High-voltage ⚡

Good morning and happy Friday,

In this week’s headlines, it could be big oil’s big finale… before the fall, Biden celebrates 100,000 new clean energy jobs, and Ohio and Indiana are on the verge of a staggering solar-farm boom.

Read on for more.

High-voltage 

Much-needed high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission is coming to the Upper Midwest. Houston-based transmission developer Grid United announced that it will partner with Minnesota-based ALLETE to build the proposed North Plains Connector. Here are some fast facts about this project:

• The 600kV North Plains Connector will be approximately 385 miles long and have the ability to transfer 3,000 MW of power when it goes into service, which is anticipated to occur in 2029. Together, the two companies will invest an estimated $2.5 billion in the project; ALLETE will operate the line and own at least 35% of it.
• The link will  “more than double the transfer capacity between the Western and Eastern interconnections, “easing congestion on the transmission system, and enabling fast sharing of electricity across a vast area with diverse weather patterns.” This will “increase resilience/reliability and reduce overall congestion on the transmission system.”
• Grid United CEO Mike Skelly says “the United States is poised for a boom in long-distance transmission,” and “The long-term expansion and extension of renewable energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act led to increased certainty that has flowed through to transmission development.”

⚡️ The Takeaway

Music to our ears. Transmission infrastructure is vital to the clean energy transition. By connecting the North Dakota and Montana grids, the project “will help mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and accommodate the growing demand for electricity.” It will also “provide tens of millions of dollars in additional property tax revenue and community investment, [and] create between 300 and 500 temporary construction jobs as well as permanent jobs.” The sooner, the better.

Gopher It

Renewable energy advocates have a new reason to feel enthusiastic about the Land of 10,000 Lakes, aka The Gopher State. Both Democratic-led chambers of the Minnesota state legislature have passed “an ambitious climate law” that Governor Tim Walz is expected to sign. Here are some key points to know about how the bill will advance renewable energy development:

• The legislation doubles down on clean energy by creating “two new mandates for electric utilities in the state: a renewable electricity standard and a carbon-free energy standard.” The newly revised renewable energy standard increases the amount of electricity utilities must get from renewables from 25% by 2025 – a target that was hit in eight years early – to 55% by 2035.
• The bill also requires 100% of the electricity sold in the state to be carbon-free by 2040. The state’s two biggest utilities, Xcel Energy and Minnesota Power, “previously promised to reach 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050, ” so the new standard “speed(s) up the utilities’ existing timeline by a decade.”
• Consistent with this age of partisan politics, Minnesota republicans staunchly opposed the legislation, dubbing it the “blackout bill” and claiming it would “make energy unreliable, unsafe and even dangerous” – statements that are contradicted by several studies, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

⚡️ The Takeaway

Land of 10,000 renewable energy projects. Noting that warming temperatures and drought are already “a threat to our $20 billion-a-year agriculture industry" and northwest Minnesota's tourism industry which benefits from ice fishing and snowmobiling, the bill’s sponsors in the senate said it would “help reduce Minnesota's carbon emissions and combat climate change.” Renewable energy developers stand ready to answer that call.

• Energy Equity: Connecticut program helps 15,000 households cut their utility bills.
• Green Cornucopia: Just how far can this climate momentum take us?
• Just Kidding: BP pares back its climate goals as oil surges. 
• Well Endowed: The man in charge of the $400bn to shift away from fossil fuels.

• Longroad Energy’s 1GW King Pine wind approved 
• EDF’s 300-MW Riverside County, CA solar project approved by BLM
• Savion’s Oak Run Solar Project stirs pushback in Madison County, OH
• Cypress Creek submits rezone application to Onslow County, NC

Good News, Sort Of

If you lie awake nights worrying that global supplies of the materials needed to make solar panels and wind turbines will fall short of future demand, you can rest easy: “A new analysis suggests planet Earth has more than enough to go around.” 

The paper estimates “demand for 17 key materials used in renewable energy generation technology between 2020 and 2050.” The authors examine 75 different scenarios; “Crucially, the scenarios they considered took into account the fact that renewable generation will not only need to replace existing fossil fuel plants, but also expand overall capacity to meet the expected growth in demand for electricity over the coming decades.”

The good news is that “for almost all the materials, they found that total demand only represented a small fraction of ‘geological reserves,’ which refers to global reserves that can be recovered economically. This will inevitably lead to a significant jump in emissions from the industries involved in providing these materials.”

Further, “the researchers found that even in the worst case, the emissions [associated with recovering these materials] would total 29 gigatons of CO2 equivalent, which is a tiny fraction of the 320 gigatons we can still emit and have a good chance of avoiding more than 1.5 degrees of warming.”

However, “the analysis does miss out on a key source of future demand for many of these materials: batteries. Given the expected worldwide transition to electric vehicles and probable need for grid-scale storage, that could change the math considerably.” Um, yeah. We’ll look forward to part two of this valuable research!