A legal debate over semantics of the U.S. EPA’s 2015 coal ash rules could decide whether groundwater-soaked coal ash can remain in place next to an Ohio power plant.

In oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week, power companies argued the rules don’t specifically ban coal ash contact with groundwater, and that as a result the federal agency overstepped its mandate in 2022 when it ordered the closure and cleanup of a coal ash impoundment at the General James M. Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio.

Attorneys for the EPA and the environmental organization Earthjustice argued during the March 7 hearing that preventing such groundwater contamination is exactly the point of the federal rules. 

“We hope the judges come out with an opinion that’s clear and definitive that the rule says you cannot close when the waste is sitting in groundwater,” Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program, told the Energy News Network after the hearing. “We think the meaning of those words is clear already. But given what industry is pulling here, let’s just define it in a way that’s super duper clear so we can be done with that issue.”

There’s little debate about the existence of groundwater contamination from the 2,600 MW Gavin plant, one of the largest coal plants in the country. Its former owner, American Electric Power (AEP) bought the entire town of Cheshire in 2002, with most residents and businesses moving out, rather than address residents’ pollution concerns.

Two federal lawsuits, however, argue that the EPA’s recent demands essentially represent the unauthorized promulgation of a new rule, since they don’t believe that coal ash sitting in groundwater is explicitly identified as a violation of the 2015 federal coal ash rules. 

“I think it’s clear,” said industry counsel Stephen Gidiere during the oral arguments, “that EPA has issued a new legislative rule,” by demanding in its January 2022 enforcement action that coal ash not sit in groundwater. 

One of the lawsuits was filed by utilities that are wholly owned subsidiaries of AEP, which sold the plant to a private equity firm in 2017, but the plant still provides power to the utilities that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. 

The other lawsuit is filed by a group of LLCs and holding companies affiliated with power generators including Vistra Corp., as well as the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group (USWAG), a trade organization representing over 100 utilities, electric cooperatives and related organizations. 

The 2015 coal ash rules mandate that at unlined coal ash impoundments that are infiltrated by water or causing contamination, the ash must be removed and placed in a lined landfill; an impermeable liner must be put in the impoundment; or engineering controls like pumps must be used to prevent contamination. 

The federal rules set a deadline of April 2021 for unlined impoundments to stop receiving coal ash and begin closing in such a way that they do not cause or present a future risk of contamination. At many sites including Gavin, companies requested extensions to this deadline. The rules offered extensions if closing by that deadline was not feasible, but only if the site was in compliance with other aspects of the rules. 

The EPA did little to enforce the rules until January 2022, when it issued a number of extension request denials, including for Gavin’s Bottom Ash Pond. Gavin’s extension request also triggered the EPA to review the site as a whole, and it found problems with contamination and compliance including with the Fly Ash Reservoir, an impoundment which was no longer receiving new coal ash. 

The EPA’s decision says that: “taking Gavin’s data at face value EPA estimates that the closed FAR [Fly Ash Reservoir] could be sitting in groundwater as high as 64 feet deep in some locations and that as much as 8.2 million cubic yards (or as much as 40% of CCR in the FAR) could still be saturated — and would remain so indefinitely.” CCR refers to Coal Combustion Residuals. 

In the oral arguments, Gidiere argued that the 2015 rules don’t necessarily mean that coal ash sitting in groundwater must be cleaned up.   

The oral arguments before a three-judge panel parsed the definition of a “free liquid” that could be separated from coal ash, with the EPA and Earthjustice attorneys arguing that groundwater indeed is a liquid that could and should be separated from toxic coal ash. 

“Once it becomes groundwater, it’s not a free liquid any more,” countered Gidiere, arguing that groundwater hence does not need to be kept separate from coal ash. 

Kearney emphasized that the coal ash rules say unlined impoundments must be cleaned up if contaminated leachate is found in the groundwater monitoring required under the rules. 

“Maybe if groundwater never moves you could have an unlined impoundment and still be okay,” Kearney said. “But at Gavin, this water is flowing through the waste, that’s generally what water does. It doesn’t just sit in the ground, it moves,” carrying leachate out of the impoundment.   

Gidiere in the oral arguments said that if an impoundment is covered and rainwater or surface water no longer creates downward pressure on coal ash, the risk of contamination is removed. He argued that the EPA’s 2022 orders that coal ash cannot remain soaked with groundwater go beyond the requirements laid out in the 2015 rules. 

“What EPA said in January of 2022, is if there’s an inch of groundwater in the bottom of 100 feet of dry CCR, that you cannot close the unit,” Gidiere said. “If you have basically wet sand in the bottom, you have to remove all that CCR.”

In response to questioning from the court, Gidiere could not identify impoundments that have only an inch of water, or any with less than 10% of coal ash saturated with groundwater.

“There are lots of sites like this one,” Kearney told the Energy News Network. “The Gavin site is a pretty egregious example, but we know there are lots of sites where coal ash is sitting in water.” 

Earthjustice, the Environmental Integrity Project and other organizations have released analyses of groundwater monitoring data required under the rules, showing that the vast majority of coal ash impoundments nationwide are causing toxic leakage. 

“The whole overarching point (of the federal rules) is that groundwater contamination is a big problem, it’s really unsafe and we have to prevent it,” said Kearney. “You can’t let water in (to a coal ash impoundment), you can’t let water out, you can’t let water just sit inside the impoundment.”

Parsing legal definitions, power industry pushes back on EPA coal ash enforcement  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.

As the federal government rolls out billions of dollars in subsidies to produce hydrogen fuel for use in vehicles, factories and power plants, a growing body of evidence is undercutting its clean credentials.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded $7 billion to seven regional hydrogen production hubs, on top of a lucrative tax credit whose rules have become the subject of intense industry lobbying.

Meanwhile, scientists and advocates are warning that the government’s rush to scale hydrogen has not adequately considered the fuel’s climate risks, including the potential of leaked hydrogen to prolong the heat-trapping impact of methane and act as a greenhouse gas itself when it creates water vapor in the upper atmosphere.

Multiple studies have also found burning hydrogen in power plants increases formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a pollutant that causes smog, harms public health, and also contributes to warming.

Hydrogen is “an indirect global warming gas,” said David Schlissel, an analyst who has testified before the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and numerous state commissions on energy issues. “It increases the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. And if you burn it in a power plant, you produce a lot of NOx, which leads to smog.”

A national coalition of environmental justice organizations are among those seeking to explain this science and demand more accountability for hydrogen’s complicated climate impacts. The Just Solutions coalition released a report last month by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research exploring the emissions and water use implications of increasing our reliance on hydrogen for fuel and power.

Similar concerns and findings were revealed in recent research by Cornell University scientists and by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where Schlissel is an analyst.

Different uses, different concerns

When pure hydrogen is combined with oxygen in hydrogen fuel cells, electricity is produced and the only byproducts are water vapor and heat. Such fuel cells can be used as power plants – sending electricity to the grid – or they can power vehicles like trucks or locomotives. A hydrogen fuel cell car, for example, is essentially an electric car with a built-in charging source.

Pure hydrogen can also be burned to power electricity generation or industrial processes, similar to natural gas combustion but without directly creating pollution that causes climate change or harms public health. Hydrogen can be combined with natural gas or burned in converted natural gas power plants.

Pure hydrogen today is produced mostly from natural gas, resulting in carbon emissions. If that carbon is sequestered, it is known as blue hydrogen. If hydrogen is produced from water in a process powered by renewables, known as green hydrogen, theoretically few greenhouse gas or other emissions result.

But advocates have questioned the viability of large-scale carbon sequestration as well as the ripple effects of diverting renewable power to make hydrogen from water. 

And then there are the more complicated ways that hydrogen could increase greenhouse gas and public health-harming emissions, scientists and community leaders say.

Even if hydrogen production, combustion and fuel cell use does not directly release greenhouse gas, it could contribute to climate change because of the way it interacts with or affects other elements in the atmosphere.

If hydrogen is to be used for everything from power generation to fuel cells to industrial processes, it will need to be produced at hydrogen plants and then usually transported and stored. Similar to natural gas, there’s ample potential during this process for pure hydrogen to “leak” into the atmosphere. 

When that happens, pure hydrogen can have a complicated effect on the concentration of the powerful greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere, an effect that hasn’t been adequately considered in federal policy, explains nuclear engineer Arjun Makhijani, co-author of the IEER report and author of Mending the Ozone Hole, by MIT Press.

‘Cleaning up’ methane

Single-bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms are known as hydroxyl radicals (HO) that “clean up” methane and other gases in the atmosphere by oxidizing and transforming them. Hydroxyl radicals decompose methane this way. But when pure hydrogen (H₂) is released into the atmosphere, it also is broken down by these hydroxyl radicals, meaning they are less available to break down methane. 

Hydroxyl radicals are “the main cleanser of atmospheric chemical pollution, with a lifetime of about a second — it’s that active — compared to methane which has a half-life of (about) 9 years,” said Makhijani. When hydroxyl radicals are “used up” breaking down pure hydrogen, there are fewer of them to break down methane. 

This effect is considered to account for half of the global warming potential represented by hydrogen, the IEER study says. 

“If you’re producing hydrogen and it leaks a lot, you’re going to increase methane concentrations even if methane emissions do not increase,” said Makhijani. “It’s like you’re stopping up the toilet.” 

Also, when hydrogen is released into the atmosphere, some of it ends up transforming into water vapor in the stratosphere. While water vapor in the lower troposphere does not cause warming, vapor higher up in the atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect of its own. This is thought to account for about 30% of the warming potential of hydrogen, IEER reports. 

Meanwhile when combusted to produce electricity or power industrial processes, hydrogen burns very hot. That heat drives oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere to form NOx, a pollutant that creates smog and harms public health while also contributing to global warming. This effect is considered to represent about 20% of the warming potential of hydrogen, IEER reported.

When hydrogen is blended with natural gas for use in heating or electricity generation, the formation of NOx can be significantly greater than when gas alone is burned, multiple studies have found.

“NOx emissions are not the only reason why burning hydrogen to make electricity is a bad idea — it is also wildly inefficient and hard to do,” said Lauren Piette, a senior associate attorney in the clean energy program for Earthjustice. 

“Burning green hydrogen in a gas plant to make electricity is like using a Rube Goldberg machine to strike a match. You take all this zero-carbon energy from solar and wind, use it to power an energy-hungry electrolyzer to make hydrogen, then burn that hydrogen in a gas plant to make a significantly smaller amount of electricity than you started with.”

Hydrogen can be mixed with natural gas to be burned in turbines or to fire traditional steel-making blast furnaces. Many clean energy advocates consider this to be an inefficient use of hydrogen, since the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is relatively moderate and can be dwarfed by the lifecycle greenhouse emissions related to producing and transporting hydrogen. 

“You’re spending a lot of money to make hydrogen from natural gas and then using it for the same purpose as natural gas — so why not just burn the gas,” said Makhijani.

Estimating leakage

A significant part of this equation is the rate of leakage — of both natural gas and hydrogen during transport and storage.

Natural gas typically leaks from pipelines and storage tanks at an average rate of about 2.7% of its volume, according to a 2018 paper in Science. Other peer-reviewed studies have found similar leakage rates. However the Argonne National Laboratory’s GREET model, used by the federal government to define standards for clean hydrogen, assumes a 1% natural gas leakage rate. Experts have demanded that federal models and rules be adjusted to reflect higher expected leakage rates. 

“The government is playing a shell game — they have set up their GREET model to show that blue hydrogen with carbon capture is close to being clean,” said Schlissel. “That only works if you make extremely optimistic and unrealistic assumptions about upstream methane leakage.”

Hydrogen is a lighter, less concentrated gas, so it takes up more room — proportionate to its energy value — than natural gas.

This means squeezing enough hydrogen into a pipeline or storage tank to compensate for the natural gas it is replacing will increase the pressure on the infrastructure. And increased pressure means more likelihood of leaks. 

Because of its expansive volume, hydrogen is often compressed for storage or transportation in tanks; it can also leak during this process.

“A recent analysis by Columbia University has estimated current leakage rates at around 2.9%” for hydrogen, Abbe Ramanan, project director for the Clean Energy Group, noted in a 2023 article for Utility Dive. “However, the push to produce more hydrogen — and deploy it in more leak-prone use cases, like pipelines — could push economy-wide leakage rates to 29.6 million tons or 5.6% of all hydrogen produced by 2050.”

To qualify as “clean,” the Department of Energy says “well to gate” emissions from a kilogram of hydrogen must be equal or less to the equivalent of 4 kg of carbon dioxide.

IEER estimated that producing hydrogen from natural gas, or combining hydrogen with natural gas for use in turbines or furnaces, can only meet this standard if natural gas leakage is reduced below current average rates, and hydrogen leakage is also kept extremely low. 

“If you’re producing hydrogen and it leaks a lot, you’re going to increase methane concentrations even if methane emissions do not increase,” said Makhijani. “That means we shouldn’t be doing blue hydrogen, we shouldn’t even be talking about blue hydrogen, until we eliminate two-thirds of methane leaks and keep hydrogen leaks very low and fix problems with carbon capture and sequestration. That’s going to be a long time coming.” 

Scientists have also demanded that the government consider the rate that methane causes warming over 20 years in its models. Currently the GREET model uses a 100-year methane-impact metric, which makes methane’s potency appear lower in comparison to carbon dioxide than if it is measured on a 20-year scale. Since methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas in the short-term, the impacts of hydrogen production that reduces carbon dioxide emissions but leads to methane increases must be measured on a shorter time scale, the experts say.

The IEEFA in its 2023 paper found that if a 20-year methane impact standard is used and a “realistic” 2.5% leakage rate for methane, the carbon dioxide emissions-equivalent measure for hydrogen jumps to 10.5 to 11.4 kg, far above the 4 kg standard used to define clean hydrogen.

“IEEFA is extremely concerned that the current blue hydrogen hype is going to result in the funding of projects that exacerbate climate change and lock in our reliance on fossil fuels for decades,” the report says.

In fact, experts have found that blue hydrogen can be worse for the climate than gray hydrogen, which is made from natural gas without carbon sequestration.

“Far from being low carbon, greenhouse gas emissions from the production of blue hydrogen are quite high, particularly due to the release of fugitive methane,” says the abstract of a 2021 paper by Cornell scientists Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobson, who used a 3.5% natural gas leakage rate in their calculations. “While carbon dioxide emissions are lower, fugitive methane emissions for blue hydrogen are higher than for gray hydrogen because of an increased use of natural gas to power the carbon capture.”

Better solutions?

The Cornell scientists note that oil and gas companies including Shell and BP have heavily promoted hydrogen as a clean fuel, including through the Hydrogen Council, which also includes automakers, mining companies and other industries.

“From the industry perspective, switching from natural gas to blue hydrogen may be viewed as economically beneficial since even more natural gas is needed to generate the same amount of heat,” the Cornell authors write. “We see no way that blue hydrogen can be considered ‘green.’”

Schlissel, like other experts and advocates, said it’s possible that hydrogen produced from water, powered by renewable energy, could be a viable and emissions-reducing way to power steel-making, heavy transportation or other hard-to-decarbonize sectors. But he’s frustrated that the federal government is investing so heavily in hydrogen when other solutions exist. 

Along with all the emissions questions around blue hydrogen, he notes that it’s not yet clear that industries and power companies are ready to buy massive amounts of hydrogen. The DOE’s hydrogen hub plan includes a billion dollars to be spent to develop markets. 

“They’re spending a huge amount of money in a short amount of time, they’re keeping the public in the dark, when we have [more established clean] technologies at our fingertips,” Schlissel said. “Renewables, energy efficiency, battery storage growth is skyrocketing.”

Scientists warn a poorly managed hydrogen rush could make climate change worse 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.

A new weatherization jobs resource hub in Wisconsin is part of advocates’ effort to avoid the boom-and-bust cycle that followed previous increases in federal energy efficiency funding.

Green Workforce Connect is a program of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), which recently rolled out the platform in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma with hopes to eventually expand it nationwide. The site is designed to go beyond your typical “niche job search board,” said IREC program director Pagan Poggione.

“There’s a disconnect between the key players” — including contractors, job seekers, and organizations implementing the federal government’s low-income Weatherization Assistance Program — “that Green Workforce Connect is trying to address,” Poggione said.

The federal weatherization program received $3.5 billion under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, with additional funds promised under the Inflation Reduction Act. Advocates hoping to make the most out of that funding have looked to 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a cautionary tale.

That Obama-era law provided $5 billion over three years for the Weatherization Assistance Program, allowing the industry to train thousands of people to seal and retrofit aging homes. Many of those trainees, though, never found long-term jobs and left the sector, industry leaders say. Then in more recent years, weatherization employers have struggled to find workers.

Industry and community leaders are hopeful the structure of current programs will avoid the problems of the past, and they are trying to build organizational systems to match weatherization worker supply with growing demand. 

Larry Zarker, CEO of the Building Performance Institute that certifies weatherization training programs, said he hopes the new federal funding and efforts like Green Workforce Connect will lead to a long-term workforce training pipeline and growing industry. 

“Back in the (ARRA) era, a lot of money was thrown out there for training, everyone got certified, the money was spent and then it was gone,” Zarker said, likening a graph of the funding trajectory to an image of a snake that had swallowed a giraffe. 

“There was an incredible rise in people trained and there weren’t jobs to sustain it. Now there is money for training and certification, but it’s over a 10-year period” — rather than three years with the ARRA funding. “We can scale this as demand rises, and meet the market needs.”

An underappreciated program

Since it started in 1976, the Weatherization Assistance Program has helped weatherize 7.2 million low-income homes, about 35,000 each year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Homes on average save $372 per year on energy bills, and the program supports about 8,500 jobs, the agency says. 

A study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory chronicled the expansion that occurred from 2009-2011 thanks to the ARRA funding, which boosted the average spending on each household from $2,500 to $6,500 and lifted the qualifying threshold from 150% to 200% of the federal poverty level. The program is administered by state energy offices, and the amount of aid each household receives is determined by various factors. 

A network of about 700 community and nonprofit organizations nationwide, including about 20 in Wisconsin, facilitate the program, enlisting residents and arranging energy efficiency audits and weatherization upgrades.

But those organizations often cannot find the contractors and direct employees needed to carry out the work, said Poggione. 

“Even though it’s been around since 1976, many people don’t know what the weatherization program is or how the program works,” Poggione said.

Organizations carrying out federally-funded weatherization often say they struggle to find contractors to do the work or employees to hire. 

“On the flip side, job seekers say it’s hard to find employers or trade programs that are vetted,” Poggione said. “The intent is to help those individuals and contractors make connections to local employers and training providers to help them make the next step.” 

Poggione said organizations have told IREC they plan to “double or triple their staffs to meet demand, and it’s not going to slow down. As funding comes online, we need more and more people trained, and we’re going to need training center expansion as well.”

An under-appreciated job 

“Weatherization” may not be a career that pops to mind often when people are considering their futures.

“The weatherization program can feel somewhat nebulous, if someone has not been exposed to it, it can be confusing,” said John Fleet, director of weatherization and housing for Partners for Community Development, which provides federally-funded weatherization in the Sheboygan, Wisconsin area. “What does weatherization even mean, what do they do?”

But experts note that weatherization is an attractive job prospect, since one can enter the field without higher education, receive free training at federally-funded centers and move up a ladder of jobs.

“I tell my staff, younger people that work for me or prospective employees: the sky is the limit in what you can do with this program,” Fleet said. “I know people that have no college education, who became very successful as a weatherization installer, then became crew leader, became an energy auditor. Someone could work with us and go start their own business. It’s a very broad industry that intersects with many others. It’s a good nurturing place for someone to get their career started.”

He said weatherization employers have faced a worker shortage for years, a problem that dovetails with a shortage of workers in the construction industry more generally. Despite the brief weatherization boom driven by the ARRA, Fleet said there’s been a longer trend affecting weatherization and related trades.

“We’ve had a lot of retirees since the Great Recession,” that followed the 2008 economic crash, he said. “People just didn’t get back into the construction industry. Even more than that, there was a push for people in the 1990s to 2000s to get away from the trades and send kids to college, as opposed to realizing that the trades are a great, exciting viable career opportunity.” 

Weatherizing a home involves a lot more than putting in storm windows or improved insulation and HVAC, experts note.

“It starts with building science principles, understanding how a house works, understanding the things that can compromise comfort, safety, energy, and durability of a home,” said Zarker. “Then we can use the diagnostic equipment, take that data, model the performance of a home and understand what kinds of savings you can achieve.”

Kelly Carey, Building Performance Institute marketing specialist, noted that while the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides 10 years of funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program, “we won’t get to all American homes in 10 years. Hopefully at the end of that time, it becomes an expectation that my home is energy efficient and it’s comfortable, I’ll expect that of my builder and renovator.”

With federal funds flowing, weatherization industry prepares to fill the gaps  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.

State and local governments across the country are finalizing plans and preparing applications for a $5 billion federal climate grant program under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) program has already distributed almost half a billion dollars to participating states and metropolitan areas to develop or refine local climate action plans. Now, the agency is preparing to award $4.6 billion in competitive grants to help implement big ideas contained in those local plans. 

By March 1, states and metropolitan areas must submit “priority” climate action plans, based on community input and prioritizing environmental justice. Those plans set the parameters for the competitive grants of $2 million to $500 million, with applications due April 1.  

“The CPRG program is intentionally designed to be broad,” said Rich Damberg, senior policy advisor at the EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, during a January webinar. “Confronting climate change requires making progress in all sectors of the economy — electric power, transportation, industry, buildings, waste and materials management, and agriculture and natural and working lands.” 

Forty-five states and nearly 70 metro areas are participating, including Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. 

Iowa, Florida, South Dakota, Wyoming and Kentucky each declined $3 million in federal funding for climate planning and are not eligible to compete for the larger grants. Wyoming initially joined the program but then Gov. Mark Gordon decided in the fall to withdraw. 

The EPA expects to award 30 to 115 implementation grants of different sizes. Tribes and territories meanwhile compete in a separate sector of the program, accounting for $300 million.

“We are in for an exciting year in 2024,” said Peter Hansel, special advisor for implementation of the EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, during a January webinar. “We encourage all applicants to collaborate and coordinate as they’re developing the (priority climate action plans).”

The funding can support a new stand-alone measure, like a state agency creating a new decarbonization program, or it can expand work already underway, like a tribe adding more solar and storage to tribal buildings, Damberg explained. Applications can address any sector emitting greenhouse gases or removing carbon from the atmosphere. 

Plans and proposals are also meant to reflect the Biden administration’s Justice 40 initiative, the idea that at least 40% of program benefits flow to low-income and disenfranchised communities. 

While the implementation grants are meant for relatively short-term projects, the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program also takes a long lens. Participants are supposed to develop a “comprehensive” climate action plan by fall 2025, with a status report due in 2027.

Milwaukee: Connecting silos

The Milwaukee area had a head start on their action plan thanks to the city of Milwaukee’s own robust Climate and Equity Plan, said Jennifer Sarnecki, principal transportation planner of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

She called the city’s plan a “foundational document” that the regional planning commission is building on for their priority climate action plan, working with surrounding cities including Waukesha, Wauwatosa, West Allis and Mequon, and four counties. Community organizations including Common Ground, the Ethnic and Diverse Business Coalition, the Hmong American Friendship Association and the Southside Organizing Center are also involved.

“We do have decades of experience with transportation and land use planning, environmental planning,” said Sarnecki. “The strength of the program EPA created is to bring all those topics together and allow us to work between silos. I applaud it because it’s giving us an opportunity to look at short-term shovel-ready projects that have already been identified and vetted, while also looking at providing a long-term framework for transformational change. As a planner, that excites me a great deal.”

Energy efficiency is central to Milwaukee’s Climate and Equity Plan and also will likely be featured in the regional climate plan, Sarnecki said. Electrifying transportation and buildings are also priorities. Milwaukee’s plan calls for reaching net zero emissions by 2050, with 45% reductions from 2018 levels by 2030. Transportation will account for almost half of the needed emissions reductions, according to the city’s analysis, with buildings and electricity generation accounting for 17-18% each.

As part of the process, the region is cataloging its greenhouse gas emissions and doing outreach. 

“The planning grant has been extremely helpful,” Sarnecki said. “At the staff level, it means being able to attend the technical forums that EPA has developed. We’re building that capacity, and it’s allowed for expanded coordination among our local municipalities. There’s opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with environmental justice populations around this topic, they provide the lived experience. And this is just the start, we’re looking forward to what comes next” with the comprehensive climate plan.

Iowa: Metropolitan collaboration

Renewable energy and Biden administration plans more generally have faced pushback in Iowa, where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. While the state is among the five declining to participate in the CPRG program, metropolitan leaders are emphasizing cost savings, collaboration and capacity building, including in ways that benefit rural residents. 

Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, just 25 miles apart, are separate metropolitan areas for the purposes of the grant, but they are collaborating on their applications with unified plans, both spearheaded by the East Central Iowa Council of Governments (ECICOG), according to project manager Jennifer Fencl.

“We obviously want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Fencl said, “but from the planning side and our organization side, this is really all about learning, going through this process, getting connected with the types of resources that will be needed in the future to set our communities up for, say, pursuing a solar project or changing out lighting.” 

Fencl said they used the $2 million total in planning grants to, among other things, work with the University of Iowa in developing and using an equitable engagement process to collect input from the more than 50 different communities that make up the area. They created a website to explain the process and ask for feedback. 

The regional council has long worked with those communities on issues including water quality, solid waste management, and recycling, but they haven’t focused as much on air quality. The grant could present an opportunity to do so, she said. 

They’ve used tools developed by the federal government to identify environmental justice areas, but Iowa’s rural landscape means they sometimes overlook marginalized populations since they draw on Area Median Income metrics that become less meaningful in regions with few residents. Hence, Fencl said, the planners are making sure to adequately study and reach out to rural communities and consider projects that will increase their well-being.

“We’ll focus on homeowners, renters and residents of manufactured housing,” she said, noting that leaders can work with the well-known energy assistance program LIHEAP to increase their outreach. “Very often renters and manufactured housing fall through the cracks with these kinds of programs.”

Their climate action plans — while not yet finished — are likely to prioritize energy efficiency and access to electrification, building on new ideas submitted by communities and existing successful programs, Fencl said. Iowa City, for example, has a pilot program helping renters access electric vehicle chargers. 

“This is not about any kind of strings attached or mandates or requirements, this is capacity-building,” Fencl said. “There are smaller communities that are interested but just don’t have the resources and connections to do what they want to do. This is a great opportunity to build that capacity.” 

Indianapolis: Calls for electrification

The agency spearheading the process for the Indianapolis area released its updated priorities in January, following a series of public events and online surveys. 

The list includes repurposing industrial sites for renewable energy, creating more parks, restoring degraded land, increasing energy efficiency of industry, and electrifying government buildings. 

Such priorities have not been embraced by Indiana state lawmakers, who have in recent years proposed legislation to bar municipalities from electrification-related measures and to protect the state’s coal industry. 

The dichotomy is an example of how federal grants like CPRG can help municipalities and state leaders do work that is not supported by the state’s legislature. Wisconsin — with a Democratic governor and sustainability-focused agencies, but a Republican-dominated legislature — faces a similar situation. The federal grant program can push climate-friendly directions that the legislature has refused to fund, noted Maria Redmond, director of the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy. 

The Indianapolis area’s preliminary greenhouse gas emissions inventory showed that a third of emissions came from commercial electricity generation, a third from mobile combustion (like vehicles), and almost a quarter from stationary combustion. It also showed that Marion County, which includes most of Indianapolis, accounted for 45% of the emissions among 11 counties. 

The Central Indiana Regional Development Authority, which is leading the effort, emphasized creating high-quality and high-wage jobs and attracting “high caliber talent” as priorities, as noted in a presentation. 

The regional agency has convened stakeholder working groups focused on agriculture and open space, transportation and recreation, electricity and heat, and industrial and technological advancement. In September, representatives did outreach at farmers markets, the Indiana Latino Expo and Car Free Day Indy. 

A survey of 480 residents asked what actions by the government would be most valuable in helping reduce emissions. Twenty-four percent asked for funding for increasing home energy efficiency, and 23% wanted funding for residential solar panels. Significant numbers also prioritized composting service and increasing electric vehicle charging infrastructure. 

The survey found slightly different top investment priorities among the general public and environmental justice communities. The EJ respondents ranked improving public transit first by a comfortable margin, and renewable energy third. The general public ranked renewables first and public transit second. 

Chicago: Regional environmental justice 

As in Milwaukee, the Chicago area’s climate plan will build on the city of Chicago’s 2022 Climate Action Plan as well as the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus’ 2021 Climate Action Plan for the Chicago Region, the third such regional plan in the country. The mayors caucus is leading the process for the Chicago region, which includes the cities of Naperville and Elgin; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and part of Northwest Indiana. 

The 2021 regional plan calls for decarbonizing energy generation, electrifying and increasing the efficiency of buildings, expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure, building transit-oriented development and generating electricity from wastewater biogas, among other measures. The plan was developed in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and with guidance from the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, which in 2019 chose the mayors caucus’ Greenest Region Compact as a pilot program on the potential of regional collaboration.  

Mayors Caucus director of environmental initiatives Edith Makra echoed other planners in noting that there are different and sometimes contradictory ways that communities can qualify for Justice 40 credit.  

“We looked at four tools that identify environmental justice communities in Illinois, and they don’t agree with one another,” said Makra, noting one estimate counted 151 while another said 113.

By all definitions, the Chicago area is home to many neighborhoods struggling for environmental justice. Making sure the climate action plan and grant proposals reflect their needs and hopes requires significant effort and outreach. 

“You can’t just call them up and say, ‘We have funding for you, take it,’” Makra noted. “You have to do the preparatory work.” 

While environmental justice issues in Chicago are well-known, the federal climate grant program has the potential to serve areas that get less attention and funding. 

“It has to be understood to be inclusive of regions beyond the city of Chicago,” said Makra. “There are huge regions in the South suburbs, Lake County, some of our older industrial cities like Elgin and Joliet that are all qualified disadvantaged communities. We’re really excited about the opportunities for further sharpening our knowledge and engaging the environmental justice communities. It’s a huge opportunity.”

The race heats up for massive IRA state and local climate funding program 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.

Almost 50 environmental justice groups on Tuesday sent a letter to leaders of the federally-funded Midwestern hydrogen hub, imploring them not to try to loosen requirements for tax incentives for hydrogen produced with clean energy.  

The U.S. Treasury in December published draft rules saying that to receive lucrative 45V tax credits for producing clean hydrogen, the energy used must not be diverted from the grid, but be “additional” energy created specifically to power the electrolysis process used to produce pure hydrogen from water. 

Environmental advocates are largely pleased with Treasury’s draft rules, which also say clean energy must be generated around the same time and near where it is used for hydrogen production, to reap incentives. But organizations are worried that industry groups are lobbying to weaken the draft rules, which are open for public comment through Feb. 26. 

The Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen (MachH2), a coalition of industry and research groups that won up to $1 billion in Department of Energy hydrogen hub funding, has proposed to produce much “pink hydrogen” powered by nuclear energy from Illinois. Critics say this, as well as “green hydrogen” produced with solar and wind, could divert zero-emissions power from other users and hence prolong the lives of fossil-fuel-fired generators that fill the gaps. 

“If MachH2 imperils the achievement of our states’ climate goals, harms the health of our communities, and causes electricity price spikes that disproportionality impact low- and moderate-income households, it will face stiff opposition from our coalition and from communities that will bear the brunt of harmful, and avoidable, pollution,” says the letter from 47 organizations, including We the People of Detroit, Interfaith Power & Light, North Dakota Native Vote, StraightUp Solar, the Sierra Club, Eco-Justice Collaborative and Illinois People’s Action. 

MachH2 declined to comment for this story. 

Three pillars 

The environmental and justice groups praised the draft 45V rules for including “three pillars” the groups see as crucial to making sure “clean hydrogen” is truly clean. Those pillars mean clean hydrogen production tax credits will only be awarded if new clean energy is used to power the projects, and the clean energy can actually be delivered to the site of the electrolysis around the time it is needed. The draft rules say that to be considered “additional,” the energy source must have been built within 36 months before the hydrogen production goes online. 

Accounting known as hourly matching, which can be verified with Environmental Attribute Certificates, ensures that hydrogen production isn’t removing clean energy from the grid that could be used by consumers at times of high demand.

A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Energy and the Environment modeled the emissions impact that hydrogen production by electrolysis would have in the western U.S., and found that all three “pillars” would be necessary to ensure overall emissions don’t exceed fossil fuel generation. 

The environmental justice organizations’ letter notes that the EPA has supported the Treasury department’s decision that induced emissions on the grid — caused by replacing electricity diverted for hydrogen production — should be counted as indirect emissions of hydrogen.  

“Backsliding on Treasury’s proposed rule… would lead to significant emissions increases from hydrogen production, in violation of 45V’s statutory requirements,” said the organizations’ letter. “It would also directly harm communities that are home to some of our states’ dirtiest power plants, which would run more to replace the zero-carbon energy diverted to hydrogen production.” 

Lauren Piette, a senior associate attorney in the clean energy program for Earthjustice, said, “The important thing now is to make sure Treasury holds the line against pressure to weaken the rules.” 

Treasury asked for comment on possible exemptions to the additionality requirement, including the possibility that existing nuclear and hydroelectric plants could receive the tax credit, or that existing plants could get the tax credit if it helps them avoid retirement. Advocates have called these possible changes in the rules “loopholes.” An analysis by the Rhodium Group found these exemptions would generally increase greenhouse gas emissions, compared to modeling under the rules without exemptions. 

“Treasury needs to reject the loopholes industry is demanding, which would create enormous subsidies for dirty hydrogen, lock in more fossil fuel production and use, and increase dangerous health and climate-harming pollution,” Piette said. “Especially damaging would be any loopholes to the incrementality requirement, which are based on industry’s speculative claims about retirement risk, curtailment, and modeling. Such loopholes would reward the hydrogen industry for siphoning critical zero-carbon energy from the grid, creating a massive power demand that would be filled by our dirtiest power plants – the ones that should be retiring, not ramping up.”

The letter charges that if the three pillars aren’t mandates for receiving tax incentives, the electricity diverted from the grid to hydrogen production will cause consumers’ energy bills to spike. They point to cryptocurrency mining as an example of how this phenomenon has played out. 

“Cryptomining, which is subject to minimal constraints and requirements, has increased utility bills by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for households and businesses in upstate New York and led to costly grid strains in Texas,” the letter says. 

Industry arguments 

BP’s Whiting oil refinery in Northwest Indiana is a focal point of the proposed Midwest hydrogen hub, as the company plans to ramp up hydrogen production at the site and provide it to regional users. BP asked the Treasury department to allow hydrogen made from existing generation to receive tax credits. 

“We encourage the IRS and Treasury to adopt flexible criteria on ‘additionality’ especially at this nascent stage,” said BP America’s comment to the IRS. “Strict additionality rules requiring electrolytic hydrogen to be powered by new renewable energy is not practical, especially in the early years, and will severely limit development of hydrogen projects.” 

BP and other members also argued against the requirement for hourly matching of renewable energy generation to use in hydrogen production, arguing instead for yearly matching. The draft rules currently allow for yearly matching until 2028, then hourly matching becomes mandatory. 

“Stringent requirements such as hourly zero-emission matching have the potential to devastate the economics of clean hydrogen production,” said BP’s comment. “Moreover, such restrictive requirements are likely not practical or feasible in these early stages. If a green hydrogen production facility can only produce during hours when wind and solar are available, the low utilization rate will dramatically increase the price of the hydrogen produced.” 

Bloom Energy Corporation, which manufactures electrolyzers, also said that adequate technology does not exist to timestamp energy generation and use in order to ensure that clean energy is generated when it is needed for hydrogen production. 

“Since electrolyzers will comprise a very small percentage of the overall EAC-qualifying energy produced for many years to come, there is ample time for those state, regional and voluntary bodies to work through their stakeholder processes and make any changes as needed to adjust those systems so as to avoid unintended outcomes,” said Bloom Energy in its comment, referring to Environmental Attribute Certificates.

The Princeton study noted that hourly matching can add considerable costs to hydrogen production, but said the 45V tax credit would be lucrative enough to compensate for those costs while driving the market development of better hourly matching mechanisms.  

Constellation Energy, owner of Illinois’s nuclear plants, also supported a mandate for hourly matching.  

“Setting an expectation of hourly matched clean energy will provide a market signal for the clean energy investments needed to further drive decarbonization in the power sector,” said the nuclear company’s comment. 

But Constellation is asking for exemptions to additionality, asking the government to decide that hydrogen made with behind-the-meter generation from existing plants qualifies for tax credits. The MachH2 hydrogen hub proposal calls for an electrolyzer on the site of Constellation’s LaSalle nuclear plant in Illinois, which could provide behind-the-meter electricity. But this electricity would still represent clean power that otherwise could have been sent to the grid, critics say. 

Constellation also argued against adding carbon emissions related to the nuclear supply chain when calculating hydrogen’s lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Measuring carbon content for nuclear fuel is not typically done by the mining, enrichment, fabrication and transport vendors in the nuclear fuel supply chain, and it would be extremely cumbersome, costly, and labor intensive to impose these requirements on said vendors,” Constellation said.

An EJ platform for hydrogen 

The letter to MachH2 comes as grassroots groups and environmental organizations are increasingly organizing around still murky but well-funded plans for hydrogen to be used in everything from power generation to steelmaking to transportation, including as part of the seven federally-funded hubs. 

On February 1, the national collaborative Just Solutions Collective released an Environmental Justice Platform on hydrogen, demanding strict limits on the type of hydrogen production and use that is incentivized as part of a clean energy shift. 

The organization says hydrogen production from natural gas, and hydrogen produced with power from the grid, should be “ruled out” since “fossil fuel-based hydrogen fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” by many estimates. They also demanded strict safety protocols around new hydrogen development, strident protections for water resources, protections around chemicals added to hydrogen fuels, and transparency in all hydrogen-related projects. 

Just Solutions leaders hope their platform influences policymakers and also helps community groups more effectively weigh in on plans for expanding hydrogen, including as the U.S. Department of Energy invests $7 billion in the seven hydrogen hubs nationwide. 

“The framework is meant to be a resource for climate and environmental justice advocates so they can advance clean energy technology that meaningfully addresses the climate crisis and to stop false solutions from taking root in our communities,” Just Solutions senior fellow and strategist Sylvia Chi said in a January webinar. 

Environmental justice organizations in other parts of the country have also opposed hydrogen hub plans. Last summer Indigenous, environmental justice, and youth groups urged the Biden administration not to fund a hydrogen hub based in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and that proposal was not among the seven selected.   

“DOE is saying a lot of the right things, but there is widespread concern that environmental justice is going to be set off to the side and figured out later, after contracts are signed and projects are approved,” said Piette. “We have yet to hear a clear answer on whether communities will be able to say no to a Hub project. DOE needs to give its own guidance teeth and hold Hubs accountable to local communities, especially those already experiencing cumulative burdens of decades of fossil fuel pollution.”

Excess energy

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) produced a report released in January commissioned by the Just Solutions Collective.

The report points to a pilot program in New York state where the Nine Mile nuclear plant is powering hydrogen production. While the nuclear power is zero emissions, it displaces energy from the grid that, when replaced by New York’s natural gas-heavy energy mix, increases overall greenhouse gas emissions. 

IEER argues that the ideal place for zero-emissions-produced hydrogen is in areas like California and Texas where there’s often much more wind or solar power available than the grid can handle. These renewables are regularly curtailed, or kept off the grid, simply going to waste. A possible exemption to the additionality requirement for tax credits that Treasury has floated includes existing generation during times that renewables would be curtailed. 

The IEER report estimates that curtailed renewables at current levels could produce 34,000 tons of hydrogen annually in California, and 150,000 tons in Texas. And the availability of renewables in those and other states is only expected to increase. 

The environmental justice organizations’ letter similarly says that in the Midwest, MachH2 could successfully procure new renewables to power green hydrogen production. 

“The MachH2 hub is one of the best situated in the country, able to take advantage of excellent wind and solar resources in the Midwest,” the letter says. “With the anticipated buildout of new renewable energy in this region, the projects funded by the hub will have no difficulty procuring cost-competitive, new, hourly-matched power from the proposed deliverability zone to claim the 45V tax credit.”

Environmental justice groups ask feds to resist weakening rules on clean hydrogen tax credit  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.