The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, for “… the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest” through the designation of national monuments by the President and Congress. National monuments are one of the types of specially-designated areas that make up the BLM’s National Conservation Lands. Some of the earliest national monuments included Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. They were initially protected by the War Department, then later by the National Park Service. More recently, the BLM and other Federal agencies have retained stewardship responsibilities for national monuments on public lands. In fact, the BLM manages more acres of national monuments in the continental U. S. than any other agency. This includes the largest land-based national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah featured here. National monuments under the BLM’s stewardship have yielded numerous scientific discoveries, ranging from fossils of previously unknown dinosaurs to new theories about prehistoric cultures. They provide places to view some of America’s darkest night skies, most unique wildlife, and treasured archaeological resources. In total, twenty BLM-managed national monuments, covering over five million acres, are found throughout the western U. S. and offer endless opportunities for discovery. Photos and description by Bob Wick, BLM.
St. George, in Utah’s southwest corner, is one of the nation’s fastest growing communities. This is partly because of a nice climate, access to a major interstate, and relative closeness to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. But it’s also because the landscape in which it sits is stunning, characterized by burnished red sandstone punctuated by dark volcanic formations and the green ribbons of the Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers, all set against the backdrop of the Pine Valley Mountains. In 2009, Congress created the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area on about 45,000 acres of BLM land just north of St. George to protect some of this landscape and its wildlife, and to offer a refuge from the burgeoning mass of humanity.
Satellite view of St. George, the southern end of the Red Cliff National Conservation Area, and the proposed highway corridor just approved by the BLM (in purple). The highway would fragment desert tortoise habitat and near-town hiking areas. Google Earth image.
But the Trump administration — and the state of Utah — have other plans. This week, the Bureau of Land Management approved Utah’s plans to build a four-lane highwaythrough the south end of the conservation area. The stated aim is to accommodate growth, reduce congestion, and speed up the car trip from one section of sprawl to another. But really it will only induce growth and more traffic, while also diminishing one of St. George’s most appealing assets.
The idea for a Northern Corridor Highway has been bantered about for a couple of decades. The proposal seemed to perish in 2016, when the BLM denied Washington County’s bid to build the road through the national conservation area. But when Donald Trump was elected president the first time, the county and the Utah Department of Transportation seized the opportunity to apply for a right of way to build a 4.5 mile, four-lane highway across a portion of the conservation area.
Red Cliff National Conservation Area. The Northern Corridor Highway would connect to the Red Hills Parkway in the mid-ground of the photo about one-third of the way in from the left. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
In January 2021, the outgoing Trump administration’s BLM approved the right of way, even though its own analysis acknowledged that it would destroy tortoise habitat, spread invasive species, and essentially chop off the southern end of the conservation area, destroying trails and damaging the recreation experience. A large coalition of environmental groups under the banner of the Red Cliffs Conservation Coalition sued the BLM, and the agency ultimately agreed to redo the environmental analysis — finally rejecting the proposed highway at the end of 2024 and recommending an expansion of the existing Red Hills Parkway, instead.
Once Biden was out of office, however, the state and Washington County once again appealed to the feds to grant them a right-of-way, arguing that the Red Hills Parkway idea was not feasible. And since the Trump administration and Utah’s elected leaders tend to value roads and more suburban sprawl over tortoises, beauty, and the thriving desert landscape, the BLM opened the door to bulldoze more land to indulge Utah’s road fetish and to make way for yet another monument to America’s car-centric culture.
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A couple of dispatches ago, I wrote about how curious it was that the Trump administration had yet to move to diminish or eliminate any national monuments during this second term. It may be because they are outsourcing the task to Congress.
Utah’s congressional delegation is expected to introduce federal legislation that would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Biden-era Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan. If the “resolution of disapproval” passes both chambers of Congress with a simple majority vote, it would erase the plan and bar the Bureau of Land Management from issuing another plan that is “substantially the same” in the future.
This wouldn’t change the boundaries of the monument, but would likely cause management of the area to revert back to the 2020, Trump I-era plan. That plan was not only less protective than the newer one, but only applied to a much smaller area, since in 2017 Trump had significantly shrunk the national monument. Revoking the current management plan, then, would leave vast areas of the monument in a sort of management limbo.
“I strongly denounce any attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan. This plan reflects years of public input, scientific research, and meaningful Tribal consultation, and dismantling it through procedural shortcuts undermines good governance, responsible land stewardship, and the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes,” said Autumn Gillard, Southern Paiute,Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalitionmember, in a written statement. “At this time, I urge lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to uphold the approved resource management plan from January 2025.”
Utah officials often say they dislike new national monument designations because, in their minds, protecting land and cultural resources is bad for the economy, mostly because they block new mining and drilling. A new study shows they are wrong.
Headwaters Economics analyzed economic conditions and trends in 30 national monument gateway communities, and found that national monument designations do not disrupt local economies. They also don’t give nearby communities a substantial economic boost. “Employment and population trends continue on the same trajectory after designation,” Headwaters found, “and income growth tends to improve modestly over time.”
From Headwaters Economics’ economic performance of communities near national monuments report.
The findings match up with what one would intuitively expect. National monuments are rarely designated in areas that are currently targeted for new drilling and mining, meaning they are unlikely to affect the existing extractive economies. Meanwhile, they are often established in places that are already experiencing an increase in visitation, meaning that designation wouldn’t necessarily cause a significant jump in tourism.
Take Bears Ears National Monument, for example. It was established in 2016 on federal land in San Juan County, Utah. Both the oil and gas and uranium mining industries were (and are) active in the county. But they weren’t interested in drilling new wells or opening new mines within the monument’s boundaries. Previous oil and gas wells had mostly come up dry — drillers have found much more success in the Aneth and McElmo fields east of the monument. And the Daneros uranium mine, which is been on standby status for years, is outside the boundaries, as well. In other words, monument designation had absolutely zero effect on either industry.
Meanwhile, fears that establishing a national monument in this corner of southeastern Utah would lead to its “discovery” by the masses were overblown, simply because the internet and social media had already lured folks to the area. Indeed, part of the reason people pushed for designation was to try to get a handle on increased visitation and its impacts on natural and cultural resources.
Headwaters has a nice interactive graphic on which you can check out the economic trends around the 30 national monuments. The trends, themselves, are interesting to see: They make it abundantly clear that other factors, especially COVID-19, had a much bigger effect than any national monument designation.
The Big Data Center Buildup is accelerating. Nearly every day I get news of another proposed hyperscale facility somewhere in the West. A lot of them are not planning on connecting to the power grid, which is good for other utility users, because they won’t have to pay for associated infrastructure upgrades. But in almost every case, their proposed power sources include at least some gas-fired generation. And natural gas, i.e. methane, is not clean energy by any means.
So, while the data center boom has the potential to accelerate the clean energy transition by encouraging more solar, wind, and battery storage, it is also slowing the transition by perpetuating fossil fuel burning and even prompting construction of new fossil fuel-fired facilities.
Projects that have come onto my radar recently include:
Laramie County, Wyoming’s commissioners approved Crusoe Energy Systems’ and Tallgrass’ proposed AI data center complex near Cheyenne, despite residents’ pushback over the project’s massive scale. If this thing is built as planned, it will be ginormous, with estimated capital costs of $50 billion. That would not only include the Project Jade’s five data centers and associated structures, but also a 2,700 MW gas-fired power plant — which would be among the largest of its kind in the West. The developers plan to use a closed-loop cooling system, which is less water-intensive than conventional evaporative systems but uses more energy.
About 150 miles west of there, Power Company of Wyoming, an Anschutz Corporation subsidiary, is proposing a 2,000 MW gas generating facility in Carbon County to serve growing data center-driven power demand. These are the same folks who are building the Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind project and the TransWest Express transmission line. The controversial, 732-mile TransWest Express was originally billed as a clean-energy line that would carry Wyoming wind to California. Looks like it also will be moving fossil fuel-fired power, as well.
Residents of Surprise, Arizona, a section of Phoenix’s sprawl, are getting a little surprise of their own: A proposed data center and dedicated 700 MW natural gas plant adjacent to a residential neighborhood. Residents are not too pleased, according to a story in the Arizona Republic, and are worried about the environmental and health impacts of a gas plant and the data center. The data center would run off the gas plant for the first couple years of operation before connecting with the grid. Then the plant would serve as backup for the center as well as a “peaker” plant, meaning it is fired up during peak demand.
🫣 Correction 🙀
In this week’s Colorado River glossary and primer I inadvertently shrunk the Colorado River watershed quite significantly by leaving out two zeros. It covers about 250,000 square miles, not 2,500. Duh.
Cool Opportunity
The Wright-Ingraham Institute is now taking applications for its three-week immersive fellowship for graduate students and early-career professionals in science, design, policy, the arts, and beyond. This year’s field workshop focuses is on “designing for adaptation in a time of prolonged drought,” and will be held in the San Luis Valley and Taos Plateau from July 6-27. Read more and apply here.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
This one popped up on my Facebook feed and I just had to purloin it. It’s downtown Grand Junction in the 1960s (I believe), not long after they refashioned the main drag to make it more people-friendly. It’s funny because a lot of folks in my hometown of Durango are freaking out about a proposal to do something kind of like this, but even less radical, to its downtown. They claim that widening sidewalks and so forth will destroy the historic integrity of the streetscape. In my mind, this photo illustrates how untrue that claim is.
The energy transition was not meant to be a main topic when world leaders and negotiators met at the 2025 United Nations climate summit, COP30, in November in Belém, Brazil. But it took center stage from the start to the very end, bringing attention to the real-world geopolitical energy debate underway and the stakes at hand.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began the conference by calling for the creation of a formal road map, essentially a strategic process in which countries could participate to “overcome dependence on fossil fuels.” It would take the global decision to transition away from fossil fuels from words to action.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks at COP30, where he promoted the idea of a road map to help the world speed up its transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. AP Photo/Andre Penner)
More than 80 countries said they supported the idea, ranging from vulnerable small island nations like Vanuatu that are losing land and lives from sea level rise and more intense storms, to countries like Kenya that see business opportunities in clean energy, to Australia, a large fossil-fuel-producing country.
I was in Belém for COP30, and I follow developments closely as former special climate envoy and head of delegation for Germany and senior fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The fight over whether there should even be a road map shows how much countries that depend on fossil fuels are working to slow down the transition, and how others are positioning themselves to benefit from the growth of renewables. And it is a key area to watch in 2026.
The battle between electro-states and petro-states
Brazilian diplomat and COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago has committed to lead an effort in 2026 to create two road maps: one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.
What those road maps will look like is still unclear. They are likely to be centered on a process for countries to discuss and debate how to reverse deforestation and phase out fossil fuels.
Over the coming months, Corrêa plans to convene high-level meetings among global leaders, including fossil fuel producers and consumers, international organizations, industries, workers, scholars and advocacy groups.
For the road map to both be accepted and be useful, the process will need to address the global market issues of supply and demand, as well as equity. For example, in some fossil fuel-producing countries, oil, gas or coal revenues are the main source of income. What can the road ahead look like for those countries that will need to diversify their economies?
Nigeria’s Bodo community is suing Renaissance Africa Energy Company Limited, an oil consortium that acquired Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary, over two major oil spills in the Niger Delta in 2008. Shell admitted liability and settled with the community in 2014, committing to cleanup efforts. However, the Bodo community has been critical of the quality and transparency of Shell’s cleanup, and is seeking further damages and remediation. Here, activists protest the company’s actions. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Oil exports consistently provide the bulk of Nigeria’s revenue, accounting for around 80% to over 90% of total government revenue and foreign exchange earnings. At the same time, roughly 39% of Nigeria’s population has no access to electricity, which is the highest proportion of people without electricity of any nation. And Nigeria possesses abundant renewable energy resources across the country, which are largely untapped: solar, hydro, geothermal and wind, providing new opportunities.
What a road map might look like
In Belém, representatives talked about creating a road map that would be science-based and aligned with the Paris climate agreement, and would include various pathways to achieve a just transition for fossil-fuel-dependent regions.
Some inspiration for helping fossil-fuel-producing countries transition to cleaner energy could come from Brazil and Norway.
In Brazil, Lula asked his ministries to prepare guidelines for developing a road map for gradually reducing Brazil’s dependency on fossil fuels and find a way to financially support the changes.
His decree specifically mentions creating an energy transition fund, which could be supported by government revenues from oil and gas exploration. While Brazil supports moving away from fossil fuels, it is also still a large oil producer and recently approved new exploratory drilling near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Norway, a major oil and gas producer, is establishing a formal transition commission to study and plan its economy’s shift away from fossil fuels, particularly focusing on how the workforce and the natural resources of Norway can be used more effectively to create new and different jobs.
Both countries are just getting started, but their work could help point the way for other countries and inform a global road map process.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has made clear through its policymaking and diplomacy that it is pursuing the opposite approach: to keep fossil fuels as the main energy source for decades to come.
The International Energy Agency still expects to see renewable energy grow faster than any other major energy source in all scenarios going forward, as renewable energy’s lower costs make it an attractive option in many countries. Globally, the agency expects investment in renewable energy in 2025 to be twice that of fossil fuels.
At the same time, however, fossil fuel investments are also rising with fast-growing energy demand.
The IEA’s World Energy Outlook described a surge in new funding for liquefied natural gas, or LNG, projects in 2025. It now expects a 50% increase in global LNG supply by 2030, about half of that from the U.S. However, the World Energy Outlook notes that “questions still linger about where all the new LNG will go” once it’s produced.
What to watch for
The Belém road map dialogue and how it balances countries’ needs will reflect on the world’s ability to handle climate change.
Corrêa plans to report on its progress at the next annual U.N. climate conference, COP31, in late 2026. The conference will be hosted by Turkey, but Australia, which supported the call for a road map, will be leading the negotiations.
With more time to discuss and prepare, COP31 may just bring a transition away from fossil fuels back into the global negotiations.
Jennifer Morgan, Senior Fellow, Center for International Environment and Resource Policy and Climate Policy Lab, Tufts University
About 60% of Iowa’s power comes from wind. Farmers can earn extra cash by leasing small sections of farms for power production. Bill Clark/Getty Images
Drive through the plains of Iowa or Kansas and you’ll see more than rows of corn, wheat and soybeans. You’ll also see towering wind turbines spinning above fields and solar panels shining in the sun on barns and machine sheds.
For many farmers, these are lifelines. Renewable energy provides steady income and affordable power, helping farms stay viable when crop prices fall or drought strikes.
Wind energy is a significant economic driver in rural America. In Iowa, for example, over 60% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy in 2024, and the state is a hub for wind turbine manufacturing and maintenance jobs.
For landowners, wind turbines often mean stable lease payments. Those historically were around US$3,000 to $5,000 per turbine per year, with some modern agreements $5,000 to $10,000 annually, secured through 20- to 30-year contracts.
Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.
States throughout the Great Plains and Midwest, from Texas to Montana to Ohio, have the strongest onshore winds and onshore wind power potential. These are also in the heart of U.S. farm country. The map shows wind speeds at 100 meters (nearly 330 feet), about the height of a typical land-based wind turbine. NREL
These figures are backed by long-term contracts and multibillion‑dollar annual contributions, reinforcing the economic value that turbines bring to rural landowners and communities.
Wind farms also contribute to local tax revenues that help fund rural schools, roads and emergency services. In counties across Texas, wind energy has become one of the most significant contributors to local property tax bases, stabilizing community budgets and helping pay for public services as agricultural commodity revenues fluctuate.
In Oldham County in northwest Texas, for example, clean energy projects provided 22% of total county revenues in 2021. In several other rural counties, wind farms rank among the top 10 property taxpayers, contributing between 38% and 69% of tax revenue.
The construction and operation of these projects also bring local jobs in trucking, concrete work and electrical services, boosting small-town businesses.
A wind turbine technician stands on the nacelle, which houses the gear box and generator of a wind turbine, on the campus of Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, N.M., in 2024. Colleges in other states, including Texas, also developed training programs for technicians in recent years as jobs in the industry boomed. Andrew Marszal/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. wind industry supports over 300,000 U.S. jobs across construction, manufacturing, operations and other roles connected to the industry, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Solar energy is also boosting farm finances. Farmers use rooftop panels on barns and ground-mounted systems to power irrigation pumps, grain dryers and cold storage facilities, cutting their power costs.
Some farmers have adopted agrivoltaics – dual-use systems that grow crops beneath solar panels. The panels provide shade, helping conserve water, while creating a second income path. These projects often cultivate pollinator-friendly plants, vegetables such as lettuce and spinach, or even grasses for grazing sheep, making the land productive for both food and energy.
Federal grants and tax credits that were significantly expanded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped make the upfront costs of solar installations affordable.
However, the federal spending bill signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, rolled back many clean energy incentives. It phases down tax credits for distributed solar projects, particularly those under 1 megawatt, which include many farm‑scale installations, and sunsets them entirely by 2028. It also eliminates bonus credits that previously supported rural and low‑income areas.
Without these credits, the upfront cost of solar power could be out of reach for some farmers, leaving them paying higher energy costs. At a 2024 conference organized by the Institute of Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I work as a research economist, farmers emphasized the importance of tax credits and other economic incentives to offset the upfront cost of solar power systems.
What’s being lost
The cuts to federal incentives include terminating the Production Tax Credit for new projects placed in service after Dec. 31, 2027, unless construction begins by July 4, 2026, and is completed within a tight time frame. The tax credit pays eligible wind and solar facilities approximately 2.75 cents per kilowatt-hour over 10 years, effectively lowering the cost of renewable energy generation. Ending that tax credit will likely increase the cost of production, potentially leading to higher electricity prices for consumers and fewer new projects coming online.
The changes also accelerate the phase‑out of wind power tax credits. Projects must now begin construction by July 4, 2026, or be in service before the end of 2027 to qualify for any credit.
Meanwhile, the Investment Tax Credit, which covers 30% of installed cost for solar and other renewables, faces similar limits: Projects must begin by July 4, 2026, and be completed by the end of 2027 to claim the credits. The bill also cuts bonuses for domestic components and installations in rural or low‑income locations. These adjustments could slow new renewable energy development, particularly smaller projects that directly benefit rural communities.
While many existing clean energy agreements will remain in place for now, the rollback of federal incentives threatens future projects and could limit new income streams. It also affects manufacturing and jobs in those industries, which some rural communities rely on.
Renewable energy also powers rural economies
Renewable energy benefits entire communities, not just individual farmers.
Wind and solar projects contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue. For example, in Howard County, Iowa, wind turbines generated $2.7 million in property tax revenue in 2024, accounting for 14.5% of the county’s total budget and helping fund rural schools, public safety and road improvements.
In some rural counties, clean energy is the largest new source of economic activity, helping stabilize local economies otherwise reliant on agriculture’s unpredictable income streams. These projects also support rural manufacturing – such as Iowa turbine blade factories like TPI Composites, which just reopened its plant in Newton, and Siemens Gamesa in Fort Madison, which supply blades for GE and Siemens turbines. The tax benefits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped boost those industries – and the jobs and local tax revenue they bring in.
As rural America faces economic uncertainty and climate pressures, I believe homegrown renewable energy offers a practical path forward. Wind and solar aren’t just fueling the grid; they’re helping keep farms and rural towns alive.
Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Naveena Sadasivam):
December 12, 2025
While the U.S. sits in self-imposed isolation, the rest of the world, led by China, raced ahead to invest in renewables and commit to climate action
As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.
The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.
It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.
“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”
These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.
The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.
In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last yearthan in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.
China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.
These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.
“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonizationwill prove to be more successful, he predicted.
Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and otherAsian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.
African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”
The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”
Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.
But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.
In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 2, 2025
Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.
But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?
It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.
“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.
Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.
“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”
The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.
Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.
A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”
Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.
“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”
Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.
Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”
That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.
In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.
In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.
Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.
“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.
He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.
“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.
Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.
In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing.
Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.
“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”
And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.
“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”
Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.
“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.
“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In early November, Texas-based New Era Energy & Digital announced plans to build a “hyperscale,” meaning massive, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County, New Mexico, the epicenter of the Permian Basin oil and gas drilling boom. The campus will be so big, and use so much power, that, if and when it is built, it will come with its own nuclear and gas power plants, with a mind-blowing combined generation capacity of about 7 gigawatts. That’s like piling the West’s largest nuclear and natural gas plants — Palo Verde and Gila River, both near Phoenix — on top of one another, and then adding another 800 megawatts. That kind of power could electrify something like 5.3 million homes, though these power plants’ output presumably will all go toward more pressing requirements: processing movie streaming, doomscrolling, social media posting and, especially, AI-related activities. [ed. emphasis mine]
Despite the enormity of this proposal, it has received very little news coverage. This is not because anyone is trying to keep it secret, but rather because such announcements have become so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning every new one. New Era’s hyperscale server farm and others like it are still a long way from generating and then devouring their own electricity. But even if only a fraction of the current proposals succeed, they will transform the West’s power grid, its landscapes and its economies as significantly as the post-World War II Big Buildup, when huge coal plants and hydroelectric dams sprouted across the region to deliver power to burgeoning cities via high-voltage transmission lines.
Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best
In fact, this transformation is already underway. A new report from the nonprofit NEXT 10 and University of California Riverside found that, in 2023, data centers in California pulled 10.82 terawatt-hours of electricity — 1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts — from the state’s grid, or about enough to power 1 million U.S. households. This resulted in about 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions, even with California’s relatively clean energy mix. (On more fossil fuel-reliant grids, the emissions would have been twice that, or even more.) These same centers directly and indirectly consumed about 13.2 billion gallons of water for cooling and electricity generation. In Silicon Valley, more than 50 data centers accounted for about 60% of one electricity provider’s total load, prompting the utility to raise its customers rates to fund the transmission and substation upgrades and new battery energy storage the facilities required.
These facilities are also colonizing cities and towns far from Big Tech’s Silicon Valley epicenter. Over 100 data centers — structures that resemble big-box stores overflowing with row after row of computer processors — have already sprung up in Phoenix-area business parks, and the planned new ones could increase Arizona’s total power load by 300% over current levels, according to utilities. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at the Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.
Data center developments around the West include:
NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County.
The 290-mile Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission project under development in Idaho and Oregon was initially designed to serve about 800,000 PacifiCorp utility customers. But in October it was revealed that the line now will deliver all of its electricity to a single industrial customer in Oregon, most likely a new data center.
In September, an NV Energy executive told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity for planned data centers. Since the utility has largely moved away from coal, this new load would likely be met by generation from existing and planned natural gas facilities, along with proposed utility-scale solar installations.
Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Xcel and the state’s public utilities commission are currently working to reverse the planned closure of a coal plant due to projected data center-associated electricity shortages.
Wyoming officials are doing their best to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. This summer, Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. It would add to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Doña Ana County approved tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Developers have indicated they plan on building dedicated power generation, though they have not yet disclosed the energy sources.
Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers, drawn by the area’s relatively cheap land, existing agricultural water rights and the fact that it’s home to the Intermountain Power Project, a colossal coal plant built during the original Big Buildup in the years after World War II. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run on natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power it would produce, and data centers could fit the bill. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20 million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there, and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar and natural gas.
The Intermountain Power Project plant in Delta, Utah. The plant was scheduled to be converted away from coal, but Utah lawmakers want it to continue to burn coal. They need a buyer for the dirty power, and data centers could fit the bill. By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2014_11_21_lhr-lax_330, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38536818
The Western power grid is interconnected but also divided into 38 balancing authorities, or grid operators. Nearly every one of them is expected to see an increase in data center-driven demand over the next decade or so as the Big Digital Buildup gains steam, and few of them are currently equipped to meet that demand. In fact, the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. warned this month that growing data center-driven power demand is increasing the risk of outages this winter in parts of the West. Therefore, many of the largest data centers are going to need to generate their own power, while utilities also will have to scramble to add generating capacity and associated infrastructure as quickly as possible to serve the region’s on-grid facilities. The costs of that new infrastructure will be borne by each utility’s ratepayers.
How will the needed power be generated?
There’s simply no way utilities and developers can meet the projected demand with solar and wind, alone. So, utilities are already making plans to keep existing coal plants running past previously scheduled retirement dates, and to build new natural gas plants and even nuclear reactors. Yes, nukes: Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI and Meta are all looking to power proposed facilities with the new — so new they have yet to be developed — crop of small, modular and advanced reactors, if and when they are finally up and running.
Can data centers be “sustainable”?
These developments will have environmental consequences, some more than others. Fossil fuel burning feeds climate change and pollutes the air, and oil and gas drilling and coal mining ravage landscapes; utility-scale solar and wind facilities can harm wildlife habitat and often require hundreds of miles of new transmission lines to move the power around; and nuclear power comes with unique safety hazards and a nagging radioactive waste problem, while the uranium mining and milling industry risks reenacting its deadly Cold War legacy. Even a facility that gets all of its power from solar and batteries is still using resources that, without the extra demand, would otherwise be replacing fossil fuels on the grid. And, unless it has a closed-loop air-cooled system, the data center will still consume water for cooling, usually from municipal drinking water systems.
Wyoming-based Prometheus Hyperscale has made waves with its ambitious and seemingly visionary talk of building “sustainable” data centers with dedicated clean energy generation, water recycling and efficient cooling systems that would capitalize on the cold in the Northern Rockies. It’s even talked about harnessing the heat from the servers to warm greenhouses and shrimp-farming operations. Maybe, one day, the power will be supplemented by nuclear micro-reactors. But so far, the company’s walk is not exactly matching its talk. In the beginning, at least, the facility will run on natural gas, and Prometheus says it will offset carbon emissions by paying another company to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from biofuel plants in Nebraska.
Is resistance futile?
Resistance to the imminent server farm tsunami and its outsized energy and water use is widespread, but because these are local projects considered on local levels, battling them can feel a bit like playing whack-a-mole. After Tucson-area residents defeated the city’s plan to annex the proposed Project Blue data center, which would have enabled it to use treated wastewater for cooling, the developers simply moved the project into the county and planned to use an air-cooling system, which requires less water but more energy. When opposition continued, the firm committed to investing in enough renewable energy on Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset all of its electricity use.
Also working against the resistance is the fact that many local governments and utilities actually welcome the onslaught. Data centers can bring jobs and tax revenues — assuming the state, county or municipality doesn’t exempt them from taxes — to economically distraught areas. Meanwhile, utilities are champing at the bit to sell more of their product and raise rates to pay for the needed additional infrastructure. When announcing all the data centers headed for Nevada, NV Energy executive Jeff Brigger noted that the utility is “excited to serve this load.”
While much of the opposition to data centers is based on their environmental impacts and the effects they might have on utility rates and on the communities where they’re built, the notion of AI itself is also a factor. It’s one thing to see a lot of water or power used to grow food, for instance, but quite another to see coal power plants continue to run simply so that a computer can write a high school essay or answer an inane question or draw a picture or even serve as a companion of sorts. To be fair, AI does have potentially significant and positive applications, such as diagnosing medical conditions and crunching large quantities of data to find, say, possible cures for cancer or solutions to geopolitical problems.
But before it goes about changing the world, maybe AI ought to start with itself and figure out how to do its thing without using so much energy and water.
The convention center in Belem, Brazil, where COP30, the United Nations annual climate talks, took place over the past 12 days. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
November 22, 2025
BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 conference center was as pervasive as the diesel fumes from the generators outside the tent.
This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was billed as the “COP of Truth” by host country Brazil, but it could go down in history “as the deadliest talk show ever,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
COP30 was yet another “theater of delay” with endless discussions, and the creation of yet more administrative duties, “solely to avoid the actions that matter—committing to a just transition away from fossil fuels and putting money on the table,” he said.
A draft text released Nov. 18 clearly spelled out the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the final version, the language was watered down, merely acknowledging that “the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.”
After setting out ambitious targets ahead of the climate talks, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago, the secretary for climate, energy and environment in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the disappointment.
“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know the youth civil society will demand us to do more to fight climate change,” he said during the opening of the final plenary.
Do Lago pledged to press for more action during his upcoming year as the COP president.
“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps, one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” he said.
That was not enough for some leading climate scientists.
“Implementation requires concrete roadmaps to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels, and we got neither,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
During the closing plenary, a representative from Colombia said that her country refused to accept parts of the decision as written. “Denying the best available science not only puts the climate regime at risk, but also our own existence. Which message are we sending the world, Mr. President?”
In a post on X, Colombian President Gustavo Petro elaborated, saying, “I do not accept that in the COP 30 declaration. It is not clearly stated, as science says, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not said, everything else is hypocrisy.”
He noted that life on the planet is only possible “if we separate from oil, coal, and natural gas as a source of energy … Colombia opposes a COP 30 declaration that does not tell the scientific truth to the world.”
After several similar objections, do Lago suspended the plenary to consult with the UNFCCC secretariat about how to proceed, since the entire process is built on consensus. And while consensus isn’t the same as unanimity, the U.N.’s climate body has faced repeated criticism in recent years for ignoring the pleas of smaller countries amid the rush to finalize COP agreements.
But apparently there was enough consensus to proceed.
Looking for bright spots, former Irish President Mary Robinson, now a member of The Elders, a group of global leaders that works to address issues, including climate change, said the deal is far from perfect, but it shows that countries can still work together “at a time when multilateralism is being tested.”
Robinson said the COP30 outcome includes concrete steps toward establishing a mechanism to ensure no countries are left behind in the transition away from fossil fuels.
“We opened this COP noting the absence of the United States administration,” she said. “But no one country, present or absent, could dampen the ‘mutirao’ spirit,” or collective effort.
Given the recent rise of global political tensions, she said Belém “revealed the limits of the possible, but also the power of the determined. We must follow where that determination leads.”
In another of the final documents, COP30 emphasized “the inherent connection between pursuing efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C and pursuing just transition pathways,” and that such a pathway leads to “more robust and equitable mitigation and adaptation outcomes.”
The conference’s adoption of a just transition mechanism was hailed as a huge win by the Climate Action Network International, an umbrella group that represents hundreds of local, regional and national grassroots organizations working on climate justice. In a statement, the group called it “one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN climate negotiations.”
The outcome could have been even better with stronger leadership from the European Union, which publicly advocated for more ambition, but opposed key provisions in closed-door negotiations, several observers said.
“With the U.S. absent, the European Union had a chance to lead; instead, they stepped into the vacuum as the primary obstructionist,” said Singh, including opposition to language on fossil fuel phaseout timetables.
He said the European Union member countries were “playing a cynical blame game while the planet burns.” Decisions made at this and previous COPs provided the tools needed to address the crisis, but the political will and the money to implement them are still lacking.
Today, nearly a third of all countries worldwide have pledged to phase out their unabated coal-burning power plants in the coming years, including several countries you might not expect. Germany, Spain, Malaysia, the Czech Republic – all have substantial coal reserves and coal use today, yet they are among the more than 60 countries that have joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance and set phase-out deadlines between 2025 and 2040.
So, where do things stand for phasing out coal burning globally? The picture is mixed. For example:
The accelerating deployment of renewable energy, energy storage, electric vehicles and energy efficiency globally offer hope that global emissions are on their way to peaking. More than 90% of the new electricity capacity installed worldwide in 2024 came from clean energy sources. However, energy demand is also growing quickly, so new renewable power does not always replace older fossil fuel plants or prevent new ones, including coal.
China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined, and it continues to build new coal plants. But China is also a driving force in the dramatic growth in solar and wind energy investments and electricity generation inside China and around the world. As the industry leader in renewable energy technology, it has a strong economic interest in solar and wind power’s success around the world.
To meet the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goals of limiting global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times, research shows that the world will need to rapidly reduce nearly all fossil fuel burning and associated emissions – and it is not close to being on track.
Ensuring a just transition for coal communities
Many countries with coal mining operations worry about the transition for coal-dependent communities as mines shut down and jobs disappear.
No one wants a repeat of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of British coal communities in the 1980s in her effort to break the mineworkers union. Mines rapidly closed, and many coal communities and regions were left languishing in economic and social decline for decades.
Two men collect coal for cooking outside the Komati Power Station, where they used to work, in 2024, in Komati, South Africa. Both lost their jobs when Eskom closed the power plant in 2022 under international pressure to cut emissions. Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
But as more countries phase out coal, they offer examples of how to ensure coal-dependent workers, communities, regions and entire countries benefit from a just transition to a coal-free system.
At local and national levels, research shows that careful planning, grid updates and reliable financing schemes, worker retraining, small-business development and public funding of coal worker pensions and community and infrastructure investments can help set coal communities on a path for prosperity.
A fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty?
At the global climate talks, several groups, including the Powering Past Coal Alliance and an affiliated Coal Transition Commission, have been pushing for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty. It would legally bind governments to a ban on new fossil fuel expansion and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use.
The world has affordable renewable energy technologies with which to replace coal-fired electricity generation – solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels in most places. There are still challenges with the transition, but also clear ways forward. Removing political and regulatory obstacles to building renewable energy generation and transmission lines, boosting production of renewable energy equipment, and helping low-income countries manage the upfront cost with more affordable financing can help expand those technologies more widely around the world.
Shifting to renewable energy also has added benefits: It’s much less harmful to the health of those who live and work nearby than mining and burning coal is.
So can the world quit coal? Yes, I believe we can. Or, as Brazilians say, “Sim, nós podemos.”
This section of the Colorado River at the boat launch near Corn Lake dipped to around 150 cfs in lake August 2025. Known as the 15-mile reach, this stretch of river should have at least 810 cfs to meet the needs of endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
By Bob Berwyn
November 12, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.
The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.
UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning.
On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.
“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”
The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.
Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016.
In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.
“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”
For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.
The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.
“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.
“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.
The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results.
“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.
Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.
How (Not) to Talk About Climate
Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.”
The experts at COP “tend to focus on what can be measured and reported, on outputs and deliverables, which shapes the negotiations themselves,” he said. “The cadence of those encounters becomes ritualized to their detriment.”
A quick look at some of the daily notifications from COP30 displays what Boykoff describes, with invitations to a “High-Level Ministerial on Multilevel Governance” or “The Launch of the Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the Operationalization of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships.”
Such language, he said, reflects a culture that prizes precision and hierarchy over connection and clarity. It’s a diplomatic shorthand that signals professionalism while numbing urgency, and it narrows the space for creativity, emotion, or reflection, he added.
Boykoff said the only way to move beyond the rituals of repetition may be to break them.
“What we really need,” he said, “is to shake it up, to create spaces that let people reflect, feel, and engage in new ways. Because if we keep doing the same thing year after year, we shouldn’t expect different results.”
Falzon said the technocratic UNFCCC language reflects the dominance at the talks of an “old world hierarchy in which rich countries set the agenda, poor countries fight to be heard, and the system keeps reproducing the conditions it’s supposed to fix.
“It’s not just the negotiations that are unequal,” she said. “The whole thing mirrors the inequalities of the world it’s meant to change.”
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Thus wrote the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966.
If Maslow were around today, I imagine he might endorse the corollary that if your only tool is technology, every problem appears to have a technofix. And that’s an apt characterization of the “tech bro”-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse.
There is no better example than Bill Gates, who just this week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly) the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history—climate-fueled Melissa—struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact. The very next day a major new climate report (disclaimer: I was a co-author) entitled “a planet on the brink” was published. The report received far less press coverage than the Gates missive. The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul than a sober assessment by the world’s leading climate scientists.
Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy). Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!”
That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including “modular nuclear reactors” that couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.
Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary “patch” for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?
Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later?
Here’s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no “patch” for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels. [ed. emphasis mine]
It was arguably Gates who—at least in part—inspired the tech-bro villain Peter Isherwell in the Adam McKay film “Don’t Look Up.” The premise of the film is that a giant “comet” (a very thinly veiled metaphor for the climate crisis) is hurtling toward Earth as politicians fail to act. So they turn to Isherwell who insists he has proprietary tech (a metaphor for geoengineering, again thinly veiled) that can save the day: space drones developed by his corporation that will break the comet apart. Coincidentally, the drones are designed to then mine the comet fragments for trillions of dollars’ worth of rare metals, that all go to Isherwell and his corporation. If you haven’t seen the film (which I highly recommend), I’ll let you imagine how it all works out.
For those who have been following Gates on climate for some time, his so-called sudden “pivot” isn’t really a “pivot” at all. It’s a logical consequence of the misguided path he’s been headed down for well over a decade.
I became concerned about Gates’ framing of the climate crisis nearly a decade ago when a journalist reached out to me, asking me to comment on his supposed “discovery” of a formula for predicting carbon emissions. (The formula is really an “identity” that involves expressing carbon emissions as a product of terms related to population, economic growth, energy efficiency, and fossil fuel dependence). I noted, with some amusement, that the mathematical relationship Gates had “discovered” was so widely known it had a name, the “Kaya identity,” after the energy economist Yōichi Kaya who presented the relationship in a textbook nearly three decades ago. It’s familiar not just to climate scientists in the field but to college students taking an introductory course on climate change.
If this seems like a gratuitous critique, it is not. It speaks to a concerning degree of arrogance. Did Gates really think that something as conceptually basic as decomposing carbon emissions into a product of constituent terms had never been attempted before? That he’s so brilliant that anything he thinks up must be a novel discovery?
I reserved my criticism of Gates, at the time, not for his rediscovery of the Kaya identity (hey—if can help his readers understand it, that’s great) but for declaring that it somehow implies that “we need an energy miracle” to get to zero carbon emissions. It doesn’t. I explained that Gates “does an injustice to the very dramatic inroads that renewable energy and energy efficiency are making,” noting peer-reviewed studies by leading experts that provide “very credible outlines for how we could reach a 100 percent noncarbon energy generation by 2050.”
The so-called “miracle” he speaks of exists—it’s called the sun, and wind, and geothermal, and energy storage technology. Real world solutions exist now and are easily scalable with the right investments and priorities. The obstacles aren’t technological. They’re political.
Gates’ dismissiveness in this case wasn’t a one-off. It was part of a consistent pattern of downplaying clean energy while promoting dubious and potentially dangerous technofixes in which he is often personally invested. When I had the chance to question him about this directly (The Guardian asked me to contribute to a list of questions they were planning on asking him in an interview a few years ago), his response was evasive and misleading. He insisted that there is a “premium” paid for clean energy buildout when in fact it has a lower levelized cost than fossil fuels or nuclear and deflected the questions with ad hominem swipes. (“He [Mann] actually does very good work on climate change. So I don’t understand why he’s acting like he’s anti-innovation.”)
This all provides us some context for evaluating Gates’ latest missive, which plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers like self-styled “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. (Incidentally, Lomborg’s center has received millions of dollars of funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years and Lomborg recently acknowledged serving as an adviser to Gates on climate issues.)
Among the classic Lomborgian myths promoted in Gates’ new screed, which I’ll paraphrase here, is the old standby that “clean energy is too expensive.” (Gates likes to emphasize a few difficult-to-decarbonize sectors like steel or air travel as a distraction from the fact that most of our energy infrastructure can readily be decarbonized now.) He also insists that “we can just adapt,” although in the absence of concerted action, warming could plausibly push us past the limit of our adaptive capacity as a species.
He argues that “efforts to fight climate change detract from efforts to address human health threats.” (A central point of my new book Science Under Siegewith public health scientist Peter Hotez is that climate and human health are inseparable, with climate change fueling the spread of deadly disease). Then there is his assertion that “the poor and downtrodden have more pressing concerns” when, actually, it is just the opposite; the poor and downtrodden are the most threatened by climate change because they have the least wealth and resilience.
What Gates is putting forward aren’t legitimate arguments that can be made in good faith. They are shopworn fossil fuel industry talking points. Being found parroting them is every bit as embarrassing as being caught—metaphorically speaking—with your pants down.
For years when I would criticize Gates for what I consider to be his misguided take on climate, colleagues would say, “you just don’t understand what Gates is saying!” Now, with Donald Trump and the right-wing Murdoch media machine (the Wall Street Journal editorial board and now an op-ed by none other than Lomborg himself in the New York Post) celebrating Gates’ new missive, I can confidently turn around and say, “No, you didn’t understand what he was saying.”
Maybe—just maybe—we’ve learned an important lesson here: The solution to the climate crisis isn’t going to come from the fairy-dust-sprinkled flying unicorns that are the “benevolent plutocrats.” They don’t exist. The solution is going to have to come from everyone else, using every tool at our disposal to push back against an ecocidal agenda driven by plutocrats, polluters, petrostates, propagandists, and too often now, the press. [ed. emphasis mine]
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
Amid all of Donald Trump’s haphazard policymaking and chaos-mongering, one part of his agenda has remained remarkably consistent throughout both terms: the quest for something he calls “energy dominance.” While Trump probably thinks he coined the concept, only the name is new; it’s really merely a macho rebranding of what was traditionally known as “energy independence,” the desire to produce the nation’s energy domestically rather than import it from potential adversaries. The yearning for energy independence became a focus back during the Nixon era, when geopolitical tensions sparked overlapping energy crises. Ever since, it’s been pursued by every administration, both Democratic and Republican.
So, yes, even cardigan-wearing, thermostat-adjusting Jimmy Carter was an energy dominance guy, maybe even the most successful one. Same goes for Presidents Obama and Biden. What distinguishes Trump — despite all of his regulatory rollbacks, his “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Mine, Baby, Mine” and “Beautiful Clean Coal” rhetoric and various “emergency” orders — is that his push for dominance has not only been ineffective, it has actually served to weaken the domestic energy industry and has even diminished its ability to produce the power needed to keep modern society running.
If Trump really cared about energy dominance, independence or abundance, he would use all of the tools at his disposal to “win” this war. Even an energy warrior who didn’t give a hoot about pollution or the climate would insist on keeping the fastest-growing energy sources — wind and solar with battery backup — in the nation’s arsenal, along with nuclear, geothermal, hydropower and natural gas, simply for practical reasons, relying on what previous administrations have called an “all-of-the-above” approach.
Instead, Trump has essentially discarded the most promising and effective energy technologies by eliminating federal tax credits for wind power and both rooftop and utility-scale solar, shuttering new wind projects on federal land and in federal waters, subjecting proposed utility-scale solar on federal land to additional scrutiny and red tape, and canceling the Solar for All program that aimed to bring clean energy and energy self-reliance to lower-income families. More recently, the administration clawed back over $7 billion in Biden-era funding for clean energy and grid-reliability projects, many of which were in Western states and all of which came from states that favored Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is trying to prop up the decrepit and rusty weapons of old, i.e. fossil fuels, and putting them on the front lines in the apparent hope that they don’t crumble away before his term ends.
The administration plans to fork out about $625 million in subsidies in hopes of revitalizing the flagging coal industry and has rolled back myriad regulations (also a form of subsidy) on coal-fired power plants. It has also opened 13 million acres of public land across the West to new coal leasing and overturned Biden-era bans on new leasing in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. At the same time, it has inexplicably canceled funding for carbon capture projects aimed at prolonging nearby coal plants’ lives.
Trump is clearly not looking to achieve energy dominance, but rather to exercise his countless grievances and realize some historical fantasy — while, of course, helping fossil fuel executives rake in a few more bucks while they still can. It’s a sort of qualified bid for coal and oil dominance, so long as it benefits red-leaning states.
But so far, even that’s not going too well.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management held its first coal lease sale in over a decade on public land in the Powder River Basin. There was only one would-be buyer, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company, which bid just $186,000 for a tract containing about 167 million tons of coal — meaning about one-tenth of one cent per ton. That’s in contrast to sales in 2012 that brought in over $1 per ton. The feds rejected the bid on the grounds that it didn’t comply with the Mineral Leasing Act since it didn’t fetch fair market value. The Interior Department promptly canceled another sale in the Powder River Basin for 441 million tons of coal just days before it was scheduled to take place. And a third sale, this one on public lands in southwestern Utah, attracted only one low bid as well; and it, too, was rejected.
One of the generating units at the power plant at Kemmerer, Wyo., is being shut down this year [2017] to reduce emissions that are causing regional haze. 2009 photo/Allen Best
And just days after the administration announced its plans to pour taxpayers’ cash into the coal industry, PacifiCorp, the largest grid operator in the Western U.S., doubled down on its plans to convert its Naughton coal plant in Wyoming to run on natural gas. Idaho Power actually proposed a rate decrease for its customers after it cut costs by shutting down a unit at a Nevada coal plant. Meanwhile, no utility anywhere has seriously proposed building any new coal plants, mainly because it is simply an obsolete, expensive and dirty technology.
The president’s continual desire to “Drill, Baby, Drill” is experiencing a failure to launch, as well. The BLM has handed out drilling permits like Shriners throwing candy to the crowd at a parade, continuing to do so at an alarming rate despite the government shutdown. During the first six months of Trump’s term, the administration issued 2,660 permits to drill on public lands — about 524 per month. That eclipses Biden’s biggest year of 2023, when he issued 317 per month and garnered the disdain of climate activists.
And yet, drill rig counts, the most accurate indicator of the industry’s enthusiasm and a good barometer of future crude oil and natural gas production levels, have remained stagnant during Trump’s term. In fact, they’re significantly lower than they were a year ago, shortly before Trump was elected. That’s due in part to low oil prices, which is something Trump has pushed for (and maybe prodded Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members to encourage by increasing their own oilfield pumping), but also because Trump’s disorderly trade wars are sowing confusion, while his tariffs on steel and aluminum are raising costs for drillers.
The most recent Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey of oil and gas executives revealed how poorly Trump’s policies are playing out in the oilfields. Most of the executives surveyed said that Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and federal royalty reductions would bring down their “break-even” costs only slightly, and that they would not appreciably increase production.
Generally speaking, optimism is in short supply in the oilpatch these days.
“It’s going to be a bleak three-plus years for the oilpatch,” one executive said, in a survey that was designed to be anonymous to encourage a candid response. Another noted: “After Liberation Day, we cut our drilling budget in half from 10 wells to five wells.”
And yet another declared, “We have begun the twilight of shale. Several multibillion-dollar firms that have previously been U.S.-onshore-only are making investments in foreign countries and riskier (waterborne) geologies.” They went on to question what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of abandoned and orphaned wells when the drilling boom ends, noting, “Society will not treat us kindly unless we do our part to clean up after we are gone.”
Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, looking south toward the Brooks Range. By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – images.fws.gov (image description page), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5787251
Last week, the Trump administration moved to reopen 1.56 million acres on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil and gas leasing, just as he did in 2017 at the outset of his first term. The first lease sale in the refuge was held in 2021, just days before Biden was inaugurated, but it attracted only low bids — none from major oil companies — with most of the leases going to an Alaska state agency. Another auction in January 2025 drew no bids at all. The industry simply isn’t all that interested.
Just as Biden’s heightened regulations on oil and gas drilling didn’t slow drilling or production, Trump’s determined deregulation is unlikely to speed it up. Nor will his hostility toward solar and wind kill their momentum: Firms are bringing utility-scale projects online at a rapid rate and financing new proposals despite the lack of federal incentives. Federal policies can serve to mitigate energy development’s impacts or perhaps bolster the companies’ profits somewhat, but they are only one of many factors that influence how much and at what rate development occurs. All the political rhetoric in the world won’t help; so-called energy dominance simply cannot be willed — or forced — into existence.
President Donald Trump’s quest for what he calls energy dominance has run into a few snags, many of which are of his own making. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the term “energy dominance” doesn’t really make sense (What is energy dominating? Or are we dominating energy? Or …????). Let’s assume that it’s just an insecure male’s version of energy independence (so woke!), or just a dumb term for producing enough energy to keep all the data centers running.
In that case, don’t you think you’d want to use all of the tools — or weapons, if you prefer — at your disposal? Certainly any reasonable person, even one who doesn’t care about pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, would do that, pushing for more solar, wind, battery storage, hydropower, and geothermal, in addition to nuclear and natural gas. But as has been shown over and over, Trump tends to let his personal whims — along with a desire to crush everything that he thinks Democrats favor — erase rationality.
As a result, he has waged war on the most promising energy sources (i.e. solar and wind), while trying to dust off the old, dying ones (i.e. fossil fuels) and prop them up on the battle lines in hopes they won’t fall down too soon. Well, it’s not working out so well.
Oil and gas drilling is continuing on federal lands, although at a much slower pace than during the Biden administration, even though Trump has handed out drilling permits like candy at a parade. That’s in part due to low oil prices, and in part due to higher drilling costs: Trump’s tariffs have increased the price of pipe and other materials used on the rigs.
The number of rigs actively drilling has stayed somewhat steady over the last nine months, but rig counts remain below what they were in 2023 and 2024 and there are no signs that Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric is having the desired effect. Source: Baker Hughes, Land Desk graphic.
But the most obvious failure is playing out in the administration’s bid to revitalize the flagging coal industry. Let’s take a look:
After the administration and congressional Republicans made much ado about rescinding Biden-era moratoria on new federal coal leasing, the Interior Department rushed to auction off parcels containing hundreds of millions of tons of coal in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. They flopped:
In Montana, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company bid $186,000 for a tract containing an estimated 167 million tons of coal adjacent to its Spring Creek Mine in the Powder River Basin. That’s a mere 1/10 of one cent per ton. Contrast that with other Powder River Basin leases in 2012 that brought in more than $1/ton. The feds rejected the bid, saying it was below fair market value.
The dismal result prompted the Bureau of Land Management to cancel the 441-million-ton West Antelope coal lease sale in Wyoming.
And then the Interior Department rejected a single lowball bid for a lease containing about 6 million tons of federal coal in Utah.
On a somewhat related note: After the Trump administration announced it would subsidize the coal industry to the tune of $625 million, PacifiCorp said it would go forward with its plans to convert the Naughton coal plant in Wyoming to run on natural gas.
You’d think that maybe the administration would get a hint and adjust their strategy accordingly. Yeah, right.
A warning sign in the Lisbon Valley. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Last week, Anfield Energy announced that Utah regulators had approved its proposed Velvet Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley. “Permitting Complete, Construction to Follow,” the company’s press release says, adding that they expected to break ground within 30 days. The project was the first beneficiary of Trump’s accelerated “energy emergency” permitting, and the BLM completed its environmental review in a mere 13 days.
The company may be jumping the gun a bit. The Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining actually gave only tentative approval to the project, conditioned upon the company posting a $539,000 bond. And it specifies that no ground disturbance can happen until the project gets other applicable agencies’ go-ahead.
But as Sarah Fields of Uranium Watch points out, Anfield has not yet received approvals from other state agencies for its radon ventilation shafts, wastewater treatment plant, or its air quality permit.
Anfield — or at least its PR team — is busy as of late. They also announced that they had completed the first phase of exploratory drilling at the defunct JD-7 uranium mine in the Paradox Valley. While these announcements are a dime-a-dozen, I was a bit intrigued by this one, because the JD-7 is like a poster child of the follies of the last uranium “boom.” It’s an open pit, a gaping wound overlooking the valley, but never actually produced any uranium because the “boom” busted before it even really began. Somehow I’m not convinced that this time will be much different.
As one might expect, the recent rains and resulting flooding boosted reservoir levels. Navajo Reservoir saw its surface level jump considerably (rising about 10 feet) due to all that water in the San Juan River. However, it’s still lower than it was this time last year.
Source: Lake Navajo Water Database
Lake Powell, which is much, much bigger, only added 1.28 feet to its surface level, and remains 32 feet below what it was on this date last year. But as the following graph shows, the big water is still making its way into the reservoir, so its level could keep climbing.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
I’m on the road right now, making my way from southern Oregon to southwestern Colorado via a circuitous route. And no, I’m not in the Silver Bullet (I’ll reveal the purpose of the trip later, along with more details about Land Desk transportation). I don’t have my good camera with me, but I’ve tried to get some snapshots anyway.
Gravestones in City Cemetery, Yreka, California. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
Snow and water in the eastern Sierras. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Basin and Range country along Hwy 50. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
I was wrong, and woefully so. I want to apologize for that and let you know how remorseful I am: I dearly, dearly wish that I was right. But alas …
See, back in November I wrote a dispatch about what to expect from the incoming Trump administration, particularly concerning public lands and the environment. It actually turned out to be fairly accurate on the public lands stuff, but there was this one offending paragraph that, I fear, may have lulled some of my readers into complacency (when they should have been preparing to resist). Here it is:
Oh, boy. Trump has been in office for less than nine months, and already he’s checked off all of the boxes that naive little me figured (and hoped) he would never dare even attempt. He and Goebbels-clone Stephen Miller and friends are going full-on fascist and trampling on the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution in general, they are prosecuting political opponents, they are using the “Department of War” to target the “enemy within,” they are suing and bullying the media for reporting the truth and making fun of him, and they have engaged in a brutal — and performative — intimidation and terror campaign against immigrants and anyone who “looks” like they might be an immigrant. Making it even worse, the President of the United States treats it all like some sort of joke, acting like a pre-pubescent middle school bully while posting stupid videos portraying he and Russell Vought (a primary architect of Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during the campaign) as the grim reaper out to destroy America’s democracy (and the economy).
So, yeah, I was way off. Apologies for my naivety.
But I was right about one thing. I predicted Trump would practice governance by spite. He has, and done it to the extreme. Not only are his words malicious, but so are his policies, fueled by a lust for vengeance. His tariffs are aimed at punishing other countries (even though they ultimately only punish American consumers and businesses — even his beloved oil and gas industry).
His quest for “Energy Dominance” is anything but that. Sure, he’s trying to help out his fossil fuel tycoon buddies, but I think he’s even more interested in retribution against the “libs” and the environmentalists that takes the form of an all-out assault on the environment, the climate, public lands — and everyone who cherishes or depends on these things. If he wanted to bolster energy, he would have at least stood aside and let the burgeoning solar and wind do their thing alongside fossil fuels by taking an “all of the above” approach. Instead, he has done everything possible to stifle these energy sources, simply because they are cleaner than coal and gas. He shut down the Solar for All program, thus denying thousands of low- and middle-income families access to rooftop solar and a smidgeon of their own energy independence and lower utility bills. Where’s the dominance in that?
And now the Trump administration has canceled some $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, efficiency, and grid reliability projects across the nation, many of them in the West. And while one might think that this is just another assault on clean energy (which it is), or maybe a way to slash expenses to pay for tax cuts for billionaires (that, too), it’s primarily motivated by, yet again, revenge: The cuts were limited to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
Yes, you read that correctly. While funding was zeroed out for blue states, identical projects in neighboring red states were left untouched. He is doing this to punish Democrat-leaning states, but the victims end up being small and large businesses that banked on those funds, the folks who work for those firms, the environment, and ultimately folks like you and me who will see our utility bills increase (because someone has to pay for those grid upgrades). And guess what? You won’t be saved just because you’re in a red congressional district.
This is not normal, nor is it politics as usual.
In fact, the funding that the Trump administration is taking away from individuals, organizations, and businesses, was allocated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, both of which Congress passed during the Biden administration. The vast majority of the funding from those bills went to Republican states and districts that voted for Trump in 2024. The funded projects created thousands of new jobs across the country and added up to billions in investment in communities in the Phoenix area, along Colorado’s Front Range, in Nevada, and elsewhere.
I’m not saying all of these projects were wonderful, or that they’d all succeed. Some were full on boondoggles, others would inflict more harm than good. But the funding was approved by Congress, and the organizations that received them were banking on them, had invested a great deal of their own money into the funded projects, and had built up workforces. For the administration to then take back the money, some of which had already been spent, for purely political, vindictive reasons, is both wrong and cruel.
And if you think that this is just for a bunch of solar panels, think again. Here’s a list of some of the biggest projects that were defunded (which includes some funds that Trump had previously cancelled).
$2.2 billion: Amount rescinded for hydrogen fuel production and distribution hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest.
$70 million: Amount rescinded from Xcel Energy to install 1,000 megawatt-hour iron-air battery energy storage systems in Colorado and Minnesota.
$50 million: Amount rescinded from the Tribal Energy Consortium’s Ignacio, Colorado-based program aimed at reducing methane emissions from tribal owned and operated oil and gas wells and facilities located on tribal lands.
$326 million: Amount rescinded from Colorado State University for a projectdesigned to develop methods for reducing methane emissions from oil and gas wells.
$15 million: Amount rescinded from Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in northern New Mexico for a grid resilience project.
$6.6 million: Amount rescinded from Navajo Transitional Energy Company for studying and developing a carbon capture retrofit project for the Four Corners coal-burning power plant in New Mexico.
Hundreds of millions of dollars more are being clawed back from Portland General Electric, Southern California Edison, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the Imperial Irrigation District, and the Electric Power Research Institute — the list goes on and on. But it never extends to similar projects in red states.
Even as Energy Secretary Chris Wright was announcing the funding cuts, for example, his department went forward with a $2.23 billion loan for Lithium Americas and its contentious Thacker Pass mine in Nevada (which voted Republican in the last presidential election). In exchange, the administration took a 5% equity stake in both the company and in the firm. Never mind that the project is opposed by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, as well as by numerous environmental groups, and that the price of lithium is lower than it’s been since 2021. Go figure.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
As expected (and as I correctly predicted would happen), the Trump administration is busy unraveling environmental protections and resource and travel management plans for public lands around the West. The most recent targets include:
The Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs resource management planwhich covers about 3.6 million acres of public lands in southwestern Wyoming, including the Red Desert. A solid, common-sense plan was first released about two years ago that aimed to push energy and other development away from the most sensitive areas. It was years in the making, and was a compromise. And yet, Wyoming’s right-wing was up in arms, saying it was too restrictive. That prompted the BLM to go back to the drawing board and incorporate more public input. They came back with a far less restrictive plan, a compromised compromise, I guess you could call it. That’s not enough for the current administration and their industry donors, however: The BLM is going to revise it again, this time to bring it in line with Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” agenda. More details and commenting instructions here.
The BLM is “reassessing” the off-road route designations in its Labyrinth/Gemini Bridges travel plan that includes about 300,000 acres of slickrock-covered public lands near Moab. The new plan was issued late in 2023, and left a whopping 800 miles of roads and trails opened to motorized travel. The off-road-vehicle lobby sued to overturn the plan, but were shot down in court. You have until Oct. 24 to comment on this one.
During water year 2025, drought moved into and intensified throughout most of the Interior West. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The 2025 water year has come to an end (on Sept. 30), and while we know it was a fairly lousy one for most of the Western U.S., the data is now beginning to come in letting us know just how lousy it was. Some of the stats aren’t updated yet, and may not be for a while, thanks to the government shutdown and the Trump administration’s fear of the word “climate.”
For the most part, the water year started out quite nicely, precipitation wise, with above “normal” amounts of rain and snow falling in October and November. But that was followed by a severe lack of snow, a dry, warm spring, and a late-to-arrive monsoon. The snowpack deteriorated, spring runoff was weak, and drought intensified under the hot, dry sun of summer, with only a bit of relief finally arriving in September.
Resulting low streamflows led to a 33-foot drop in Lake Powell’s surface level during the water year. Here are the charts and the numbers:
8.08 million acre-feet: Total Lake Powell inflows, water year 2024 (Unregulated inflows = 7.98 MAF)
3,578 feet: Lake Powell’s surface elevation on Oct. 1, 2024
5.14 million acre-feet: Total flows into Lake Powell during the 2025 water year. (Unregulated inflows = 4.69 MAF)
3,545 feet: Lake Powell’s surface elevation on Oct. 1, 2025
11.96 MAF: Inflows during water year 2023
21.65 MAF: Inflows during water year 1984 (the highest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963).
9.85%: Percent of the Western U.S. that was experiencing severe to exceptional drought at the beginning of the 2025 water year.
44.12%: Percent of the Western U.S. that was experiencing severe to exceptional drought at the end of the 2025 water year.
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
You just can’t make this stuff up. MAGA-world is rife with conspiracies about the Charlie Kirk killing last month, which is hardly surprising. I guess it’s tough for some folks to believe that some 22-year-old Mormon kid from a Republican, gun-loving family could assassinate a right-wing entertainer and provocateur on his own. He must have had help from that ever-elusive Antifa (which is not an organization, but simply a shortening of the term anti-fascist). Or maybe it was Mossad — a favorite theory among a certain sect of the right wing.
But then there’s Candace Owens, MAGA podcaster and Crazytown mayoral candidate. She’s raising the possibility that Phil Lyman was involved in the plot to assassinate Kirk. Yes, that Phil Lyman: the former San Juan County Commissioner who gained notoriety after leading an ATV ride — with Ryan Bundy and his “militia” buddies making a cameo — down Recapture Canyon just days after the Bunkerville standoff. Lyman has since swerved further and further into MAGA-land, served as a Utah state representative, received a pardon from Trump, and hurled some conspiracy-laden accusations of his own after losing the gubernatorial election to Gov. Spencer Cox.
I tried to listen to Owens’ argument and alleged evidence (including the link, with a suggestion not to click on it) regarding Lyman and couldn’t make any sense of it. But I guess Owens’s following is big enough for folks to take it kind of seriously. Even Cox, whom Lyman has assailed with accusations of his own, took to social media to defend his right-wing rival. Meanwhile, I’ll be making some popcorn while I wait to see how this one plays out.
A recent email query about renewable power got me thinking about where we produce renewable power and why. The reasons are complicated. However, the weather is critical in determining where we generate renewable energy such as solar and wind power. I’ll be candid enough to say that I like renewable power, but my goal for this blogpost is not to comment on the merits of generating electricity one way or another. My goal is simply to share a couple maps from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and discuss why we see the patterns we do.
Solar Power: Solar power production potential is determined by geographic factors such as latitude altitude, and weather. Figure 1 below, from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows “Global Horizontal Solar Irradiance” across the Contiguous United States. For practical purposes, we can think of this as “solar power production potential,” or even more simply “how much sunlight do you get?”
Figure 1: Global Horizontal Irradiance across the Contiguous United States. Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Perhaps the most obvious pattern in Figure 1 is the difference between the northern and southern United States. The “Sun Belt” is aptly named. The southern United States receives more direct sunlight than the northern United States because it is closer to the equator. Northern states are blessed with nice, long summer days with plenty of sunshine hours, but sunlight pierces the atmosphere at a more direct angle at lower latitudes. Even within Colorado, we can see a difference in solar power potential from south-to-north. Areas like the Four Corners, San Luis Valley, and Comanche Grasslands (all in southern Colorado listed west-to-east respectively) stand out as sunny areas.
Altitude is an important factor as well. Even under clear skies, not all sunlight that passes through the top of earth’s atmosphere makes it to the surface. Some is scattered by particulates and some is absorbed by water vapor, dust, or ozone. Sunlight is thus less intense at lower elevations. Therefore, all else being equal, high elevation areas will have more solar power production potential than low elevation areas. You have probably felt this either hiking in our Colorado mountains or traveling down to sea level. The sun feels more intense on the skin, and it is easier to burn at higher altitudes.
Why is it that Colorado’s highest elevations do not show as high of solar production potential as the valleys? Weather. Our mountains are more likely to be shrouded by clouds due to orographic lift: As air is forced over our mountain ranges it must rise. As air rises it cools. As air cools, the water vapor in the air condenses, forming clouds, and oftentimes, rain or snow. One obvious example of the role of weather in solar power generation potential can be seen looking at Oregon. Western Oregon has a wealth of onshore airflow from the Pacific Ocean, bringing thick, low clouds and drizzle, which block sunlight. Eastern Oregon is high desert. The Cascade Mountain Range blocks clouds and moisture from moving inland. As a result, solar power production potential is much higher in eastern Oregon than western Oregon. While it is less obvious in Colorado than Oregon, some of our driest and least cloudy locations stand out. For instance, the San Luis Valley (south-central Colorado) is known as “The Land of the Cold Sunshine.” This area receives less than 10″ of precipitation annually, and has some of our highest solar power production potential in the state.
Wind Power: We can also take a look at wind power production potential across the United States, and dissect some of the drivers behind it. Figure 2 shows annual average wind speeds at 10 meters (~33ft) above ground level across the contiguous United States. A few patterns jump out here: 1. If we look at the western United States (including Colorado), higher elevation terrain does have higher average wind speeds. 2. The middle of the country is windy. 3. The east side of the Rocky Mountains is windy, including in Colorado. 4. Oh boy, our poor neighbors to the north (sorry, Wyoming)!
Figure 2: Average wind speeds at 10 meters above ground level. Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory For what it’s worth, most wind turbines are much taller than 10 meters, thus a better reference height would be more appropriate for looking at wind power. NREL does produce maps at higher reference heights. I chose a low reference height because it is closer to the weather as we feel it.
Winds with height: On average, we do see wind speeds increase with height. This is due to increased pressure gradients, decreased friction, and reduced air density. However, Figure 2, which shows average windspeeds, does not tell the whole story. Our mountain air is only ~70-80% as dense as sea level air, so it takes stronger gusts to produce the same amount of force. Turbines at higher elevations will not generate as much power for a given windspeed as turbines at lower elevations.
The middle of the country: Figure 2 also clearly shows the “wind belt” is the high plains and southern plains around 100 degrees longitude (North Dakota down to west Texas). This area is frequently subject to sharp boundaries between air masses, or fronts. As a result, it is often windy. The terrain roughness is also an important factor. It is easier to get frequent high winds over open grasslands than forests. Eastern Colorado can be thought of as part of this wind belt, and has a relatively smooth, grassy surface with few obstacles.
East side of the Rockies: If we look at Colorado in Figure 2 we see that higher elevations are winder, but we can also see that there is an increase in winds east of the Continental Divide. There is both a sharp increase in wind speeds at high elevations immediately east of the Divide, and higher average wind speeds more generally across the eastern Colorado Plains. Our prevailing wind direction in Colorado is most commonly west-to-east, especially from October through April. Thanks to our old friend gravity, air traveling uphill slows down, and air traveling downhill speeds up. We call the days when air races down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains downslope wind days. These blustery days are usually unseasonably warm, but can be cold if the air is coming from the north or northwest. Cross-mountain airflow does not automatically create downslope winds. Sometimes air in the valleys is too cold and dense to be forced out of the way by air moving over the Rockies. On these days we more commonly see wavy streaks of clouds instead of strong surface winds. In fact, you may also notice in Figure 2 that Denver and surrounding areas are somewhat protected, sitting in the Platte River Valley. Denver has plenty of windy days, but sometimes the strong winds pass overhead without completely mixing down to the surface.
Windy Wyoming: I love the way southern Wyoming from Cheyenne to Casper stands out in Figure 2. Southern Wyoming is the closest thing to a gap in the Rocky Mountains, so when changing weather crosses the Rockies, air gets forced through southern Wyoming like a wind tunnel. The impacts of these gap winds bleed into Colorado. For instance, Wellington is windier than Fort Collins or Denver on average. Gap winds, combined with downslope winds, also are a factor in southeastern Colorado. There are high wind warning signs on I-25 south of Pueblo as winds race down the leeward side of the Sangre de Cristos, and shoot through the gap between the Sangre de Cristos and Wet Mountains. You will see many wind turbines in this area too.
Nature sets the initial conditions for where solar and wind power can be most readily generated. Overall, Colorado experiences both plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind. Some parts of our state are especially well positioned for one or the other. Our southern valleys have strong solar production potential due to a combination of relatively low latitude, high altitude, and clear skies. Our eastern plains have strong wind production potential due to frequent exposure to strong weather fronts, relatively smooth, grassy terrain, and being downwind of the Rocky Mountains.
May 6, 2023 – Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) ESCAPES (Education, Stewardship, and Community Action for Promoting Environmental Sustainability) program lend a hand to Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colo. Bethany Speer (left) goes back for more while Nancy Trejo distributes her wheelbarrow load to the agrivoltaic plots. (Photo by Bryan Bechtold / NREL)
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Alexa St. John). Here’s an excerpt:
October 6, 2025
Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis. Global solar generation grew by a record 31% in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew by 7.7%, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight Tuesday London time. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than overall global demand increased in the same period, it found. The findings suggest it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power — even as demand for electricity skyrockets — with continued investment in renewables including solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy and geothermal energies.
“That means that they can keep up the pace with growing appetite for electricity worldwide,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember and lead author of the study.
At the same time, total fossil fuel generation dropped slightly, by less than 1%.
“The fall overall of fossil may be small, but it is significant,” said Wiatros-Motyka. “This is a turning point when we see emissions plateauing.”
The firm analyzes monthly data from 88 countries representing the vast majority of electricity demand around the world. Reasons that demand is increasing include economic growth, electric vehicles and data centers, rising populations in developing countries and the need for more cooling as temperatures rise. Meeting that demand by burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas for electricity releases planet-warming gases including carbon dioxide and methane. This leads to more severe, costly and deadly extreme weather.
“America’s Data Centers Could Go Dark,” the subject line of the email read.
If only, I mused. I’m less worried about data centers going dark than about everything else going dark because of data centers. But whatever. That’s not what the PR person (or AI bot?) who sent the email was trying to say. They were there to ask, rhetorically: “Can Microreactors Save the Day?”They then offered to connect me with James Walker, CEO of a firm called NANO Nuclear Energy, who would then try to sell me on his KRONOS MMR™, described as a “compact, carbon free” way to power data centers.
There is a lot of hysteria around data centers these days. Folks like me are worried about how much energy and water they use, and the effect that might have on the grid, the climate, scarce water supplies, and other utility customers. Others are panicking over the possibility that the U.S. might fall behind in the AI race — though I have no idea what winning the race would entail or look like.
And, in our capitalistic system, where there is fear, there are myriad solutions, most of which entail building or making or consuming more of something rather than just, well, you know, turning off the damned data centers. The Trump administration would solve the problem by subsidizing more coal-burning, while the petroleum industry is offering up its surplus natural gas. Tech firms are buying up all the power from new solar arrays and geothermal facilities, long before they’re even built.
Perhaps the most hype, and the loftiest promises of salvation, however, involve nuclear power and a new generation of reactors that are smaller, portable, require less up-front capital, and supposedly not weighed down with all of the baggage of the old-school conventional reactors, which not only cost a lot to build, but also tend to evoke visions of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.
Yet for all the buzz — which may be loudest in the Western U.S. — it’s far from certain that this so-called nuclear renaissance will ever come to fruition. The latest generation of reactors may go by slick, newfangled names, but they are still expensive, require dangerous and damaging mining to extract uranium for fuel, produce waste, are potentially dangerous — and are still largely unproven.
Experimental Breeder Reactor II on the Idaho National Laboratory. The reactor was shut down and decommissioned in 1994. Now Oklo is building a new reactor, using similar technology, nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Several years ago I visited Experimental Breeder Reactor I, located west of Idaho Falls. It has been defunct since 1963 and is now a museum, and a sort of time capsule taking one back to heady times when atomic energy promised to help feed the exploding, electricity-hungry population of the post-war Western U.S. and its growing number of electric gadgets (remember electric can openers?).
The retro-futuristic facility is decked out with control panels and knobs and valves and other apparatus that possess the characteristic sleek chunkiness of mid-century high-tech design. A temperature gauge for the “rod farm” goes up to 500 degrees centigrade, and if you look closely you’ll see a red button labeled “SCRAM” that, if pushed, would have plunged the control rods into the reactor, thereby “poisoning” the reaction and shutting it down. If you have to push it, you’d best scram on out of there.
I couldn’t help but get caught up in the marvels of the technology. On a cold December day in 1951, scientists here had blasted a neutron into a uranium-235 atom and shattered it, releasing energy and yet more neutrons that split other uranium atoms, causing a frenetically energetic chain reaction identical to the one that led to the explosions that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki several years earlier. Mass is destroyed, energy created. Only this time the energy was harnessed not to blow up cities, but to create steam that turned a turbine that generated electricity that illuminated a string of lightbulbs and then powered the entire facility — all without burning fossil fuels or building dams.
This particular reactor was known as a “breeder” because its fuel reproduces itself, in a way. During the reaction, loose neutrons are “captured” by uranium-238 atoms, turning them into plutonium-239, which is readily fissionable, meaning it can be used as fuel for future reactions.
A diagram of the atomic fission and breeding process at Experimental Breeder Reactor-I in Idaho. The reactor began generating electricity in 1951. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
At first glance it seems like the answer to the world’s energy problems, and two years after EBR-I lit up, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech. Nuclear energy would help redeem the world from the terrible scourge of atomic weapons, the president said; it would be used to “serve the needs rather than the fears of the world — to make the deserts flourish, to warm the cold, to feed the hungry, to alleviate the misery of the world.”*
Now, with Arizona utilities teaming up to develop and build new reactors; with Wyoming’s, Idaho’s, and Utah’s governors collaborating on their nuclear-powered “Energy Superabundance” effort; and with Oklo looking to build a modern version of EBR-I not far from the original, it’s beginning to feel like 1953 all over again. Only now the nuclear reaction promises to serve the needs of cyberspace rather than the real world — to make AI do your homework, to cool the server banks, to feed the Instagram feeds, to send out those Tik-Toks at twice the speed.
Advertisement from 1954.
Seven decades later, Eisenhower’s hopes have yet to be fulfilled.
It turns out a lot of people aren’t comfortable with the idea nuclear reactions taking place down the road, regardless of how many safety backstops are in place to avoid a catastrophic meltdown a la Chernobyl. Nuke plants cost a lot of money and take forever to build. They need water for steam generation and for cooling, which can be a problem in water-constrained places and even in water-abundant areas: Diablo Canyon nuke plant sucks up about 2.5 billion gallons of ocean water to generate steam and to cool the reactors, before spitting it — 20 degrees warmer — back into the Pacific. This kills an estimated 5,000 adult fish each year, along with an additional 1.5 billion fish eggs and fry and messes up water temperature and the marine ecosystem. And while nukes are good at producing baseload power (meaning steady, 24/7 generation), they aren’t very flexible, meaning they can’t be ramped up or down to accommodate fluctuating demand or variable power sources like wind and solar.
And then there’s the waste. The nuclear reaction itself may seem almost miraculous in its power, simplicity, and even purity.
But the steps required to create the reaction, along with the aftermath, are hardly magical. To fuel a single reactor requires extracting hundreds of thousands of tons of ore from the earth, milling the ore to produce yellowcake (triuranium octoxide), converting the yellowcake to uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to concentrate the uranium-235, and fabricating the fuel pellets and rods.
Each step generates ample volumes of toxic waste products. Mining leaves behind lightly radioactive waste rock; milling produces mill tailings containing radium, thorium, radon, lead, arsenic, and other nasty stuff; and enrichment and fabrication both produce liquid and solid waste. It has been about 40 years since the Cold War uranium boom busted, and yet the abandoned mines and mills are still contaminating areas and still being cleaned up — if you can ever truly clean up this sort of pollution.
Yet the reaction, itself, generates the most dangerous form of leftovers, containing radioactive fission products such as iodine, strontium, and caesium and transuranic elements including plutonium. This “spent nuclear fuel,” or radioactive waste, is removed from the reactor during refueling and for now is typically stored on site. Efforts to create a national depository for these nasty leftovers have failed, usually because the sites aren’t deemed safe enough to contain the waste for a couple hundred thousand years, or because locals don’t want it in their back yard. If it were to fall into the wrong hands, it could be used in a “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive that scatters radioactive material around an area.
Plus, breeder reactors, especially, produce plutonium, which can then be used in nuclear warheads (India used U.S.-supported breeder technology to acquire nuclear weapons). That’s one of the reasons folks soured on the technology and the U.S. ended its federal plutonium breeder reactor development program in the 1980s. The other reasons were high costs and sodium coolant leaks (and resulting fires). After the EBR-I shut down in 1963, because it was outdated, the Idaho National Laboratory built EBR-II nearby. It was shut down and decommissioned in 1994.
Nevertheless, Oklo — one of the rising new-nuke stars — is touting its use of similar technology as the EBR-II, i.e. liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor, as a selling point for the reactor it is currently developing at the INL.
The envisioned new fleet of reactors go by many names: SMRs, or small modular reactors, and advanced, fast, micro, or nano-reactors. Most of them can be fabricated in a factory, then trucked to or assembled on-site. Some are small enough to fit in a truck. They can be used alone to power a microgrid or a data center, or clustered to create a utility-scale operation that feeds the grid.
Their main selling point is that they require less up-front capital than a conventional reactor, that you can build and install one of these things for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time (once the reactors are actually licensed, developed, and produced on a commercial scale, which is still not the case).
A decade ago, companies like NuScale were also promoting them as ways to power the grid in a time of increasing restraints on carbon. Now that the feds are not only declaring climate change a “hoax,” but also forbidding agencies from even uttering the term, that no longer carries as much weight. Instead, almost every new proposal now is marketed as a “solution” to the data center “problem.” Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI, and Meta are all looking to power their facilities with nukes, if and when they are finally up and running.
The new technology is not monolithic. Some are cooled in different ways, or use different types of fuel, but they all work on the same principle as old-school conventional reactors. As such, they also require the same fuel-production process, also have potential safety issues, and also create hazardous waste.
In fact, a 2022 Stanford study found that small modular reactors could create more, and equally hazardous, waste than conventional reactors per unit of power generated. The authors wrote: “Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30 {compared to an 1,100 MW pressurized water reactor}.”
The cost thing isn’t all that clear cut, either. The smaller reactors may be cheaper to build, but because they don’t take advantage of economies of scale, they are more expensive per unit of electricity generated than conventional reactors, and still can be cost prohibitive.
In 2015, for example, Oregon-based NuScale proposed installing 12 of its 50-MW small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratories to provide 600 MW of capacity to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS (which also includes a handful of non-Utah utilities). In 2018 — after receiving at least $288 million in federal subsidies — NuScale upped the planned capacity to 720 MW, saying it would lower operating costs.
But what started out as a $3 billion project in 2015 kept increasing, so that even after it was ramped down to 421 MW, the projected price tag had ballooned to $9.3 billion in 2023 (still about one-third of the cost of the new Vogtle plant in Georgia, but with a fraction of the generating capacity). UAMPS’s collective members, realizing there were plenty of more cost-effective ways to keep their grids running, canceled the project later that year.
It kind of makes you wonder: Is this new wave of nuclear reactors solving the data center energy demand problem? Or are data centers’ energy-gobbling habits solving the nuclear reactors’ cost and feasibility problems?
I suspect it’s a little bit of both, with the balance swinging toward the latter. In that case, nuclear reactors are not alone: The Trump administration is using data center demand as the prime justification for propping up the dying coal industry.
Before the Big Data Center Buildup, utilities really had no need for expensive, waste-producing reactors — they could more cheaply and safely build solar and wind installations with battery storage systems for backup. If needed, they could supplement it with geothermal or natural gas-fired peaker plants.
But if data centers end up demanding as much power as projected (like 22,000 additional megawatts in Nevada, alone), utilities will need to pull out all the stops and add generating capacity of all sorts as quickly as possible, or they’ll tell the data centers to generate their own power. Either scenario would likely make small nukes more attractive, even if they do cost too much, and even if it means that data centers end up being radioactive waste repositories, too.
Another plausible scenario is that the tech firms figure out ways to make their data centers more efficient; that it’s more cost-effective (and therefore profitable) to develop less energy- and water-intensive data processing hardware than to spend billions on an experimental reactor that may not be operating for years from now.
What a novel concept: To use less, rather than always hungering for more and more and more.
Last week, Jeff Brigger, an executive with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility — and a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary — told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity to support planned data centers.
That is an insanely enormous amount of generation capacity. It’s about two-and-a-half times NV Energy’s current peak demand of 9,000 MW, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal story. It’s enough to power about 11 million homes. And it’s equivalent to the generating capacity of five Palo Verde generating stations, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant.
Brigger noted, correctly, that these are “unprecedented times” before going on to say that the utility is “excited to serve this load.” I bet they are. Not only does it mean selling a hell of a lot more of their product, but it will also require investing in new infrastructure in a massive way, for which they can then recover the costs, with a profit, from all of their ratepayers. Warren Buffet’s about to get even richer — so long as power line-sparked wildfires don’t drain his utilities of all their cash.
To its credit, NV Energy has largely moved away from coal generation, shutting down its heavily polluting Reid Gardner plant near Moapa and replacing it with battery storage and solar. It is in the process of shutting down its North Valmy coal plant, too, but instead of tearing it down, the utility will convert it to run on natural gas, adding to its already substantial fleet of the fossil fuel-burning facilities. It’s likely that a portion of that requested 22,000 MW will come from new methane-fired plants.
But a great deal of the new capacity will also come from solar power. NV Energy is currently constructing the $4.2-billion Greenlink West transmission line between Las Vegas and Reno. And it is seeking Bureau of Land Management approval for its Greenlink North line that will run along Highway 50, also known as the Loneliest Road in America. These lines will open up hundreds of square miles of public land to utility-scale solar development, with most or all of the power going to data centers in the Reno and Las Vegas areas.
Proposed path of the Greenlink North transmission project. Credit: BLM
Look, I’d much rather see a solar or wind facility than a coal or natural gas plant. No matter how you figure it, the environmental and human health toll from burning fossil fuels is far greater than solar or wind power. A solar plant doesn’t spew sulfur dioxide and mercury and arsenic into the air (and bodies of those nearby); nor will it explode catastrophically, as a natural gas pipeline did this week in southern Wyoming, damaging a freight train and sending up flames visible from Colorado. Coal mining and natural gas extraction often occurs on public lands, damaging the ecosystem, fragmenting wildlife habitat, and polluting the water.
So it’s one thing when a new giant solar installation leads to a fossil fuel generator being retired. Yet the Big Data Center Buildup’s energy needs are so high that utilities end up deferring coal and gas plant retirements, building more gas plants, and carpeting public lands with solar. As the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly put it in an email: “Turns out the destruction of the desert for renewable energy isn’t about displacing fossil fuels, it’s about feeding the big tech machine.”
Of course, at this point it’s anyone’s guess whether those solar and wind installations are ultimately built. While some are already under development in Nevada along the Greenlink West line, the Greenlink North line has yet to garner BLM approval. And since it is intended to carry primarily solar-generated electrons, it could face added scrutiny from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wiped out federal tax credits for solar and wind, making new developments less feasible.
It’s somewhat surprising that data centers continue to flock to the Las Vegas area given the water constraints. Nevada has butted up against the limits of its 300,000 acre-feet (down to 279,000 under current restrictions) Colorado River allotment for years. That has forced the Southern Nevada Water Authority to crack down on water consumption by banning new lawns, limiting pool sizes, and putting a moratorium on commercial and industrial evaporative cooling systems like those used by many data centers in arid regions.
As long as the moratorium stays in place — a Nevada lawmaker unsuccessfully tried to ban the ban this year — it will force new data centers in the Vegas-area to use less water-intensive, but more energy-intensive, cooling methods1. Still, the Las Vegas data centers that began operating prior to the 2023 ban use a lot of water: more than 716 million gallons, or about 2,200 acre-feet2, in 2024, according to Las Vegas Valley Water data obtained and reported by the Review-Journal.
It’s a bit overwhelming, especially since it all came on so fast. I looked back through the news and noticed that just five years ago talk about data centers’ energy and water use was confined to a few cryptocurrency miners setting up shop in rural Washington to take advantage of cheap hydropower. While the impact was big locally, it wasn’t yet throwing utilities’ long-term plans into disarray. But here we are.
In other data center news, the Doña Ana County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Once again it’s a situation in which the community and region need the economic benefits and diversity the campus offered, but which is also short on water. As such, it sparked both opposition and support.
You may wonder why a place would try to lure, welcome, or even allow data centers into their communities, given their hefty resource consumption.
Sometimes they don’t: Tucson’s city council recently rejected a proposed data center after local residents raised concerns about water and power use and a lack of transparency. (The developers re-upped their proposal for a site outside the city, but opponents aren’t backing down).
The answer, as is often the case, is for the economic shot in the arm they offer. These sprawling facilities each create hundreds of construction jobs, which offer relatively high wages (even if they are short lived). Then they need employees to operate the centers (although not nearly as many). And they pay property taxes.
Right now, Las Vegas and Nevada as a whole seem to need a little help, given that they are one of the nation’s biggest victims of Trumponomics. Visitor volume to Las Vegas was down 11% in June and 12% in July compared to the same months in 2024, with hotel occupancy rates also taking a big hit. The state has lost 600 federal government jobs since Trump took office. And it has shed a whopping 7,300 construction jobs since January. Ouch.
On a similar note, Wyoming’s mining and logging sector shed about 1,000 jobs since January, a 6% drop. That’s surprising, given that this includes coal and uranium miners and oil and gas workers, who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Go figure.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Here’s one more from the USGS’s Guidebook of the western United States: Part E – The Denver & Rio Grande Western route, published in 1922. This map shows a segment of the Wasatch Front in Utah. I’ve also included a Google Earth image of the same area now. It’s remarkable to me because back then Salt Lake City was a small city that stood on its own; now it’s surrounded by a sea of sprawl. Salt Lake was a bit bigger then (or rather, the lake level was higher than it was when the Google Earth image was made; when the map was made in 1909 it was 4,203 feet, now it’s about 13 feet lower). And Bingham Canyon still was a canyon, with little towns in it, rather than the gaping hole known as the Bingham Canyon copper mine.
House passes a water and energy spending bill for fiscal year 2026 that boosts Army Corps construction budget.
White House uses an illegal maneuver to retract an additional $3.2 billion in foreign aid.
With Congress having returned from summer break, committees will hold hearings this week on water infrastructure, AI, energy efficiency, permitting reform, and the state of federal forests.
And lastly, NOAA expands a national flood mapping project..
“Energy strength is national strength – fueling jobs, innovation, and resilience in every community – and no longer will traditional energy sources be punished for being affordable and reliable.” – Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) in a written statement after the House passed a fiscal year 2026 spending bill for water and energy agencies. Cole did not mention the failures of natural gas plants in the winter storm in 2021 that forced multi-day blackouts in Texas and led to a number of deaths. Nor that solar photovoltaic is the cheapest source of new electricity in the U.S.
By the Numbers
$3.2 Billion: Foreign aid spending retracted by Donald Trump using a “pocket rescission” that withholds spending late in the fiscal year. The retracted funds are from USAID’s development assistance program, which is meant for poverty reduction. But the administration opposes spending on things like climate adaptation abroad. The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog for Congress, calls the pocket rescission an illegal maneuver.
News Briefs
2026 Budget The 2026 fiscal year is just over three weeks away, and Congress is making typical slow progress on the budget bills.
The bill increases the Army Corps construction budget by nearly 40 percent, to $2.55 billion. That is for waterway navigation, flood protection, and ecosystem restoration. It also adds 10 percent to the operations and maintenance budget.
Energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, however, were cut 47 percent.
The bill does not include the EPA, which is handled in a separate piece of legislation.
Not making the September 30 deadline and needing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running is the way Congress now works. According to Pew Research, the last year that a budget was completed on time was 1997.
Studies and Reports
Flood Maps Real-time and predictive flood maps from NOAA are now available for 60 percent of the U.S. population.
The mapping service provides a model-based picture of areas currently underwater from river flooding. It also forecasts the area that will be flooded in the upcoming five days.
Regions that are not yet depicted in the maps include the intermountain West and the northern Plains.
Irrigation Organizations The USDA’s Economic Research Service published a report on the structure of irrigation organizations in the country. These are a mix of Bureau of Indian Affairs projects, mutual companies, unincorporated mutuals, and special-purpose government units.
On the Radar
California Water Meeting On September 9, the Bureau of Reclamation will hold its quarterly public meeting to provide updates on the coordinated operation of the two big canals in the state: the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project.
The meeting will run from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Pacific. Join via Microsoft Teams using this link. The meeting ID is 262 767 956 444 and the passcode is f74jJg
House Hearings On September 9, a House Natural Resources subcommittee will hold a hearing on the nation’s federal forests.
Also on September 9, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will discuss energy efficiency standards for buildings. Republicans have criticized efficiency standards for both water and energy as a waste of money.
And also on September 10, a Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee will hold a hearing on implementation of previous iterations of the Water Resources Development Act.
Senate Hearing On September 10, a Senate Commerce subcommittee will discuss the Trump administration’s AI plan. The witness is Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.
Can I just make a little confession: I don’t like constantly writing about the Republicans’ relentless attacks on Americans’ public lands, the agencies that oversee them, and the regulations designed to protect them. I’d much rather be delivering some good news, or pondering some historical mystery or old maps, or explaining the complicated workings of the Colorado River’s plumbing, the power grid, or oil and gas drilling.
And yet, the Trump administration and the GOP simply won’t let up, so neither can I. For those of you who come here for not-so-gloomy content, please stick around. The nightmare has to end sometime. Doesn’t it? (And just to be clear, much more heinous things are happening outside the public lands/environmental sphere like, you know, the loss of democracy and the rapid slide into authoritarianism — but this is the Land Desk, so I’ll stick to land coverage, mostly.)
The latest developments include:
In an unprecedented move, House Republicans this week voted to wield the Congressional Review Act to “disapprove” Bureau of Land Management Resource Management Plans in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. It is the first time the CRA — which allows Congress to revoke recently implemented administrative rules — has been used to eviscerate an RMP. That’s in part because RMPs are not considered “rules,” according to a January opinion by the Interior Department’s Solicitor. The Senate is expected to vote on the resolutions soon. These plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.
Overturning the three RMPs in question would reopen: 2 million acres in Montana’s Miles City Field Office planning area to future coal leasing; 4 million acres to coal leasing and 213,000 acres to oil and gas leasing in North Dakota; and 13.3 million acres in Alaska’s Central Yukon planning area to oil and gas leasing and mining claims. The Alaska move would also revive the Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills and the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve that would provide mining companies access to copper and zinc deposits.
But it also throws management of these planning areas, covering some 30 million acres, into question. While the Miles City resolution only targets a court-ordered, coal leasing-specific amendment to the RMP, the others include the entire RMPs, and don’t say anything about whether the agency is supposed to revert back to the older — sorely outdated (the 2024 Central Yukon RMP replaced a 1986 version) — RMPs, or simply try to manage the land without RMPs (which they are not authorized to do). The CRA not only revokes the “rules,” but also bans the agency from issuing a rule in “substantially the same form.” That will severely limit the BLM in efforts to replace the revoked RMPs, and could hinder it from issuing any permits or authorizations at all.
Using the CRA in this way (as if RMPs were “rules”) also blows a cloud of uncertainty over every other RMP implemented since 1996, when the CRA was passed. First off, it makes other Biden-era RMPs subject to being revoked by Congress. More broadly, if Resource Management Plans are deemed subject to the CRA, wrote Interior Solicitor Robert Anderson in January, it would create “uncertainty as to whether post-1996 RMPs have ever gone into effect, which also raises questions as to the validity of implementation decisions issued pursuant to these plans …”
Prior to the House vote, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”
The Interior Department has been on a bit of a tear recently, especially when it comes to blocking solar and wind projects and encouraging fossil fuel extraction, especially coal. Over the last month, the department has:
Fast-tracked the environmental impact statement for Canyon Fuel Company’s application to expand the Skyline Mine in Utah via lease modifications.
Approved Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s bid to expand its Antelope Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin to an additional 857 federal acres.
Moved forward with coal lease sales in Utah (the Little Eccles tract as requested by Canyon Fuel Company) and Montana (at the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s Spring Creek Mine).
The Trump administration is moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which limits new roadbuilding in parts of the National Forest that are currently roadless. It would open up nearly 45 million acres of public land to new roadbuilding and, by extension, new logging, mining, and drilling, including in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Colorado’s and Idaho’s state-specific roadless rules would be spared from this move. At least for now.
It’s important to remember that this rule didn’t and doesn’t shut down roads — of which there are already far too many criss-crossing our public lands — it just keeps new ones from being built. That’s important because roads are, well, pretty darned bad for forests and deserts and everywhere else.
Roads fragment landscapes, they enhance erosion, and liberate dust to be carried away by the wind, degrading air quality. Vehicles traveling on the roads leak oil and other nasty fluids, while also spewing exhaust and disrupting the natural sounds of the wild. A study found that a toxicant used to protect car-tires is winding up in streams, killing salmon. Most problematic: a backcountry road serves as a giant hypodermic syringe, injecting humanity and accoutrements deep into the backcountry, where they can do more damage to otherwise difficult-to-access, sensitive areas.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued new restrictions on the Land and Water Conservation Fund yesterday, possibly hampering the program’s effectiveness.Still, it could have been worse.
Congress established the LWCF in 1964 to further conservation and enhance recreation by using offshore oil and gas drilling revenues to acquire private land in or near national parks, wilderness areas and forests, and then making it public. It has been popular with both parties, and in 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act with bipartisan support, permanently funding the LWCF to the tune of $900 million annually and creating a separate account for national park and public lands maintenance. After the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., showed Trump a photo of a spectacular parcel acquired by the fund in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the president agreed to sign the bill into law.
Initially Trump and Burgum wanted to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund and use it to maintain infrastructure in national parks and other public lands. But they backed off, perhaps because they knew congressional Republicans would bear the brunt of the backlash. Instead, Burgum tacked a bunch of restrictions on how the funds can be used, which could slow or nix proposed land acquisitions.
A while back I mentioned the new surfing wave on the Animas River in Farmington and how that has been rendered un-surfable by low streamflows. I don’t have any good news to report on that, but I do have a link to a live webcam of the surf wave, which is pretty cool and a good way to check in on the lower Animas River from anywhere at anytime!
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Some readers have asked what they can do about data centers, AI, and their profligate energy and water use. There aren’t any easy answers. You can’t exactly boycott data centers unless you’re willing to remove yourself from the modern age. After all, virtually the entire digital world requires data centers to operate, including me sending you this newsletter. Abstaining from AI might be a little easier, except that you’re often using it without knowing, simply because the tech companies employ it as a default (try doing a Google search and you’ll see that the first result is usually an AI-generated answer; you can opt out by adding “-ai” after your search query, but you’re still using a data center).
I would recommend learning as much as you can about the technology and how much water and power each one uses. This piece from The Conversation provides a good breakdown of some of these things, and is a good place to start.
Here’s a crazy one: Texas firm BorderPlex Digital Assets is looking to build what they say will be a $165 billion data center complex in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Holy frijole, that’s a lot of cash (all of the property in neighboring El Paso County is currently valued at $95 billion, according to El Paso Matters.
The developers are claiming Project Jupiter, as it’s called, would create 750 new jobs, use minimal amounts of water, and would be powered by a dedicated, on-site microgrid. But the details are sparse on exactly how they would cool the facilities (which is the where most of the water use comes from) and what their electricity generation sources would be. Solar? Natural gas? Nuclear?
Seems like these details should be made public before the county commissioners enter into a deal with the developers in which they would issue industrial revenue bonds and exempt the facility from property taxes in exchange for a $300 million payment. El Paso Matters has more on the plan.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 26, 2025
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
What I’m about to write is strange, even a little surreal, even to me. It seems over the top, hyperbolic, and alarmist, all things I try to avoid in my writing (unless I’m going for satire). But here it is: The Big Data Center Buildup is transforming the West (and other regions) as quickly and radically as the post-war Big Buildup of coal plants and other power infrastructure in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
See what I mean by hyperbolic? After all, data centers are just big box stores filled with walls of computer, processors, servers, and other equipment rather than cheap plastic items. How transformative could they really be?
Very, it turns out. As I’ve written here before, data centers use huge amounts of energy and water, and if they keep sprouting like weeds in business parks and rural areas, then they very well could not only hamper, but reverse the transition away from fossil fuels.
Tech bros will certainly say I’m being hysterical, and point to the latest estimates showing that each AI query uses a tiny fraction of the energy and water that a person consumes by doing other cyberspace activities or, for that matter, simply existing in modern times. Google, for example, says a “median” Gemini text query uses .24 watt-hours of electricity, which is about the same as watching 9 seconds of television, or microwaving for 1 second, or running a refrigerator for six seconds. And growing the beef for a single hamburger uses hundreds of times more water than hundreds of AI queries.
As far as I can tell, these figures are accurate. But what do they really tell us? I suppose we can feel a bit less guilty about succumbing to the temptation to use that iPhone AI thingy to identify something we photograph, or for asking ChatGPT to pen a song. It has no bearing, however, on what’s playing out on the ground, which is a sort of colonization of the power grid by larger and larger server farms.
I closely follow energy-related news as part of my job, and hardly a day goes by when I don’t encounter a story about the growing electricity demand from new data centers and utilities scrambling to keep up. Less than a decade ago, most Western utilities were expecting power consumption to plateau or even begin decreasing by now.
In 2018, for example, California utility regulators approved a plan to shutter Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. Doing so would deprive the state’s grid of enough juice to power some 1.7 million homes. But Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant’s operator, figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since demand was expected to decline over time due to efficiency gains and more rooftop solar, and they could cover the rest with new renewables.
Instead, demand has increased substantially on PG&E’s grid since then, in large part due to new data centers in Silicon Valley, and it’s likely to continue to balloon over the next couple of decades. This forecast-blowing turnaround has prompted PG&E to toss out its old resource plans, work on acquiring more energy generation, and delay Diablo Canyon’s retirement for at least another five years. The pattern is being repeated all over the West with alarming regularity. It seems as if no place is safe from the invasion.
Some recent examples:
In late July, PG&E said it expects 10 gigawatts of new data center capacity to connect to its grid over the next ten years. Ten gigawatts, or 10,000 megawatts, is about one-fourth of the total demand on the California grid on a hot summer’s day, or equivalent to about five Diablo Canyons. It’s a crapload of power, in other words, and there’s no way they’re going to serve that kind of demand growth with just solar and wind, especially since a certain administration is doing all it can to stop all solar and wind from being built. It’s also notable because it’s a 20% increase in projected data center capacity since May.
NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County. This would require the utility to either construct or purchase additional power, which could lead to higher rates for their existing customers. Now NorthWestern is proposing to merge with Black Hills Corp., another electricity and gas utility, saying the combined utility would be better positioned to meet rising power demand from, you guessed it, new data centers.
Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Also of concern: If the projections are overblown, Xcel could end up building a bunch of new generation that’s not needed, leaving the utility and its customers with a bunch of stranded assets.
Wyoming officials have worked to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. Earlier this month energy firm Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. That adds to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers, while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers. This is in part because land is cheap there. But also because it is home to the Intermountain Power Project, a massive coal plant built during the Big Buildup. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run off natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power: Enter data centers. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20-million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there; and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar, and natural gas.
And Arizona’s largest utilities say demand from planned new data centers could increase total power load by 300% over current levels. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.
Sometimes the tech firms will purchase renewable power or build their own solar, wind, or geothermal facilities. But in most cases, they rely partly or wholly on fossil fuel generation, whether it’s from the grid — which is still largely dominated by natural gas and coal in many places — or from dedicated generators. While a lot of solar is still being added to the grid, it isn’t enough to keep up with rapidly growing demand. Plus, it may not last. The GOP phased out federal tax credits for wind and solar. And the Trump administration killed the Solar for All program that funded rooftop solar for lower-income households, and crippled the REAP program, which helps farmers install solar panels. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has vowed to make it as difficult as possible to develop solar and wind on federal lands.
What that means is that we’re likely to see another Big Buildup for the cyber age. It will include single new data centers that span nearly 500 acres and consume more power than all of the homes of Montana and Wyoming combined. And it will include the generating facilities to run the servers and to keep them cool. In the absence of policies limiting fossil fuel burning and preventing cost shifts to existing customers, we’re all going to pay the price.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Bullfrog Creek and the Little Rockies, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
When I was a kid, I collected pinback buttons, political and otherwise. Most of you probably know what that is, but for the youngs out there, it’s basically an analog meme you pin to your clothing to let folks know which political candidate or other cause you might support.
I’m pretty sure I had a “John Anderson for President” button. My parents supported the Independent candidate in the 1980 election because he had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter, while championing environmental preservation, had supercharged the fossil fuel industries in the West, which ravaged landscapes and economies, losing their support. I had a couple of buttons from the early Snowdown celebrations in Durango, and one from Wolverton Mountain Days, a funky event held at the Durango nordic center whose motto was: “Track, Telly, Twinkie,” or something along those lines. Maybe the little collection included a “Gilbert Slade for County Commissioner,” that I would have picked up at one of Slade’s Democratic Party goat roasts out on the Dryside.
But perhaps the most intriguing one was small, dark blue or black, with a bold white typeface declaring: “Fight Blight / Burn a Billboard Tonight.” I probably had to ask an adult what blight meant, though the second part I understood. It was, perhaps, my first encounter with the concept of monkey-wrenching, or sabotaging equipment or structures or billboards as a form of protest, usually with environmental motivations.
This would have been shortly after Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published (50 years ago this month), in which Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug did some billboard burning of their own before joining up with Seldom Seen and George Hayduke and moving on to bigger acts of sabotage. But the button’s text preceded the novel. The slogan was a favorite of David Brower, according to John McPhee’s “Encounters of the Archdruid,” which ran in the New Yorker in 1971.
Though I wouldn’t find out until much later, it turns out my father lived out the slogan during his younger days in Silverton, Colorado.
***
Up until the 1950s, Silverton was a full-on mining town, with a little bit of tourism on top. Following World War II, however, the last big mine, the Shenandoah-Dives, shut down. The local economy, sputtered and gasped, ushering in what Silvertonians would come to call the “Black Decade.”
Desperate, the townsfolk turned to tourism, capitalizing on a Hollywood-fueled, global fascination with the Wild West of American mythology. The Durango-to-Silverton stretch of railroad switched from hauling ore to carrying sightseers, and almost overnight Silverton morphed from mining town to a facsimile of a Hollywood version of a place that never existed. In order to lure motorists, some local businesses installed billboards along Highway 550 as it dropped into town from Molas Pass.
My parents arrived in Silverton in the 1960s. Mining had come back in force, with Standard Metals’ American Tunnel facilitating the re-opening of the fabled Sunnyside Mine. Yet the tourism industry and its cheesy theatrics persisted, much to the disgust of my parents and their peers, who were members of a sort of rural Western intelligentsia, drawn there by the mountains, the wildness, the culture, the history, and perhaps most of all, the authenticity of the community. They saw the tchotchke-peddling economy as the antithesis of the richer, more real mining culture.
In July 1963, Terry Marshall summed up the sentiment in a Silverton Standard editorial on the surreal scene that unfolded every day at “train time.”
Ultimately, the town would pass statutes and rules that reined in the carnival atmosphere. Yet the billboards on 550 remained and fell into disrepair, and efforts to have the highway department take them down apparently went nowhere. One day in the late 1960s — the story goes 1 — my father was telling his cousin about his frustration with the situation, not just at how ugly the billboards were, but at the powerlessness to do anything about it. This relative (who will remain nameless), suggested in his sanguine way: “Let’s just burn it.”
And so, on one dark night, that’s exactly what they did, with my mother possibly driving the get-away car, nearly a decade before the fictional George Hayduke sabotaged the equipment building the road through Comb Ridge. My father and accomplices were never caught. Indeed, the billboard was so damned ugly that maybe nobody cared.
***
People who knew or knew of my father might find it incredible that he would go to this extreme. He was a diplomat and uniter, someone who could bring together disparate factions to benefit the community. He also had a strong moral compass and cared deeply about this land and its communities, and would do what he could to defend it — within reason — even if it may have skirted the law just a little bit.
I know this because when I was maybe 12 or 13, I went camping with my dad and his friend and the friend’s kid. It was way up near Raplee Ridge, in southeastern Utah, looking down into the San Juan River, on a dusty two-track. On the way to the campsite, we noticed some survey flags sticking up from the sparse and rocky earth.
This would have been the early 1980s, when the Carter-era quest for “energy independence” was still in full-force, and miners and drillers were ripping apart the Western landscape for whatever uranium, coal, oil and gas, or oil shale they could find. My young heart ached at the realization that the stakes marked a future extraction site, that soon the bulldozers and the drill rigs would show up and tear the earth apart and suck out whatever minerals dwelled down there.
On the way back, the adults stopped the car near the site, told us kids to stay put, got out, walked over to the stakes, methodically pulled them out of the ground, and threw them over the edge of the cliff. Then they got back in and we drove away, without saying anything else about it. It was a soothing site to witness, even from the remove of the old car.
The site was never developed or drilled or mined, though I’m guessing that had less to do with this little act of sabotage than with the fact that the energy booms all faded shortly thereafter. For them, however, it was a significant act of resistance, and perhaps of love for the Place. Maybe just as importantly, they were defying the powerlessness we feel in the face of the churning gears of progress and greed, apathy and cruelty.
***
The Monkey Wrench Gang is often considered monkey-wrenching’s literary debut. It’s not. Two years before Abbey published his book, there was Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die, which followed a trio on a Florida-to-Idaho road trip in a quest to blow up a dam.
Harrison’s protagonist is named Tim, a Hayduke-esque guy just back from a couple tours in Vietnam, scarred in more ways than one and with a hankering for booze and pills to ease the pain. The story’s narrator, a bit of a cad with relationship issues, is on a fishing trip and escapist odyssey in Florida’s Keys when he encounters Tim. During a drinking session, the narrator tells Tim offhandedly that there’s a dam in the Grand Canyon, or at least they are planning one, pushing Tim into a melancholic slump. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “it will fill up with water.”
Tim is immediately fixated by the idea, noting that he has never seen the Grand Canyon. The narrator “had seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors.” After a little more thought, he notes, casually: “We probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.”
Tim takes the idea and runs with it, though it isn’t entirely clear what his motives are. Is he truly looking to defend the environment and free the Colorado River? Is he seeking to punish those who deigned dam up something as sacred as the Grand Canyon? Or is he merely lashing out at the general injustice of the world, hoping to be heard among all the cruel noise?
Whatever it is, the narrator gets caught up in it, too, maybe just to have a bit of purpose beyond baking in the sun and waiting for the fish to bite. When Tim suggests a trip West, the narrator hesitates and says only if they return quickly. But as the story progresses he becomes more invested in the act, even if it is only a means for pursuing the alluring Sylvia, Tim’s on-again-off-again girlfriend.
When they discover there is no dam in the Grand Canyon, the narrator refuses to abandon the mission, and suggests they instead decommission an earthen dam on a tributary of the Clearwater in Idaho, “where a wealthy rancher ruined a good steelhead stream … out of greed and contempt for the natural world.” Once the new target is picked, the narrator feels “strong and clean and very moral. Heroic, in fact.” 2
***
A Good Day to Die may have preceded and even inspired the Monkey Wrench Gang, but the latter was far more widely read and influential. Abbey’s classic was published 50 years ago this month, inspiring many acts of low- and high-level eco-sabotage in the decades that followed. And in 1985, Bill Haywood and Dave Foreman published a manual for Abbey’s acolytes called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.
Monkeywrenchers pulled up survey stakes by the dozen, spiked trees to halt logging projects, cut commercial fishing drift nets, dumped sand and corn syrup into bulldozers’ gas tanks and crankcases, vandalized ski-lift supports, cut power to uranium mines, and plotted to topple transmission towers carrying electricity from nuclear plants. Some were caught. Others were not.
In the late 1990s, factions of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front took it up a notch by torching a Bureau of Land Management wild horse captivity facility in Burns, Oregon. Then, in 1998, they burned down several structures at the Vail Ski Resort in an effort to block the ski area expansion and its deleterious effects on lynx habitat.
The ski area recovered and expanded, despite an estimated $24 million worth of damage. Direct environmental action, however, took a hit as federal law enforcement (and corporate interests) began throwing around the term “eco-terrorist,” the connotations of which became far more grim after 9/11 3. The FBI then declared monkeywrenching to be one of the nation’s leading domestic terror threats, surpassing even right-wing militia groups, despite the fact that the saboteurs only damage property and make a point of not harming humans or other living beings.
This put quite a damper on environmental direct action, since even pulling up a few survey stakes might get you labeled a terrorist and tossed in the clink — or even Guantanamo Bay — for years. Monkeywrenching, however, did not die. In 2016, for example, a crew of “Valve Turners” managed to shut down several major oil pipelines in an attempt to slow fossil fuel burning and bring attention to the climate crisis (Michelle Nijhuis wrote a terrific piece on this in 2018). Otherwise there have been very few high-profile direct-action eco-sabotage cases, at least from what I can gather.
***
Monkeywrenching is on my mind not because it’s MWG’s half-century birthday or even because the White House, Congress, and the courts have been occupied by authoritarians, oligarchs, and their enablers, who value profit over everything else, especially the environment. I’ve actually been pondering it for several months, since long before Trump was elected.
A couple of things sparked this line of thought. First, it seems as if there’s a bit of a literary revival of monkeywrenching. It’s one of the methods employed by climate activists in Stephen Markey’s excellent novel The Deluge. And it is the main theme of the film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a fictional rendering of Andreas Malm’s non-fiction treatise of the same name.
I began to write that these books and films are Monkey Wrench Gangs for the global warming age. But I don’t think that’s quite right. The tone of the newer book and film is far different — more urgent and somber — than MWG or a Good Day to Die. And the motives of the protagonists are also more serious and deep, if you will. Pipeline’s characters, for example, mostly were direct victims of the fossil fuel industry, making their sabotage a form of self-defense, while the Deluge’s eco-saboteurs see themselves as warriors fighting for the planet’s very survival.
It’s not surprising that eco-sabotage is experiencing a revival, even if it’s only fictional. The urgency of a warming climate is becoming acute, and yet the powers that be are diddling their thumbs. More and more people are frustrated and fed up with the lugubrious process of fighting climate change and environmental destruction in legal and legitimate ways. Even when the Democrats control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, they rarely are able to take more than a half-step forward policy-wise, only to see their incremental progress obliterated by Trump, the MAGA-dominated Congress, and a runaway Supreme Court within weeks after taking power.
Now the Trump administration is even precluding public input for major mines, oil and gas drilling, and other developments on public lands, all in the name of a bogus “energy emergency.” They are literally blocking the public’s legal avenues for making a difference, leaving concerned citizens with little choice but to take more direct action.
What is surprising to me is that a new wave of eco-sabotage has not made it from the screen and page to real life. 4 Instead, climate activists are throwing soup, paint, and other stuff at prominent artworks, hoping to bring attention to their cause. They are gluing themselves to the road and disrupting bicycle races, from the World Championships in Scotland to the Tour de France, and Just Stop Oil even defaced Charles Darwin’s graves.
The activists and their supporters claim that these actions raise public awareness. That may be so, but awareness of what, exactly? How does disrupting a bike race, of all things, reduce fossil fuel combustion? How does defacing a painting — even if only “symbolically” — relate to environmental destruction? And what’s with targeting Darwin’s grave? While I appreciate the zeal, I can’t help but wonder: If you’re going to vandalize something and risk jail time, why not do something that makes a direct and immediate difference — even if only temporarily?
When the narrator in a Good Day to Die decides to get rid of the dam in Idaho, he is hit with a moment of moral clarity. I suspect it has to do with the directness of his planned action. He sees a problem, a fish-harming dam, and sets about to solve it in the most logical and direct way possible: blowing it up — preferably without harming anybody. He’s not looking to send a message, to make a symbolic gesture, or raise awareness. He’s just trying to fix something that’s wrong, not unlike burning an atrocious billboard or surreptitiously removing some survey stakes from a remote area or destroying a pipeline that defiles the land and carries planet-killing fossil fuels.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and do anything illegal. I’m just saying that when a person’s home — whether that’s a house, a community, a Place, or the entire planet — comes under attack, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would go to extreme lengths to defend it.
Four Corners Power Plant. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
For the last several years, the coal industry in the Western U.S. has been suffering from what I call the Big Breakdown — as opposed to the Big Buildup of the 1960s and 1970s, when coal power plants and mines popped up all over the Colorado Plateau and beyond. Now, it appears that the proliferation of energy-intensive data centers is stalling the Breakdown, maybe even reversing it. Last week, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico running — and polluting — for another seven years beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement.
The coal-burning extension is part of the state’s largest utility’s plan to shift its climate goal from becoming zero carbon by 2050 to carbon neutral. While that sounds like a mere semantic switch, its on-the-ground effects will be significant. Along with the coal plant news, APS and the state’s other largest utilities are going in on a new natural gas pipeline from the Permian Basin so it can increase fossil fuel generation rather than pivoting entirely to solar, wind, battery energy storage, and other carbon-free sources.
APS officials say the shift is necessary to meet growing power demand. While population growth and increasingly hot temperatures play a role in the ever-larger load on the grid, the crop of new energy-intensive data centers sprouting in the Phoenix area is a principle driver. The utility is also likely reacting to the Trump administration’s fondness for fossil fuels and disdain for renewables.
The Four Corners plant and its accompanying Navajo Mine were constructed about 15 miles west of Farmington in the early 1960s by a consortium of utilities led by APS and Utah Construction & Mining Co, a subsidiary of Kennecott, a global mining firm. It was the flagship of a much larger fleet that would include the San Juan, Navajo, Mojave, Cholla, Coronado, and Escalante plants. Mojave was shuttered in 2005, with the other big plants closing down more recently (Coronado will be converted to natural gas). That leaves just Four Corners, which was supposed to be shuttered in 2031, or even sooner, if Public Service Company of New Mexico were able to get out of its 13% stake before then.
But over the last few years, utilities have been second-guessing plans to decommission the aging behemoths as data centers have sprouted across the region, significantly increasing demand on the power grid. Over the last week, both Salt River Project and APS have set new peak power demand records as both residents and data centers crank up the coolers to offset extreme heat. Demand is projected to grow significantly over the next decade, mostly due to new data centers. It’s the Big Buildup all over again, only this time it’s high-tech server farms sprouting all over the place, with power generating sources struggling to keep up.
1 *I didn’t hear this story until after my father died, so this is all second-hand and the details may be a bit off.
2 I won’t tell you what happens. If you read the book, you should be warned that reviewers of the time sneered at it for being too macho, too crude, having too much drug and alcohol use, “adolescent,” and so forth. Maybe that’s all true, but I liked it the first time I read it decades ago, and I still liked it when I read it again recently.
3 * The term was apparently coined in the 1980s by Ron Arnold, the founder of the anti-environment Wise Use Movement.
4** Right-wing nationalist attacks on the power grid are not, in my mind, a form of monkeywrenching. Their goal is to disrupt and harm society, including humans, not to stop environmental damage or even make a political protest.
Jeff Hurd, the U.S. representative from western Colorado, met this week with first responders and residents from a region where multiple wildfires are raging. The Lee Fire had become the fifth-largest wildfire in state history and was threatening the town of Rifle, where officials had to evacuate a state prison in the fire’s potential path.
In a social media post about the visits, Hurd thanked local authorities and community members for their response to the fires tearing across his district, and he vowed to “be here for the long haul to help recover.”
But nowhere did he offer the most appropriate gesture: an apology.
Hurd, along with the other three Republican members of Colorado’s U.S. House delegation, has promoted drill-baby-drill policies as part of a Trumpist “energy dominance” agenda, even though those policies crank up the greenhouse gas emissions that guarantee more megafires in Colorado. The only posture truly available to Hurd when he meets constituents is contrition. The only plausible message is, “I was wrong.”
Rising global temperatures are increasing the risk and frequency of extreme weather across the globe. The Southwest is being transformed by aridification amid the worst drought in 1,200 years. There is no scientific doubt that the primary cause of climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels.
In Colorado, this means bigger, fiercer wildfires and a fire season that no longer respects warm-month limits. The most destructive wildfire in state history, the Marshall Fire in 2021 in Boulder County, occurred five days after Christmas. The state’s 20 biggest fires have all occurred since the turn of the century. The three biggest came in 2020, when one of them, East Troublesome, grew so ferocious it leapt over the Continental Divide. A 2021 study found that hotter, drier conditions in the American West are causing fires, such as East Troublesome, to reach high elevations that were previously too wet to burn.
“And they are burning at rates unprecedented in recent fire history,” the authors wrote. “While historical fire suppression and other forest management practices play a role in the West’s worsening fire problem, the high-elevation forests we studied have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.”
Colorado is especially exposed. A huge part of the state is the site of one of the largest areas of the highest temperature spikes in the lower 48 states. It covers Hurd’s hometown of Grand Junction and much of his district. Either Hurd is oblivious to the science or he’s cynically chosen to side with oil and gas industry interests.
During the freshman Hurd’s campaign last year, he sometimes seemed to align with an “all of the above” energy policy, which at least purports to include renewables, but he also signaled a strong preference for fossil fuel extraction over wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. He even champions coal, the most damaging of fossil fuels, a position he’s reinforced as recently as April.
Hurd found himself in an awkward spot once he was in the House as MAGA extremism sought to demolish the all-of-the-above plank and demonize renewables. He and U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton were among 21 Republicans who urged colleagues not to eliminate energy tax credits, which support wind and solar jobs and development in Colorado. (The other two House members from Colorado, Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank, left their names off the letter.) But they both voted to pass the recent Trump megabill, which eliminated the credits.
Hurd insists he believes climate change is real. But this just makes his approach all the more hypocritical. For example, he repeats the pro-carbon talking point that since fossil fuel in other countries is dirtier than America’s the U.S. should maximize production.
“If you genuinely care about reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, then you ought to support getting as much energy out of Colorado as possible. That includes not only the clean coal that we have, but also natural gas,” he told CPR in September.
But that’s like saying that since people are going to abuse fentanyl even though it’s deadly, America should manufacture a superior product to preempt China’s more dangerous supply. An immoral practice should be avoided because it’s immoral, not pursued with improvements.
If he has any doubt that prioritizing carbon-based energy is immoral, Hurd should take a closer look at the environmental catastrophe unfolding in his own district. He often cites the jobs at risk in the transition to renewable energy, but this short-sighted perspective ignores substantial state greening efforts to responsibly transition local economies, and it misses the larger risk that whole regions of a cooked Earth will be uninhabitable.
The megafires in Hurd’s district are exposing “energy dominance” as disastrously self-defeating.
During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a “war on energy.” It was a demonstrably false allegation. The most either of the Democrats did to attack the energy industry was to incrementally increase common sense regulations and environmental protections, which apparently did little to hamper energy development. The so-called shale revolution, when “fracking” opened up huge new reserves of tight oil and gas, began under Obama, and truly came to fruition under Biden, when domestic oil and gas production reached new record highs. Meanwhile, Biden’s Interior Department approved dozens of utility-scale solar and wind and long-delayed transmission projects on public lands.
But now the Trump administration is, in fact, waging a very real war on energy — renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. They’ve frozen and even clawed back funds for projects, killed federal clean energy tax credits, subjected wind and solar projects on public lands to heightened reviews, and eliminated wind energy leasing areas off Oregon’s coast. And they’ve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an “energy emergency.”
Now, the Interior Department has gone even further with a new order that threatens to kill all new renewable power development on federal lands. I know there are some readers out there who might applaud this, since so many of our public lands are not suited for sprawling utility-scale solar or wind developments. But this order — deceptively and cynically titled, “Managing Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environment” — would potentially replace proposed wind and solar projects with coal or uranium mines and/or power plants, oil and gas fields, or other non-renewable energy projects.
The order requires land management agencies, when reviewing proposed solar or wind energy projects, to consider “a reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.”
Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Department’s calculations (we’ll get to the flaws there in a moment), the capacity density (megawatts/acre) for various power sources are:
Advanced nuclear reactor: 33.17 MW/acre
Combined cycle gas plant: 5.4 to 24.42 MW/acre (depending on configuration)
In other words, wind and solar are the big losers, taking up far more space to generate the same amount of electricity as, say, a nuclear plant. According to the new order, this raises the question of “whether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.”
This isn’t a new argument: The specter of “renewable energy sprawl” has long been wielded to push back against solar and wind development. And certainly the amount of space a project takes up should be one of many considerations in whether to permit it. But should it really have more weight than the amount of damage the project would inflict? How about pollutants emitted per megawatt, or amount of harm to people, the climate, and the environment per megawatt? Is there consideration for the fact that there is a lot of space between the turbines within a wind facility that is minimally affected? And why doesn’t their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?
Also, the Interior Department’s calculations are a bit fishy, or at least incomplete. They say they are based on a 2023 Sargent & Lundy report commissioned by the Energy Information Administration. The report is not on capacity density, but rather the costs of building and operating various power generating technologies. When determining the acreage of the nuclear and fossil fuel plants, they do not take into account the land required for fuel production, which can be extensive.
The supercritical coal plant referenced in the report, for example, would require a mere 600 acres. Yet, the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico — along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities — covers (and wrecks) some 15,000 acres. That acreage will continue to grow for as long as the plant operates, since the mine and waste dumps will continue to expand. Compare that to the 2,400 acres covered by the nearby San Juan solar plant.
I’d also argue that if the goal is to get the most energy out of every acre of public land (which is a silly goal, but whatever), then they should figure in the amount of energy the proposed project consumes. Coal mining and oil and gas drilling require large amounts of electricity and petroleum (along with human labor, which is also a form of energy), as does transporting coal and gas by train and pipeline. Uranium enrichment, which is necessary to produce reactor fuel, is extremely power-intensive.
None of this really matters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, however. That’s because he knows we’re not really in an “energy emergency,” and that it is merely a fabricated excuse to give more handouts and regulatory relief to his fossil fuel-industry buddies and to get revenge on Trump’s political opponents by punishing cleaner energy sources.
Proposed utility-scale solar and wind facilities on public lands should by all means be scrutinized and subjected to the same reviews as any other projects, contrary to what the Abundance faction might believe. The projects should be denied if their impacts outweigh the benefits, with bonus benefit-points for solar or wind projects that displace or replace coal or natural gas generation.
But judging the projects based on a virtually meaningless metric is not only spiteful, unfair, and stupid, but it also will needlessly hamper the fight against health-harming pollution and climate change. And that’s simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Speaking of fake energy emergencies … In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah’s Lisbon Valley in just 11 days. The rush, sans public input, ostensibly was necessary to get the mine online quickly to address the supposed uranium shortage.
The mine’s proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesn’t share the Trump administration’s sense of urgency. At the end of April, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining asked Anfield for more information on its application to commence large mining operations, which was deemed technically incomplete. Anfield has yet to respond. The company is also not rushing forward to get state approval for its water treatment plant permit or to reopen its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, where the Velvet-Wood’s uranium would be processed.
In other words, the fast-tracked permitting was merely a ruse, intended to bypass environmental regulations and public input, not to expedite the project, itself.
***
Photo-illustration of the Animas River a few days after the spill from the air. Jonathan P. Thompson photo and illustration.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the Gold King Mine blowout that affected the Animas and San Juan rivers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A few folks have asked if I’m going to write anything about it — since I did write a book about it — but I don’t think there’s much more to say, really.
The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water — though it is being treated before it’s released into the watershed — and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they aren’t being treated). Superfund designation hasn’t been the boon to water quality that some hoped for, nor did it stigmatize Silverton as many feared it would (property values continue to soar into the unreachable zone).
While the event did bring more attention to the problem of abandoned mine sites (even though the Gold King wasn’t technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected “acid mine drainage” into the public’s vocabulary, it hasn’t led to mining law reform or any widespread effort to address the issue. That said, Congress finally did pass a Good Samaritan bill, that might clear the way for volunteer groups to do some additional cleanup without being sued for it. Still, they need funding, and that’s in short supply these days.
If you’d like to read more on it, check out this piece by Peter Butler. And you can check out past stories in the Land Desk for more information (links below, but they are behind the paywall). Better yet, go down to your local bookstore and buy River of Lost Souls.
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
An image of the Sharp Fire near Cahone, Colorado, from the Benchmark fire lookout. Source: Watch Duty.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Fire season is really heating up, along with the summer temperatures. The relatively dry spring was followed by higher than normal temperatures in July and zero to minimal precipitation in many places, turning low- and mid-elevation forests to kindling. Officials working the Leroux Fire west of Paonia said the relative humidity was just 2%, contributing to rapid fire growth.
The Leroux blaze was just one of many new starts on Colorado’s Western Slope over the last several days. The Sharp Canyon Fire north of Cahone, Colorado, grew rapidly to 400 acres on Monday, forcing evacuations, but it seems to have quieted down overnight. The Lee and Elk fires in Rio Blanco County blew up to 13,000 and 7,700 acres, respectively, over a couple of days. The Middle Mesa Fire east of Navajo Reservoir and just south of the Colorado-New Mexico line grew to 2,500 acres as of Monday night.
Meanwhile, the Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has lived up to its name, reaching 126,445 acres as of Tuesday morning with only 13% containment a month after it ignited.
The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings for parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, with extreme heat warnings in parts of Arizona and southern California. The mercury in Moab is expected to reach 100° F or more every day this week, and there’s no significant rainfall in sight.
…in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change. These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate. But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 1, 2025
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The monsoon is on its way, apparently, but seems to be delivering more lightning than rain to many areas that are grappling with wildfires. Meanwhile, the drought is intensifying and spreading in almost all parts of the West, especially in the deep Southwest.
Streamflows are dropping, too. The Animas River in Durango has fallen to about 200 cubic feet per second, and it’s only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexico’s, new surfing wave. The Rio Grande already dried up in Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago (but got a good boost from a thunderstorm early this morning). WyoFile reports that the Snake, Wind, and Bear Rivers are all at record low flows for this date, even though the snowpack was about average this winter.
And, of course, the wildfires continue to burn. The Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has burned through 112,000 acres so far, with only 9% containment. The Monroe Canyon Fire in southwestern Utah is at 55,642 acres with 7% containment, and is causing power outages in surrounding communities. The Turner Gulch Fire northeast of Gateway is still growing “due to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.” And the Elkhorn Fire north of Durango has settled down a bit at 317 acres, but officials worry forecasted hot and dry conditions could reawaken it.
Below are some satellite moisture index maps, with blue being moist and red indicating dryness. The top image shows Dove Creek and areas south of there. This was dryland farming country for many years (Pinto Bean Capital of the World), but irrigation from McPhee Reservoir on the Dolores River was later extended out to Dove Creek. Problem is, their water rights are junior to the farmers in the Montezuma Valley near Cortez, so when reservoir levels are low, they tend to get less irrigation water. Here you can see the difference between 2023 (on the left), when snow, river, and reservoir levels were high, and this year (right), when they are not. What stands out to me is that some fields are still being irrigated this year, despite the drought, as is indicated by the circles of bright blue. But there are more fallow fields now, and the areas around the fields are especially dry.
Here are two more images showing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farms south of Ute Mountain in 2023 compared to 2025. Again, some irrigation is still reaching the fields, but apparently far less, given the number of fields that are apparently fallow.
📈 Data Center Watch 📊
The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that I’ll be covering data centers and their economic and environmental ramifications a bit more frequently from here on out. Why? Because they currently are proliferating throughout the West: There are 93 data centers in the Phoenix area, 54 in the greater Denver area, and eight in Albuquerque, with many more on their way. And every one of them uses outsized quantities of electricity and water, straining power grids, and throwing utilities’ resource planning into disarray.
Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesn’t count Meta’s $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrass’s proposed facility that would pull 1,800 megawatts of electricity from new, dedicated natural gas plants and renewable power installations (presumably solar and wind). Down in Tucson, city officials are considering Amazon Web Services’ proposed Project Blue, a massive complex that is poised to consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year and become Tucson Electric Power’s largest single customer.
In Alaska, a company is looking to build a large data center and a dedicated natural gas plant that would run off of oilfield methane. Numerous data centers can be found along the banks of the Columbia River, drawn there in part by the relatively cheap and abundant hydropower. In Montana, a proposed data center would use all of the powergenerated by NorthWestern Energy’s existing resources. And Pacific Gas & Electric expects new data centers in Silicon Valley to drive a 10 GW increase in electricity demand over the next decade, which is about one-third of today’s forecast peak demand for California’s grid.
The biggest concern with these sprawling warehouses packed with processors is their power consumption. Each one can draw as much electricity as a small city — the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the state’s households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities weren’t expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now it’s hitting hard, and coinciding with increased demand from a growing number of electric vehicles and electrified homes, and utilities are scrambling to bring new power sources online to meet the projected demand growth. This includes geothermal, wind, and solar power — each with impacts of their own — but also new natural gas plants and even small nuclear reactors. Some utilities are cancelling plans to retire coal plants to keep enough generating capacity online.
In other words, the data center boom is likely to radically reshape the energy landscape of the West, and will spur more debates over the costs of this sort of economic development and the impacts our cyber-world has on the environment and humanity.
📈 Data Dump 📊
In some ways, I guess you could say that as alfalfa is to the Colorado River, data centers are to the Western power grid: they both suck up a lot of the resources. That doesn’t make them bad. Alfalfa mostly goes to dairy cows, which make cheese and ice cream and other really good things. Data centers power annoying AI art, sure, but they also make everything internet possible, including me sending this newsletter to you.
Anyway, it’s worth tracking both — alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So here’s a quick update on hay exports from the U.S. (which includes alfalfa and other hay), as well as a look at acreage planted in alfalfa (excl. other hay) over time. Exports seem to have peaked in 2022 and are now in decline. Nevertheless, sending alfalfa and other hay overseas is big business.
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
You might think that our federal agencies under Trump would be content to wreck the environment and trample civil liberties in a quiet, not-so-noticeable way. But no, of course not: They’re so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof — they are trolling us, in other words.
Above are just two recent examples. In the first one, the Department of Energy fawns over a sparkling chunk of coal. In the other, the Department of Homeland Security posts an 1872 painting by John Gast titled “American Progress.”
Both are gross in their own way.
What the hell kind of sexualization of coal — i.e. “She is the moment” — are they going for in that first one? Friggin’ perverts, if you ask me.
As for the second, it glorifies the crimes the American military and white colonial settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples in order to get more Lebensraum, one might say (it makes sense to use Hitler’s term given that he was inspired by the U.S.’s policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word “Heritage” in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but it’s also kind of weird to be talking about defending the “Homeland” against immigrants when, in the image, the immigrant invaders are the white settlers, and the folks trying to defend themselves and their homeland are the Indigenous people (and wildlife) fleeing from the settlers.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
I don’t want to leave y’all with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.
About 60% of Iowa’s power comes from wind. Farmers can earn extra cash by leasing small sections of farms for power production. Bill Clark/Getty Images
Drive through the plains of Iowa or Kansas and you’ll see more than rows of corn, wheat and soybeans. You’ll also see towering wind turbines spinning above fields and solar panels shining in the sun on barns and machine sheds.
For many farmers, these are lifelines. Renewable energy provides steady income and affordable power, helping farms stay viable when crop prices fall or drought strikes.
Wind energy is a significant economic driver in rural America. In Iowa, for example, over 60% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy in 2024, and the state is a hub for wind turbine manufacturing and maintenance jobs.
For landowners, wind turbines often mean stable lease payments. Those historically were around US$3,000 to $5,000 per turbine per year, with some modern agreements $5,000 to $10,000 annually, secured through 20- to 30-year contracts.
Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.
States throughout the Great Plains and Midwest, from Texas to Montana to Ohio, have the strongest onshore winds and onshore wind power potential. These are also in the heart of U.S. farm country. The map shows wind speeds at 100 meters (nearly 330 feet), about the height of a typical land-based wind turbine. NREL
These figures are backed by long-term contracts and multibillion‑dollar annual contributions, reinforcing the economic value that turbines bring to rural landowners and communities.
Wind farms also contribute to local tax revenues that help fund rural schools, roads and emergency services. In counties across Texas, wind energy has become one of the most significant contributors to local property tax bases, stabilizing community budgets and helping pay for public services as agricultural commodity revenues fluctuate.
In Oldham County in northwest Texas, for example, clean energy projects provided 22% of total county revenues in 2021. In several other rural counties, wind farms rank among the top 10 property taxpayers, contributing between 38% and 69% of tax revenue.
The construction and operation of these projects also bring local jobs in trucking, concrete work and electrical services, boosting small-town businesses.
A wind turbine technician stands on the nacelle, which houses the gear box and generator of a wind turbine, on the campus of Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, N.M., in 2024. Colleges in other states, including Texas, also developed training programs for technicians in recent years as jobs in the industry boomed. Andrew Marszal/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. wind industry supports over 300,000 U.S. jobs across construction, manufacturing, operations and other roles connected to the industry, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Solar energy is also boosting farm finances. Farmers use rooftop panels on barns and ground-mounted systems to power irrigation pumps, grain dryers and cold storage facilities, cutting their power costs.
Some farmers have adopted agrivoltaics – dual-use systems that grow crops beneath solar panels. The panels provide shade, helping conserve water, while creating a second income path. These projects often cultivate pollinator-friendly plants, vegetables such as lettuce and spinach, or even grasses for grazing sheep, making the land productive for both food and energy.
Federal grants and tax credits that were significantly expanded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped make the upfront costs of solar installations affordable.
However, the federal spending bill signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, rolled back many clean energy incentives. It phases down tax credits for distributed solar projects, particularly those under 1 megawatt, which include many farm‑scale installations, and sunsets them entirely by 2028. It also eliminates bonus credits that previously supported rural and low‑income areas.
Without these credits, the upfront cost of solar power could be out of reach for some farmers, leaving them paying higher energy costs. At a 2024 conference organized by the Institute of Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I work as a research economist, farmers emphasized the importance of tax credits and other economic incentives to offset the upfront cost of solar power systems.
What’s being lost
The cuts to federal incentives include terminating the Production Tax Credit for new projects placed in service after Dec. 31, 2027, unless construction begins by July 4, 2026, and is completed within a tight time frame. The tax credit pays eligible wind and solar facilities approximately 2.75 cents per kilowatt-hour over 10 years, effectively lowering the cost of renewable energy generation. Ending that tax credit will likely increase the cost of production, potentially leading to higher electricity prices for consumers and fewer new projects coming online.
The changes also accelerate the phase‑out of wind power tax credits. Projects must now begin construction by July 4, 2026, or be in service before the end of 2027 to qualify for any credit.
Meanwhile, the Investment Tax Credit, which covers 30% of installed cost for solar and other renewables, faces similar limits: Projects must begin by July 4, 2026, and be completed by the end of 2027 to claim the credits. The bill also cuts bonuses for domestic components and installations in rural or low‑income locations. These adjustments could slow new renewable energy development, particularly smaller projects that directly benefit rural communities.
While many existing clean energy agreements will remain in place for now, the rollback of federal incentives threatens future projects and could limit new income streams. It also affects manufacturing and jobs in those industries, which some rural communities rely on.
Renewable energy also powers rural economies
Renewable energy benefits entire communities, not just individual farmers.
Wind and solar projects contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue. For example, in Howard County, Iowa, wind turbines generated $2.7 million in property tax revenue in 2024, accounting for 14.5% of the county’s total budget and helping fund rural schools, public safety and road improvements.
In some rural counties, clean energy is the largest new source of economic activity, helping stabilize local economies otherwise reliant on agriculture’s unpredictable income streams. These projects also support rural manufacturing – such as Iowa turbine blade factories like TPI Composites, which just reopened its plant in Newton, and Siemens Gamesa in Fort Madison, which supply blades for GE and Siemens turbines. The tax benefits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped boost those industries – and the jobs and local tax revenue they bring in.
As rural America faces economic uncertainty and climate pressures, I believe homegrown renewable energy offers a practical path forward. Wind and solar aren’t just fueling the grid; they’re helping keep farms and rural towns alive.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots wesite (Allen Best):
July 16, 2025
Four electrical utilities that deliver electricity from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins have a common problem. All have rapidly expanding demand, and all, in turn, need to add new sources of generating capacity.
Can they save money by sharing electricity? Improved transmission would be crucial. The four power providers — Colorado Springs Utilities, CORE Electric Cooperative, Platte River Power Authority, and United Power — have agreed to explore potential synergies to achieve common purposes.
Together, the four utilities provide electricity to 1.5 million Coloradans, collectively putting them just behind the 1.6 million customers of Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electrical utility.
The utilities began talking about this last November, and they are just beginning the work of figuring out how they might collaborate.
“This is a positive first step in exploring alternative ways for our four utilities to support growth and resiliency across our service territories,” stated Pam Feuerstein, chief executive of CORE. “Additional transmission would enable CORE to continue providing affordable and reliable power to our members, now and into the future.”
One option might be to use existing rights of-way to erect upgraded transmission capacity, similar to going from a two-lane highway to a four-lane highway. In this case, the utilities might decide to create a 345 kV electron highway. That’s as large as they get in Colorado right now, except for a new 500 kV line that nicks the state’s corner northwest of Craig.
“There could be some commonality where CORE, for example, has a 115kV transmission line, that those rights of way could be used to develop a larger project,” said Feurstein. “It’s way too early to tell at this stage. This is really just the beginning of us exploring opportunities.
Also an option is to create expanded transmission bypassing metropolitan Denver, in more rural areas served by United Power and CORE.
The electrical utilities share common borders. The service territory of Colorado Springs Utilities, for example, comes close to that of CORE, which serves Castle Rock and Parker and other parts of rapidly growing Douglas and Arapahoe counties.
CORE’s expansive service territory — from 60 miles east of Denver to 65 miles west of Colorado Springs —has close proximity to Brighton-based United Power, which serves one of Colorado’s fastest growing areas along the I-76 and I-25 corridors north and east of Denver. United’s service territory extends to Longmont, one of the four municipal members of Platte River.
These four utilities are also defined by what they are not. Unlike Xcel, which provides power for much of metropolitan Denver, they report only to customers, not to private investors.
By banding together, they might be able to avoid charges for sharing electricity over the transmission lines owned by Xcel Energy or possibly Tri-State.
Congestion along the north-south lines has become a growing challenge that limits flexibility as the utilities try to meet rising demand while supporting Colorado’s ambitious carbon reduction goals.
The analogy again might be to Colorado’s north-south highways. If time is of the essence, you might want to avoid I-25 by taking an alternative route, including E-470. And in this case, an alternative might provide a way to avoid paying Xcel to use its lines.
But growth in demand undergirds the effort to achieve synergies.
“We expect our growth to continue, so addressing transmission congestion is critical,” said Mark A. Gabriel, chief executive of United Power. “United Power serves an area that is growing quickly, attracting large residential developments and new businesses alike. A more reliable transmission route would help to stabilize costs and increase reliability for current and future members in the cooperative’s service territory.”
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
CORE has more members, 170,000, but less demand.
Colorado Springs has 269,000 metered-customers in the city and in surrounding areas and has been growing at a rate of 1% to 2% in demand per year. Travas Deal, the chief executive of the city’s utilities, suggested that demand could grow much more rapidly from data centers and other businesses if the city had the electrical resources.
The city recently put out a request for proposals for 1,900 megawatts of new generating capacity. The door is open for wind, solar and natural gas and whatever else may come along. Some of that generating capacity might come from individual projects, but Deal says that the electrical generating capacity might be delivered at better prices with larger economies of scale. In other words, through shared demand.
“We understand the need, we understand the opportunities,” said Deal.
In a prepared statement, Jason Frisbie, chief executive of Platte River Power Authority, alluded to this shifted dynamic. “All options are on the table to help improve reliability and reduce costs, including opportunities to enhance transmission capabilities as we move into an organized market,” he said.
In a complementary move to help manage costs and maintain reliability, Colorado Springs Utilities, Platte River Power Authority and United Power will join the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional Transmission Organization on April 1, 2026. CORE is also evaluating market participation, including the SPP.
It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below ⤵️
Click the link to read the article on the ProPublica website by Abrahm Lustgarten
July 9, 2025
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?
Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.
Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.
We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.
The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.
There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.
What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
Sensitive satellite-based instruments enable scientists to measure relative variations of Earth’s gravitational field. Data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is used in a new study to show that many continental regions are experiencing long-term aridification. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research
The Rundown
President Trump’s budget bill targets a few water projects while eliminating some climate and environment programs.
Agencies move to constrain environmental reviews under NEPA.
EPA says it will loosen wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants later this summer.
GAO reviews NASA’s major projects, including the third generation of a water-tracking satellite.
EPA intends to take public comments on its idea to narrow state and tribal reviews under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
White House orders higher fees for foreign tourists visiting national parks.
And lastly, EPA’s internal watchdog notes the risks of rising seas to federally owned Superfund sites.
“If contaminants from federal facility Superfund sites are released into the surrounding communities, the health, jobs, and environment of millions of U.S. residents may be threatened. Further, the federal funds expended to implement those remedies would have been wasted.” – Report from the EPA Office of Inspector General that identifies 49 federally owned Superfund sites at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
By the Numbers
$658 Million: Expected baseline cost of the third generation of NASA’s satellite mission that measures changes in the planet’s water storage. The GRACE-C mission is scheduled for July 2029, according to a Government Accountability Office review of NASA’s major projects. Operating for more than two decades, the GRACE satellites have been instrumental in tracking global groundwater depletion.
News Briefs
NEPA Overhaul Cabinet and other agencies – including the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Army Corps of Engineers – announced they will revise their rules for environmental reviews of major projects and prioritize shorter and quicker assessments of potential harms.
The agencies are shortening the administrative timeline for implementing a new rule, arguing that the standard notice-and-comment process would be an unnecessary delay and “contrary to the public interest.”
The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House arm that traditionally oversees NEPA, revoked its regulations in April in response to an executive order promoting domestic energy production. The agencies, now seeking faster, more efficient reviews, are establishing their own rules.
Besides the arrival of the new administration, recent legal rulings have also rearranged the playing field for environmental reviews.
In justifying its action, each agency cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in May in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. That ruling, in a case which centered on a railroad line in Utah for crude oil, allowed for narrowly focused environmental reviews that assess only a specific project and not the actions – like upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining – it would enable.
Among the few call outs: The bill delivers $1 billion for surface water storage and water conveyance in the western United States. The money is for projects that increase or restore capacity of Bureau of Reclamation water conveyance systems or increase their use. Increasing reservoir storage capacity – such as raising Shasta Dam, a Republican-driven idea that’s been on the table for years – is also acceptable. The money is available through September 30, 2034.
More broadly, climate and environment programs were chopped. Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds – those not yet committed to a recipient – were yanked back for programs on climate data, environmental justice block grants, reducing air pollution at schools, and more.
National Parks Fees President Trump ordered the Interior Department to increase national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The additional revenue would be channeled to infrastructure improvements at the parks or to increase park access.
Still Storm Watching, For Now NOAA said it would delay by one month the termination of certain storm-tracking satellite data, the Associated Press reports.
Studies and Reports
Superfund Sites at Risk from Rising Seas The federal government owns 157 Superfund sites. Forty-nine of those sites are at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
The assessment comes from the EPA’s internal watchdog, which published the report to draw attention to federal liabilities related to climate change and the nation’s most toxic sites.
The at-risk Superfund sites are clustered at military sites around Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and San Francisco Bay.
Arizona Groundwater Assessment The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on water quality in the Coconino aquifer in northern Arizona, where it could be a water source for the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation.
On the Radar
Water Quality Permitting The EPA is considering a rulemaking that would narrow the scope of Clean Water Act reviews undertaken by states and tribes.
These Section 401 reviews have been a target of the Trump administration. Energy companies complain that states have used their review authority to block fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines.
Before the rulemaking, the EPA is asking for public input. The agency opened a docket for written submissions, and it will hold two online events at a time to be announced.
File written comments at www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0272. The deadline is August 6.
Another Slogan Commission Through an executive order, President Trump established the President’s Make America Beautiful Again Commission.
The commission’s objectives – “promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth; expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing; encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts; cut bureaucratic delays; and recover America’s fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts” – in some ways conflict with the administration’s desire to cut budgets and greenlight fossil fuel projects.
One of the commission’s charges is to recommend to the president “solutions to expand access to clean drinking water and restore aquatic ecosystems to improve water quality and availability.” Stay tuned.
Power Plant Wastewater Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said his agency later this summer will relax wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants that burn fossil fuel and nuclear fuel.
The Biden administration placed stricter limits on these wastewater discharges last year. In a press release, Zeldin said compliance deadlines would be extended. The agency will also reconsider technological requirements for preventing polluted discharges.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 3, 2025
Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.
Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.
On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.
“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”
The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.
“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.
“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”
Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.
The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.
“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.
“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”
Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.
“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.
“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”
Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.
“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”
Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.
The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.
Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.
Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.
The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.
A serious mess, also known as the NE Hogback #53 well and associated infrastructure. Chuza, the most recent owner of the site in the Horseshoe Gallup oil field in northwestern New Mexico, went bankrupt. That left New Mexico and federal taxpayers holding the cleanup bill. The site has been partially reclaimed, but only partially. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A new report on New Mexico’s abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells presents an alarming and expensive scenario for the state. It reveals that while the industry generates a lot of revenue for the state, cleaning up its mess is also poised to cost state and federal taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. No, this report was not put out by an environmental or progressive advocates, but by the state’s legislative finance committee.
New Mexico has been an oil and gas hotspot for more than a century, during which drillers have sunk at least 121,000 wells, mostly in the San Juan and Permian basins in the northwest and southeast portions of the state. Newly drilled wells typically kick out a large volume of oil and/or gas during the first months after drilling, generating a lot of cash for their operators and for state coffers, and helping to push production numbers for the state through the roof.
Decline curve generated by decline curve analysis software, utilized in petroleum economics to indicate the depletion of oil & gas in a petroleum reservoir. By Richard Banks – Sent to me personally, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33914059
But the wells are soon afflicted with what’s known as the decline curve, meaning that the longer they pump, the less they pump. You know, it’s kind of like aging in people. Eventually, aging will render all oil and gas wells into low-producing stripper wells (I’m not sure how this analogy extends to the human realm, but hey …) that kick out less than 10 barrels of oil per day. Thousands of New Mexico wells are extreme strippers, producing one barrel or less daily. Yet they continue to spew methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds at the same as or an even higher rate than their younger, more vital counterparts.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, the operators of stripper wells are likely to be smaller, less financially secure companies, and it’s easier and cheaper for them to keep the wells in a nearly inactive state — during which the wells continue to ooze pollutants into the air and groundwater — than to decommission, plug, and reclaim them. It may make economic sense to abandon these wells, or for the companies to cease to exist and “orphan” the wells, leaving them to the state or federal taxpayers to clean up, since reclamation bonds are woefully inadequate. And, finally, these wells generate almost nothing in production taxes, meaning that they aren’t contributing much to the state’s conservation fund, a portion of which is used to clean up abandoned and orphaned wells.
The near constant drone of drilling for over a century has resulted in a near-constant addition of low- to non-producing wells to New Mexico’s rosters. While responsible and financially solvent companies plug and reclaim their own wells, many smaller operators simply walk away.
New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division is currently responsible for plugging close to 1,000 abandoned and orphaned wells, including 700 on state or private land, and for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sites (such as leaky tank batteries).
Detail of interactive map showing orphaned, inactive, and low-producing wells on state and private land in the San Juan Basin (this leaves out hundreds of additional such wells on federal lands).
At recent rates, plugging them will take close to a decade, not including remediation/reclamation. OCD is also responsible for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sties. In total, plugging, remediation, and reclamation of all currently orphaned wells and infrastructure on state and private land is estimated to cost a minimum of $208 million, and likely more. And that’s just for now.
The report goes on to say: “… in addition to wells the state already has legal authority to plug, thousands of inactive and low-producing wells are at risk of being orphaned, potentially increasing the state’s liability by many orders of magnitude.” There are about 1,400 inactive at high risk of being orphaned on state and private land, according to the OCD. And there are thousands more that are extremely low-producing wells — putting out less than one barrel of oil equivalent per day — for which the “expected cost of cleanup far exceeds predicted future revenues, increasing their risk of being orphaned.”
And the kicker: “Altogether, the state’s current and near-future liability for well plugging and site remediation is estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.”
More data from the report:
38,817 Number of stripper wells, meaning they produce less than 10 barrels of oil-equivalent daily, in New Mexico, making up about 64% of the state’s active wells. This number will continue to increase.
$100,000 Average cost to plug single oil and gas well.
450% Percent the average state-contracted cost to plug an oil and gas well in New Mexico has increased since 2019.
$250,000 Maximum amount of financial assurance an operator in New Mexico must post to cover the costs of plugging and reclaiming its wells. This cap applies whether the operator has five wells or 500 wells, meaning it actually provides almost no financial assurance whatsoever.
$46.4 million Amount spent by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug and reclaim 360 wells and associated infrastructure between 2019 and 2024.
9% Percent by which the cost of plugging a gas well exceeds that of an oil well. Most of the wells in the San Juan Basin are gas wells.
$208 million Estimated cost to New Mexico to plug, remediate, and reclaim all existing orphaned and abandoned wells and infrastructure on state and private land.
$5.6 million Amount in financial assurance associated with orphaned wells or their operators, meaning most of the costs will be shouldered by the taxpayers — either via the state reclamation fund or federal grants.
$66.7 million April 2025 balance of New Mexico’s oil and gas reclamation fund (which is funded by a portion of conservation tax revenues).
$6 million Tax revenue New Mexico’s 3,024 wells producing less than 1BOE/day would generate with the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $70/barrel (it’s currently lower than that). Plugging and reclaiming those same wells would cost an estimated $531 million to $885 million. “The vast majority of the wells—87%—are owned by private companies whose financial health is difficult for regulators to assess.”
$1.6 million Amount New Mexico paid in 2024 to plug six of Ridgeway Arizona’s wells under a 2023 settlement agreement with the company. Under the agreement, the state pays to plug 299 of the company’s wells, and the company reimburses the state $2 for each barrel of oil it sells, with a minimum payment of $30k per month. But at current rates, the total cost to plug the remaining wells could be $60 million or more, meaning it would take the company as long as 170 years to pay it off.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
By now you’ve probably heard that Sen. Mike Lee pulled his public land sell-off provision from the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed following intense backlash. And perhaps you’re planning on celebrating the salvation of America’s public lands on July 4.
There’s so much BS in Lee’s statement. How, for example, does selling public land to developers keep it from being ruined for the next generation? It doesn’t, it just locks up that land for every generation except those that can afford to buy a house in the new subdivision that would go there. Public land is not “locked away from the people who live there.” But it would be locked away if it was privatized. And while there is no property tax on public lands, there are federal payments in lieu of taxes, or PILT, which a county can use to fund schools and search and rescue operations. Plus, public lands generate billions in revenue for gateway communities through public land users’ sales and lodgers taxes and local spending.
Well, I hate to be Mr. Buzzkill, but while this victory may be sweet, it does little to offset the bitterness brought by continuing attacks on public lands, along with democracy, morality, decency, and, well, America, itself, this Independence Day week.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” perpetuates and amplifies the massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income and working-class Americans to the richest 10%. It will slash Medicaid and other vital programs Americans have paid into and rely upon, while also dismantling tribal sovereignty. And yet, it will also drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars due to additional spending on the military industrial complex, which is reaching its tentacles further into immigration enforcement, wildlife blocking border walls, deportations, and $450-million-per-year concentration camps. With Trump threatening to revoke citizenship from U.S.-born citizens whom he considers threats (e.g. Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk), those camps may end up housing his political opponents. I really hate to make this comparison, but that is some severe Nazi-esque nastiness.
The Senate’s bill gives more handouts to the oil and gas and coal industries, while revoking tax credits for wind and solar power, which could kill those industries when they are needed most.
And yes, some of you may cheer a weaker renewable-energy industry, since it will mean fewer utility-scale installations blanketing the desert. I get that. But it will also hurt rooftop solar and larger installations on big box stores, over parking lots, or in fallow agricultural land, brownfields or other appropriate sites. A western Colorado farmer’s plan to install solar panels to generate electricity and shade his crops, for example, is imperiled by the GOP’s plans.
This at a time when strain on the power grid is exponentially increasing due to the outsized demand of more and more AI-powering, hyperscale data centers. That power will come from somewhere, and if it’s not solar or wind or batteries, then it’s likely to be from pollution-intensive coal and natural gas (mined and drilled from public lands), fish-killing hydropower, or new nuclear reactors (that will require uranium mined from public lands).
And keep in mind, oil and gas leasing and mining claims represent a sort of quasi-privatization of public lands. Sure, the government retains title to the land, but the corporations get access to the minerals within, can rip the land apart to get to them, and can cut off public access with the necessary permits. With its accelerated 14-day “energy emergency” permitting process, the Trump administration is making it a heck of a lot easier for corporations to mine, drill, and otherwise develop public lands, sans public input. The latest beneficiaries include:
NorthWestern Energy, which was given the Bureau of Land Management green light to build a 74-mile natural gas pipeline between Helena and Three Forks, Montana.
Ormat got the BLM go-ahead to move forward on three separate geothermal projects in Nevada: • Exploration work at the Diamond Flat project near Fallon; • Upgrades at the McGinness Hills project in Lander County; • Exploration drilling at the Pinto Geothermal Project near Denio.
I’m not suggesting that these are horrible projects that shouldn’t have been approved. Geothermal holds a lot of potential as a relatively clean, round-the-clock baseline power source, and these are merely upgrades and exploration, not full on developments. Still, geothermal development and even exploration have impacts and can affect groundwater aquifers, springs, and wetlands. Land agencies should have as much time as it takes to adequately analyze potential effects, and tribal nations should be consulted and have time to do their own analysis. And if it’s happening on public lands, then the public deserves to know about it and have an opportunity to weigh in. None of that is possible under this 14-day permitting process.
So, yeah, happy Fourth of July, y’all and welcome to the Divided States of Project 2025. And on that note, the Land Desk will be taking the rest of the week off.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Just getting into the ol’ July Fourth spirit with this picture of Raymond “Squeek” Hunt’s signs near his mutton meat slaughterhouse and shop in Waterflow, New Mexico. I mean, it does have an American flag in it, after all.
Solar panels San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 3, 2025
Not much to like in this bill. But then, it’s only half-time. How hard will key Republicans in Senate push back?
Higher electricity rates? In Colorado as elsewhere, that’s the given if the U.S. Senate adopts the recent budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives that would end a whole host of federal tax credits.
Tax credits shorn by the bill include those now available to consumer who purchase electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
How exactly will that impact Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy? In the short term, the legislation adds uncertainty as the electric cooperative works to move from 80% emission-free energy in 2025 to its goal of 100% in the next five years. It serves the Aspen- and Vail-dominated resorts valleys.
Brighton-based United Power has a different problem posed by the sharp-elbowed bill if it remains intact after review by the U.S. Senate. An electrical cooperative also, United serves one of Colorado’s fastest growing areas for population growth, but the electrical demand from new homes is dwarfed by that from new industrial and commercial development.
By a one-vote margin, the House approved the sweeping tax and spending bill on May 22. In addition to other sweeping provisions, the bill largely guts incentives created by Congress in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act to advance clean energy and storage. The IRA is widely regarded as the most significant climate change legislation ever adopted in the United States.
Supporters of the controversial bill included two Republicans from swing districts in Colorado, Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction. Two Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted against the bill. Another two Republicans did not vote and one merely registered presence.
Evans and Hurd were among 21 House Republicans who signed a letter in March that calls for preserving energy tax credits as necessary to “increase domestic manufacturing, promote energy innovation and keep utility costs down.” Hurd, but not Evans, was among 26 who signed a May letter calling for preservation of tax credits necessary to accelerate deployment of next-generation nuclear power technologies.
After the vote, Evans posted a press release that said the bill “eliminates Green New Deal-style giveaways.”
Two days before the vote, President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to inform on-the-fence representatives that they could face primary opposition if they voted against what the president had called his “one big beautiful bill.” Big Pivots requested comment of both Evans and Hurd but without response.
he Senate, where Republicans hold a three-vote advantage, may act on the budget bill as early as July. However, the Washington Post on Monday noted that four Republicans senators in April sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioning against “the full-scale repeal of current credits.”
“We just hit half-time. We’re still very much in the middle of this game,” said Harry Godfrey, who manages federal priorities for Advanced Energy United, a national industry association that monitors Colorado and 16 other states.
Differences would be negotiated by a conference committee before being returned to the two chambers for review.
“They really went after just about everything that they could in the realm of clean energy and electric vehicles,” said Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office.
“I would certainly hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the Senate,” Toor added. “The benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are widespread, not just for clean energy but for consumers and for jobs, especially in red states and districts. We’re hopeful that the Senate will reject this incredibly unwise bill that was adopted by the House of Representatives.”
Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, had described the bill as being “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer” approach to the IRA. Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, called it a “sledgehammer masquerading as a scalpel.”
The IRA along with the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have produced a proliferation of announcements about expanding battery production and other business ventures along the Front Range.
For example, Louisville-based Solid Power is developing next-generation solid-state batteries and has agreements with EV manufacturers Ford and BMW. The company’s business model assumes continued rapid expansion of the market for EVs. See October 2024 story.
Wind turbines near Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Employment at the Vestas factories in Brighton and Windsor may suffer if clean energy incentives get gutted. The manufacturer of blades and nacelles for wind turbines invested $40 million at its plants. In the last year it hired 700 people in anticipation of orders for 1,000 turbines during 2025. Orders for wind turbines would be impacted by loss of the manufacturing production tax credit, according to Advanced Energy United.
At Namaste Solar, chief executive Jason Sharpe said he is unsure whether to plan for expansion or constriction.
“As a business owner, how do you plan a business with this amount of uncertainty, trying to thread the needle between coping with political change and not creating panic among my employees? It’s challenging,” he said.
Namaste sees the bill having a target on residential solar because it would eliminate tax credits that homeowners can apply for directly.
The bill also has a provision that would disrupt the transfer of tax credits, harming existing renewable energy and storage projects and making funding more difficult for other, less proven technologies.
“If Xcel Energy, for example, builds a large solar project, they might not have enough tax obligation to fully utilize the tax credit. So, they could sell that, or transfer it, to other investors to monetize the tax credit.”
Advanced Energy United’s Godfrey says that a conventional big bank will be more risk adverse, but the transferrable tax credit enlarges the pool of potential investors. As such, this sweetener, as the Economist describes it, will also be lost for nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage, technologies currently absent in Colorado but which remain theoretically possible. The State Land Board has leased subterranean rights to several parcels for carbon capture.
As for Colorado’s solar sector Sharpe says Namaste will survive if the bill becomes law but with fewer employees. Now 20 years old, the company has 200 employees “We will have a smaller market but not a zero market,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet met last week with Sharpe as well as representatives of Vestas, electrical utilities, and others to hear how they saw the proposed shift in tax incentives impacting them.
“This casts a broad shadow on lots of the progress that the state has made in terms of power supply,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power, in a later interview. The bill as written, if it becomes law, will impact “virtually all of our members and virtually all of Colorado.”
Project developers will find it more difficult to get financing, said Gabriel. Those projects that do go forward will cost more.
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
“I am a practical businessman. I don’t have dreadlocks. I don’t wear Birkenstocks. This is not a crusade,” said Gabriel.
Resource adequacy and reliability lie at the heart of Gabriel’s concerns. Colorado has plans to close all of its coal plants in the next six years. Coal has become expensive when compared to renewables. Most Colorado utilities plan major investments in natural gas plants, and United Power has one nearing completion about 40 miles northeast of Denver.
United also plans new renewable generation and battery storage in what Gabriel calls a hyper-localization strategy. Cheap renewables from other states and time zones could be part of the long-term strategy, but getting new transmission built remains a daunting, long-term challenge.
“Replacing base-load generation takes time,” said Gabriel. “The transmission is not coming over the hill to save us between now and 2030. What resources can we install in a relatively expeditious manner? They tend to be solar and storage and some gas.”
Perversely, the higher cost of electricity would also add to the cost of production of oil and gas in Colorado. Chevron, said Gabriel, has reported plans to drill 262 wells north of Denver in the Wattenberg Field, some of which is served by United.
“If you think about it, oil and gas is moving to electrify many of their fields. Certainly, the folks in the mid-stream arena are under certain requirements of the state,” Gabriel observed.
Xcel Energy CEO Robert Kenney was also at the meeting. He told Bennet that the existing tax credits will help Xcel reach its goals for emissions reduction while simultaneously reducing the cost of projects, all while keeping customers’ bills well below the national average.
In a filing with state regulators in October, Xcel said it needs 700 megawatts of new generating capacity, about two-thirds of it for a wave of new and large data centers.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado’s second largest electrical wholesaler, said that the House version presents challenges to meeting its priorities of maintaining reliable and affordable energy for rural communities.
Residents of Castle Rock and other communities served by CORE Electrical Cooperative could also expect higher electricity prices. The utility, Colorado’s largest in terms of members, has entered into contracts for renewable and battery projects. Any reduction of the tax credits will result in increased costs to CORE’s members,” said the utility in a statement. “These tax credits are critical to keeping costs, and therefore rates, stable for our members.”
Holy Cross Energy has no large data centers on its horizon and serves only a few gas wells in the Western Colorado’s Piceance Basin. Growth in electrical demand from the Aspen and Vail-dominated resort valleys has been modest. It has a different challenge. It wants to erase all emissions from its electrical generation by 2030.
Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive, said six years ago that achieving 85% to 90% emissions-free energy would be the easier task. Holy Cross is close to complete. For 2025, the utility expects to surpass 80% emissions-free energy. That compares to 50% in 2022. Last October and again in April, it surpassed 90% emissions-free electricity.
Holy Cross did this while maintaining some of Colorado’s lower electrical rates.
Now, the utility has started work on that last 10% to 15%. After securing large amounts of wind and solar energy from Colorado’s eastern plains, Holy Cross now is focused on adding local resources with greater flexibility and in precise locations within its service territory or base-load generation that can be relied upon when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Geothermal is one of the options.
A program called Power+FLEX encourages Holy Cross members to install batteries that can benefit the homes and businesses where they are located but in a way that Holy Cross can draw upon them when needed to support the local power grid. Roughly 850 batteries have been installed as part of the program with a combined capacity for 4.25 megawatts.
The batteries are financed through a combination of upfront rebates, low-interest financing by the utility, the federal investment tax credit and the direct pay provisions in the current tax code. These provisions allow Holy Cross to subtract the value of the tax credit from the amount financed. Loss of the tax credit will make the batteries more expensive, dampening future demand.
Bryan Hannegan has been leading Holy Cross Energy in a quest to mostly end emissions in generation of electricity nad, possibly, become a model for larger utilities. Photo/Allen Best
On May 22, the same day the House passed its bill, Holy Cross issued a request for proposals for solar combined with battery storage and other technology that may allow it to produce 90% clean energy consistently in coming years.
“These resources are different from what they were in the past: much more flexibility, much more localized, even specific locations. That reflects the success of the energy transition so far. To go further, we will need different things than what we have had in the past,” said Hannegan.
How might the bids — which are due by the end of June — impact Holy Cross’s plans? The uncertainty about federal law will introduce a large amount of uncertainty, said Hannegan.
“These tax changes will be far reaching throughout the entire energy system, and without some clarity, it is hard to say what those impacts will be,” he said. “But if you increase the cost of something, people tend to reduce their consumption of it.”
In other words, if solar and energy storage become more expensive because tax credits go away, the costs to utilities will increase.
Wouldn’t it be fair for the renewable sector to stand on its own now? Prices for first wind and then solar have dropped with jaw-dropping speed during the last decades with energy storage now echoing their successes.
Namaste’s Sharpe says that time is approaching but has not yet arrived.
“I think we are getting close, and I do look forward to that day,” he said, while noting that the fossil fuel industries had what he called a 200-year head start in their subsidies.
Solar, he said, has become the lowest cost resource and the fastest dispatching. But it does have a vulnerability, as does wind: variability.
“The problem with high-penetration renewables is that variability,” said Sharpe. “That is the last hurdle.”
Colorado — and the world, actually — are on the “cusp of what we need to get over that hurdle,” said Sharpe, as we work on new storage technologies such as the Form Energy iron-air project in Pueblo. For that, innovation — which has started coming in great spurts, particularly by companies along the Front Range — must continue, and that innovation has been driven by the favorable tax credits.
“It’s wrong to abruptly end incentives at a time when we are on the cusp of innovation that will solve this problem,” he said.
On Tuesday, February 25th, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, delivered the Schultz Lecture, offering a sobering analysis of the structural, legal, economic, and political hurdles to the energy transition on public lands. His talk, “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now,” constituted a tribute to the late Charles Wilkinson’s coined phrase. Harkening back to Wilkinson’s work, Beaudreau traced these contemporary challenges to the legacy of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement, illustrating how outdated laws and entrenched interests continue to shape today’s energy policies.
American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. By John Gast – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID 09855.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=373152
Beaudreau framed public lands as a political flashpoint in the energy transition. While state and private lands—particularly in North Dakota and the Southwest—have played significant roles in the oil and gas boom, debates over renewables, permitting, and leasing disproportionately focus on federal lands. Ironically, legal tools once used to block fossil fuel projects are now being turned against renewables, complicating efforts to decarbonize.
Beyond regulatory hurdles, fossil fuel revenues remain deeply embedded in state economies, funding schools, public safety, and infrastructure. Many Tribal nations, too, rely on fossil fuel revenues, balancing economic interests with environmental concerns. Beaudreau stressed that a “just transition” must provide financial alternatives before communities can fully embrace renewables.
Outdated laws, like the 1872 Mining Law, remain a major obstacle to energy reform. Beaudreau highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a key step in shifting energy policy, but legal battles persist over leasing rights, mineral access, and state-federal control. He pointed to Louisiana’s lawsuit over the Biden administration’s oil and gas lease moratorium, which raised critical questions about governmental statutory and commercial contractual rights in energy development.
Economic arguments also dominate the debate. Critics claim renewables are too costly for federal subsidies, mirroring past fights over offshore oil incentives. Meanwhile, global competition—especially China’s control of solar panel and battery supply chains—adds geopolitical complexity to the transition.
Despite these challenges, Beaudreau offered a measured note of optimism. He pointed to Western landowners and ranchers, historically conservation advocates, as potential allies in sustainable land management. Their interest in wildlife migration corridors and outdoor access could foster new conservation coalitions.
Ultimately, Beaudreau underscored that energy transition requires modernizing laws, addressing economic realities, and building broad political consensus. As attendees left Wittemyer Courtroom, they carried with them a clear message: the road ahead is uncertain, but public lands remain central to shaping America’s energy future and, as Wilkinson’s “lords of yesterday” remain, the imperatives of change have arrived.
The recording of the 16th annual Schultz Lecture can be found here.
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
From email from the Getches-Wilkinson Center (Annie Carlozzi):
Thank you for joining the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Center of the American West for the Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25th! We are so grateful to Tommy Beaudreau for making time in his schedule to spend lunch with our law students and the evening with all of our attendees in person and online.
We have a few things to share with you:
Conference Photos
Barb Colombo of 11:11 Productions Photography has provided us with wonderful images of the lecture with Tommy Beaudreau. We’ve added them to a Flickr album for easy viewing here.
Conference Recordings
The Law School IT Team has released the recording from the lecture.
GWC Blog Current Colorado Law students Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly shared their reflections on Tommy Beaudreau’s visit to the Colorado Law School on the GWC blog. You can read their piece here.
Upcoming Event
We hope you will consider joining us for the annual Colorado River Conference co-convened by GWC and the Water & Tribes Initiative. You can find more information on our website regarding this year’s theme: Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads.
On March 13, 2025 Gabe Evans visited a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle. Photo courtesy of Rep. Gabe Evans
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 21, 2025
Colorado sends four Democrats and four Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Of them, Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, and Gabe Evans, a Republican from Fort Lupton, will be the most interesting to watch during the next two years.
These two representatives, both new to Congress in January, were among 21 Republican signatories in the House to a letter calling for restraint in efforts to gut the Inflation Reduction Act.
The letter expresses concern about “disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.” The New York Times and Utility Dive both interpreted the language as a reference to the IRA, the landmark climate legislation adopted in August 2022. President Donald Trump, the Times notes, often talks about repealing the law.
Atlas Public Policy, a research firm, reported in February that 80% of funds authorized by the law have gone to Congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Hurd, an attorney who formerly was chief counsel for the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, essentially replaced Lauren Boebert in the Third Congressional District. Boebert was almost certainly headed for defeat had she tried to run against Aspen’s Adam Frisch a second time in the Western Slope-dominated and Republican-leaning district after squeaking out just 50.6% of votes in the strongly Republican-leaning district. With a new home in Windsor, she easily won election in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District.
While Boebert inevitably echoes Trump, Hurd signaled his measured distance from MAGA hat-wearing positions when he criticized Trump’s blanket pardon of rioters who had invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. At the same time, his bill, Productive Public Lands Act, rhymes with Trump’s drill-baby-drill slogan. Never mind that the United States has already been setting records for oil and gas extraction.
As long as he can survive Republican primaries. Hurd can probably return to Washington for a good many terms. His drill bill is likely part of that political dance.
Evans has a more tricky path to negotiate. He narrowly beat the incumbent Democrat, Yadira Caraveo, in the Eighth Congressional District. The district extends from the edge of Denver to the farm country of northern Colorado. Although a former police officer in Arvada, he nonetheless refrained from criticizing Trump’s pardons of the rioters, as Denver TV newscaster Kyle Clark pointed out.
Most of Weld County lies in his district. The county delivers 82% of Colorado’s crude oil and 56% of its natural gas extraction. The district also has the Vestas factory in Brighton that produces nacelles for wind turbines. Vestas has 1,800 employees in Colorado between that factory and another in Windsor. Evans’ district also has many solar energy installations.
On March 13, Evans visited the Vestas factory, a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle, and an oil installation. Bayswater, operator of the latter, proclaims itself a producer of “some of the cleanest energy molecules in the country and world.”
Invited to tag along, Channel 4 gave Evans the time to say that he favored an “all-of-the-above safe, affordable, secure energy supply to bring costs down to consumers and jobs back to the United States.”
That “all-of-the-above energy approach” was a key element of the letter signed by Evans and Hurd. Combined with a robust advanced manufacturing sector, the approach “will support the United States’ position as a global energy leader,” the letter said. “Both our constituencies and the energy industry alike remain concerned about disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.”
Tax credits adopted over the last decade “allowed energy developers to plan with these tax incentives in mind. These timelines have been relied upon when it comes to capital allocation, planning, and project commitments, all of which would be jeopardized by premature credit phase outs or additional restrictive mechanisms such as limiting transferability.”
The Evans all-of-the-above tour was arranged by a former Republican state senator, Greg Brophy. Brophy grows watermelons north of Wray and operates an organization called The Western Way. Brophy has been a strong supporter of renewable energy for eastern Colorado and also has a presence on the Western Slope.
Brophy told me that he has organized a similar tour for another member of Congress from Colorado, but it has not been scheduled. He declined to identify the representative.
What if Trump succeeds in rolling back the federal energy tax credits? Energy Innovation, a think tank, estimates increased average household energy costs in Colorado of $180 per year by 2030.
Will other Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation join Evans and Hurd? After all, renewable energy didn’t start out as a partisan issue.
Colorado’s energy industry has had a slightly rougher go of it, mainly because it specializes in natural gas, not crude oil, and methane prices have been low since the 2009 crash. Note to Jeff Hurd: Revenues were substantially higher under Biden than under Trump I. Just sayin’. Source: ONRR via The Land Desk/Jonathan P. Thompson
The construction project to build the Kayenta solar farms on the Navajo Nation, shown here in 2018, employed hundreds of people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Navajo citizens. Renewable energy is drawing increasing attention from tribes and others as a way to build jobs for the future. (Photo from the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority / Navajo Nation)
The Getches-Wilkinson Center and Center of the American West will co-host the 16th Annual Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25, 2025 with special guest, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 6:00-7:30 p.m. (Mountain Time) Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom
A reception will be held immediately following the lecture for all in person registrants.
Two general CLE credits have been approved for Colorado attorneys.
“The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now”
Beaudreau will discuss the structural, legal, and political challenges to energy transition on public lands. He will provide an exploration of the contemporary problems that must be solved for bringing public lands to bear in energy transition efforts, and how the roots of those issues rest in the legacy of American westward expansion and the displacement of Native people.
Student Lunch and Learns Tues, February 25, 2025 at the Center of the American West Wed, February 26, 2025 in Room 207 in Wolf Law
GWC and CWA respectively, will host a lunch and learn for students, where Tommy Beaudreau will share his professional experiences and offered advice and guidance to students and engage in a Q&A session.
Tommy Beaudreau
Tommy Beaudreau is co-chair of WilmerHale’s Energy, Environment and Natural Resources and Native American Law Practices. Mr. Beaudreau focuses his practice on a broad range of areas including conventional and renewable energy and large-scale infrastructure projects; environmental regulatory, litigation and enforcement matters; crisis management and response; and Tribal matters. In addition, Mr. Beaudreau leads internal investigations and responses to government investigations and congressional oversight.
Mr. Beaudreau served in senior leadership roles in the United States Department of the Interior for nearly a decade across two administrations. Most recently, he served as the Deputy Secretary of the Interior after being confirmed by the US Senate in June 2021 by a vote of 88-9, reflecting his strong reputation as a bi-partisan problem solver. In this role, Mr. Beaudreau was point on the most pressing and high-profile matters before the Department, including energy development on public lands and waters, water infrastructure and delivery to address sustained drought in the American west, infrastructure permitting and critical minerals development, implementation of the historic investments through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, and a broad range of priorities relative to Indian Country.
Mr. Beaudreau previously served for nearly seven years at the Department of the Interior (DOI) during the Obama Administration, including as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, and chief of staff for the Interior Department.
He is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The Schultz Lectureship in Energy
In 2007, the Schultz Lecture in Energy was launched to support an annual lecture by renowned scholars in energy or natural resources law. This series was made possible by the generosity of John H. and Cynthia H. Schultz and allows the Getches-Wilkinson Center (GWC) to bring in thought leaders from across the country. Our speakers address emerging issues and challenges in the oil and gas, energy, and natural resources fields, providing valuable information to policymakers, practitioners, business executives, students, and the academic community.
John Schultz (CU Econ, Political. Science ‘51) (CU Law ‘53) was an oil and gas attorney whose impactful career in Colorado and the Western U.S. spanned the second half of the 20th century. John Schultz passed away on April 5, 2020, surrounded by family in the comfort of his own home in Lafayette, Colorado. Cynthia Schultz was a University of Colorado administrative staff member who served the University in many ways. She was a member of the Graduate School Advisory Council, the Graduate School Resource Committee, and on the Ad Hoc Task Force on Graduate Education. Cynthia passed away on December 20, 2011. Both John’s and Cynthia’s generosity of time with our students was exceptional.
Their legacies continue, in part, through their substantial gifts to the University of Colorado, Colorado Law, and to the GWC where we are so appreciative of the Schultz family’s generosity. The family’s continued commitment means that this lecture can be free and open to the public. The format (normally) includes a public reception following the talk, providing the opportunity to continue a lively discussion, as well as a dinner with the speaker, the extended Schultz family, the Dean, GWC faculty, and several law students.
January 2025 – Surface air temperature and sea surface temperature highlights
Global Temperatures
January 2025 was the warmest January globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.23°C, 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average for January.
January 2025 was 1.75°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 18th month in the last nineteen months for which the global-average surface air temperature was more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.
The last 12-monthsperiod (February 2024 – January 2025) was 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average, and 1.61°C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level.
*Datasets other than ERA5 may not confirm the 18 months above 1.5°C highlighted here, due to the relatively small margins above 1.5°C of ERA5 global temperatures observed for several months and differences among the various datasets.
Europe and other regions
The average temperature over European land for January 2025 was 1.80°C, 2.51°C above the 1991-2020 average for January, the second warmest after January 2020, which was 2.64°C above average.
European temperatures were most above the 1991-2020 average over southern and eastern Europe, including western Russia. In contrast, they were below average over Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northern France, and northern Fennoscandia.
Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over northeast and northwest Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. They were also above average over southern South America, Africa, and much of Australia and Antarctica.
Temperatures were most notably below average over the United States and the easternmost regions of Russia, Chukotka and Kamchatka. The Arabian Peninsula and mainland Southeast Asia also had below-average temperatures.
Sea surface temperature
The average sea surface temperature (SST) for January 2025 over 60°S–60°N was 20.78°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, 0.19°C below the January 2024 record.
SSTs were below average over the central equatorial Pacific, but close to or above average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, suggesting a slowing or stalling of the move towards La Niña conditions. SSTs remained unusually high in many other ocean basins and seas.
Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to January 2025, plotted as time series for each year. 2025 is shown with a thick red line, 2024 with a thick orange line, 2023 with a thick yellow line, and all other years with thin grey lines. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service /ECMWF.
According to Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF:
“January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and their temporary cooling effect on global temperatures. Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.”
January 2025 – Hydrological highlights
January 2025 saw predominantly wetter-than-average conditions over regions of western Europe, as well as parts of Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries; heavy precipitation led to flooding in some regions.
Conversely, drier than average conditions established in northern UK and Ireland, eastern Spain, and north of the Black Sea.
Beyond Europe, it was wetter than average in Alaska, Canada, central and eastern Russia, eastern Australia, south-eastern Africa, southern Brazil, with regions experiencing floods and associated damage.
Drier than average conditions established in southwestern United States and northern Mexico, northern Africa, the Middle East, across Central Asia and in eastern China as well as in much of southern Africa, southern South America and Australia.
January 2025 – Sea Ice highlights
Arctic sea ice reached its lowest monthly extent for January, at 6% below average, virtually tied with January 2018.
In the Arctic region, sea ice concentration anomalies were well below average in the eastern Canadian sector, including Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea, and in the northern Barents Sea.
Antarctic sea ice extent was 5% below average and thus relatively close to average compared to other recent years. This contrasts with the record or near-record values observed in 2023–2024.
In the Antarctic region, sea ice concentrations were above average in the Amundsen Sea and generally mixed in other ocean sectors.
More information about climate variables in January and climate updates of previous months as well as high-resolution graphics can be downloaded here.
Other useful links:
Answers to frequently asked questions regarding temperature monitoring can be found here.
Follow near-real-time data for the globe on Climate Pulse here.
More on trends and projections on Climate Atlas here.
Change is the only constant, all around us at all times. In our natural, human, and political systems, the pace of change feels particularly intense right now. How will we participate in this change, appropriate to its scope and scale, to shape or be shaped by it?
For the past several years, the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance has focused on three broad “avenues” (or approaches) for local solutions regarding rural climate action. In each of these, the new federal administration and shift in Congress could impede or derail progress already made and potentially into the future.
Avenues for climate action that the CO Farm & Food Alliance has focused on are (1) meeting landscape-level conservation goals to secure water supplies and boost ecological and climate resilience; (2) producing more locally generated and community-centered clean energy; and (3) helping small-acreage agricultural producers benefit from and support the shift to more regenerative practices that increase climate mitigation and adaptation, and boost farm health.
In 2025, we expect ongoing attempts to rollback current environmental and conservation policy – based on stated intent from the new administration and Congress, along with early action and leadership changes in agencies and on committees – with a hard shift away from natural resource protection, environmental justice, and climate action.
The CO Farm & Food Alliance is troubled by this change in federal direction. We will work with partners to defend the progress made and seek opportunities to continue that progress.
With our model of local action and community-rooted solutions, the CO Farm & Food Alliance will work to prevent harm and continue to advance on all of these fronts in partnership with national and local allies.
meeting landscape-level conservation goals to secure our water supplies, wildlife, and quality of place
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance began with the premise that healthy lands and clean water protect Colorado farms, food, and drink. At the time of our founding, we sought to unify as a local voice for farm and food leaders who supported the protection of the public lands and water source areas surrounding the North Fork Valley.
As our focus broadened to include food security and climate change, among other issues, we also recognized that land use, specifically the conservation and restoration of natural places and systems is a powerful way to help address climate anomalies.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance remains committed to working with our partners to secure and maintain protection for critical public and watershed lands in western Colorado. Protecting cherished places such as the Thompson Divide and Clear Fork area, the North Fork Valley, and Dolores Canyons enjoys broad public appeal.
Conservation also helps address the biodiversity crisis and makes watersheds and Colorado farms more resilient to drought. These iconic landscapes are foundational to the character of this place and its residents. They protect our water supplies, essential wildlife habitats, and popular hunting and recreation areas. This means we will join with others to defend public lands and conservation policies from rollbacks and other emerging threats in Washington. However, there will also be opportunities to champion the importance of public lands to Colorado and highlight their values.
producing more locally produced and community-centered clean energy
Rural communities’ powering of farms, businesses, and homes—and the growth of renewable energy projects in rural areas—can significantly improve people’s lives and livelihoods. However, rollbacks to clean energy, environmental justice, and other climate programs could set western Colorado back and be a “gut punch” we do not need.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance supports deploying more community-based renewable energy for farms and rural communities. We will closely monitor how Washington’s changes might impact local communities’ ability to develop their own home-grown power solutions.
For transitioning coal and power-plant communities, like the North Fork and other places in Colorado, environmental justice means supporting local solutions for front-line communities. This is recognized in climate funding laws passed during the last Congress, which directly benefit places like Craig, Naturita, and Pueblo, as well as communities in Delta County. However, a recent January 2025 White House Executive Order seeks to defund many of these programs.
Despite this, we will continue working with partners to help advance innovative community-based clean energy projects – like the Thistle Whistle Community Solar project. We will advocate for the preservation of funding that allows coal-mining and power-plant communities – whether rural or urban, red or blue – to envision and implement their own home-grown energy solutions.
The North Fork River valley. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
supporting small-acreage agricultural producers in benefiting from a shift to more regenerative practices
The Farm Bill, which is central to agriculture in the United States, was recently extended for a third time. This has made a normally five-year bill into an eight-and-counting ordeal. It is not certain that it will be settled this year, but it will have a far-reaching impact when it is.
That’s because the Farm Bill touches many things, from nutrition to farming to clean energy. Even with an uncertain passage, the debate over this bill will continue in committees in both the House and the Senate, now under narrow Republican control.
The Farm Bill is one place rural renewables get funded, through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). This is another place where cuts might come to clean energy under a new Congress and priority shifts in the administration.
Clean energy is just one small part of the Farm Bill. Several vital programs funded by this legislation could be at risk of cuts or elimination. These include nutrition programs such as SNAP (“food stamps”) and Doubleup Foodbucks. This program, which could be targeted, addresses hunger in our communities and supports local farmers by increasing SNAP benefits at local farmers’ markets.
Farm and ranch conservation funding is another area likely to see proposed Farm Bill cuts. This includes helping small-acreage farmers implement more regenerative and climate-adapted practices. Programs that support small-acreage farmers are essential for conservation. In the U.S., the number of farmers is decreasing, but the average size of farms is increasing. Many small farms will be converted to other uses and will not stay in agriculture if farming becomes nonviable.
The loss of a farm is personally devastating and sends ripples through the local economy. It also limits the type and scope of nature-based climate solutions that can be implemented. In important headwaters and agricultural areas, like the Gunnison River basin, ensuring the viability of agriculture–which smaller and mid-sized farms and ranches dominate–and protecting our farm economies are critical strategies to support rural, farm-based climate action.
Conservation funding and nutrition programs that allow farmers to provide food directly into local markets are key tools that improve farm outputs, provide income, boost resilience, and address food insecurity in western Colorado.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is sharing and we will continue to develop new and additional resources to help farmers and others navigate policy and program changes at the USDA and other agencies. We will also highlight growers and ranchers practicing techniques that make their farms and pastures more resilient, productive, and sustainable. Showcasing our successes and our shared work will be important in the years ahead.
A North Fork Orchard. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
The Future is here: We are it.
Despite all these changes and challenges coming our way, we can find security in our community and shared endeavors. We can create something new, sustainable, and fair that emerges right here.
But first, we must persist. This means securing and defending what we have and value most. It means standing up for the vulnerable and those people and places that are targets of attack.
Still, that cannot be all we do. We should neither feel defeated nor content to just wait for a different time. We should imagine new ways to connect with each other now, to celebrate what we cherish and to replicate and share out what we do well.
The future is up to us, but we are mighty together. Now we must become the change we seek.
74% of Gen Zers say climate change threatens the clean water supply in the U.S.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 28, 2025 — The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup releaseda new report today examining Gen Z’s experiences with climate change and water issues, shedding light on their concerns about climate events and the potential impact on their generation’s future. The research finds water issues top the list of Gen Z’s climate worries, with individual perspectives shaped by diverse experiences and beliefs.
Of 12 climate-related issues measured in the study, majorities of Gen Zers express “some” or “a great deal” of worry about nine, including five related to water. This is true regardless of location, with water pollution and the health of fish and oceans ranking among the top three concerns in every U.S. Census region. While a majority of Gen Zers nationwide (61%) have reported experiencing a water-related climate issue in the past two years, water-related problems are more commonly reported by those in the Central and Western U.S.
When considering how these issues may affect their future, Gen Zers report concern about the availability of clean water and the potential need to relocate. Those who have experienced climate-related events at a higher rate are more likely to worry about these impacts . T here are notable differences across demographic groups. Hispanic (36%) and Black (34%) Gen Zers are more likely than their White (27%) peers to have experienced unsafe tap water . They are also more likely to believe there will not be enough clean water for their generation to live in the future (41% of Hispanic and 34% of Black Gen Zers, compared with 24% of W hite Gen Zers). Adult Gen Zers are significantly more likely to worry about needing to move due to climate change compared with their 12- to 17-year-old counterparts (40% vs. 27%, respectively).
Denver School Strike for Climate, September 20, 2019.
There is large-scale unity among young people on the importance of protecting water quality. Seventy-four percent of Gen Zers say it is “very important” to protect oceans, lakes and rivers from pollution, with another 19% saying it is “somewhat important.” Gen Z acknowledges the adverse effects of climate change on water resources: 74% of Gen Zers say climate change impacts the amount of clean water available in the U.S. “somewhat” (47%) or “a great deal” (27%). There is solid bipartisan agreement on the inadequacy of current water protection efforts: M ajorities of both Democratic (88%) and Republican (63%) Gen Z adults say the U.S. is “probably” or “definitely” not doing enough to protect water.
“Gen Z is united in their deep concern for water protection and availability, recognizing it as a critical issue that touches us all — regardless of where we live or who we are,” said Moira Mcdonald, Environment Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. “As we look to the future, there’s a growing sense of urgency. Young people fear inheriting a world where clean water is scarce and climate change continues to worsen. We need to work on solutions to ensure clean, safe water remains accessible for generations to come.”
Looking ahead, Gen Zers are pessimistic about the trajectory of climate change — 67% believe climate change will worsen in their lifetime. And rates of pessimism are about 10 percentage points higher among those who have recently experienced a climate-related issue such as flooding, drought or unsafe tap water. Among voting-age Gen Zers, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans believe it is very or somewhat unlikely that climate change will be stopped.
Methodology
Results are based on a Gallup Panel™ web survey conducted Aug. 6-14, 2024, with a sample of 2,832 12- to 27-year-olds from across the U.S. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults. Data were weighted to match demographic targets of age, gender, education, race, Hispanic ethnicity and Census region for 12- to 27-year-olds, using the most recent five-year population estimates from the American Community Survey.
Twelve- to 17-year-old children, as well as some 18-year-olds, were reached through adult members of the Gallup Panel who indicated they had at least one child aged 18 or younger living in their household. The remaining 18- to 27-year-old respondents are members of the Gallup Panel.
For the total sample of 2,832 respondents, the margin of sampling error is +/-2.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher; selected subgroups are reported below. All margins of error reported are adjusted to account for the design effect.
John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, with China’s special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, at the 2015 Paris climate conference. FRANCOIS MORI / AP PHOTO
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Joseph Winters & Naveena Sadasivam):
January 20, 2025
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.
Conventional wisdom — and political donations — would indicate that Republicans are friendlier than Democrats to the oil and gas industry. And, in fact, that’s probably true: Democrats are more likely to pass regulations on drilling; Republicans are more likely to give oil corporations massive tax cuts. But in spite of all of that, Over the last fifty years, Republican presidents have been more likely to oversee crude oil production declines, while production has generally increased under Democrats, with the exception of the Clinton administration. In fact, the current surge in production began during Obama’s first year, and has continued through Biden’s entire term. This doesn’t mean that Democrats spur production. What it means is that more regulations don’t hamper production, and rescinding those regulations — and corporate tax cuts — don’t spur production. There are many forces in play, and the occupant of the White House is merely one of them, and a relatively insignificant one at that. Source: EIA, Land Desk.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
‘Drill, baby, drill‘
Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”
“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”
Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.
Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the U.S. should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the U.S.,” Kammen told Grist.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Exiting the Paris Agreement (again)
Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming that the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the U.S. would leave the agreement — titled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning U.S. negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the U.S. could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only 2 in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris Agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.
Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the U.S. and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.
Coyote Gulch’s Leaf in Byers Canyon on the way to Steamboat Springs August 21, 2017.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. [ed. emphasis mine] The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Biden, the U.S. also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.
“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for U.S. consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”
Youth activists rally for climate justice in front of the US Capitol in Washington,DC (photo from earlier in the year). Image: Lorie Shaull,CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Rescinding environmental justice initiatives
Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.
That move was part of a broader push that Trump described as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.
Cheyenne Ridge, located between Burlington and Cheyenne Wells, near the Kansas border, is one of many wind projects on Colorado’s eastern plains. Soon, new transmission will enable far more wind and solar projects. Photos/Allen Best Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
Blocking new wind energy
Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.
Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.
“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”
QTS Data Center Aurora June 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 2, 2025
Gov. Polis and many utilities say that data centers can benefit just about everybody in Colorado. But others fear impacts to rates and potential setbacks in reduction of emissions.
Under the umbrella of the energy transition were dozens of interesting, important stories in Colorado during 2024, including:
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association got the lifeline it so desperately needed to make the transition from coal in the form of $679 million in assistance from the federal government. Sen. Michael Bennet — a key partner in the Inflation Reduction Act sausage-making in D.C. in 2022 — was there to commemorate it. And United Power, itself independent of Tri-State on May 1, is getting $261.6 million.
Pueblo talked a lot about nuclear — and inexplicably began cleaving itself from the renewable energy that had been very nearly the sole bright spot of its economy in recent years.
Holy Cross Energy achieved 90% renewable generation for a month this fall.
United Power broke ground on a natural gas plant, and Platte River Power Authority and everybody else laid plans similar plans for natural gas.
Seeds were planted for geothermal to become a viable part of Colorado’s energy story in Vail, Steamboat and easily a dozen other places across Colorado.
Important stories — these and many others in this energy transition. But easily surpassing them was the story of data centers and their voracious hunger for energy. Could their looming demand derail Colorado’s decarbonization plans? Defenders say no, but they are not convincing. And will interests of ratepayers be protected?
Figuring out the public policy to balance public interests and private gain will be a major issue in the 2025 legislative session.
Three years ago, few people outside of Virginia’s data center alley were talking about data centers. In 2019, there was a half- or less-baked idea of a cryptocurrency mill in Pueblo. Later came a crypto outfit near Montrose.
The era of hyperscale data centers — hyperscale is often defined as having “massive” power needs — arrived in early 2022 when Microsoft purchased a 260-acre parcel in Aurora, south of DIA, for $63.5 million.
In February 2023, Mile High CRE, an online news site about commercial development, described the purchase as the first in metropolitan Denver for a hyperscale data center.
“Denver has an edge over more established markets like Silicon Valley or Northern Virginia in that cost of power, cost of land, and cost of construction are lower, environmental risks are not as high, and the central location grants access to a plethora of networks,” it said. What Colorado lacked, the article added, was a competitive incentive package.
In February 2024, State Sen. Kevin Priola introduced a bill that would have extended more tax breaks to data center developers. Big Pivots did write about that in a column that got broad play across Colorado. See: “Why do data center need tax breaks in Colorado? They’re coming anyway.” A few weeks later came news that the data center subsidy bill was postponed. It never got one committee hearing.
Colorado already has one hyperscale data center. It’s in Aurora, and Mark Jaffee of the Colorado Sun broke the story about QTS in October 2023. (Big Pivots was too busy on a series about water and urban landscapes to chase it).
Two guest columnists in Big Pivots weighed in on the value of data centers. Morey Wolfson, a one-time staffer at the Colorado Energy Office and at the PUC, in September argued against subsidies. Jeff Ackermann, a former chair of the PUC as well as director of the state energy office, in October argued that data centers can have upsides. Meanwhile, the Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post began writing frequently about data centers — including this story from last week: “Energy hungry AI firms bet on these moonshot technologies.”
Xcel Energy in October delivered the statistics that made this a compelling Colorado story. The electrical utility, responsible for more than half of electrical sales in Colorado, said it needed a staggering 12,500 to 14,000 megawatts of new generation to meet rising demand. To put that into perspective, Rush Creek, Xcel’s wind farm between Limon and Colorado Springs, has a capacity of 600 megawatts.
After average annual growth of 0.7% during the preceding five years, said Xcel, it projected 4% growth compounded annually from 2023 to 2031.
Data centers lie at the center of this projected growth, 62% for energy growth overall and 72% for peak demand, according to Xcel’s Jack Ihle. In an Oct. 15 filing with Colorado regulators, he also said the same base-case forecast saw electric vehicles producing 19% and building electrification 12% of its new demand.
Even without this new demand, Xcel has had trouble getting renewable energy across the finish line. These are projects approved through the electric resource plan from 2021. Supply chain issues have something to do with that.
How will Xcel be able to meet burgeoning demand? And does this imperil Colorado’s drive to meet its 2030 goal of 50% economy wide reduction in emissions? The state’s existing modeling already showed the state falling short, and that was without the data centers becoming a major part of the equation. Now comes speculation — and, at this point it is merely that, speculation — that Xcel may find it necessary to keep Comanche 3, its newest and largest coal-fired unit, operating beyond 2030.
That speculation is not completely out of the blue. That is indeed what has happened in Virginia.
Here, I have described Xcel Energy. But data centers could be part of the stories of Tri-State and its members as well as Platte River Power Authority, Black Hills Energy and perhaps others. Even Fort Morgan — a town of 12,000 northeast of Denver, which is supplied by electricity by the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska. A Wyoming company, Prometheus Energy, says it intends to create a data center there as well as in Pueblo in 2026, according to one report.
Chris Hansen, one of Colorado’s most important state legislators in the energy transition, told Big Pivots in November that one of his larger disappointments in leaving the Legislature to manage La Plata Electric was that he wouldn’t be able to advance legislation to address the data center issue and help Colorado avoid the problems of Virginia. Hansen has handed the work off to State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville. Brown has a background in health care, and he will never have the adroit voice of a Chris Hansen or a Steve Fenberg, but he has demonstrated in his two years that he is a capable, solid legislator.
Yesterday, Gov. Jared Polis was in my neighborhood, and I got in a few minutes to talk with him about passenger rail and data centers. I asked him explicitly whether the growth in demand from data centers would imperil Colorado’s goal of achieving 50% economy wide decarbonization.
No, he said. Done right, growth in data centers can be a win-win for consumers and the utilities.
“Data centers are a broad category of electricity users, but I would say in the right time, in the right place, data centers can play a very important role in improving the reliability and sustainability of the grid, just like if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, they can add transmission costs,” he replied. “It’s really about what, when and where, and how that factors into grid resiliency as we move towards clean energy.”
I persisted with a question about the need for legislation. He did not answer directly:
“If there’s a way to bring in more data centers working with some of the larger providers in areas that make sense, that help us reduce costs for Colorado consumers and improve grid resiliency, then we should explore those.”
I suspect Xcel would be happy with his phrasing. However, we are already seeing upward price pressures in renewables because of supply chain and other issues. If that upward migration coupled with rapid growth in demand produces sharply higher consumer costs, there could be strong pushback. That could delay Colorado’s progress toward its decarbonization goals. The debate in the PUC proceedings about Xcel’s just transition electric-resource plan in coming months should be lively. That applies, too, to the debates in the Colorado Legislature.
There’s lots of good journalism to be had here for Big Pivots going into 2025. It’s one of many good stories across Colorado deserving deeper dives.
Xcel was reluctant to go forward with its first major wind farm, completed in 2004, but now has much wind — and will add far more in the next few yeas. Photo near Cheyenne Wells, Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 2, 2024
Jimmy Carter had an underappreciated role in Colorado’s story. It started in May 1978 when he announced that the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden would get $100 million in federal funding.
“Nobody can embargo sunlight,” Carter said. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored and used.”
It was a rare umbrella day in Golden. Carter’s timing for his proclaimed “Sun Day” was off. But he was on the mark about solar energy in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate.
Carter had advanced schooling in nuclear energy, but by 1975 he was thinking about renewables. He invited Ron Larson, an electrical engineering professor from Georgia Tech, to share lunch and talk about renewable energy.
“At that time there wasn’t much to photovoltaics,” says Larson. “It was over $100 a watt. Now it’s less than $1 a watt.”
Larson moved to Colorado in 1977 to work as SERI’s first principal scientist and stayed in multiple roles in helping pivot our energy use. Since then, thousands have followed.
One component of SERI’s mission to advance use of solar energy was outreach to 300 builders and architects in Colorado to help them learn how to construct houses with lessened need for fossil fuels.
John Avenson, an engineer with AT&T/Bell Labs, was among the beneficiaries. The house in Westminster that he built in 1981 faces south and has large windows coupled with effective shades.
On Facebook the day after Carter’s death, Avenson rued the widespread failure to acknowledge Carter’s early thinking. “Every house built since then should have been this good or better but the program was cancelled by (President Ronald) Reagan,” he wrote.
Avenson’s house near Standley Lake Reservoir was built with a natural gas furnace. He rarely used it, his gas bills never surpassing $180 for a full year. After tweaking and new technology, he was finally satisfied the house would do fine at 20 below without the furnace. In 2016 he had Xcel Energy stub the gas line.
When I visited him on New Year’s Eve, he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “I’m an Arizona kind of person,” he said. He keeps the house at 72 to 78 degrees. It will be featured on a Jan. 25 broadcast on PBS.
I asked Avenson about Carter’s death. “Oh, so sad,” he replied. “He influenced my life and didn’t know it.”
Steve Andrews was also influenced by Carter. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he had used the GI Bill of Rights to take college classes in basic engineering. That led to an internship and then a job at SERI. He wrote the guidebook for the 1981 Denver Homebuilders annual Parade of Homes featuring a dozen passive-solar homes across the Denver metro area.
Then, Andrews got laid off. As president, Reagan had no real use for renewable energy. He famously removed the 32 solar panels that Carter had placed atop the White House. He also halved SERI’s budget. Andrews, a recent hire, was among the first to go. The mission of SERI was also narrowed, pushing outreach to the back burner. The director, Denis Hayes, was fired after accusing his bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy of being “dull gray men in dull gray suits thinking dull gray thoughts.”
Later, under a former oilman, President George H.W. Bush, SERI was resurrected as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL has now expanded to a staff of 3,675 employees and broadened its influence.
Can it be mere coincidence that Colorado, in 2004, had the nation’s first voter-initiated renewable energy portfolio standard? Or that Colorado in recent years has adopted a dozen or more first-in-nation policies and regulations designed to curb greenhouse emissions? We might be guilty of parochial pride, but there can be no doubt that Colorado belongs in any national conversation about the pivot to a new energy economy, to use the title of former Gov. Bill Ritter’s center that is affiliated with Colorado State University.
Ironically, passive-house building has gotten little traction. The economics are unassailable, and the technology just isn’t that difficult. It does take basic site-planning. Andrews, in his post-SERI career, once calculated that 85% of houses in metro Denver face east or west. That results in unwanted summer heat, but little in winter, when it is wanted. Housing should face north and south.
Colorado has decades of work ahead in decarbonizing its buildings. We need to remember what Jimmy Carter understood nearly 50 years ago.
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
In mid-November, 10 days after 77 million of our fellow Americans chose Donald J. Trump to be their next president, I found myself at the old Navajo Bridge, which spans Marble Canyon and the Colorado River downstream from Lees Ferry in northern Arizona. I got out of my car, stretched and ambled toward the pedestrian bridge, which mirrors the newer one for automobiles.
As I reached the bridge, I noticed some onlookers looking intently downstream with binoculars. I followed their gaze to see a trio of giant, bald-headed, feathered creatures perched on the steel beams of the automobile bridge, looking a bit like the flying monkeys in the old Wizard of Oz film. They were California condors, maybe 10 in all, apparently waiting for an afternoon carrion snack to float by on the slow-moving emerald waters far below.
I wandered back and forth on the bridge for the next hour or so, stopping frequently to snap another photo, meditate vertiginously on the river and limestone cliffs or to gaze again in awe at the magnificent, uncanny creatures. Politics and the election results became irrelevant, at least for a moment, and it was with a newfound sense of serenity that I finally got back into the car and headed north.
Condors 6Y and 2A (I’m sure they have their own, more interesting names, but …) at the Navajo Bridge. According to condorspotter.com, 6Y is a male born in March 2019 at the Oregon Zoo. And 2A is a female hatched at the World Center for Birds of Prey in May 2021. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
My mental calm was quickly shattered, however, as news trickled out about Trump’s Cabinet picks and plans. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are entering a perilous political era in which the federal government’s role is fundamentally altered. This includes a multi-pronged assault on our public lands and the rules, regulations, laws and agencies designed to protect them. Those condors on the Colorado River could be among the many victims.
Judging from the record of Trump’s first term, his campaign platform, his Cabinet picks so far and Project 2025, the right wing’s “presidential playbook,” it’s clear that he will once again attempt to dismantle the administrative state — and he’ll likely be better at it this time. The destruction will include gutting federal agencies, replacing experienced staffers with Trump loyalists and eviscerating protections for human health and the environment. The goal is to shrink the government, slash spending on safety nets and social programs to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy, and (of course) remove regulatory barriers standing in the way of ever-growing corporate profits. With the likes of Elon Musk buying his way into the administration, it promises to be a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.
Trump actually summed up this ethos better than I ever could in a social media post, when he vowed to give anyone who invested at least $1 billion “in the United States of America … fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” He seemed to be responding to global mining corporation Rio Tinto, which is behind the proposed Resolution Copper Mine at Oak Flat in Arizona, urging the new administration to weaken environmental laws and expedite permitting for big mines.
During his first term, Trump made his hostility toward public lands clear as he reduced national monuments and rolled back regulations on fossil fuel extraction. This time, he promises a repeat performance, backed by a GOP-dominated Congress, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and an army of professional ideologues who have been eagerly preparing for this moment for the last four years.
We can expect him to try to shrink or entirely rescind national monuments — particularly Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon — potentially reopening hundreds of thousands of acres of uranium-rich lands to new mining claims during a time when the domestic uranium industry is experiencing a revival.
He will likely reward petroleum companies for donating generously to his campaign by implementing his “drill baby drill” policies. He’ll open up more public land to oil and gas leasing, including in the Alaskan Arctic, and rescind drilling bans on Thompson Divide in western Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. He’ll roll back new EPA rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas and mercury pollution from coal power plants.
If Trump’s hunger for “energy dominance” and corporate freedom don’t come for your public lands, the “Cult of Efficiency” probably will. Musk donated $277 million to Trump’s campaign. In return, he has been chosen to co-chair the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has vowed to slash some $2 trillion in allegedly “wasteful” spending.
What this will actually mean remains unclear. But Trump’s suggestion that he may try to privatize the U.S. Postal Service because it’s not “profitable” and must be “subsidized” gives a good indication of what Musk’s quasi-department will be targeting. The USPS is designed to provide a public good, not a profit, and its priorities are fulfilling that mission, not maximizing efficiency. After all, how could delivering a letter to some remote rural backwater for some 50 cents ever be efficient?
And if the USPS is a problem, then what about public lands and the agencies that manage them? Sure, they provide ecological benefits, stewardship of and free access to millions of acres of stunning landscapes, wildlife habitat and so much more. And yet, they are “subsidized” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year, making them ripe for Musk’s chopping block. Utah, with the support of other conservative states, has offered to make Musk’s job easier with a lawsuit seeking to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal land in its midst. Because those states can’t afford to manage those lands at a loss, they would almost certainly sell them off to private interests.
And what about those condors? For years, industry and conservative politicians have tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act because it stood in the way of development and profits. Project 2025 calls for an escalation of these efforts, which now have more support in Congress — and from the efficiency cult.
The federal government has spent at least $35 million so far on the California condor program. It’s an effort that has so far paid off by helping to bring the species back from the brink of extinction; the wild population is up to almost 600 from an 1980s low of just 22 birds. Public goods such as species restoration simply don’t fit into narrow Musk’s profit-focused vision. And the condor remains fragile, threatened by lead poisoning, power lines, wind turbines and avian influenza, and it is not yet self-sustaining.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve seen a number of pundits, politicians and even advocates calling on land, water and air defenders to take a more conciliatory approach, to forge alliances with oil and gas companies, to abandon calls to “keep it in the ground,” to work with Republicans to speed up permitting reform in order to expedite renewable energy development, even if it does mean more fossil fuel development as well. Yet if ever there was a time not to give in, this is it. America’s public lands are under unprecedented attack from nearly every front. Now we need to be even more vigilant and fierce in our defense of it. [ed. emphasis mine]
Out on that bridge, something compelled me to hang my body a little too far over the rail so I could gaze straight through the empty space toward the river. My vertigo was overcome by the thrill of seeing, just below me on a steel girder, a juvenile condor, its pink beak jutting from a thatch of dark brown feathers. That, I thought, is certainly worth fighting for.
Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Colorado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 19, 2024
Transmission line in southeast Colorado a cause for guarded optimism among utility leaders
Interstate highways have transformed Colorado and America altogether. People growing up in the 1950s rarely had fresh fruit or vegetables in winter. Now, broccoli beheaded yesterday in a field near Yuma, Ariz., can be on a store shelf in metro Denver within a day or two. Much of that journey will be on an interstate highway.
High-voltage transmission lines are our four-lane highways of electricity. They worked well enough when giant coal plants provided most of our electricity. Now, as Colorado and other states strive to replace fossil fuels with renewables, new connections must be built, to knit us together across broader areas.
A federal agency this week delivered cause for cautious optimism. The Department of Energy has picked three transmission corridors among 10 national candidates for advanced work. One of them, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, would begin in southeast Colorado near Lamar, and work south into New Mexico and then somewhat west.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized the secretary of energy to designate any geographic area as a national interest electric transmission corridor. The energy department has found that absence of transmission harms consumers. With more transmission, we can share low-cost renewable generation across broader areas. We need an electric grid larger than one weather system and covering more than one time zone.
The existing transmission network is akin to our highways of 50 to 60 years ago. We have transmission, but it’s as if Interstate 70 stopped at the state line. In fact, transmission lines do. Colorado is in the Western electrical grid of 10 states and some adjoining areas. This grid, however, is better understood as a collection of 34 different islands connected by narrow causeways.
“A cautious hurrah,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power when I asked his reaction. The Brighton-based electrical cooperative supplies 113,000 members from the foothills to Weld County’s oil and gas fields, including many new industrial centers along I-76.
“Anything that promotes additional transmission is a good thing,” said Gabriel. “However, the challenge remains in actually getting something constructed in a reasonable period of time to make a difference.”
Gabriel pointed out that more than $40 billion in transmission projects have been announced. “Only a fraction are actually being built.”
Permitting has been the bane of many transmission projects. For example, it took 18 years before the TransWest Express Transmission project that will ferry wind-generated electricity from southern Wyoming to Utah and West Coast markets finally broke ground in 2023. It nicks the corner of northwest Colorado.
A bill being negotiated in Congress would ease federal permitting requirements to allow more rapid creation of transmission lines. Other provisions of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 would also benefit oil and gas extraction.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale provider for 17 of Colorado’s 22 electrical cooperatives, pointed to the need for streamlined permitting in its reaction to the transmission line in southeastern Colorado.
Transmission doesn’t come cheap. And just as interstate highways have their unsavory aspects — my companion and I can routinely hear I-70 roaring a mile away — transmission lines have their downsides. Who wants one in their backyard?
Baca County has Colorado’s best wind resource and it gets plenty of sunshine. Lacking has been transmission. Top photo transmission in Colroado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Some want to believe nuclear energy will solve all of our problems. The Pueblo City Council, while saying nice things about nuclear, intends to scrap a goal of 100% renewables by 2035. Maybe nuclear will be an answer, but recent projects have had eye-bulging costs. Natural gas has problems, too, as was evident in Winter Storm Uri of February 2021 when costs soared.
Chris Hansen, as a state legislator from Denver, sponsored key legislation to push transmission planning in Colorado. Now in Durango as CEO of La Plata Electric, he has started working on guiding his electrical cooperative to 97% emission-free electricity in the next decade. Transmission, he says, will be crucial.
Capacity of existing transmission lines can be expanded by reconductoring and other technology. But we altogether need to be better connected east and west, north and south.
One crucial question, says Hansen, is whether Denver-based Chris Wright, the choice of Donald Trump to be secretary of energy, will support continued transmission planning. His Colorado-based career has been in oil and gas. Wright sees renewables as a distant solution.
Southeastern Colorado brims with renewable energy potential. Baca County has Colorado’s best wind, according to a 2017 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It also has strong solar. That’s why corn grows so well there — assuming it has water. The water of the Ogallala Aquifer won’t last, but the solar and wind almost certainly will. What it lacks now is a farm-to-market transmission highway.
From warbler research to transmission line placement, Audubon staff worked on planning with birds and people in mind.
This year wind and solar generation in the U.S. surpassed coal for the first time, and solar is expected to supply most of the growth in electricity generation through 2025. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) continues to be a major catalyst for this momentum by providing substantial incentives that include tax credits for renewable energy and transmission projects. At the state and local level, clean energy goals and mandates, new jobs, and economic and community benefits are driving the growth of renewables.
Transitioning to clean energy is crucial for protecting hundreds of North American bird species from climate change, but infrastructure must be sited and operated with birds and people in mind. Audubon staff and chapters across the U.S. are working with planners, developers, and federal and state agencies to achieve this goal. Over the last 12 months, Audubon has been involved in the planning, permitting, siting, or operation of over 36 gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind and solar projects, as well as almost 45 gigawatts of transmission capacity. This conservation work includes providing recommendations on siting, permitting, monitoring, and research, grounded in Audubon’s extensive science and policy advocacy for birds and their habitats.
Here are some of this year’s efforts across the network:
Transmission Lines in Minnesota
In May, Minnesota made a significant move by passing legislation to allow transmission lines alongside highways, thanks to the efforts of Audubon Upper Mississippi River and their work with the NextGen Highways coalition. Audubon’s Birds and Transmission report shows that placing transmission lines on existing rights-of-way minimizes the overall transmission footprint, leaving more habitat intact and reducing the chance of collisions. This approach advances the clean energy transition while ensuring that Minnesota’s birds and communities benefit from responsibly sited transmission.
Getting Build Ready for Clean Energy in Washington
Audubon Washington is working with local chapters Lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society, Vancouver Audubon Society, and others to accelerate the state’s transition to clean energy on several fronts. The Audubon Washington team is championing a new Build Ready Clean Energy Program and advocating for the creation of a Clean Energy Development Authority to help meet the state’s clean electricity mandates. By joining forces with the NextGen Transmission coalition and actively participating in the Western Clean Energy Advocates (WCEA), Audubon is making its voice heard on key energy and transmission issues. They’ve also weighed in on the state’s environmental impact assessments for major transmission projects, utility-scale solar, and onshore wind. Audubon has also conducted in-depth spatial analyses, pinpointing areas in Eastern Washington as candidate sites for low-conflict solar development.
Monument Planning in California
While Audubon California co-leads the effort to designate the Chuckwalla National Monument in California’s desert, Audubon has joined solar industry leaders and conservationists to secure monument status for this unique landscape while ensuring the designation would not impede solar development in designated areas outside the monument and existing and planned transmission development through the monument. By balancing conservation with clean energy needs, this collaborative effort aims to protect the Chuckwalla’s important habitat and natural beauty while paving the way for responsible development.
A Prothonotary Warbler is fitted with a tracker. Photo: Erik Johnson/Audubon Delta
Warbler Research in Louisiana, Kansas, Arkansas, and Ohio
In May and June, Audubon Delta and partners fitted over 50 Prothonotary Warblers with tiny trackers across Louisiana, Kansas, Arkansas, and Ohio. The multi-sensor geolocators will collect data on the flight behavior of these songbirds as they migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. The information gathered from returning birds will offer new insights into their use of airspace and their responses to inclement weather. This research will aid in assessing collision risks for offshore wind projects in the region and support improved planning and siting efforts.
Reasonably foreseeable development scenario solar area relative to total area of lands available for application. Credit: Bureau of Land Management
Solar Development in Western States
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finalized in a plan for how utility-scale PV solar will be sited and permitted on 30 million acres of public lands across 11 states. In April, Audubon filed detailed comments on the Draft EIS that recommended improvements to BLM’s Solar PEIS, with a focus on avoiding and minimizing impacts to birds by prioritizing project development on degraded lands and close to transmission lines. Audubon also filed similar joint comments in a letter to BLM leadership in collaboration with four conservation organizations and five solar development companies. More than 2,900 Audubon supporters sent comments to the BLM in support of this approach. The Final EIS, released in August, improves on the initial draft, but further improvements are needed in plan implementation to streamline permitting for rapid deployment of solar energy on low conflict lands.
In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) made their incidental take permitting program under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act more efficient in ways that support the buildout of wind energy while benefitting Bald and Golden Eagle conservation. As part of the permit program, clean energy developers will commit to conservation measures and monitoring at their wind project and transmission sites, and the FWS will set the maximum number of eagles and eagle nests that might be harmed by wind energy and transmission without prosecution under the federal law. Audubon advocated for these improvements alongside conservation and industry partners to help advance wind energy development while protecting eagles.
The Offshore Wind panel during Climate Week NYC 2024. Photo: Darien Fiorino/Audubon
Offshore Wind Development
During Climate Week NYC, Audubon hosted a panel on the future of offshore wind in the United States. As of September, the U.S. has approved ten lease areas for offshore wind projects, representing more than 15 gigawatts of energy. That’s enough to power 5.25 million homes, and equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve the national goal of permitting 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Audubon has been engaged on each project every step of the way, filing science-based comments that point to key areas that should be avoided for birds and sharing recommendations for research and operation. This is a collaborative effort with conservation partners as well as Audubon’s coasts and seabird experts and state coastal offices in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific. In the Atlantic, Audubon has a seat on the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative for Offshore Wind (RWSC), which released a new research plan in January and announced funding commitments from federal agencies and developers to implement the plan.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
President Joe Biden signs H.R. 5376, the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”, Tuesday, August 16, 2022, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law passed Congress by the narrowest of margins, without a single Republican in favor. GOP leaders have attacked the bill and promised to repeal it.
Yet despite the law’s hyper-partisan creation story, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, could prove difficult to roll back, whatever the outcome of next month’s election.
The IRA was the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution, with an array of programs that are beginning to shower the economy with grants, loans and tax incentives. The total sum is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade, funding that will leverage much more in private investment. And by design, the money is flowing throughout the country, with most of it being spent in conservative-leaning states.
One report by E2, a pro-environment business group, identified at least 334 “clean energy and clean vehicle” projects announced since the law’s enactment, with the potential to create 110,000 jobs. Those projects were spread across 40 states, with nearly 60 percent in congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Another assessment, by the Rhodium Group, examined total “clean technologies and infrastructure” investment by businesses and consumers in the two years after the bill’s enactment, and found it had climbed to nearly $500 billion, a 71 percent increase from the two preceding years.
“This is a huge investment. We are really seeing its impacts,” said Jackie Wong, a senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, an environmental political advocacy group that has endorsed Kamala Harris. “This isn’t just about climate. This is also about public health and about jobs and about revitalizing American manufacturing.”
Trump and his advisers and spokespeople have said he would seek to roll back the law’s spending, a step Wong said “would be devastating for climate and economic health.”
And yet all the spending that has begun going out helps explain why there might not be much appetite in Congress for a wholesale repeal. In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson urging caution in any efforts to reform or repeal the law, noting that its tax credits for clean energy “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
The law’s design—which created, expanded or extended a wide array of tax credits for everything from wind and solar power generation to battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, clean hydrogen production and sustainable aviation fuel—has made it broadly popular among businesses big and small. Now that those credits are in place, industry leaders expect them to last, said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a law and lobbying firm that represents clients across the energy industry.
“They think this is not going away because of the good things it can do,” Maisano said. He added that the bill included policies that have generally drawn bipartisan support, and that while it may get tweaked, “I don’t think Congress is going to go back on these things that are happening in their districts.”
But if a full repeal is unlikely, many of the law’s supporters worry that a second Trump administration or a Republican-controlled Congress could use executive authority, hearings or oversight to constrain or reshape spending in ways that would undermine the law’s goals.
The tax credits, for example, require guidance issued by the Treasury Department to help define which projects are eligible. In the case of a clean hydrogen tax credit, a Trump administration could issue guidance that would skew the credit toward more polluting fossil fuel projects. For electric vehicles or wind and solar generation, new guidance could restrict how many vehicles or projects qualify for the credits or could simply cast uncertainty over the programs’ future, discouraging private investment.
Derek Sylvan, strategy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said the tax credits have the potential to drive tremendous emissions cuts with hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits. But many, like the hydrogen credit, have the potential to be skewed in favor of fossil fuels or other polluting technologies.
“That could be really huge,” Sylvan said. “You could imagine that for any particular tax credit, if that changes and suddenly a lot of funds are going to activities that have pretty limited or even negative climate benefits, that could certainly undermine the climate impacts of the IRA.”
A study published last year in Science estimated that the IRA is expected to slash the nation’s climate pollution 43 percent to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, compared to an expected reduction of 27 percent to 35 percent without the legislation.
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
Many of the IRA’s programs came in the form of grants, loans or direct spending that has already been committed. One of the largest is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion “green bank” program. Most of that money was awarded in August to nonprofits, which will now be able to lend the funds directly to emissions-cutting projects or distribute them to a network of green banks around the country. Some of its programs are intended to benefit communities that have limited access to financing for things like rooftop solar or energy-efficiency retrofits.
Reed Hundt, chief executive of the Coalition for Green Capital, one of the recipients, said the fund differs from tax credits because his group can choose projects that will have outsized climate impacts. It is also looking to fund projects in rural and often conservative states that might be less likely to get commercial loans for renewable energy projects, Hundt said.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money has been obligated, meaning it would take violating a contract to pull it back. But a hostile administration or Congress could use hearings, oversight or staff cuts to make it harder for the banks to spend the money, said Kyle Kammien, policy director of the Green For All program at Dream.org, an advocacy group focused on green jobs and criminal justice.
“In some ways it’s safe, but you could see how political levers could make it less effective or slow it down,” Kammien said.
For other programs, simply cutting staffing at agencies could make it harder to spend money that’s already been obligated.
Still, the architects of the IRA designed it with elections in mind, said Kate Gordon, a former senior adviser to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and now chief executive of California Forward, an economic development nonprofit. The bill’s timelines, its broad distribution of funding across the economy and the country, were all meant to make it more popular and durable.
“It brings a lot more people and places into the conversation versus your typical government policy that says, ‘We are going to build a big thing,’” Gordon said. She told the story of a visit she made to a summit in Wyoming organized by the state’s governor and senators, neither of whom had voted for the IRA.
“They didn’t vote for it for political reasons, I’m sure, but they were 100 percent in in taking advantage of it,” Gordon said. She compared the IRA to President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, which was attacked for years but has remained in place.
“My gut is that there will be a lot of talk about repealing things,” she said, “and not a lot of action.”
Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertionsand false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it.
Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hoycdE1G0C0?wmode=transparent&start=0 Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss clean energy policy during their presidential campaign debate on Sept. 10, 2024.
Legislation and regulations
Three bills passed by Congress under Biden and Harris – the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – have transformed U.S. energy policy. The three bills allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for building infrastructure, providing incentives for clean energy manufacturing and purchases, and funding clean energy research.
None of these measures is likely to be completely overturned, since each funds numerous projects in red states. But implementation by the next administration will determine how effectively they stimulate clean energy growth.
The Environmental Protection Agency will also play a crucial role. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the EPA issued its most stringent regulations ever for controlling emissions from fossil fuel power plants and motor vehicles. Those rules could accelerate the transition to clean electricity and electric cars.
Currently, the U.S. has a backlog of nearly 2,600 gigawatts of projects waiting to be added to the nation’s electricity grids. That’s roughly eight times the amount of wind and solar generating capacity on U.S. grids today.
However, Congress is deadlocked over competing proposals for streamlining permitting rules. State and local governments and regional grid operators also play key roles and are not easily swayed by federal action.
Still, the next president can influence policy through his or her selection of commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate transmission of oil, gas and electricity. Presidents also can push Congress to pass permitting reforms.
Trade policy
As fast as U.S. clean energy manufacturing and deployments have grown under the Biden-Harris administration, that increase is dwarfed by China’s output. Chinese companies manufacture over three-quarters of the world’s solar cells and modules, more the half of the world’s wind turbines and three-quarters of the advanced batteries needed for electricity storage and electric cars. China also sells more electric cars than the rest of the world combined. https://www.youtube.com/embed/rkxMdmipYqM?wmode=transparent&start=0 China’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing poses challenges for nations wary of relying on Chinese components.
Like it or not, America’s ability to rapidly deploy clean energy and electric cars will require importing at least some materials from China. After falling behind for decades, there’s simply no way to scale up U.S. manufacturing fast enough to meet national climate goals. Even if solar panels, batteries or electric cars are assembled here, they’ll depend upon critical minerals that are mostly refined in China.
Biden and Harris have also tried to tilt the playing field to favor U.S. companies. The administration is offering loans and incentives for domestic manufacturing, and has also imposed a 100% tariff on electric vehicles and a 50% tariff on solar cells from China.
Such policies may shelter domestic manufacturers for a while, but are unlikely to make them competitive on global markets that are pivoting to electric cars and solar energy.
U.S. standing under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a legally binding treaty that sets targets for curbing climate change, will also be key. Countries around the world have pledged to shift to clean energy to reduce emissions. The European Union is enacting carbon border tariffs that will penalize imports from high-emitting producers.
If Trump were to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement again, as he did in 2017, and roll back emissions rules, U.S. manufacturers could face new hurdles in exporting their products overseas. For her part, Harris has supported the Paris accord and criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from it.
No reversing the revolution
Markets worldwide are rapidly transitioning to renewable energy and electric cars, which are becoming cheaper, cleaner and more appealing than their fossil-fueled alternatives. Popular subsidies for clean energy would be difficult to claw back. China’s dominance in clean energy technologies will not soon be shaken, whatever trade policies the next administration adopts.
Based on their records, Harris could be expected to build on the legislation and regulations passed under the current administration, while Trump would be likely to roll back some but not all of its advances. Neither candidate is proposing policies as transformative as the ones enacted in the past several years. Whoever is elected will govern within a clean energy landscape that has been reshaped by those policies, and by market forces that are beyond the control of any president.
sSeptember 26, 2023 – Small cubes of the PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network (PECAN) resin used to understand their depolymerization kinetics. (Photo by Werner Slocum / NREL)
Click the link to read the release on the NREL website:
August 22, 2024
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) see a realistic path forward to the manufacture of bio-derivable wind blades that can be chemically recycled and the components reused, ending the practice of old blades winding up in landfills at the end of their useful life.
The findings are published in the new issue of the journal Science. The new resin, which is made of materials produced using bio-derivable resources, performs on par with the current industry standard of blades made from a thermoset resin and outperforms certain thermoplastic resins intended to be recyclable.
The researchers built a prototype 9-meter blade to demonstrate the manufacturability of an NREL-developed biomass-derivable resin nicknamed PECAN. The acronym stands for PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network, and the manufacturing process dovetails with current methods. Under existing technology, wind blades last about 20 years, and afterward they can be mechanically recycled such as shredded for use as concrete filler. PECAN marks a leap forward because of the ability to recycle the blades using mild chemical processes.
The chemical recycling process allows the components of the blades to be recaptured and reused again and again, allowing the remanufacture of the same product, according to Ryan Clarke, a postdoctoral researcher at NREL and first author of the new paper. “It is truly a limitless approach if it’s done right.”
He said the chemical process was able to completely break down the prototype blade in six hours.
The paper, “Manufacture and testing of biomass-derivable thermosets for wind blade recycling,” involved work from investigators at five NREL research hubs, including the National Wind Technology Center and the BOTTLE Consortium. The researchers demonstrated an end-of-life strategy for the PECAN blades and proposed recovery and reuse strategies for each component.
“The PECAN method for developing recyclable wind turbine blades is a critically important step in our efforts to foster a circular economy for energy materials,” said Johney Green, NREL’s associate laboratory director for Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences.
The research into the PECAN resin began with the end. The scientists wanted to make a wind blade that could be recyclable and began experimenting with what feedstock they could use to achieve that goal. The resin they developed using bio-derivable sugars provided a counterpoint to the conventional notion that a blade designed to be recyclable will not perform as well.
“Just because something is bio-derivable or recyclable does not mean it’s going to be worse,” said Nic Rorrer, one of the two corresponding authors of the Science paper. He said one concern others have had about these types of materials is that the blade would be subject to greater “creep,” which is when the blade loses its shape and deforms over time. “It really challenges this evolving notion in the field of polymer science, that you can’t use recyclable materials because they will underperform or creep too much.”
Composites made from the PECAN resin held their shape, withstood accelerated weatherization validation, and could be made within a timeframe similar to the existing cure cycle for how wind turbine blades are currently manufactured.
While wind blades can measure the length of a football field, the size of the prototype provided proof of the process.
“Nine meters is a scale that we were able to demonstrate all of the same manufacturing processes that would be used at the 60-, 80-, 100-meter blade scale,” said Robynne Murray, the second corresponding author.
The other coauthors, all from NREL, are Erik Rognerud, Allen Puente-Urbina, David Barnes, Paul Murdy, Michael McGraw, Jimmy Newkirk, Ryan Beach, Jacob Wrubel, Levi Hamernik, Katherine Chism, Andrea Baer, and Gregg Beckham.
The U.S. Department of Energy jointly funded the research through its Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and Bioenergy Technologies Office and their support of the BOTTLE Consortium. Additional research and funding will allow the investigators to build larger blades and to explore more bio-derived formulations.
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 17, 2024
Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. It’s harder to say in the long term. Here’s why.
Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative. But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.
The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.
What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.
While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.
This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.
Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.
Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.
Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.
Emissions Goals
The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.
Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.
Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.
Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.
Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.
A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.” House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.
Possible Water Dividends
The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.
Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.
In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.
Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.
Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.
Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?
“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.
Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.
“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.
Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.
The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.
The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.
The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.
That’s why this year’s bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.
The Future of Energy
Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock
What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.
Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.
You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.
One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.
Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water
Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.
Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.
Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.
Graphic credit: Joan Carstensen
A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.
“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.
Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.
Gov. Polis’ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.
Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.
Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.
Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.
Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.
New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.
With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com
Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.
Into The Future
The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.
Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?
What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.
What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.
The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”
Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.
Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website
Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.
However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.
One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.
Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,” says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”
A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.
Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”
A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.
No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.”
More than 350 prominent climate advocates on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president, a sign that environmental leaders believe hercampaign will energize like-mindedvoters in a way that President Biden could not. In a letter shared first with The Washington Post, big names in the environmental movement — including former U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D)— wrote that Harris has long prioritized climate action and would continue to do so as president.
“We know that protecting our planet for ourselves and future generations requires the kind of bold leadership that Kamala Harris has demonstrated her whole life,” they wrote. “We are proud to support her and be in the fight against climate change with her.”
Inslee, whose ambitious climate proposals during his 2020 presidential campaign influenced Biden’s climate policies, said Harris could help mobilize young voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, rising seas and stronger storms in their lifetimes.
“Her candidacy instantly lit an electric spark under young people across the country,” Inslee said. “That’s going to bode well for our fortunes.”
Kerry, who left the Biden administration in March, said in an interview that Harris was a “terrific ally” on climate policy. He noted that she was an early advocate of the United States reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, and she delivered a forceful speech at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai last fall.
