Jr. library and later other public buildings, and Shambarger said they will apply for direct pay tax credits made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act — basically eliminating the need for a third-party agreement.

“Utility-scale is the complement to rooftop,” said Shambarger. “They own it and maintain it, we get the RECs. It worked out pretty well. If you think about it from a big picture standpoint, to now have the utility offer a big customer like the city an option to source their power from renewable energy — that didn’t exist five years ago. If you were a big customer in Wisconsin five years ago, you really had no option except for buying RECs from who knows where. We worked hard with them to make sure we could see our renewable energy being built.”

We Energies already owns a smaller 2.25 MW solar farm on the same landfill, under a similar arrangement. Building solar on the landfill is less efficient than other types of land, since special mounting is needed to avoid puncturing the landfill’s clay cap, and the panels can’t turn to follow the sun. But Shambarger said the sacrifice is worth it to have solar within the city limits, on land useful for little else.

“We do think it’s important to have some of this where people can see it and understand it,” he said. “We also have the workforce requirements, it’s nice to have it close to home for our local workers.”

Madison is also pursuing a mix of city-owned distributed solar and utility-scale partnerships. 

On Earth Day 2024, Madison announced it has installed 2 MW of solar on 38 city rooftops. But a utility-scale solar partnership with utility MGE is also crucial to the goal of 100% clean energy for city operations by 2030. Through MGE’s Renewable Energy Rider program, Madison helped pay for the 8 MW Hermsdorf Solar Fields on a city landfill, with 5 MW devoted to city operations and 3 MW devoted to the school district. The 53-acre project went online in 2022.

Farrell said such “all of the above” approaches are ideal.

“The lesson we’ve seen generally is the more any entity can directly own the solar project, the more financial benefit you’ll get,” he said. “Ownership comes with privileges, and with risks. 

“Energy is in addition to a lot of other challenging issues that cities have to work on. The gold standard is solar on a couple public buildings with battery storage, so these are resiliency places if the grid goes down.”

Correction: Covering Kalamazoo’s public service station roof with solar panels would provide an estimated 14% of power used by that building. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the number.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, cities are finding rooftops alone may not achieve solar energy goals  is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

AUBURN HILLS, Mich.-Continental today announced the sale of Zonar, a leading smart fleet management provider, to GPS Trackit, an industry pioneer in cloud-based, IoT fleet solutions and GPS tracking. Details of the transaction, including financial terms, are not being disclosed.

The deal follows Continental’s Group Sector Automotive strategy, announced last year, centered around focusing on its core strengths and streamlining its business operations.

“The decision to sell Zonar is part of our broader automotive strategy to sharpen our focus and enhance our fundamental strengths,” said Philipp von Hirschheydt, Member of the Executive Board and Head of Automotive. “As the market continues to evolve, our focus on value creation is the cornerstone of our strategic efforts. Continental is committed to leveraging innovation and operational excellence to strengthen its position in the marketplace by further investing in its core competencies to prioritize its growth.”

Zonar, founded in 2001, is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with more than 300 employees. It has pioneered smart mobility solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit, and commercial trucking industries. The Zonar mission is to enhance the safety, performance, and success of its customers with actionable, innovative, and AI-enabled insights.

“We are thrilled to welcome Zonar to the GPS Trackit family. This acquisition represents a significant step forward in our mission to deliver innovative, customer-focused fleet management solutions,” said Charles Kriete, CEO, GPS Trackit. “By combining our strengths, such as our best-in-class video platform, with Zonar’s advanced technologies and industry expertise, we are poised to create unparalleled value for our customers and further disrupt the market as two industry leaders in overall customer satisfaction. We look forward to building on the Zonar legacy of excellence and driving transformative growth together.”

Continental develops pioneering technologies and services for sustainable and connected mobility of people and their goods. Founded in 1871, the technology company offers safe, efficient, intelligent and affordable solutions for vehicles, machines, traffic and transportation. In 2023, Continental generated sales of €41.4 billion, and currently employs around 200,000 people in 56 countries and markets.

The post Continental Sells Zonar to GPS Trackit appeared first on School Transportation News.

Election Day yielded few bright spots for the transition to clean energy, but there was one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The city of nearly 120,000 voted 79 percent in favor of a measure to create a ​“sustainable energy utility” (SEU) that will supplement the existing grid and help residents shift to cleaner, more reliable energy.

With that overwhelming approval, city officials will now figure out the governance, staffing, and leadership of the new local utility. They have already begun outreach to residents interested in participating; 600 customers had registered by Tuesday afternoon. The plan is to assemble an initial tranche of 20 megawatts worth of demand, at which point Ann Arbor will finance the purchase and installation of solar panels, batteries, and energy-efficiency upgrades to serve those customers.

Installations — on homes, sheds, schools, libraries — could happen in the next 18 to 24 months, Mayor Christopher Taylor told Canary Media. Longer term, the utility hopes to construct a district-level geothermal network to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels.

“I’m incredibly gratified by the support that voters of Ann Arbor have given to the SEU,” Taylor said. ​“The SEU is going to be both great for our carbon future and great for the pocketbook.”

The effort to fast-track local clean energy installations serves Ann Arbor’s ambitious climate goals. But it’s also a response to an uptick in power outages as extreme weather collides with for-profit utility DTE’s aging distribution-grid infrastructure. Monopoly utilities, for the most part, have shown little interest in seizing the opportunities of decentralized energy, but that’s core to the new Ann Arbor utility’s mission.

The measure’s success marks the latest episode in a sporadic national trend of communities trying to break free from the century-old model of for-profit, monopoly utilities controlling local energy systems.

Such efforts typically provoke a scorched-earth response from the incumbent utility. Utilities elsewhere have waged lengthy legal battles and spent millions of dollars on political campaigns to stop these escape attempts. When localities win their energy autonomy, they often have to pay hefty exit fees as a reimbursement for grid infrastructure built on their behalf. Communities that make it through that ringer then have to shoulder the laborious task of operating and maintaining decades-old infrastructure while trying to push ahead with new technologies.

In a bracing and punchily worded 2021 report, Ann Arbor’s sustainability office made clear that it would take a different route.

“Every dollar we don’t spend in litigation or to buy the [investor owned utility]’s old, failing infrastructure is money we can spend on new infrastructure here in Ann Arbor to generate power, distribute power, and store power — dollars we can use to immediately provide reliable, clean, and affordable public power to everyone,” the city wrote.

In short, it’s a distributed energy wish list coming to life. Ann Arbor has created a clear pathway to building more clean, local, resilient, and publicly owned infrastructure. If the city can make electricity cheaper on top of that, it will demonstrate that a better electricity system is possible even without completely overhauling the existing utility industry.

Local action for local needs

In 2019, Ann Arbor set a 2030 deadline to deliver equitable, community-wide carbon neutrality. Meeting that target requires sourcing clean electricity, driving out fossil-fuel combustion in buildings, and cleaning up transportation.

But the city’s built environment poses some challenges. Ann Arbor spans about 49,000 households, 52 percent of which are rentals. Overall housing stock averages 48 years old. That necessitates a lot of retrofits to turn these buildings into efficient systems running on clean electricity.

The SEU thus prioritizes energy-efficiency upgrades for customers. Unlike a for-profit utility, the municipally owned nonprofit has no incentive to let customers keep wasting energy. Ann Arbor aims to make efficiency more accessible with tools like on-bill financing, ​“structured to match or be lower than the monthly utility bill savings, resulting in a positive cash-flow for the customer immediately,” per the 2021 report.

The utility can buy equipment like solar panels and batteries in bulk and finance these upgrades with its AAA municipal credit rating, accessing far cheaper capital than a bunch of lone homeowners negotiating separately with private lenders. And the on-bill charge stays with the house — if someone moves out, the new resident takes over paying for the improvements that will lower their bill.

Climate goals weren’t the only factor motivating the change. The area’s aging grid has suffered a number of outages lately.

“Ann Arbor is currently served by an investor-owned utility that has a history of reliability challenges in our area,” Taylor noted. ​“We expect the SEU to provide far more reliable service.”

The SEU plans to install and own solar panels on customers’ rooftops and batteries in their sheds and garages, selling those customers the power at cost, without a markup. That lets residents access solar power and backup power without dropping a load of cash up front for it or taking on debt. This kind of subscription is available from companies like Sunrun, but they do it to make money, not to sell at cost.

The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.

But Ann Arbor officials tracked down a century-old precedent that makes sharing power possible: ​“The Michigan Constitution preserves the rights of cities and villages to form their own utility or to supplement an existing utility,” Missy Stults, the city’s sustainability and innovation director, told me.

Thus, the SEU will link up different properties if the people living there want it. If a home generates more solar than it can use, it could run a line to a neighboring house that’s shaded by trees, allowing it to buy surplus power.

“We’ll be able to connect homes with each other, schools with homes, schools with each other,” Taylor said. ​“We’re going to do this in a way that is cost-effective and fully opt-in.”

This plan assumes people will be happy to offer up their roof space for panels that the SEU will own and use for broader community benefit. But doing so will let that household buy cheaper, cleaner power for itself. The battery controls present some additional complications: Will the host customer get first dibs on backup power, or will that be split among the locally connected homes as well? This is new territory for distributed energy in the U.S.

That said, the strong show of support at the ballot box demonstrates the local community is fully on board with the general direction of the SEU. It’s no accident that this idea is coming to fruition in a college town like Ann Arbor, said Liesl Clark, a former state climate leader who now serves as director of climate action engagement at the University of Michigan.

“There are a lot of people who are innovative and also are interested in having agency,” she said. ​“It is a community that was ripe for a solution like this.”

Furthermore, the city structured the plan in a way to minimize any downside for residents who don’t want to jump on the decentralized power opportunity.

“You haven’t asked me how much it’s going to cost the taxpayer,” Taylor told me as I was about to wrap up our phone call. He answered the rhetorical question: ​“Nothing!”

That pledge veers into too-good-to-be-true territory, but the SEU structure makes it possible. The city won’t levy any new taxes because it’s not buying out DTE’s assets. Instead, it’s installing new equipment based on voluntary customer commitments, and those customers pay their way, while saving themselves money.

Breaking free from utilities without all the hassle

The outcome of this effort remains far from certain. But so far, Ann Arbor has managed to pursue a low-drama, low-conflict way to break up with a monopoly utility, in contrast to high-profile recent attempts elsewhere.

The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously fought for a decade to peel off from Xcel Energy, and ultimately gave up. In 2010, California mega-utility PG&E spent $46 million to make it harder for communities to source their own electricity, though even that gargantuan sum failed to stop the rise of community choice aggregators.

Maine has grappled for years with its deeply unpopular monopoly utilities. Last year, voters nonetheless soundly rejected a ballot referendum to seize utility assets under a new public power entity. The utilities spent $40 million to fight it, and independent experts raised concerns about how the public entity would deliver on promises of a cheaper, more efficient grid after saddling itself with billions of dollars of debt.

Activists in Ann Arbor have also pushed for full municipalization — a city-level version of what Maine considered and rejected. The city is working on a second study to dig into the details of what purchasing the grid infrastructure would entail. That conversation will continue as the SEU implementation moves forward, Taylor noted.

For its part, Michigan utility DTE hasn’t declared war on Ann Arbor. Following the vote, the company stated that it will continue to invest in making the city’s grid more resilient and clean — a recent Michigan climate law requires ramping to 60 percent renewable power by 2035 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2040.

The public interest in full municipalization may explain the muted response from the utility: The SEU allows DTE to go on with business as usual, and its distribution grid will continue to play a crucial role even if kilowatt-hour sales decline from the new local solar generation.

Instead of fighting the utility colossus head on, Ann Arbor is taking a live-and-let-live approach. It’s a case where avoiding head-on conflict could make it possible to deliver the benefits of clean, local energy far more quickly.

Voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, create a local clean energy utility is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Dearborn, Michigan, was at the heart of auto industry innovation during the days of the Model T Ford. 

Now clean energy and environmental justice advocates are proposing that the city play a lead role in greening the auto industry, through a transformation of the Dearborn Works steel mill to “green steel” — a steelmaking process powered by hydrogen and renewable energy with drastically lower emissions than a traditional blast furnace. 

The blast furnace at Dearborn Works is due for relining in 2027, at an estimated cost of $470 million. Advocates argue that instead of prolonging the blast furnace’s life, its owner, Cleveland Cliffs, should invest another $2 billion dollars and convert the mill to Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) technology powered by green hydrogen (hydrogen produced with renewable energy).

An October report by Dr. Elizabeth Boatman of the firm 5 Lakes Energy examines the economics and logistics of such a conversion, and argues that demand for cleaner steel is likely to grow as auto companies and other global industries seek to lower their greenhouse gas footprints. Starting in 2026, steel importers to the European Union will need to make payments to offset emissions associated with steel production.

Worldwide, the auto industry is the second largest consumer of steel after construction, and “being able to pass on the price of a ‘green steel premium’ to its end consumers, the automotive industry is uniquely positioned to create demand for green steel without having to rely on public subsidies,” the European Union think tank CEPS said in a recent publication.

“This is a great chance for the state to step in now and ensure this conversion happens, instead of waiting another 20 years,” said Boatman. “All the economic indicators suggest clean steel is the steel product of the future, and the best way to future-proof jobs especially in the steel sector and especially for unions.” 

Cutting pollution, creating jobs 

Cleveland Cliffs is planning to convert its Middletown, Ohio, steel mill to DRI, tapping a $500 million federal grant for industrial decarbonization under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. 

A DRI furnace does not need to use coke or heat iron ore to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce pure “pig iron”; the same result is achieved with a different chemical process at much lower temperatures. DRI furnaces can be powered by natural gas or clean hydrogen. Initially, Cleveland Cliffs says, its Middletown mill will run on natural gas, releasing about half the carbon emissions of its current blast furnace. Eventually, the company announced, it could switch to hydrogen. 

Along with slashing greenhouse gas emissions, a similar green steel conversion at Dearborn Works would greatly reduce the local air pollution burden facing local residents in the heavily industrial area, which is also home to a Marathon oil refinery, a major rail yard and other polluters.    

But it wouldn’t be cheap. Boatman’s report estimated the cost of converting a blast furnace to a DRI furnace and associated electric arc furnaces at $1.57 billion, plus $2.6 billion to build a green hydrogen plant. Utility DTE Energy would need to work with grid operator MISO to add about 2 GW of solar and 2 GW of wind power, plus battery storage, to the grid to power the green hydrogen production. 

The conversion would mean closure of the EES Coke plant, which turns coal into coke for the steel mill, on heavily polluted Zug Island in the River Rouge just outside Detroit, five miles from Dearborn. In 2022, the EPA sued the coke plant, a subsidiary of DTE Energy, over Clean Air Act violations. 

A recent study by the nonprofit Industrious Labs found that the EES Coke plant could be responsible for up to 57 premature deaths and more than 15,000 asthma attacks. The report also found that more than half the people living within a three-mile radius of both the steel mill and coke plant are low-income, and three-quarters of those living around the coke plant are people of color, as are half those living around the steel mill. 

“The total health costs are quite significant,” said Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which is representing local residents as intervenors in the EPA lawsuit against the coke plant. “We allow companies to externalize those costs and not account for them. If they were required by some sort of change in policy or regulation to be responsible for those costs, it would certainly make the case they could make this expensive switch” to green steel. 

The law center also represented residents in legal proceedings around Dearborn Works’ Clean Air Act violations, including a 2015 consent decree and a 2023 mandate to install a new electrostatic precipitator at a cost of $100 million. 

Leonard said local residents “know Cleveland Cliffs poses a risk to their health, and they want solutions. They know there’s a problem, they are frustrated by the lack of will or attention from state and local government.”

Cleveland Cliffs did not respond to a request for comment. 

Why Michigan? 

The country’s active steel mills are concentrated in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Advocates and residents are asking Nippon Steel to consider a green steel conversion at the Gary Works mill in Northwest Indiana, if the global corporation succeeds in acquiring Gary Works owner U.S. Steel. Advocates have also proposed green steel conversions for Pennsylvania mills. 

There are factors that make a green steel conversion both more promising and more challenging at Dearborn Works, compared to other locations, Boatman explained. 

Dearborn Works has only one blast furnace in operation, meaning a potentially smaller investment than at mills with more furnaces. Michigan has also set aggressive renewable energy goals, which could be furthered by the ambitious renewable energy buildout that would be required to produce enough green hydrogen for the steel mill.

“That’s why we’re asking the state of Michigan and the governor to get all the interested parties to the table to actually talk about this, hopefully commit to it, and do the detailed planning that needs to be done to figure out how much wind, how much solar, how much battery storage does there need to be to get this off the ground,” said Boatman. 

Michigan has legal limits on behind-the-meter generation that could make it more difficult to build renewables specifically to power green hydrogen production for a steel mill. Utilities would instead need to produce or procure the renewable energy, and sell it to the steel mill, Boatman explained.

A green steel conversion at Dearborn Works could create a total of about 500 new jobs, Boatman estimates, considering that about 500 jobs would be lost at the closing coke plant but 410 jobs would be created at the hydrogen plant, 550 in new renewables and 170 at the mill itself. The DRI conversion at the Middletown steel mill is expected to create 170 new permanent jobs and 1,200 construction jobs, according to Cleveland Cliffs. 

A 2023 analysis by the Ohio River Valley Institute found that at the Mon Valley Works steel mill in Pennsylvania, a DRI conversion would likely preserve more iron- and steel-making jobs than “business as usual,” with 87% of the current jobs expected to exist in 2031, compared to 69% without a change — as U.S. steel production continues to shrink and automate. 

“We are seeing a general trend for both iron and [secondary] steel production to move toward the South, to states that aren’t friendly to unions and can produce products at cheaper prices by bypassing unions,” said Boatman. “Michigan obviously has a proud history of being a strong union state, it matters to keep those good union jobs there.” 

Labor unions have largely been silent on the concept of green steel conversion. The United Auto Workers union — which represents Dearborn Works employees — and the United Steelworkers did not respond to requests for comment. 

Hydrogen wild cards 

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to spend $8 billion on hydrogen hubs, and a potentially lucrative tax credit known as 45V is being finalized for clean hydrogen. Experts and advocates agree that energy-intensive, hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel are where hydrogen could have the most impact. But large-scale production of pure hydrogen for industrial use is still in nascent stages, and little infrastructure has been built or tested for transporting and storing hydrogen. 

That is among the reasons, Boatman said, that there’s been reluctance among residents and union leaders to embrace the concept of green steel. Boatman’s report emphasizes that community benefits agreements and community engagement processes are crucial to make sure residents are informed about, benefit from, and have a meaningful voice in any green steel plans. 

“Union workers and fence-line community members all want better air quality, lower emissions, who wouldn’t want to go to work knowing you’re safer being there?” she said. “There’s a lot of interest in cleaning up the air. It’s more a question over how that happens. When hydrogen becomes part of the equation, there’s always some concern.” 

She noted that hydrogen could potentially be stored in salt caverns in the Detroit area, though extensive study on the feasibility and environmental impacts would be needed. In Mississippi, a startup company Hy Stor Energy is planning to store green hydrogen in salt caverns, ready to generate electricity during times of high demand. 

Tax incentives for clean hydrogen could provide major incentives for steel mills. But clean hydrogen proposed projects have been in flux nationwide as the rules for qualifying for 45V tax credits are being hashed out in a lengthy, controversial process; and the change in presidential administration adds even more uncertainty. 

“These industries have to be incentivized,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, founder and executive director of the U.S. Hydrogen Alliance, which advocates for pro-hydrogen policies on the state level. “Europe is creating a mandate — that’s one incentive. We’d love to support any incentives that would allow hydrogen to be leveraged in the steel industry. With state legislation we certainly can incentivize it. It’s a question of how competitive we want to be.”

Advocates make economic case for green steel production at Dearborn, Michigan plant is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to finalize more than $200 million in grant funding in the coming weeks to accelerate the clean energy transition at three Great Lakes shipping ports.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority, and the Illinois International Port District were each selected for grants last month under the Biden administration’s Clean Ports Program.

The U.S. EPA said it intends to finalize grant agreements by December or January. That action will obligate the federal government to pay roughly $3 billion in grants under the program, even if President-elect Donald Trump or the next Congress tries to repeal or block further action under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The $94 million grant announced for the Cleveland port is the largest it has ever received and will help it build on work that’s already underway to electrify and decarbonize its infrastructure. 

“It puts us at the forefront of decarbonization,” said William Friedman, president and chief executive officer of Cleveland’s port authority. “Now we’ll be able to start figuring out what’s the phase-in and then how do we move forward with the next round.”

The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority will get approximately $25 million for solar panels, charging infrastructure and electric cargo handling equipment, and another $95 million will go to the Illinois EPA for solar, battery storage and hydrogen-related investments at the Illinois International Port District serving greater Chicago.

The largest share of grants will go to ports along the East and West coasts. “But the program is also intended to set the foundation for transitioning the entire port industry to zero emissions,” said Jennifer Macedonia, a deputy assistant administrator for U.S. EPA. “And there are important communities around many of our inland ports as well.”

The shipping industry accounts for roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. While the bulk of that is from ships themselves, port operations typically rely on diesel power for most of their energy. And ships often burn fuel to power equipment even while they’re in port.

The EPA’s review process included ensuring that selected projects can achieve or exceed goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other pollution that can affect nearby communities, said U.S. EPA Administrator Michael Regan. Those criteria air pollutants are ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

The work is especially important for Ohio, which has lagged other Midwest states and regions in deploying strategies to reduce greenhouse gases, said Valerie Katz, deputy director for Cuyahoga Green Energy. “Our regional decarbonization efforts will reduce environmental exposure to toxic air pollutants for downstream Ohio communities.”

Funding for the Port of Cleveland will encompass work for electric cargo-handling equipment and vessels that serve the port, along with solar generation and battery storage, charging infrastructure and shore power for vessels. Project partners include Logistec USA, the commercial operator for day-to-day operations, as well as the Great Lakes Towing Company, which will build two electric tug boats.

Decarbonization is a “competitive advantage that will attract more shipping volume to our port,” said Baiju Shah, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. “Companies are striving to reduce their environmental footprints through their operations and value chains,” including Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. “In addition, electrifying the port operations supports our region’s clean air efforts.”

That’s especially important given the port’s location near the downtown lakefront and riverfront areas, Shah said. Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River are the focus for several waterfront development projects aimed at drawing more business and visitors to Cleveland.  

Funding for the Port of Detroit will go toward electric cargo-handling equipment, some vessels and railcar movers, along with charging infrastructure and solar generation. Part of the money also will be used to develop a roadmap for adding EV and hydrogen fueling infrastructure. The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority is part of the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen, or MachH2, which was selected last year for $1 billion in Department of Energy funding for a hydrogen hub.

Funding for the Illinois International Port District will cover a variety of projects for its three ports, including hydrogen fueling infrastructure, solar energy and battery storage, and hydrogen and electric cargo handling equipment. Hydrogen and electric locomotives also are on EPA’s program selections list. The Illinois EPA is the lead partner for the grant work.

Like its counterpart in Cleveland, the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority had already begun working on plans to move to cleaner energy sources for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. But zero-emissions equipment to move cargo is new in the U.S. shipping industry and is still generally more expensive than fossil-fueled counterparts.

“What’s great about the EPA grant is that it helps these businesses make the decision to choose this cleaner technology,” said Mark Schrupp, executive director for the Detroit port authority. Over time, costs for such equipment should come down, but the grants will help launch market growth.

Various projects among the 55 selected for grants last month have planning components and provisions for community engagement or workforce development. Planning work on emissions inventories can position other ports to move ahead with clean energy in the future, Macedonia said.

The U.S. EPA plans to move ahead swiftly to finalize grant agreements, which will have the effect of protecting the funds from a possible clawback under Trump or the next Congress.

“We will be awarding the grants in December of 2024 and January of 2025… so that money will be obligated on or before the end of this administration,” Regan said. Depending on the projects, implementation will occur over the next three to four years.

In Cleveland, that means a big chunk of work under the new grant will be taking place even as renovation of the Port of Cleveland’s Warehouse A and electrical work take place under its current projects.

“We’ll have to throw a lot here at the engineers and construction project management people to figure this out,” Friedman said. Yet the timing means it will be that much sooner for the port to move to zero emissions for its own operations.

Great Lakes ports will get a share of U.S. EPA funding to move shipping off fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The following commentary was written by Mel Mackinm, director of state policy at Ceres, a nonprofit that works with investors and companies to advance clean energy policy. See our commentary guidelines for more information.

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Look out across Michigan and you’ll see groundbreakings for major solar panel manufacturing sites, huge investments to build battery cells, and sparkling new facilities to ensure the state stays in the driver’s seat as the auto industry moves into the future.

It seems Michigan manufacturing is having a moment.

It’s little wonder why. Michigan has always had the legacy, the workforce, the supply chains, and the know-how to serve as the epicenter of an American manufacturing renaissance. That’s exactly what’s happened since Congress finalized the nation’s largest-ever clean energy investment in the summer of 2022.

Powered by incentives for companies to manufacture and deploy clean energy infrastructure and technology here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act has unlocked more than $360 billion in private-sector investment in less than two years, according to research from Climate Power. Its impact has been felt in every corner of the country with hundreds of new projects taking shape to build innovative technologies, employ hundreds of thousands of workers, and power the economy – all while cutting costs and pollution. But no other state has seen as much activity as Michigan, the site of 58 new clean energy projects.

Michigan policymakers deserve some credit for moving quickly to take full advantage of this opportunity. In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made clear in her MI Healthy Climate Plan that she wanted to make Michigan one of the best places in the world to build and deploy clean energy. Lawmakers since followed her lead with legislation that will move the state to 100% clean electricity by 2040 and ensure clean power infrastructure can be built both quickly and responsibly – a pair of laws that boasted ample support from Michigan companies that recognize confronting climate change is also an economic opportunity.

These policies were designed to fully harness the Inflation Reduction Act, making clear that the state is ready to support the growing number of businesses that supply or rely on innovative clean technology. In response, businesses that include classic Michigan manufacturers like GM, global brands like Corning, and upstarts like Lucid Motors have flooded the state with more than $21.5 billion in new clean energy innovation and manufacturing investment, creating some 20,100 new jobs.

With projects located from Detroit to Holland to Traverse City, so much of the state is already benefitting. That includes communities that have so far been left behind in the 21st century economy. About half of the state’s recent clean energy investment is located in rural or low-income areas, such as Norm Fasteners’ $77 million facility that will create 200 electric vehicle supply chain jobs in Bath Charter Township.

Now is not the time to slow down. We are now in the throes of the 2024 election, and we all know Michigan has been getting a lot of attention. No matter what happens in November, Michigan and the U.S. must continue investing in this revamped manufacturing base. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have prioritized rebuilding American industry to provide good jobs and bolster U.S. leadership

Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing boom provides clear evidence that this shared goal is coming to fruition. Policymakers at both the federal and state levels, along with leaders in the private sector, must maintain this momentum and the strong policy environment that will allow the U.S. and its workforce to lead the global economy in the emerging industries of the future – with Michigan, as it so often has, standing strong as the foundation.

Commentary: Michigan is the epicenter of America’s clean energy manufacturing renaissance is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The following commentary was written by Laura Sherman, president of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council. See our commentary guidelines for more information.

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Last year, Michigan got attention as the first Midwestern state to adopt an energy storage standard. Energy storage is essential for the clean energy transition because it allows clean electricity initially generated by sources like wind and solar to be available at all times.

The standard calls for 2,500 MW of energy storage to be deployed by 2030. This storage will be fulfilled by a range of technologies, with lithium-ion batteries, the type of the storage that has grown rapidly across the U.S. and the world in recent years, chief among them. But it’s not too early to start thinking about how this standard (and future standards) will also involve new technologies that serve different needs, including shifting low-cost energy over longer periods of time to support electric reliability and affordability. A U.S. Department of Energy report found that to achieve a net-zero economy, the U.S. grid may need 225 GW to 460 GW of long-duration energy storage by 2050. By comparison, the U.S. currently has over 500 GW of gas power plants, and battery storage capacity is expected to double to about 30 GW by the end of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Fortunately, Michigan’s energy legislation anticipated this need. The legislation that created the 2030 storage target also ordered Michigan regulators to report to lawmakers on the potential for long-duration and multi-day energy storage. The Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) is in the midst of this study right now.

But how is “long-duration” energy storage different from the battery storage that is growing quickly in Michigan and across the country right now? It’s all about the concept of duration, which refers to how long a storage resource like a battery can discharge stored energy until it is out of capacity. Most of the batteries being built at utility scale right now have a duration of around four hours. But long-duration storage refers to resources that have a duration of over 8 hours and up to well over 100 hours.

This longer duration unlocks capabilities that will make 100% clean electricity a reality. Short-duration storage right now can cover shortfalls in wind and solar on an hour-by-hour basis. But what about if there is a shortfall in energy supply expected not for just a few hours, but from one day to the next? Or from one month to the next? Those situations arise especially in seasons like winter, where cloud cover can linger and hamper solar energy production for extended periods of time. That is where the need for long-duration storage comes in. Long-duration storage could become a capacity resource that grid operators can tap to reliably deal with long-term fluctuations in energy supply, like those caused by changes in the season from summer to winter.

What would this type of energy storage actually look like in practice? Two companies that are members of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council are potential examples.

• Energy Dome’s above ground compressed gas technology, the “CO2 Battery,” is a closed-loop system that holds carbon dioxide gas in a large dome structure. Using electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, this gas is heated and compressed into a liquid, which can be easily stored at room temperature. When discharging, the liquid is evaporated, and the resulting gas spins a turbine, generating electricity when needed, often with one full cycle per day (8+ hours of discharging). The company is currently constructing its first full-scale plant in Sardinia, Italy, with the project nearing completion. In the U.S., another plant is soon to follow, with project proponent Alliant Energy recently filing for regulatory approval of the Columbia Energy Storage Project in Wisconsin.
• Form Energy is commercializing a multi-day energy storage technology, a 100-hour duration iron-air battery for utility-scale applications. Essentially, the battery rusts and un-rusts iron to store and release electricity. Form Energy has constructed a new factory to manufacture these batteries domestically, and is working to deploy the first large-scale demonstrations of its technology with utilities like Great River Energy, Xcel Energy, Dominion and Georgia Power in 2025 and 2026.

A tremendous amount of innovative work will need to happen between now and the realization of the full potential for long-duration storage. There are a few things Michigan regulators should do with their study to best set up the state to reap the benefits from these emerging technologies:

First, the Commission should set clear targets for how much long-duration and multi-day storage utilities need to procure in coming years. Utilities are generally conservative and hesitant to pursue new technologies unless pushed or clearly allowed. But this problem is particularly heightened when it comes to long-duration storage. That’s because utilities, if given a megawatt target for storage they must deploy, will likely acquire storage without considering the benefits of having a diverse portfolio of technologies that can deliver energy over different durations. As a result, Michigan may lose out on the operational benefits that come from having a diversified storage portfolio. These benefits include the ability of long-duration storage to make firing up high-emitting, fossil-fuel-burning peaker plants unnecessary because the storage can provide more reliable, cleaner and cheaper alternatives. They also include overall cost and land-use savings, by storing renewable energy when it would otherwise be wasted and shifting it over long time periods when it is most needed.

Second, speaking of substitutes for fossil fuel plants, the Commission should identify which power plant sites around the state could be good candidates for being replaced with long-duration storage projects. Michigan’s coal-fired power plants are almost all retired, with Consumers Energy this year set to retire its final coal plant in Ottawa County. Long-duration storage could be fitting replacements for not only those plants, but also gas plants that will be reaching the end of their life cycles in coming years.

With its storage targets, Michigan has already become one of the national leaders in energy storage. Let’s further cement that reputation by taking steps now for smart planning for long-duration storage. All Michiganders stand to benefit from the potential for long-duration storage to enable an electric grid that is cleaner, lower-cost and more reliable.

Commentary: How Michigan regulators can help advance energy storage is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.