When faced with sticky situations requiring fundamental change, a friend of mine used to say, “If three people tell you you’re a horse, saddle up!”
Blunt wisdom, but highly applicable to the industry discussions that NetZero Insider reporters have been covering of late, focused on the opportunities and challenges of the U.S. energy transition and the need for utilities and regulators to adopt new approaches and ways of thinking.
Jon Lamson was in Mystic, Conn., for the New England Energy Conference and Exposition, where a state regulator talked about the information imbalance between utilities and regulators, which will require regulators “to learn how to ask the right questions and be prepared with new and creative ways to interpret data.”
K Kaufmann reported on an industry conference in D.C., where Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, called on utilities to respond to the anticipated spike in electricity demand from data centers with new thinking and programs. “We need to get utilities to act like private-sector companies and actually take risk,” Shah said.
A new paper from researchers at the University of Texas calls for utilities to develop new ways to value distributed energy resources as part of non-wires alternatives for upgrading distribution systems, again to handle higher demand, James Downing wrote. A “bilevel optimization framework” is needed to minimize system planning costs while ensuring that DER developers get their required rate of returns, the researchers say.
Finally, K reported on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration final rule updating the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standard, which will push the nation’s automakers and drivers to think differently about how many miles per gallon they should be getting from their cars: 65.1 for a U.S. sedan by 2031.
In our curated content, Canary Media covers the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s new rule phasing in zero-emission standards for more than 1 million fossil fuel-fired large water heaters, small boilers and process heaters in Southern California. While aimed at cutting ozone-forming nitrogen oxides, the rule will also help zero out the greenhouse gas emissions this equipment produces.
Best Lawyers, a legal industry trade publication, delves into the ongoing challenges of implementing the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, and the broad of range of details that remain uncertain, even after the Treasury Department has issued regulations.
After his conviction on 34 counts of fraud, former President Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail, where record-breaking heat at his rallies in Arizona and Nevada sent 24 supporters to hospitals for heat-related treatment, The Guardian reports. Trump is pledging to help the oil and gas industries “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels.
Keep up to date on all the hottest federal, state and local policy and election stories in this week’s Intelligence Report:
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