Pueblo, Colorado Is Working On Clean Energy, Why Not Anderson? Indiana?

 Long ago, I posted Cutting Carbon - Modest Proposals. No one has ever read it. Recently I got a newsletter about Pueblo, Colorado and followed the link to Pueblo is a clean energy leader. But you might have to look close to see it.   

Today, the facility is the world’s first and largest solar-powered steel mill. Its considerable energy needs are almost entirely met by a purpose-built photovoltaic array next to a nearby coal plant, Comanche Generating Station, where the first of three boilers has already come offline as Colorado pursues an aggressive coal-retirement strategy. Shifting energy policy and falling wind and solar costs have helped make Pueblo County a burgeoning renewables hub, and not just for solar; to the south, a sprawling factory owned by CS Wind is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbine towers.

“Pueblo is going to be, I hope, known as the renewable energy capital of the world,” said Mayor Nick Gradisar, the son and grandson of CF&I steelworkers. “It’s exciting what’s happening here.”

The town does sound like Anderson (and Muncie, and New Castle, and Marion):

But strip away the veneer of growth and progress and you can find struggle. The Great Recession hit especially hard in Pueblo, deepening the pain inflicted by deindustrialization in the early 1980s, when more than 6,000 steelworkers lost their jobs.

“People do feel left out and left behind here,” said state Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Democrat elected in Pueblo County last year by less than 3 points. “There’s some legitimate gripes there. We haven’t thrived in the way the communities further north along the Front Range have, economically.”

But:

A slide on the projector screen at CS Wind’s Pueblo factory showed the “simple mathematics,” in the South Korea-based company’s estimation, of the Inflation Reduction Act: Producing 75,000 new wind turbines by 2030, as the Biden administration has promised, will mean manufacturing 45,000 wind tower sections per year — triple the industry’s current U.S. production capacity.

“The first time I showed this slide to the mayor, it opened your eyes, right?” James Won, head of CS Wind America, said to Gradisar, seated across the room beside Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado.

Jobs are in the offing – in Colorado.

 And could not Indiana reach out for these kinds of investments?

But first, in front of a small gathering of factory workers and a few reporters, the three VIPs performed the painstaking work of building a political coalition that they hope will help sustain CS Wind’s North American business for years to come.

“We really appreciate President Joe Biden,” Gim said. “(The IRA) will help, I think, the U.S. economy and the environment, and all our employees are very happy with that.”

To underscore the point, Gim added that he’d told employees that morning that they’d be receiving an end-of-year bonus thanks to the company’s post-IRA financial outlook. Gradisar didn’t pass up the opportunity to underscore the point one more time.

Again, does this not sound like Central Indiana?

Even the world’s largest wind tower factory isn’t likely to ever employ a huge plurality of Pueblo’s workforce, the way the CF&I plant once did. But in a city that has seen the pitfalls of that kind of economic development, maybe that’s not all bad.

“We know we need to diversify because of that,” said Joy Morauski, a longtime resident and 20-year city employee.

Around town, electricians and HVAC companies have begun to advertise IRA rebates for home energy upgrades, another multibillion-dollar tranche of the law’s decarbonization funding. When Adams and Norton had rooftop solar installed on their home last year, their contractor filled out all the forms to make sure they got the proper tax credits.

So, what is Central Indiana – its city mayors, its Congresspeople, its state representatives – doing about getting in on this business?

 I hear nothing, I see nothing, I assume they are still waiting for the return of General Motors and 1972.

sch 10/14

 And then there is all that space on Indiana's highways that could be used for generating solar power: Earth Matters: Calif. looks into building roadside solar; maybe gov't should come for your burger. Which seems another idea by-passing Indiana.

 Fast-forward nearly half a century and using highway easements to host solar farms isn’t viewed as outlandish, but rather obvious. In well-designed projects, roadside solar economics work just fine using panels crafted by 50 years of technical advances. The Federal Highway Administration, which prohibited outside infrastructure in easements until 1989, issued new guidance in 2021 to state transportation departments to encourage use of these rights-of-way for solar installations. Even before the guidance, a handful of states had taken modest steps to make roadside solar a reality. Wisconsin was the pioneer. In 2003, it passed legislation that produced a regulatory framework that has allowed construction of 26 roadside transmission projects with hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines. But few other states have followed suit.

***

The Ray, which advocates a nationwide meshing of transportation and solar energy production transmission, conducted the Environment California Research & Policy Center’s report, “Solar power alongside California’s highways.” It found that roadside solar on 4,800 acres in just three counties could generate electricity for more than 270,000 homes if covered in solar panels. 

And that could be just the beginning. The Ray Solar Highway Project: Assessment of solar potential installed in ROWs across the United States conducted by the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas, Austin, looked at potential across the contiguous 48 states. It found large amounts of vacant roadside land near exits along the nation’s interstate highways are suitable for solar energy development. These, the researchers calculated, could generate 36 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity annually, worth $4 billion, and enough to charge 12 million electric passenger vehicles.

Besides the obvious gains in clean energy production, building roadside solar would rarely collide with the local opposition that can kill or cause expensive delays in utility-scale installations on farm land or ecologically delicate public lands. With roadside solar, no easements must be negotiated and purchased, and environmental concerns are far less or nil compared with other potential sites.

***

And there’s more. Tom Stone at TTI reports:

“On day one of these projects, state DOTs [departments of transportation] win,” said Laura Rogers, director of strategic partnerships at The Ray. “State DOTs have a lot of options when structuring ROW renewable energy projects. Depending on their priorities and goals, state DOTs can own the renewable energy system and use or sell the clean energy generated, or they can work with a solar developer who owns the system and collect a land fee, while at the same time transferring land maintenance obligations to that developer. Where available, the state DOTs can also retain solar renewable energy credits that they can use to meet greenhouse gas reduction or renewable energy generation goals, or they can sell the credits and keep the revenue,” Rogers added. “No matter how they decide to structure the deal, state DOTs win on all fronts by optimizing underutilized land to generate clean renewable energy that benefits their communities, the environment, and their budgets.”

Again and again – where are our state leaders? Money is to be made, money saved, and all they can do is be the first state in the nation to pass an antiabortion law.

sch 10/15