Illinois has $30 million in incentives available for solar installations on multi-family buildings. 

So far, though, the state program has not received any applications for such projects, according to Jan Gudell, Illinois Solar for All associate director at Elevate, the organization tasked with running the state program. 

In urban areas like Chicago, residents of environmental justice and lower-income neighborhoods are highly likely to live in multi-family residential buildings where it is extremely difficult to install rooftop solar. 

There is little incentive for a landlord to invest in solar that will provide cost savings to the tenants, and rooftops may need significant upgrades to handle solar. In condo buildings, homeowners association bureaucracy and other concerns must be navigated.

There’s also a lesser-known logistical and structural barrier — if solar is to be channeled to individual residential units behind the meter, a separate solar system is essentially needed for each unit — with separate inverters and wiring.

“That’s a lot of hardware, space and cost,” said Aliya Bagewadi, US director of strategic partnerships for Allume Energy, an Australian startup company that says it can address at least this part of the puzzle, by sending energy to individual units with only one inverter and system. 

The company has served thousands of customers in Australia, New Zealand and Europe with its SolShare technology. Now it is rolling out in the U.S., in sunny southern states as well as Illinois, because of the state’s robust solar incentives. 

“It’s inherently an energy equity issue,” said Bagewadi, who is based in Chicago. “We know [multi-family building residents] are much more likely to be lower-income, longer-term renters. We want to make sure those savings flow to people who can really benefit the most.”

Direct benefits 

Illinois isn’t alone in the lack of multi-family solar arrays. Solar developers and advocates have long noted the challenge nationwide, especially for affordable multi-family rental buildings. A 2022 study by Berkeley lab noted that in 2021, about 3% of solar installed in the U.S. was on multi-family buildings, mostly owner-occupied condos. 

“Solar may be a non-starter in a rental multi-family property because the owner may be looking at a complex, expensive and time-consuming process, where they would have to consider the design, permitting, installation, interconnection, and cost for multiple systems,” said Gudell. “For many property owners, this may be unaffordable and unimaginable.” 

A 2018 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the majority of potential capacity for new solar serving low- and moderate-income customers is on renter-occupied multi-family rooftops. California passed a law in 2015 specifically to address the dearth of solar on multi-family buildings, promising to invest up to $1 billion by 2031.

There are typically several ways to handle rooftop solar on multi-family buildings. 

In rental properties, the building owner can own the array, and use the energy to power common areas, like hallways, a pool or gym. Owners can also allocate a portion of the energy savings to tenants, by charging an amenity fee or otherwise collecting some revenue themselves. 

Alternately, the energy can all be sent back to the grid, in areas with viable net metering policies, and the compensation can be shared with tenants or among condo owners, often referred to as virtual net metering. Community solar offers a similar situation — where the solar isn’t onsite at all, but residents can subscribe to partake in savings. 

Solar advocates, developers, lenders, and policymakers have all been working at state and federal levels to improve opportunities for virtual net metering and community solar. 

These arrangements, however, can still be unattractive or impossible depending on state and utility policy. Community solar isn’t even legal in some states, and virtual net metering depends on utility participation. 

The California law requiring solar on new multi-family construction up to three stories high exempts areas served by utilities that don’t offer virtual net metering.

SolShare avoids these challenges by sending electricity directly from the solar array to individual users, without involving utilities or the grid.

“You can do behind-the-meter with direct benefit to tenants,” said Bagewadi. “We’re physically pushing the electrons to multiple meters.”

Possibilities 

Allume partners with solar installers and developers to help deploy rooftop solar on multi-family buildings, including by working with landlords to design financial structures that benefit both the building owner and tenants. In some cases, Allume acts as the solar developer itself. 

With SolShare, a building owner or manager can allocate energy from a shared solar system, based on unit square footage, in equal amounts, or however they choose. 

Where the technology is deployed in Australia and the UK, energy can be sent to different units on demand, Bagewadi explained. In the U.S., the rollout in Florida and Mississippi is being done with preset amounts that can be changed with 24 hours notice. 

An Allume case study from a 64-unit Orlando apartment building with SolShare notes that a 392-kilowatt rooftop system resulted in savings of almost $100 per month for each unit, with electricity purchased from the grid reduced by almost 60%. While the idea is for residents to use solar behind the meter, excess solar can be sent to the grid. Adding an on-site battery to the mix lets residents use all the power on-site behind the meter, and makes solar power available when the grid is down.

Solar advocates hope the EPA’s $7 billion commitment to the federal equity-focused Solar for All program — separate from Illinois’s state program — will “further unlock multi-family solar,” in Bagewadi’s words.

Gudell said Elevate and other experts know there are many Illinoisans living in multi-family rental buildings that would qualify to have solar installed through Illinois Solar for All. They hope policy and technology evolve to match the available funding. 

“We’ll need a solution that addresses the split incentive problem for rental situations, where the building owner cannot or will not subsidize solar for tenants; and the complexity of bringing solar to multiple electrical accounts at one building,” Gudell said. 

“Adoption of a technology that allows for a single system to be split into shares, for use by multiple electrical account holders, could help in that it would simplify the design, permitting and installation process.”

Startup pitches new model to unlock solar for multi-family buildings, in Illinois and beyond is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A major expansion of battery storage may be the most economical and environmentally beneficial way for Illinois to maintain grid reliability as it phases out fossil fuel generation, a new study finds.

The analysis was commissioned by the nonprofit Clean Grid Alliance and solar organizations as state lawmakers consider proposed incentives for private developers to build battery storage.

“The outlook is not great for bringing on major amounts of new capacity to replace the retiring capacity,” said Mark Pruitt, former head of the Illinois Power Agency and author of the study, which suggests batteries will be a more realistic path forward than a massive buildout of new generation and transmission infrastructure. 

The proposed legislation — SB 3959 and HB 5856 — would require the Illinois Power Agency to procure energy storage capacity for deployment by utilities ComEd and Ameren. Payments would be based on the difference between energy market prices and the costs of charging batteries off-peak, to ensure the storage would be profitable. The need for incentives would theoretically ratchet down over time. 

“As market prices for power go up, your incentive goes down,” Pruit said. “The idea is to provide an incentive that bridges the gap between the cost of battery technology and the value in the market. Over time, those will equalize and level out.” 

The bills, introduced in May at the end of the legislature’s spring session, would amend existing energy law to add energy storage incentives to state policy, along with existing incentives for nuclear and renewables. 

The study noted that Illinois will need at least 8,500 new megawatts of capacity and possibly as much as 15,000 new megawatts between 2030 and 2049, with increased demand driven in part by the growth of data centers. Twenty-five data centers being proposed in Illinois would use as much energy as the state’s five nuclear plants generate, according to nuclear plant owner Exelon’s CEO Calvin Butler Jr., quoted by Bloomberg. 

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) found in its summer and winter 2024 assessments that within MISO and PJM regional grids, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana are all at “elevated” risk of insufficient capacity. 

“NERC, PJM, MISO and the Illinois Commerce Commission have all identified the potential for capacity shortfalls,” said Pruitt. “You do have some options for alleviating that. You can build transmission and bring in capacity from outside the state. You can maintain your current domestic generating capacity [without retiring fossil fuel plants]. You could expand your domestic generating capacity. And an independent variable is your growth rate. All these have to work together, there’s no silver bullet. We know there are major challenges on each of those fronts.” 

Gloomy numbers 

The latest PJM capacity auction results showed capacity prices increasing from $28.92/MW-Day for the 2024/25 period to $269.92/MW-Day — a nearly 10-fold increase — for the following year. That “translates into an annual cost increase of about $350 for a typical single-family household served by ComEd,” Pruitt said. “The increase in costs indicates that more capacity supply is required to meet capacity demand in the future.” 

There are many new generation projects in the queue for interconnection by MISO and PJM, but many of them drop out before ever being deployed because of unviable economics, long delays, regulatory challenges and other issues. A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noted that while interconnection requests for renewables have skyrocketed since the Inflation Reduction Act, only 15% of interconnected capacity was actually completed in PJM and MISO between 2000 and 2018, and experts say similar completion rates persist. 

“This finding indicates that deploying sufficient new capacity resources to offset [fossil fuel] retirements is not likely to occur in the near term,” said Pruitt. “Just because something is planned doesn’t mean it gets built.” 

Meanwhile the state is running out of funds for the purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs) that are crucial to driving wind and solar development. The 2024 long-term renewable resources procurement plan by the IPA shows the state’s fund for renewables reaching a deficit in 2028, so that spending on RECs from renewables will have to be scaled back by as much as 60%. 

Long-distance transmission lines could bring wind energy or other electricity from out of state. But planned transmission lines have faced hurdles. The Grain Belt Express transmission line, in the works for a decade, was in August denied needed approval from an Illinois appellate court. The transmission line, proposed by Invenergy, would have brought wind power from Kansas to load centers to the east. 

“That sets it back years,” Pruitt said. “Transmission is a very long-term solution. I’m sure people are working diligently on it, but it’s five to 10 years before you get something approved and built.” 

Value proposition, solar benefits 

Pruitt’s study found that if 8,500 MW of energy storage were deployed between 2030 and 2049, Illinois customers could see up to $3 billion in savings compared to if they had to foot the bill for increased capacity without new storage. The savings would come because of lower market prices in capacity auctions, as well as investment in new transmission and generation that would be avoided. 

Pruitt found that $11 billion to $28 billion in macro-level economic benefits could also result, with blackouts avoided, reduced fossil fuel emissions and jobs and economic stimulus created. 

Pruitt’s analysis indicates that the incentives proposed in the legislation would cost $6.4 billion to customers. But the storage would result in $9.4 billion in savings compared to the status quo, hence a $3 billion overall savings between 2030 and 2049. 

“Solar is great, but solar is an intermittent resource; battery storage when paired with solar allows it to be far more reliable,” said Andrew Linhares, Central Region senior manager for the Solar Energy Industry Association. “Battery storage is not as cheap as solar, but its reliability is its hallmark. Combining the resources gives you a cheap and reliable resource.” 

“Solar and storage is this powerful tool that can help reduce costs for consumers and create new jobs and economic activity,” he continued. “I don’t believe that same picture is there for building out new natural gas resources. Anything that helps storage, helps solar and vice versa. CEJA sees these two technologies as being joined at the hip for the future, they are being seen more and more as a single resource.”

Study suggests a big role for grid battery storage as Illinois shutters its coal power plants is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Darryl Moton is ready to “get on a roof.”

The 25-year-old Chicago resident is among the latest graduates of an intensive 13-week solar training course that’s helping to connect employers with job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

Moton was referred by another job readiness program meant to keep youth away from gun violence. He “never knew about solar” before but now sees himself owning a solar company and using the proceeds to fund his music and clothing design endeavors.

He and others interviewed for jobs with a dozen employers assembled at a church on Chicago’s West Side on August 1 as part of the fourth training cohort for the 548 Foundation, which is partnering with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on a recently-announced $30 million initiative to create 1,000 solar jobs in Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods.   

The 548 Foundation is part of 548 Enterprise, a suite of renewable energy and affordable housing development projects, launched in 2019 and named after the public housing unit where co-founder A.J. Patton grew up. 

The idea is to help keep housing affordable by using solar to lower energy bills, while training people left out of the traditional energy economy to supply that solar. 

“When you invest in a community, the biggest question is who benefits, who gets the jobs?” asked Patton, during the job fair. “This is as good as it gets,” he added, about the recent state investment. “We just have to keep advocating for quality policy.” 

Employers at the job fair said such training programs are crucial for them to find workers in Illinois, where robust solar incentives are attracting many out-of-state companies eager to hire and hit the ground. Mike Huneke, energy operations manager for Minnesota-based Knobelsdorff said he has hired 18 employees from previous 548 cohorts, and he expected to make about six job offers after the recent interviews. 

“Illinois is on fire,” said Huneke. “We’re not from Illinois, so finding this new talent pipeline is what we need. We have a ton of projects coming up.” 

Lisa Cotton, 30, has dreamed of being an electrician since she was a kid. She had received two job offers at the August 1 fair before the group even broke for lunch. 

“A lot of times you go through a training program, get a certificate, and that’s the end of it,” said Jacqueline Williams of the Restoring Sovereignty Project, a partner which administers the wraparound services for the training program. 

The 548 program makes sure to connect graduates with employers, and only companies with specific openings to fill are invited to the job fair. 548 and its partners also stay in contact with graduates and employers to make sure the placement is successful. 

“We have a post-grad program where they can call us any time, and an alumni fund. If an employer says, ‘This guy can’t come to work because his radiator is busted,’ we’ll take care of that,” said Williams. 

Achieving equity   

After Illinois passed an ambitious clean energy law in 2017, multiple solar training programs were launched in keeping with the law’s equity provisions. But employers and advocates were frustrated by a seeming disconnect in which many trainees never got solar jobs, and employers weren’t sure how to find the workers. 

Since then, the state has passed another clean energy law – the 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, with even more ambitious equity mandates; and non-profit organizations have developed and honed more advanced workforce training programs. To access incentives under the law, employers need to hire a percent of equity-eligible applicants that rises to 30% by 2030. The program prioritizes people impacted by the criminal justice system, alumni of the foster care system, and people who live in equity-designated communities. 

548 affiliates help employers navigate the paperwork and requirements involved in the equity incentives. Several employers at the job fair said this is a plus, but noted that regardless of equity, they are desperate for the type of highly-trained, enthusiastic candidates coming out of the 548 program. 

“This is a great way to bridge what the state is trying to do with its clean energy goals, and connecting under-represented people with these opportunities,” said Annette Poulimenos, talent acquisition manager of Terrasmart, a major utility-scale solar provider. “We came here ready to hire, and I think we’re going to walk away with some new talent.”   

Member organizations of the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism do outreach to recruit most of the training program participants. 

Nicholas Brock found out about the training thanks to a staffer at one of these organizations who noticed his professional attitude and punctuality as he walked by every morning to a different workforce program. 

“Whatever I do, nine times out of 10, I’m the first one to get there, before the managers,” said Brock, 20. “He noticed that and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about solar panels?’” 

Brock knew little about solar at that point, but now he aims to be a solar project manager. 

“I’m so glad I came here,” he said. “They bring out the best in you.” 

Full service 

Wraparound, holistic services are key to the program’s success. During the training and for a year afterwards, trainees and alumni can apply for financial help or other types of assistance. 

“There are so many barriers, it might be child care or your car is impounded,” said Williams. “We might be writing a letter to a judge asking to ‘please take him off house arrest so he can work.’ It’s intensive case management, navigating the bureaucratic anomalies that arise when you’re system-impacted.”

Moises Vega III, 26 – who always wanted to work in renewables because “it’s literally the future” – noted that his car battery died during the training program, and he was provided funds to get his vehicle working again. 

While ample support is available, the program itself is rigorous and demanding. Classes meet from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, and trainees are required to check their phones at the door and be fully focused, notes instructor and 548 workforce strategies director Michael Thomas. During the hands-on boot camp week, the day starts at 6 a.m. 

“That’s when the trades start,” noted Thomas. “You need to figure out how that works, how will you get child care at 5:30 a.m.?” 

Sixty-one trainees started in the first three cohorts, and 46 graduated, the first group in July 2023. The fourth cohort started with 25, and as of the job fair, 18 were on track to graduate. Eighty-five percent of graduates from the first three cohorts are currently working in the field, according to 548. 

“Even though I wish the graduation rate were higher, the people who commit to it, stay with it,” said Kynnée Golder, CEO of Global HR Business Solutions, which has an oversight role for the 548 Foundation. “It’s monumental, it’s life-changing for a lot of people.” 

Comprehensive curriculum 

The curriculum starts with life skills, including interpersonal relationships, resume-building, financial planning and more. Each day begins with a spiritual reflection. 

The students learn about electricity and energy, and soon move into specific instruction on solar installation and operation. Rooms at St. Agatha’s church served as labs, where students connected wires, built converters and eventually mounted solar panels on a demonstration pitched, shingled roof. 

Terrance Hanson, 40, credited Thomas as “the best instructor ever.” 

“I’m not a young kid, my brain is no longer a sponge,” Hanson said. “He made sure I got it all. Now I feel like I know so much, I’m confident and prepared to get out and show what I can do.” 

He added that people in disinvested neighborhoods have ample untapped potential to be part of the clean energy workforce.  

“You see a lot of basketball players in my community because there are a lot of basketball hoops,” he said. “If there were golf courses in the hood, you would see more golfers. It’s about opportunities. And this was the most amazing and empowering thing I’ve ever been through.” 

Jack Ailey co-founded Ailey Solar in 2012, making it the oldest still-operating residential installer in Illinois, by his calculations. He noted that there can be high turnover among installers, and intensive training and preparation is key. 

“You’re out there in the sun, the cold, it’s heavy physical labor, wrestling 40-pound panels up to the roof,” he said. “You have to know what you’re getting into.” 

“Some training programs vary in quality,” Ailey added, but he was impressed by the candidates at the 548 job fair. 

Trainees test for and receive multiple certifications, including the OSHA 30 for quality assurance, and the NCCER and NABCEP for construction and solar professionals, respectively. The program is also a pre-apprenticeship qualifier, allowing graduates to move on to paid, long-term apprenticeships with unions representing carpenters, electricians, plumbers and laborers – the gateway to a lucrative and stable career in the trades. 

Thomas noted that most trade unions still don’t have a major focus on solar. 

“We’re ahead of the unions, and our graduates bring real value to them, and to the companies,” he said. “The students might know more than a company’s foreman knows. It’s a win-win situation. Solar is a nascent industry, there’s so much opportunity in this space.” 

When Tredgett Page, 38, connected with 548, his auto detailing work and other odd jobs were not going well. He had always loved science and been curious about photosynthesis and the sun’s power. 

“I had been in the streets before, and I was leaning back toward that, but God brought me here,” he said. “Now I have the confidence, I know what I’m talking about, I know about megawatts and kilowatts, net metering, grid-connected, pretty much anything about solar.” 

He sees metaphorical significance in his new trade: “Energy is life, and it teaches you balance, it’s all about negative and positive ions.” He feels like “the sky is the limit” after the training. 

“I have so much skill that they gave me, now I’m hungry to use it,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, but optimistic, excited, very exuberant!”  

‘The sky is the limit’: Solar program opens new opportunities for Chicago trainees is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Growing up in Southern California, Saxon Metzger and his brother Ayda Donne — now 29 and 26 — didn’t think much about their Indigenous heritage in Oklahoma. Their great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt saw her mother murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror, when locals brutally attacked tribal members over oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching the family history.

In the past decade, the brothers began exploring this history, including the fossil-fuel linked violence and exploitation recently showcased in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the country’s highest concentration of abandoned, uncapped oil and gas wells, which continue to leak methane and other dangerous pollutants. 

Now, Metzger and Donne are seeking to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by making sure clean energy does not leave its own legacy of abandonment or disinvestment. 

Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization Metzger founded, aims to provide solar decommissioning workforce training and project management, as well as promote solar installation. 

“Tribal nations, along with many other historically disenfranchised communities, are justifiably skeptical of development that doesn’t fully acknowledge its potential shortcomings, having been bearing the brunt of fossil fuels,” Metzger said. 

Osage Nation Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has officially pledged support for the brothers’ vision. In March, Eighth Generation won a U.S. Department of Energy Community Energy Innovation concept phase prize, meaning a $100,000 grant, mentorship and the chance for more DOE funding. Metzger was also recently awarded a Grid Alternatives Tribal Energy Innovators Fellowship, which comes with $50,000 and mentorship, and he is a finalist for MIT’s Solve Global Challenges Indigenous Communities Fellowship program. 

Family roots 

Metzger studied economics at Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah, then returned to Southern Illinois to help facilitate the deployment of solar in the largely rural, lower-income region. 

He was program director for the nonprofit Solarize Southern Illinois, then worked as a project developer for StraightUp Solar, a residential and commercial solar installer focused on underserved areas in Illinois and Missouri. Metzger got an MBA with an emphasis in sustainability from Wilmington University, then worked for a decommissioning company in California. 

Striking out on his own, he co-founded a company called Polaris Ecosystems that does solar decommissioning project management and consulting. Polaris is under contract to support commercial and utility-scale repowering in California and Texas, Metzger said, declining to give more details because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts. 

The company collaborated with a Georgia solar waste management company called Green Clean Solar, whose founder, Emilie Oxel O’Leary, said she plans to partner with Polaris on more contracts. Her company has found ways to reuse solar packaging and components – for example, using thousands of cardboard boxes from solar delivery as mulch for a tree nursery in Hawaii, where landfill space is especially scarce. 

“Saxon and I find these solutions together. We find sustainability. We bring circularity to our conversations,” she said. “Very few [companies] do what we do. These billion-dollar companies have never stopped and thought about this.” 

Metzger now leads Eighth Generation and Polaris from Chicago, while also teaching a sustainable business class at Wilmington University. 

Donne is in charge of grant-writing for Eighth Generation, while pursuing his doctorate in English literature at New York University, with a focus on Indigenous literature and environmental justice. Donne also collaborates with NYU professor and toxicologist Judith Zelikoff, doing blood and urine testing and health workshops with the Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey, who face serious health threats from a former Ford Motor Company illegal dump that is now a Superfund site. Donne hopes to further intertwine the humanities and STEM sides of academia in pursuit of environmental and energy justice for tribes.  

“My family is very scarred by what happened during the reign of terror. They tried to run” from that legacy, said Donne, who also works as chief librarian at the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma. “But repressing things like that rarely works, rarely protects you for very long. I like to think that Saxon and my work is kind of a departure from that history of denying our identity and running from the pain that’s in our family.” 

On visits to the Osage Nation, the brothers say they’ve recognized the cultural as well as economic importance that fossil fuels still hold for the tribe. They strive to acknowledge and respect this dynamic while promoting clean energy. The tribe currently has no large-scale solar on its land, and this year a federal judge ruled that a controversial wind farm must be removed because it failed to get proper permits a decade ago. The tribe has long opposed the wind farm, which was built on sacred land.    

“We’re trying to plug into the existing things that they’re doing, and not show up and say, ‘Hey, we know what the solution is,’” said Metzger. “This is my tribe, these are my folks, my culture, my people. But I am approaching it with the understanding that to a certain degree, I’m also an outsider from a market that they don’t have access to.” 

Metzger added that when he first visited the Osage Nation, “I didn’t see a single solar panel, on the entirety of the reservation. I looked for it. I was shocked. It was one of the few places I’ve ever seen that there were no Trump flags, and there were no solar panels.” 

Metzger said that it is still likely a long road to installing solar on the reservation, but he’s been encouraged by tribal leaders, and received a letter of support in July from Osage Chief Standing Bear. 

A growing need 

More than half of states have decommissioning policies that require financial assurances be put up in advance, according to a 2023 year-end report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center and DSIRE. Nineteen states have no state-level decommissioning policies at all, the report shows, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“When it comes to assurance policies, you want to make sure landowners won’t be stuck with the bill at the end of the day, a dine-and-dash situation,” said Justin Lindemann, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at North Carolina State University’s Clean Energy Technology Center. “In most states, you have to have these finances in place well before the project decommissions.” 

Solar project contracts and permits typically include a decommissioning estimate. In states with financial assurance requirements, developers are usually required to put up incremental amounts of financing over time for decommissioning, so that there is not a major financial burden tacked on to the project’s startup cost. 

Metzger said that in his experience, estimates can be unrealistically low, a situation that in the near-term can benefit everyone, as the project cost appears lower. 

“The reality is that our industry doesn’t really want to have that conversation” about decommissioning costs and logistics, “because a developer, if they included the full cost of decommissioning, would not sell as many projects,” Metzger said. “No one really wants to hear that the project is going to cost more.” 

Lindemann said he hasn’t seen major problems with low-balled estimates, but there still have been relatively few large-scale decommissions. State laws and policies can try to ensure that estimates are accurate and large enough financial assurances are available. For example, Ohio requires that estimates be revised periodically, and if the estimate has increased, the required bond must be increased too.  

Ideological opponents of solar have stoked fears about solar panels filling up landfills and presenting hazardous waste. Those concerns are often exaggerated, as solar panels are made up primarily of steel and glass and the toxic compounds in the cells present relatively little risk, experts say. Even as solar farms expand exponentially, solar waste will still be much smaller than other waste streams, like construction debris and municipal garbage. 

Nonetheless, responsible and smooth decommissioning is crucial for the industry to thrive, experts agree. 

“We live in a social media environment where bad stories, singular bad examples do spread,” said Lindemann. “We need to make sure that relationships don’t get strained because of a lack of direction regarding deconstruction and decommission. Do people involved in or impacted by a project understand what’s in front of them 20 to 25 years down the line? That level of trust and transparency can be built, and comprehensive directives from states and other entities provide the first step.” 

In 2023, almost 33 GW of solar were installed nationwide, and solar deployment is only expected to keep growing. 

“In order to handle that, it’s important to make sure state and local governments have the right rules in place to handle mass decommissioning,” said Lindemann.  

Many challenges 

Metzger notes there are many costs and logistics to decommissioning that can be easy to overlook: the need to remove fences and drive over fields to haul panels off, lodging for workers, renting equipment like pile drivers, dealing with buried electrical conduit or other hazards. 

“If you look at a site, there isn’t one solution,” Metzger said. “Say you have 20,000 panels, that’s a bunch of metal. How heavy is that? What kind of tractor trailers are you going to need to pull it? What about the labor, how many 40-pound panels can someone lift in an hour?” 

Metzger and Donne are developing a decommissioning workforce training curriculum, and hope to eventually train Osage tribal members and others in various aspects of decommissioning work and project management.  

“We’re thinking about what this is going to look like for our tribe in 100 years,” said Donne. “Are these structural resources available when Saxon and I are long gone?”

That perspective is what inspired the name Eighth Generation, Metzger explains. 

“It’s often cited as an indigenous principle to think of an action through seven generations of impact, and that phrase always reminded me that some problems just won’t show up until the eighth generation,” he said. 

“And it feels like that is what’s happening here, as we’re staring down millions of panels annually needing decommissioning. It’s all solvable problems to an industry that genuinely is making the world a better place. We need to follow through on the promise we made as an industry to be meaningfully different than previous energy systems, and taking care of our legacy assets is a necessary component of that.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story described Eighth Generation Consulting as a nonprofit; it is a for-profit entity that is exploring nonprofit status.

Indigenous solar consultant works to ensure responsible development in communities scarred by fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Indiana ratepayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year for power from coal plants that are operating despite the availability of cheaper sources, including wind and solar.  

The state is emblematic of a larger problem, as electricity market rules typically allow utility-owned power plants to essentially cut in line even when they are not the most economical option for customers.  

A recent report commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council examined how this phenomenon plays out in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) regional transmission organization specifically, building on previous research by RMI, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others — all of which show that uneconomic coal plant dispatch takes a huge toll on ratepayer wallets and public health. 

The problem happens primarily with vertically integrated utilities or municipal utilities and cooperatives, which can recoup costs of fuel and operations from ratepayers even if they are operating at a loss. In most of MISO territory, energy markets have not been restructured as open markets, making such cost recapture the norm. 

The NRDC study showed that Indiana ratepayers bore the second-highest burden in MISO, paying $338 million for uneconomic coal power from 2021-2023, just behind Louisiana’s $341 million. North Dakota ratepayers spent an extra $120 million, Wisconsin $69 million, and Minnesota $54 million, the study found. 

Indiana’s R.M. Schahfer plant, run by utility NIPSCO, cost ratepayers more than $100 million in such uneconomical dispatch from 2021-2023, the NRDC study found. 

In an ongoing rate case, Duke Energy is seeking to increase reliance on its Gibson and Cayuga plants in Indiana. These plants were responsible for $29 million and $7.6 million in uneconomic dispatch costs to consumers in 2023, according to RMI’s economic dispatch dashboard. 

“This has been a problem plaguing Indiana coal plants for many years, it’s costing our consumers in Indiana millions of dollars and it’s one of the factors driving rates higher and driving clean energy off the grid,” said Ben Inskeep, program director for Citizens Action Coalition in Indiana. “It’s a tale of utilities making bad decisions as part of their profit motive and then utility regulators failing to hold them accountable as they’re supposed to. Certainly utilities should be operating their plants efficiently and economically, and when they fail to do so, they shouldn’t be getting cost recovery.” 

Duke spokesperson Angeline Protogere said the study misses important context. 

“There are a lot of considerations that go into plant dispatch decisions, and the priority is always reliability of service and economics,” Protogere said. “We weren’t able to replicate the NRDC data, but it appears it’s based on incomplete information. For example, there are times when MISO calls on a unit because of grid reliability needs. There’s a bigger picture that’s not reflected here.”

Skewed markets

The NRDC study found that over three years across MISO, about 400 MW of wind power was curtailed in favor of power from coal plants generating at higher-than-market costs. 

Power producers bid into regional energy reverse-auctions for real-time and next-day power, offering the price for which they can produce their electricity. Grid operators like MISO and PJM are supposed to dispatch the power starting with the most affordable option, until demand is met. 

Even if vertically integrated utilities are not selling their power on the open market but rather serving their own customers, they still need to be dispatched by the grid operator to send their energy onto the grid. 

But under the rules for MISO and other grid operators, coal plants can “self-commit” to run for a given time period even if they cannot produce power below the market rate. The idea is that coal plants can’t ramp up or down quickly, so they may need to keep running at a certain level to be ready to provide more power when needed.  

If this relatively expensive coal power weren’t on the grid, more wind power would be purchased and demand for new renewables would likely be created. 

“That increment of power would be filled through the market selecting the next highest bidder,” providing “an accurate picture of what electricity should cost that gives a signal that incentivizes newer generation,” explained James Gignac, Union of Concerned Scientists Midwest senior policy manager. 

The lower the energy prices at a given time and the lower the demand, the worse the coal plant dispatch problem gets. Data from RMI and a 2020 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that ratepayer losses due to uneconomic coal dispatch were lower in 2022, because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused natural gas prices to spike, making coal more competitive by comparison. Conversely, when energy demand plummeted in 2020 because of the pandemic, uneconomic dispatch of coal plants soared. 

Since 2015, the uneconomic dispatch of coal plants has cost Indiana ratepayers $1.9 billion and ratepayers nationwide $20 billion, according to RMI’s dashboard. 

The issue has real impacts on the growth of renewables, experts note. If the practice was prevented, market prices would be higher and there would be more incentive for renewable developers to build projects to sell their power on the open market. Meanwhile if vertically-integrated utilities were not allowed to recoup their costs for uneconomic dispatch, they would be motivated not to run coal plants and might decide to invest in building renewables instead, or at least buy wind power on the open market.    

“I’ve talked with [wind] developers who say they look at where coal plants self-commit uneconomically, and they avoid those transmission lines because they know they will be curtailed,” said Joseph Daniel, principal in RMI’s Carbon Free Electricity team and lead author of the Union of Concerned Scientists report. 

That report shows that if uneconomic coal dispatch was avoided, Indiana customers would save money — but not as much money as ratepayers in other states, because there is less wind power available around Indiana. Over time, a market unfettered by uneconomic coal plants might correct this situation. 

“The greatest immediate savings for customers from stopping uneconomic coal plant operations are in areas where there are existing low-cost resources such as wind power being curtailed by that behavior,” said Gignac. “If the replacement for the uneconomic coal generation is something like a relatively higher-cost gas plant, then the market clearing price is higher and customer savings are not as significant. However, that higher clearing price is a signal and an incentive for low-cost renewables to locate projects in that area and deliver further cost savings. 

“Removing the market distortion of uneconomic coal operations helps move us toward the cleaner, lower-cost energy system we need.” 

Solutions   

Studies show that coal plants that sell their power on the open market – known as “merchant” plants – rarely decide to operate when they are not getting market prices at least equal to their cost of operating – the way vertically-integrated or publicly-owned coal plants do when they know they can recoup their costs from ratepayers, without compensation from the market. In other words, merchant plants do not ask grid operators to be uneconomically dispatched. 

These merchant plants nonetheless seem to ramp up in time to operate when their power is needed, experts note, indicating that vertically-integrated plant operators in MISO are understating their ability to ramp up and down quickly, as noted by NRDC policy analyst Dana Ammann and other experts.  

“There’s so little incentive to ramp up quickly, because the market really accommodates their inflexibility,” said Ammann, lead author of the recent NRDC study. The vertically-integrated coal plants in MISO are “much less flexible than coal plants in other markets. In PJM you see coal plants turning on much more quickly, since the merchant plant operators are reliant on the price signals to turn a profit. They don’t have the guaranteed rate recovery, so they’re very responsive to price signals.” 

State utility commissions can prevent regulated utilities from recouping costs when coal plants are dispatched uneconomically. Michigan regulators did exactly this last year in a rate case for Indiana Michigan (I&M) Power, preventing the utility from passing on such costs for its share of the Rockport coal plant, located in Indiana.  

Daniel said Indiana regulators should likewise protect Indiana customers from paying for uneconomic power from the Rockport plant. The RMI dashboard shows that plant dispatched $142 million worth of such power last year. Meanwhile the Michigan ruling could be considered precedent for Michigan utilities like DTE and Consumers Energy in future rate cases. 

Ammann noted that states can also use the Integrated Resource Plan process to curb uneconomic dispatch, as Minnesota’s utility commission did when it recently decided that Otter Tail Power’s Coyote coal plant can only recoup costs during a designated power emergency.

“It’s an interesting approach for getting ratepayers basically off the hook for coal plants that aren’t retiring, that might still be economic to run for a small number of hours,” Ammann said. 

Grid operators like MISO may have the most important role to play in better managing markets, refusing to dispatch coal plants that aren’t necessary and doing deeper analysis to figure out exactly how much power is needed. Experts say multi-day markets – rather than just real-time and day-ahead ones – could better match supply with demand and avoid unnecessary coal plant dispatch. 

MISO’s Independent Market Monitor has recommended such measures, including de-committing coal power producers who sold into the day-ahead market if it turns out that others – including renewables – could sell power more efficiently in the real-time market once the time comes. 

“MISO works closely with our members, state regulators and our independent market monitor to ensure our markets are efficient,” said MISO spokesperson Brandon Morris. MISO’s June 2024 monthly operations report shows that in June, 18% of coal-fired power dispatched in the region was uneconomic self-committed dispatch. 

Experts note that fuel delivery contracts often include a minimum purchase, so utilities committed to buying a certain amount of fuel might as well burn the fuel even if they are not making a profit on the power. This might not have been an issue in years past when coal plants operated at high capacity most of the time, but as coal plants have become increasingly uncompetitive, the NRDC study notes, they are more likely to be committed to buy fuel they actually don’t need. Fuel contracts are usually of short duration, with 88% of those reviewed by the federal Energy Information Administration expiring by 2025, meaning there is ample opportunity for fuel delivery contracts to be revised, the NRDC study said. 

Such fuel contracts have meant massive stocks of unneeded coal piling up at Duke plants in Indiana, Inskeep said, forcing the company to burn it even if the power isn’t needed.

Protogere said the coal supplies are necessary, as “the goal is to ensure a reliable supply in an increasingly uncertain market. The aim is to manage volatility as well as maintain long-term supply reliability and security, so that we don’t have to resort to higher cost options in the market.”

Inskeep hopes state regulators deny requests by Duke and other utilities to increase coal-fired generation and the recouping of the costs from ratepayers. 

“The bottom line with this uneconomic dispatch situation is it means utilities are keeping their old expensive coal plants open longer than they should,” Inskeep said. “Utilities should be rapidly transitioning to a renewable energy-based portfolio of resources. Instead, utilities are feeling pressure to justify a lot of the bad economic decisions they’ve made in the past, foolish decisions to invest millions or even billions of dollars to keep these plants open.”

Indiana’s dependence on coal is costing ratepayers millions and holding back clean energy growth is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.