UNDERWOOD, N.D. - The Upper Midwest will see a seismic shift in energy production after a Minnesota-based utility announced it will close a coal plant in the Dakotas.

Great River Energy, which is Minnesota's second largest electric utility, says it will retire the Coal Creek Station in North Dakota in the second-half of 2022. Great River also plans to boost its wind-energy output by the end of 2023 and have it make up two-thirds of its energy production.

J. Drake Hamilton is science policy director with the group Fresh Energy and says this is a significant move.

"They're moving very rapidly away from coal, reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions by about 95%," says Hamilton.

The coal plant in Underwood, North Dakota accounts for half of the energy Great River sells to dozens of electric cooperatives across the region.

The plant currently employs more than 250 people. To ease the economic pain that will be felt by the community, the company says it will keep paying local taxes on the property for five years after the plant closes.

Great River says the move was largely driven by economics, with coal plants becoming less profitable in the energy market. Hamilton says it's not surprising to see the company want to shift more toward renewables such as wind energy.

"The growth of wind energy, followed secondly by solar energy, that has really upended the economics of burning coal and made it much less attractive to a large number of companies," says Hamilton.

In Minnesota, Xcel Energy last year announced plans to retire its last two coal plants in the Upper Midwest a decade earlier than scheduled.


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California lawmakers hold a hearing in Sacramento today on a bill to hold oil companies and gasoline refiners accountable for alleged price gouging.

According to the Office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, gas prices in California hit an average of $6.42 per gallon last fall, which was $2.61 more than the national average. And it happened even as crude oil prices dropped and state taxes and fees remained unchanged.

Farrah Khan, mayor of Irvine, said she supports Senate Bill 2, which would establish an independent watchdog within the California Energy Commission.

"It's going to establish a new division to provide independent oversight and analysis of the market," Khan explained. "This new division would have the power to subpoena information deemed necessary to root out and address any of the abuses of market power."

The Western States Petroleum Association said in a statement, "This new windfall penalty in this proposal is actually worse than the original bill. The Legislature would be giving away all its authority to a group of unelected bureaucrats who will have the power to set gasoline prices and impact fuels markets. [This] will likely lead to the same unintended consequences as his initial proposal - less investment, less supply, and higher gasoline prices for Californians."

Steven Hernandez, mayor of Coachella, said it is a matter of fairness to the families who live paycheck to paycheck.

"People struggle to afford gas and rent, and to pay medical expenses," Hernandez pointed out. "When we're mindful of the working class, I think we're better off as a society."

The California Energy Commission watchdog would analyze data to look for patterns of misconduct or price manipulation. The bill would also start a rule-making process at the Commission, to set a reasonable profit margin and impose a penalty for price-gouging above the margin. Any fines would be returned to taxpayers.


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A new report found forced power outages in this winter's extreme weather only added to "unreliability" in the fossil-fuel sector.

The PJM Interconnection is the electricity market including Pennsylvania and a dozen other states. Coal and gas plant owners' failure to honor their reliability commitments may cost them as much as $2 billion in penalties.

Dennis Wamsted, energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and the report's author, said some states saw rolling blackouts, and PJM used emergency measures to keep the lights on in Pennsylvania. Wamsted argued it all makes the case for renewable energy as an alternative.

"We are an organization that favors the transition to renewables," Wamsted explained. "We think renewable energies like solar, wind, battery storage, are here today. They are reliable today, they are cheaper than fossil fuels, and they also don't pollute the air, and solve, you know, a lot of our climate change problems."

The report noted in the PJM system, with more than 32,000 megawatts of gas and 7,600 megawatts of coal capacity, were offline at the height of the cold, despite substantial capacity payments PJM pays generators to be available at critical times.

Wamsted pointed out hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were left without power because of the severe storm, and customers in the Carolinas and the seven states in the Tennessee Valley Authority service territory saw outages. He noted there were no rolling blackouts in the Keystone State, but notifications were sent to customers to prepare for the possibility of an outage.

"And so they didn't get to the point where they actually had to turn people's lights off," Wamsted recounted. "They were getting close to that in the sort of a warning structure, and they were appealing to customers to, you know, cooperate and help reduce demand. And that actually does work. "

The report showed the problems associated with the outages prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to launch a joint inquiry into the events surrounding the December freeze and the performance of the nation's bulk power system.

Overseas markets could be harming forests in the U.S. Demand for wood pellets for biomass energy has increased dramatically around the world, especially in Europe where burning wood is treated as renewable energy and heavily subsidized.

The UK-based company Drax Group plans to build a 450,000 ton per year wood pellet plant in Longview.

Peter Riggs, director of the Washington state-based nonprofit Pivot Point, said the region has a productive wood sector.

"This new wood pellet plant proposed for Longview is very different," Riggs pointed out. "First of all, it's not for the domestic market, it's not making pellets for home stoves. It represents a substantial and entirely new source of wood fiber demand for export."

Riggs said much of the biomass would be bound for Asia. His organization signed a letter, along with more than 100 others in the U.S. and Canada, calling for the European Union to stop incentivizing wood burning as renewable energy.

Laura Haight, U.S. policy director for the Partnership for Policy Integrity, said despite its label as renewable energy, burning wood from forests one of the worst activities for the environment. It releases emissions when burned and removes trees that store carbon. Haight's organization also signed the letter to the European Union, urging it to no longer classify forest biomass as renewable.

"It's the money that's driving this system," Haight asserted. "If they change that policy, then this will no longer be subsidized, and we can see a better future for our forests and for our climate."

Riggs noted solar and wind energy were subsidized, and the costs have gone down dramatically. However, the same is not true for forest biomass. He emphasized plant operators have struggled to reduce the costs involved in sourcing, transporting and burning biomass fuels.

"If they're going to subsidize it, you kind of got to subsidize it forever," Riggs contended. "But with wind and solar, those are already cost-competitive."